On 10 December, Horace Wilson, a senior civil servant, had written to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, of his worries that Wallis Simpson intended:
not only to come back here but (aided by what she expects to be a generous provision from public funds) to set up a ‘Court’ of her own and – there can be little doubt – do her best to make things uncomfortable for the new occupant of the Throne. It must not be assumed that she has abandoned hope of becoming Queen of England. It is known that she has limitless ambition, including a desire to interfere in politics: she has been in touch with the Nazi movement and has definite ideas as to dictatorship.9
On the night before the Duke’s broadcast, 500 pro-Nazi supporters had gathered at Buckingham Palace, chanting, ‘We want Edward!’ and ‘One, two, three, four, five, we want Baldwin, dead or alive!’ later converging on Downing Street. The following afternoon, 3,000 people had attended a mass meeting in Stepney, addressed by Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, in which he demanded that the abdication issue should be put to the people. On 11 December, the Zionist campaigner Blanche Dugdale wrote in her diary that her friend, the historian Jack Wheeler-Bennett, ‘is on record that Ribbentrop used Mrs Simpson, but proofs are hard to come by.’10
Meanwhile, from Boulogne, the Duke had taken a special Pullman for Austria, where he had been lent the use of Schloss Enzesfeld, the home of Baron Eugene and Kitty Rothschild, just outside Vienna, after it was discovered he had nowhere to go whilst he waited to marry Wallis. His initial euphoria had now vanished as the reality of his position sunk in. On Sunday 13 December, the Archbishop of Canterbury had preached a sermon berating the Duke for seeking:
happiness in a manner inconsistent with the Christian principles of marriage and within a social circle whose standards and ways of life are alien to the best instincts of his people . . . ruined by his disastrous liking for vulgar society, and by his infatuation for this Mrs Simpson.11
The Duke had been sufficiently angry to consult Monckton about a lawsuit.12
There was relief in official circles that the Abdication Crisis seemed to have blown over and the couple neutralised. Amongst those who knew the Duke well, he was not missed. Harold Nicolson noted in his diary, after lunching on 14 December with the Duke’s former assistant private secretary, Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, how he:
is so relieved at the fall of his master that he was almost indiscreet . . . He says that the King was like the child in the fairy story who was given every gift except a soul. There was nothing in him which understood the intellectual or spiritual sides of life, and that all art, poetry, music, etc. were dead to him . . . He had no friends in this country, nobody whom he would ever wish to see again . . . He was without a soul, and this made him a trifle mad . . . he never cared for England or the English. He hated his country since he had no soul and did not like being reminded of his duties.13
It was a view shared by the MP Robert Bernays, who had ruminated in his diary a few days earlier:
He hasn’t one real friend to lean upon in this frightful emergency. His case seems to be arrested development. He has never passed the stage from boyhood to manhood. He is the spoiled child of success with the film star mentality. He sees his job only in terms of cheering crowds . . . He has never thought the matter out. He imagined that he could quietly retire into private life, leaving his brother to perform the dreary ceremonial functions, while he spent a tranquil life gardening at Fort Belvedere and holidaying on the Riviera, occasionally emerging to open a hospital or review the Fleet and receive the cheers that mean so much to him. For the first time he has been brought up against the fact that abdication means exile and that for the rest of his life he can serve no useful purpose.14
Windsor was not an easy house guest. Kitty Rothschild had brought staff from her home in Paris and made great efforts to ensure the Schloss was welcoming, giving him a suite of rooms, comprising bedroom, drawing room, library, smoking room and bathroom, but he remained depressed and frustrated.
He watched Mickey Mouse movies, went sightseeing, walked, played golf and skittles, skied, and once a week took a Turkish bath in Vienna. There were card games where ‘he played for high stakes, and when he won he cheerfully collected his winnings. But when he lost, he did not pay.’15 He distracted himself, according to Piers Legh, who had remained with him, by ‘playing the jazz drums very loud and long to a gramophone record; he also drank quite a lot of brandy, and performed his celebrated imitation of Winston Churchill trying to persuade him not to abdicate.’16
When he shopped, he sent the bills to the British Legation, where no one knew what to do with them, until an equerry, probably Legh, paid them out of his own pocket.17 Eventually the British Government said the purchases were not their responsibility and the bills were sent to the Rothschilds. Lunching with Sir Walford Selby, the British Ambassador, he asked what the silver rings around the napkins were. Told they were napkin rings, he expressed surprise that there was not ‘fresh linen with every meal’.18
Much of his time was spent on the phone to Wallis – the bill at the end of his stay coming to £800, which he, too, expected the Rothschilds to cover.
He missed Wallis. Percy Brownlow, his loyal friend who had escorted Wallis to the South of France in December, now joined him and remembered:
talking to him until three o’clock in the morning . . . all around his bed, propped up on chairs and tables, were pictures of Wallis. I counted sixteen of them. It was as if he were in a crypt. And there he was, fast asleep, hugging a small pillow of hers with the initials WS on it.19
Belittled and undermined by Wallis, angered by his family’s refusal to acknowledge the woman he loved and the protracted financial negotiations, Windsor became almost paranoid, later admitting: ‘It was the sense of powerlessness that brought me close to the breaking point. I could do nothing there but wait and count the days.’20 The situation was not helped by Wallis’s jealousy of Kitty Rothschild and the suspicion that the Duke was having an affair with her.
A further concern was a series of articles that ran from 17 December, syndicated in various American papers, written by Newbold Noyes, the husband of Wallis’s second cousin. Noyes, who was part-owner of the Washington Evening Star, the city’s largest afternoon daily, had offered to write some supportive articles about the couple. The previous November he had come to Britain, where he was given the use of an office at Buckingham Palace, and on the basis of three hours of interviews he had written 14,000 words; but the articles were not now to the couple’s taste.
Wallis repudiated them, claiming in a statement she had not invited him to Britain, they were not related and she had not approved the articles. Statements over the authenticity of the articles flew between the parties for the next year and Wallis tried to sue Noyes, using as her lawyer Armand Gregoire, who had acted for her former husband Ernest Simpson’s interests in France. He proved to be an unfortunate choice.
Gregoire, whose appearance was enhanced by a duelling scar across his left cheek, was also the lawyer for some of Hitler’s most important officials: his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop; the Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess; and Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering; as well as the chief contact of Sir Oswald Mosley in Paris, where he was responsible for channelling funds to Mosley’s British Union of Fascists from Mussolini. He had also been the founder and director of Marcel Bucard’s fanatical Franciste movement, one of the leading Fascist cells in France, and under the pseudonym of Greg Le Franc, he had contributed pro-Hitler articles to Le Franciste, the official journal of the movement. According to a 1934 French Sûreté report, he was ‘one of the most dangerous of Nazi spies’.21
Wallis’s appointment of Gregoire as her lawyer only further confirmed concerns in official circles about the sympathies of the couple. Only on 18 December, a week after the Abdication, the diplomat Orme Sargent had recorded a memo on the Duke’s association with Rib
bentrop, noting that Hitler was ‘very distressed at the turn that affairs had taken in this country, since he looked upon the late King as a man after his own heart, and one who understood the Führerprinzip, and was ready to introduce it into this country.’22
* * *
The Duke continued to be alternatively short-tempered, sullen, bored and depressed. Kitty Rothschild tried her best, laying on a musical entertainment on Christmas Eve with entertainers and musicians from Paris, but the Duke did not bother to attend. The next morning she had his gift – a set of sapphire studs from Cartier – placed on his breakfast tray. The gift caught him unawares, but he promised her a little something. Later that day he ‘presented her with an autographed photograph of himself.’23 Meanwhile Wallis spent Christmas Day at the Villa Mauresque as the guest of Somerset Maugham, with her friend, the interior designer Sibyl Colefax.
The arrival at the Schloss Enzesfeld of an old friend, Edward ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, helped the situation. Three years younger than the Duke, Metcalfe was a tall, handsome cavalry officer, who had won the Military Cross during the First World War. The two men had met on Windsor’s tour of India in 1922 and Windsor had quickly appointed him as an ADC, attracted by the Irishman’s high-spirits, good-nature, loyalty, knowledge of horses and personal friendships with many of the maharajas.
It was taking time for the Duke to accept the new situation. The Welsh Guards did not want him as their Colonel in Chief and he no longer remained a member of the Privy Council, but there were compensations – such as invitations to open the Zorine Springs nudist colony, and to become mayor of Chippewa Falls in Wisconsin – and the Orpheum Theatre, Los Angeles, offered him and his ‘lovely lady’ a million dollars and a Hollywood mansion to star in a ‘stupendous historical film’.24
The Duke continued to ring the new king at all hours. ‘Tonight he was told at dinner that HM wanted to talk on phone to him. He said he couldn’t take the call, but asked for it to be put through at 10 p.m.,’ Fruity Metcalfe wrote to his wife Baba on 22 January. ‘The answer to this was that HM said he would talk at 6.45 tomorrow, as he was too busy to talk at any other time. It was pathetic to see HRH’s face. He couldn’t believe it! He’s been so used to having everything done as he wishes, I’m afraid he’s going to have many more shocks like this.’25 Eventually George VI told the switchboard at Buckingham Palace not to put the calls through at all.
These phone calls, which were bugged by the Germans, were not only to sort out his own affairs – his possessions had been moved from Fort Belvedere to Frogmore House in Windsor – but also to arrange a financial settlement and press for recognition of Wallis in the family, not least by the family attending their wedding.
Bertie was sympathetic, but his mother Queen Mary was adamant that nothing should give the impression that the Royal Family accepted the relationship and this view was shared by the new Queen and most courtiers. When Lord Queenborough asked Elizabeth when the Duke might return to Britain, she supposedly replied, ‘Not until he comes to my funeral.’26
The result was diminishing goodwill between the brothers and a resentment that was to last throughout the Duke’s life. He was shocked that his younger brother did not have the time for long and frequent phone calls, but the real break in their relationship was over the financial settlement.
At the Abdication, it had been agreed the Duke would receive £25,000 p.a., the annual annuity traditionally voted for a younger brother of a Sovereign, either from the Civil List or, if not approved by Parliament, from his brother. It was quickly discovered that the ex-king had not been open about his financial situation and he was far wealthier than he had claimed or was realised. He had told his brother he had just under £100,000, when, in fact, he had some £800,000 on deposit abroad, much of it controlled by Mrs Simpson; and another £80,000 was shortly to be paid from the Civil List and Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, the result of money saved over many years.27
The Duke felt his private wealth irrelevant to the compensation for relinquishing his interest in Balmoral and Sandringham, reiterating he was not well provided for ‘considering the position I shall have to maintain and what I have given up’.28 Negotiations over the issue were to continue over the next year.
A few weeks later, his old friend Walter Monckton arrived to try and thrash out a financial settlement after Windsor supposedly threatened not to sell Balmoral and Sandringham, claiming a ‘syndicate of Seventh Avenue sportsmen’ in New York were prepared to pay sufficient for shooting rights not to have to sell them.29
A mock sale of Sandringham, York Cottage, Balmoral, Birkhall and their contents gave a value of £256,000, which put into a trust fund brought an annual income of £5,000 p.a. Rather than open a can of worms by seeking money through the Civil List, George VI agreed to top this up by £20,000. In return, Windsor agreed to pay £5,000 p.a. of pensions to former members of staff.30
‘Of course, he’s on the line for hours and hours every day to Cannes,’ wrote Fruity to his wife on 24 January:
I somehow don’t think these talks go well sometimes . . . She seems to be always picking on him or complaining about something that she thinks he hasn’t done and ought to do . . . All he is living for is to be with her on the 27th April.31 As we come back every night after skiing, he says, ‘One more day nearly over.’ It’s very pathetic. Never have I seen a man more madly in love . . .32
The problems continued, relayed in Fruity’s daily letters to Baba. ‘She is at him every day on the phone. He always seems to be excusing himself for something or other,’ wrote Fruity on 27 January. ‘I feel so sorry for him, he is never able to do what she considers the right thing.’33
‘The evenings lately have been dreadful,’ he wrote to Baba a week later:
He won’t think of bed before 3 a.m. and now has started playing the accordion and the bagpipes. Last night there was almost a row on the phone. W said she’d read he’d been having an affair with Kitty! This is d–mn funny, but I can tell you it was no joke last night. He got into a terrible state. Their conversation lasted nearly two hours.34
Kitty Rothschild had had enough and that day she returned to Paris. The Duke was still in bed and as Fruity reported :
Never saw her to say goodbye or thank her! She was frightfully hurt and I don’t blame her. He is awfully difficult at times and this is the worst thing he’s done yet. I went down to the station with a letter which I got him to write to her, and that made things a bit better. He also never saw the servants to tip them or thank them, etc! (all due to more d–n talking to Cannes. It never stops) . . .35
Even with the financial arrangements almost sorted, the couple’s future remained uncertain. For example, where were they to live? It was clear they were not welcome in Britain for the moment and the decision was not helped by the suggestion the Duke would now have to pay income tax. There were preliminary negotiations to buy Cloisters, a huge Gothic residence outside Baltimore, built in 1932, but they came to nothing.36
On 9 March, Wallis, with her maid Mary Burke and twenty-six pieces of luggage, moved to Château de Candé, a fairytale castle of high towers, pointed turrets and Gothic doorways in the Loire, in preparation for her third wedding.37 Lying on high ground with views over the countryside, it had originally been built in 1508. In 1927 it had been sold to Charles Bedaux, a multimillionaire Franco-American businessman, and friend of Herman Rogers – Herman’s brother, Edmund, was Bedaux’s principal financial agent in America – who had made his fortune with a time-and-motion system that increased industrial productivity.
Bedaux, the fifth richest man in America, and his American wife Fern, had set about modernising the Château de Candé, installing state-of-the-art facilities that included central heating, en-suite bathrooms, a $15,000 telephone system with a full-time telephonist, art deco bathrooms, huge refrigerators, a bar in the old kitchen (which still had the hooks for game) and a gym with the latest exercise equipment. An underground passage led to an old hunting lodge,
which Bedaux had converted into a billiard room.
Interestingly, Herman Rogers was installed next door to Wallis’s bedroom in an adjoining sitting room with day bed. As she later wrote, ‘Herman decided to take this for himself. He had slept in a room adjoining mine with a gun under his pillow ever since I had arrived from England, more than three months before. Upstairs were several other bedrooms, of which Katherine took one.’38 And there Wallis, who had changed her name by deed poll to Wallis Warfield, waited to learn if the marriage could go ahead.
The answer came on 18 March when Sir Thomas Barnes, the Treasury Solicitor, announced that there had been no evidence of collusion and the marriage could proceed, though he had not interviewed the one servant who might have established the truth, Wallis’s maid, Mary Burke, arguing, ‘It is not the practice of the King’s Proctor to endeavour to get information from such servants.’39
It is clear that evidence did exist of collusion (Ernest Simpson had obligingly been caught in bed with his future wife, Mary Raffray, so Wallis could sue him for adultery), payment (it is thought the King had covered Ernest Simpson’s costs) and perjury, but the King’s Proctor chose not to use it – not least evidence of Edward’s adultery with Wallis in Budapest in 1935, where an unsigned three-page memo confirming it remains on the file.40
Francis Stephenson, who had lodged the objection, later claimed he had dropped his objections, ‘Because I was told to.’41
At the beginning of April, the Duke sent his cairn terrier, Slipper, sometimes called Mr Loo, to Wallis at Candé. The next day, whilst chasing a rabbit, it was bitten by a viper. Though rushed to the local vet in Tours, it died that night. ‘My darling – I have just given Herman Mr Loo’s rug to wrap his little body in before Herman buries him. Even God seems to have forgotten WE,42 for surely this is an unnecessary sorrow for us,’ reported Wallis. ‘He was our dog – not yours or mine but us – and he loved us both so. Now the principal guest at the wedding is no more.’43
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