by Anne Sebba
Wood, Rosa
Woolf, Virginia
World War I (1914 – 18)
World War II (1939 – 45)
Wright, Frank Lloyd
York, Duchess of see Elizabeth, Queen of George VI
York, Duke of see George VI, King
York House, London
Yule, Annie Henrietta, Lady
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Zara, Lt (later Admiral) Alberto da
Zetland, Lawrence John Dundas, 2nd Marquess of
Ziegler, Philip: on Edward’s character; on Edward at Oxford; on Edward’s exercise regime; on Wallis’s effect on Edward; on Duchess of York’s hostility to Wallis; on Edward’s abdication decision; on Windsors’ wedding; on Edward’s visit to Germany; on Edward’s leaving British Military Mission in France; doubts Edward’s agreeing to be Nazi puppet; on improvements to Government House, Nassau; on Wenner-Gren and Edward; on Wallis’s cancers
A statue in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon Square of the man after whom Wallis was named – lawyer, political reformer and friend of the family, Severn Teackle Wallis.
The house at Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, where Bessiewallis Warfield was born on 19 June 1896. She always believed she had inherited two conflicting strains: the Warfield toughness and practical ability, and the Montague gentleness and artistic sensibility.
Wallis aged six months with her mother, the spirited and beautiful Alice Montague Warfield, from then on a single parent responsible for Wallis’s upbringing.
Uncle Solomon Davies Warfield, Wallis’s paternal uncle, a wealthy bachelor on whom she depended for her education and who was to disappoint her when he left his fortune to set up a home in memory of his mother.
Wallis’s mother, Alice Montague, was remarried twice more and her hard life helped fuel her daughter’s ambition. ‘Wouldn’t mother have loved it all,’ she wrote to her aunt of the exciting times when she first entered the Prince’s circle.
A signed portrait of Wallis looking demure as she left Oldfields School ready to conquer the world.
The brief time Wallis spent at the house on Biddle Street – a three-storey brownstone in a fashionable district of Baltimore – was happy and free of financial worry.
Wallis wearing a monocle – one of her schoolgirl experiments with different styles while she was a pupil at Oldfields.
Earl Winfield Spencer Jr (second from left), a naval officer and pioneer aviator from Chicago in training at Florida sh at"leftortly before he met Wallis.
Wallis as a debutante, short of money but never lacking style and said to have more beaux than any other debutante after she was introduced to Baltimore high society in December 1914.
Wallis, as Win’s bride, on a cold day in November 1916. The Baltimore Sun described the evening wedding as ‘one of the most important of the season’.
Mrs Wallis Spencer gazing intently at the Italian naval officer Lt Alberto Da Zara, one of many adoring males who fell for her charms in 1924 in Peking.
A young Wallis posing for a study for a blue Cartier tiara, 1937.
Three generations of royalty: the Duke (far right) with his father George V and grandfather Edward VII (seated) on board the royal yacht in 1910 shortly before the latter’s death later that year.
The handsome Prince of Wales, as he embarked on a world tour in 1920. He became a pin-up for millions of young girls around the world, the cigarette between his teeth only adding to his appeal.
Mr and Mrs Ernest Simpson presented at court in June 1931. Wallis borrowed her formal clothes from friends but could not resist additional jewels. Ernest wore his uniform of the Coldstream Guards.
Wallis, still married to Ernest, cruising along the Dalmatian coast on the Nahlin yacht with the new King. This picture, with Wallis’s restraining hand on the King’s arm, was widely published abroad before most people in England had any idea who Wallis Simpson was.
The bracelet of crosses, each separately inscribed, which Wallis wore on many occasions before her relationship with the Prince of Wales was public, gave rise to intense speculation as to their meaning.
Wallis in 1936 with plenty to look pensive about. She is wearing the enormous Cartier platinum and emerald engagement ring that Edward had given her following her decree nisi while awaiting the decree absolute.
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Married at last: the new Duke and Duchess of Windsor posing for photographs by Cecil Beaton at the Chateau de Candé in France, 3 June 1937. Wallis wore a figure-hugging Mainbocher gown in a shade of blue henceforth known as ‘Wallis blue’.
The fatal smile. Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, shakes hands with the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, while the Duke looks on during their 1937 visit to Germany.
Mary Kirk, Wallis’s longest-standing school friend, married Ernest Simpson in Connecticut on 19 November 1937, six months after Ernest’s divorce from Wallis.
23 September 1939. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor with Major Fruity Metcalfe at his home in Sussex where they are his guests just after the outbreak of war.
The Duchess of Windsor at a Paris depot in December 1939, still wearing her jewelled bracelet, helps to make up packages for the troops at the front.
The Duke and Duchess on their way to the Bahamas. Wallis is wearing the spectacular diamond, emerald, ruby, citrine and sapphire flamingo brooch just made by Cartier in Paris in 1940.
America’s First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, meets the Duchess of Windsor in Washington, October 1941. Later that day the Windsors were entertained to lunch at the White House.
Wallis in Nassau wearing her uniform of the Bahamas Central Branch of the British Red Cross of which she was President.
The Duke with his mother, Queen Mary, at Marlborough House, October 1945.
One of Ernest’s personal favourites – a picture of him shortly after his marriage to Mary Kirk Raffray.
The new Mr and Mrs Ernest Simpson returning to London onboard HMS Queen Mary after their wedding in Connecticut, 1937. Ernest and Mary had one child together in 1939, before Mary died of cancer in 1941.
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In 1952 the Windsors were offered the use of a magnificent house by the Paris municipal authorities, 4 Route du Champ d’Entraînement in the Bois-de-Boulogne.
Jack Levine, the American satirical artist, painted Reception in Miami in 1948 in response to his disappointment at the way the Duke and Duchess were greeted by fawning admirers in Miami.
Wallis takes charge, telling the Duke what she thinks … and how his hair should look.
The Duke and Duchess in 1950 at their favourite spa hotel, the Greenbrier in Virginia, awarding a prize to the legendary golfer Ben Hogan.
The Duke and Duchess dancing at the Greenbrier – an activity the Duchess enjoyed more than golf.
A selection of Cartier jewellery, including the original sketches, especially made for The Duchess of Windsor.
The Duchess at a gala opening of the New Lido Revue in Paris, December 1959, displaying a variety of jewellery including the articulated panther bracelet, made by Cartier with her in mind and sold in London for the second time in 2010.
A rare fashion faux pas – the Duchess chatting to Mrs Aileen Plunkett at a Paris party in 1966 where both women are in the same dress, a stri
py shift by Givenchy.
Wallis looking elegant in a plain dark coat with white fur stole in London in 1967. This was a dedication ceremony for a statue to commemorate the centenary of the birth of her mother-in-law, Queen Mary.
The frail Duke, leaving the London Clinic in 1965 following an operation on his eye, flanked by nurses with the Duchess leading the way.
5 June 1972. The funeral of the Duke of Windsor at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Queen Elizabeth II is followed by the Duchess, veiled, and the Duke of Edinburgh.
The Duchess looking haggard, May 1980. She was already ill but survived another six painful and reclusive years.
30 April 1986. The Queen Mother (top right) watches as the coffin of the Duchess of Windsor is carried by Wels
h Guards down the steps of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, before being laid to rest next to the Duke at Frogmore.
Notes
1 In 2009 this newly restored building reopened, trading on its connections with Wallis Warfield but refurbished in a splendid style which she would not have recognized.
2 In 1912, Governor Woodrow Wilson signed the country’s first mosquito-control law which declared malaria a reportable disease.
3 See here
4 That year, Gull published his paper ‘Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica)’, in which he described two cases of young women he had treated for severe weight loss and two others treated by other physicians.
5 For example, the Prince wrote to Freda Dudley Ward on 13 December 1918: ‘I’ve got a major attached to me … & he seems alright though I think he’s a Jew; anyhow he looks it!!’ (Rupert Godfrey (ed.), Letters from a Prince (Warner Books 1999), p. 146).
6 Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic, had also been married twice, and twice widowed, by the time she met the Prince of Wales, later King George IV, in 1784. They were married secretly the following year, though the marriage was considered invalid. The King married again, Caroline of Brunswick, in 1795, but continued his relationship with Mrs Fitzherbert.
7 In 1937 this was adapted as Storm in a Teacup, a film starring Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison, which acquired cult status as a minor British comedy classic.
8 In 1941 Lord Sefton married Wallis’s divorced friend, Josephine ‘Foxy’ Gwynne.
9 Queen Victoria’s faithful servant, with whom she was rumoured to have had an affair.
10 Years later, inexplicably taking his only son to show him the hotel, Ernest still refused to divulge the identity of Buttercup Kennedy, who was probably the boy’s mother.
11 Wallis, presumably funded by the King, later paid back these costs to Ernest under an agreement they had between them, according to Michael Bloch. This is further evidence of collusion. Wallis herself refers to some IOUs in a letter to Ernest (Wallis and Edward: Letters 1931 – 37: The Intimate Correspondence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, ed. Michael Bloch (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1986), p. 206, and private archive).
12 Nancy Dugdale has a more circumspect version of Baldwin’s suggestion to which the King is supposed to have responded, ‘Mrs S is a lady’ (Nancy Dugdale diary, Crathorne Papers).
13 Nancy Dugdale later added that Baldwin, on reading this diary in February 1939, maintained that the exchange had occurred at Fort Belvedere on the occasion of his last meeting with the King. ‘TLD [Tommy Dugdale] says he is quite certain SB is mistaken and that the exchange is rightly placed in this interview at Buckingham Palace (Nancy Dugdale diary).
14 At least two kings in the eighth century, Ine and Ceolwulf, gave up their thrones voluntarily and embraced religion.
15 The only organization working openly for the Duke’s return was an obscure group called the Society of Octavians, membership of which was never more than a few hundreds, the majority of whom were Fascists. According to the police, ‘no person of any prominence has so far identified with them other than [the novelist] Compton Mackenzie, who is a member … generally speaking they are innocuous’ (HO 144/22448, Special Branch, 5 Jan. 1939, Note to Commissioner marked ‘secret’, NA PRO).
16 After the war, the new French government investigated Bedaux’s wartime activities and, on evidence that he had in fact sabotaged German factory production and protected Jewish property, awarded him a posthumous knighthood of the Légion d’Honneur. Fern lived on at Candé until 1974.
17 By early June 1941 most of the Balkans had fallen into Axis hands, culminating in the capture of Crete by German and Italian forces on 1 June 1941.
18 Henry was for a second time bundled off to America and did not see his father again until he was eight, by which time Ernest had married for the fourth time, a deeply happy marriage at last to the widowed Avril Leveson-Gower. Henry was sent to Harrow, an unhappy experience where he was teased for being the son of Ernest Simpson. Shortly after he left school Ernest also died. Henry was never really to know his father. In what he perceived to be a final ao bg tct of vindictiveness against her younger brother, knowing how hard Ernest had tried to conceal it, Maud decided after Ernest’s death to share some family secrets with Henry, principally that his grandfather was born Jewish and had changed his name from Solomon(s). This knowledge persuaded Henry to change his own name by deed poll to Aaron (or Aharon) Solomons in 1962 and emigrate to Israel, where he lived for many years, brought up a family and served in the Israeli army.
19 The Fort was eventually leased to the Hon. Gerald Lascelles, a nephew of the Duke, who had been imprisoned in Colditz and was a distant relation of his former Private Secretary.
20 Kathleen Kennedy married William ‘Billy’ Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, in May 1944. He was killed in combat three months later. Although widowed, she was at the heart of British society.
21 Gone with the Windsors was such a good title that it was used again in 2005 by Laurie Graham for a work of fiction about the couple.
THAT WOMAN. Copyright © 2011 by Anne Sebba.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address
St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
Orion Publishing Group Ltd, an Hachette UK Company
eISBN 9781429962452
First eBook Edition : January 2012
First U.S. Edition: March 2012