Traitor King

by Andrew Lownie

  in which it was stated that His Royal Highness said that if the Labour Party wished, and were in a position to offer it, he would be prepared to be President of the English Republic. Tyrrell urged Greenwood [the Daily Herald journalist] to have this left out of any published account of this interview, as he was so shocked and horrified. This Greenwood promised to do, and, I understand that, so far, the interview has not seen the light of day . . . I am not informing anyone of the above except yourself.33

  The Duke was clearly on manoeuvres. These would be confirmed by subsequent events.

  1 Sir Geoffrey Harrison (1908–90) later served as the British ambassador to Brazil, Iran and the Soviet Union, from whence he was recalled in 1960 after he was caught in a KGB honey trap with a Russian maid.

  2 FO 954/33A/118, TNA.

  3 Jonathan Petropoulos, Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 208.

  4 Heart, p. 307.

  5 Forwood, p. 59, BREN 2/2/7, Churchill College Archives.

  6 Sunday Mirror, 31 October 1954.

  7 Heart, p. 306.

  8 Forwood, p. 44, BREN 2/2/7, Churchill College Archives.

  9 Heart, p. 304.

  10 Heart, p. 304. Four-flusher means braggart.

  11 Heart, pp. 304–5. Rarely sober, with a penchant for underage girls, Ley committed suicide whilst awaiting trial at Nuremberg for war crimes. His wife, twenty-six years his junior, was driven to suicide in 1942 by his brutal treatment of her.

  12 Ogilvie-Forbes to Secretary of State, 17 October 1937, ‘Bedaux Activities’. FO 954/33A/94, TNA.

  13 ‘Report of Consul General in Munich to British Embassy, Berlin’, 22 October 1937, FO 954/33A/114, TNA.

  14 Heart, p. 308.

  15 New York Times, 23 October 1937.

  16 Heart, p. 308.

  17 Forwood, p. 60, BREN 2/2/7, Churchill College Archives.

  18 J. Paul Getty, As I See It (WH Allen, 1976), p. 84.

  19 Sunday Mirror, 31 October 1954.

  20 CHAR 2/300, TNA.

  21 FO 954/33A/183, TNA.

  22 Martin, p. 353.

  23 Washington Dept of State file FW033.4111, Memorandum of Confidential Conversation, 2 November 1937, National Archives, quoted Greg King, The Duchess of Windsor (Aurum, 1999), p. 286.

  24 Martin, p. 354.

  25 Lindsay to Foreign Office, 4 November 1937, FO 954/33A/121, TNA.

  26 Jim Christy, The Price of Power: A Biography of Charles Eugene Bedaux (Doubleday, 1984), p. 169.

  27 Associated Press, 5 November 1937. Bedaux lost £200,000, control of his US companies, had a nervous breakdown and spent months in a Bavarian sanatorium. He never returned to America.

  28 6–7 November 1937, Vincent, p. 585.

  29 Daily Herald, 8 November 1937.

  30 Bruce Lockhart Diaries, 22 November 1937, Vol. 1, p. 382.

  31 Ronald Lindsay to Alec Hardinge, 29 November 1937, FO 954/33A/183, TNA.

  32 Ronald Lindsay to Alec Hardinge, 29 November 1937, FO 954/33A/183, TNA.

  33 Eric Phipps to Anthony Eden, 28 December 1937, FO 954/33a/186, TNA, and PHPP 1/19, Churchill College Archives.

  CHAPTER 6

  Interlude

  Since returning from honeymoon, the Windsors had been living in a suite of rooms at the Hotel Meurice, overlooking the Tuileries, where they had agreed a reduced rate of $30 a day, on the basis that they were a good advertisement for the hotel.1 Given they would not be allowed to return to Britain – their concern was as much taxation, now payable as private citizens, as any stipulations from the Royal Family – and their financial future was secure, they now decided to put down roots in France.

  On 26 January 1938, Wallis wrote to her Aunt Bessie:

  We have decided not to go to Havana this year as we feel we really must have a home before we travel any more. This life of trunks and hotels is very unsatisfactory. I have looked at a number of places in different directions outside of Paris, furnished and unfurnished. The former are hopeless and the unfurnished ones either palaces or too small, the wrong direction or too far from golf, etc, etc, so just to get out of this hotel we have taken a furnished house at Versailles with a small garden and tennis court, belonging to Mrs Paul Depuy. It is comfortable, no charm but dignity, and we have taken it from February 7 to June 7 – appalling rent as everyone is out to do the Windsors . . .2

  This was the Château de La Maye in Versailles, which sat in a large private garden with swimming pool, tennis court and a nine-hole private golf course.3 This was a compromise as Wallis wanted to be in Paris and the Duke to have a country house, where he could indulge his love of gardening. One of its advantages was that it was near the Villa Trianon, the home of their close friends, Sir Charles and Elsie, Lady Mendl.

  Elsie de Wolfe, a tiny woman whose party trick was standing on her head, was thirty years older than the Windsors. She had single-handedly invented the profession of interior decorating and with her lover, Elisabeth Marbury, a literary agent representing Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, had come to Paris at the turn of the century. She and Marbury, who died in 1933, had bought the eighteenth-century Villa Trianon, which had been built by Louis XV as a retreat from the main palace but was then a wreck, and restored it.

  In 1926, de Wolfe had surprised her friends by marrying the bisexual Sir Charles Mendl, the press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. It was an arrangement that worked well as he needed her money and she wanted a title – Mendl had been knighted in 1924 for reputedly retrieving letters from a gigolo blackmailing the Duke’s brother George, but more likely for his espionage activities.

  Constance Coolidge, an old friend of Wallis, often dined at Château de La Maye. On 22 March, she noted in her diary:

  Well the dinner was a great success . . . Wallis looked lovely in a blue sequin dress. It wasn’t a bit formal and everyone talked all the time. Wallis did interrupt the duke rather but then he stayed in the dining room a long time afterwards and talked politics very well. He said Czechoslovakia was a ridiculous country – just look at it – how could anyone go to war for that. It isn’t a country at all, just an idea of the Wilsons.4

  Coolidge’s diary gives a glimpse of a strange episode in the Windsors’ life that appears in little other documentation. The next day, Coolidge recorded how she was invited to meet a woman called Maroni at a third-floor flat at 36 Boulevard Emile Augier in the 16th arrondissement:

  a butler in white coat opened the door – very queer apartment – white satin sofa & curtains . . . a queer woman, light hair died (sic), dark eyes, a long nose – Italian – certainly an adventuress . . . she was the intermediary for a friend . . . also a duchess . . . This woman has papers, letters, photographs . . . proofs of something very harmful to the royal family & the duke. She wants to see the duke alone . . . you can’t believe the papers & if he asks her to she will burn the papers but she must see him. She has followed him around Austria . . . She will offer me a very large sum. ‘What is your price?’ to arrange this. There is a man who will buy these papers to print them in America.5

  Two days later, Coolidge lunched with a police inspector, who told her there was already a dossier on Maroni, that the woman was a former maid of the Duke and ‘the papers had to do with the Prince of Hesse’.6

  The Prince of Hesse was most likely Philipp of Hesse and, like the Duke of Windsor, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria. An architect and bisexual – one of his relationships was with the poet Siegfried Sassoon – he had married Princess Mafalda, daughter of King Victor Emmanuel in 1925. In October 1930, Hesse had joined the Nazi Party and by June 1933 was an Oberpräsident or regional party leader in Prussia. He was close to both Goering and Hitler, who was godfather to one of his sons, and, being fluent in English, French and Italian, had served as a special envoy for the Nazis. In that capacity he had had dealings with the Duke and had accompanied him on his October 1937 German tour.

  The blackmai
ler appeared to have incriminating material. According to Charles Higham, the woman:

  had posed as a maid at the home of the duke’s cousin, Prince Philipp of Hesse, Hitler’s favourite and a frequent emissary to the Italian dictator, in order to steal photographs and documents showing that the duke had a secret and intimate connection with the bisexual Philipp.7

  The Windsors, who were in the South of France, looking at renting a villa for the summer, immediately rushed back.8 Meeting them in Paris was Sir Philip Game, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

  ‘The duke and two chief of police, one English & one French were there and I had to tell them everything before the Duke,’ wrote Coolidge in her diary. ‘Even that about “a man who renounced a throne & had a mistress in Austria”. It was embarrassing very!’9

  Faced with police involvement, Madame Maroni disappeared and, according to Higham, ‘her documents were seized by the Sûreté and . . . sent to Moscow; when they were returned to Paris after World War II, they vanished again.’10 The hunt was now on for the letters with Hesse, which might reveal a sexual relationship with the Duke, or at least some embarrassing communication relating to politics.

  Aside from the Hesse letters, there were numerous issues surrounding the Duke, not least the claims of illegitimate children he had fathered across the world. The question of the Duke’s sexuality has long intrigued. Before meeting Wallis, he was known to have had many affairs, including a long-standing one from just after the First World War until 1929 with Freda, the wife of William Dudley Ward, a Liberal Member of Parliament. As with Wallis, there was a certain mother fixation. He called her ‘Fredie-Wedie’ and their correspondence was marked by lots of baby talk (‘vewy angwy’, ‘your own little David is cwying so hard inside’) and dirty jokes.

  A petite, elegant, loyal, discreet woman with a good sense of humour, she was seen by the Duke’s friends as a good influence on him. Freda only learnt that she had been dropped as a royal favourite when the Buckingham Palace switchboard refused to put calls through, but what most hurt her was the behaviour to her two daughters Penelope and Angela, as he ‘had been like a father to them’. As she later told the author Caroline Blackwood:

  They adored him. But once he met the Duchess, they never heard from him again . . . The Duke did something that really shocked me. It was so petty and cruel that it really hurt me . . . He had arranged for one of my daughters who was quite small at the time to receive a pearl from a jeweller every time she had a birthday . . . The idea was that she would have a necklace by the time that she was grown up . . . The moment he met the Duchess he cancelled the order with the jeweller! I thought it was really shocking that the Duke, who had more jewellery than anyone in the world, would take away a tiny pearl necklace from a child.11

  Ward’s position as royal mistress was taken by the former actress Thelma Furness, then married to the shipping magnate Viscount Furness. In 1934, she told her friend Wallis to look after ‘the little man’ and the rest is history.

  Along the way there were many affairs, especially on the world tours he made after the First World War.12 There have even been claims of illegitimate children, including with a French seamstress Marie-Leonie Graftieaux (Marcelle Dormoy), which produced a son Pierre-Edouard (1916–94).13 Frederick Evans, born in 1918, claims that his concert pianist mother, Lillian Bartlett, had an affair with the Prince, that his birth was registered as the son of a Welsh miner, James Evans, and that she told the Prince of the boy and he responded with financial support.14

  According to Peter Macdonald, who heard the story from his grandfather, in 1920, whilst staying at the Dunedin Club on his New Zealand tour, the Prince impregnated a servant who went on to have a son ‘who was paid a remittance from London . . . his nickname in Dunedin was King . . . the King would strut around town and he had a great resemblance to the Prince of Wales’s father, as he wore similar clothes and wore the royal beard.’15

  There are also rumours that Edwina Drummond, born in April 1920, was fathered by the Prince of Wales, her godfather, who was a regular visitor to her family home Pitsford Hall, outside Northampton, where he rode with the Pytchley Hunt. Wilf Harris, then a choirboy at the village church, recalls the Prince’s visits. ‘We all knew he was fond of horses and her [Mrs Drummond].’ Many in the village, he said, believed the Prince was having an affair with Kathleen Drummond and was the father of her third daughter, Edwina. ‘No doubt about it,’ said Harris.16

  Another local, a retired policeman in Northamptonshire, agrees. His mother was an employee at Pitsford Hall and he has been left in no doubt by the stories handed down to him. ‘Edwina was the prince’s daughter,’ he said. ‘Everyone knew she was different.’ Her father George Drummond is supposed to have caught his wife Kathleen with the Prince of Wales in a compromising situation in the stables and said, ‘Sir, I will share my wine and horses with any man, but I will share my wife with no man!’

  Drummond’s second wife, Honora, claimed that whereas Edwina’s three sisters inherited their father’s aquiline nose, Edwina had a turned up nose like the Prince. In 1937, whilst at finishing school in Germany, she saw the Prince on his visit to Hitler. The links between the two families continued with George VI becoming godfather to Drummond’s son George from his second marriage and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret learning to ride at Pitsford. Edwina later married Eric Mirville, who had served in the French Foreign Legion, and moved to Ireland where she died in the 1980s.17

  A more convincing case can be made for the actor Timothy Seely (born 10 June 1935), whose mother, Vera, was the sister of Freda Dudley Ward. The Duke of Windsor, then Prince of Wales, had been best man at Vera’s wedding to Jimmy Seely in 1925 and was godfather to Tim’s sister Elizma. The Prince and Jimmy Seely had become friends on the hunting field and the Prince often stayed with the Seelys in Nottinghamshire. The Seely family later played down the story, which was first revealed by the author John Parker, and refused to talk to the author about it, but after the Duke’s death, Seely was contacted by the Duke’s lawyers.18

  ‘Over the years various authors/reporters have contacted Tim for interviews/articles, but the response was always the same, he is not interested,’ his wife Camilla said firmly. ‘He is immensely discreet . . . We would not wish to be even a small part of yet more unworthy stories concerning The Royal Family.’19

  * * *

  The Windsors continued to be in limbo. Chips Channon wrote in his diary in March 1938:

  Disturbing news of the Windsors; they dine alone night after night, ignored, snubbed by the French, and neglected by the English. The Duke of Windsor is, of course, very pro-German; he maintains that had he been on the throne, the German coup in Austria could never have happened. ‘I should have appealed personally to Hitler,’ he said pathetically to Kitty Brownlow. He is so lonely, so bored.20

  The journalist Collin Brooks, running into the couple at the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo that month, provides a portrait of them at the time:

  Leading a little knot of people through the bowing functionaries came a small, tight-lipped, dark-haired woman, very regal in her carriage, followed by two nondescripts and then by a miniature of a man with blond hair, a very red face, and the general demeanour of a happy grocer’s boy. It was the Duke of Windsor. To my eye he looked tanned and well and far more composed than when I last saw him. There was no fiddling with the tie, his hands were thrust in his trouser pockets. She was the focal point of the little party, not he. Her face has become palpably harder – she is the creature of hard lines altogether, the dark hair parted and smoothed down like the painted hair of a Dutch doll, the line of the mouth, hard, the eyes hard, the severe black dress cut in hard lines.21

  In May 1938, the Windsors found their summer villa, taking a ten-year lease on the Château de la Croë, situated on the Cap d’Antibes peninsula, from the widow of British newspaper proprietor Sir Pomeroy Burton. Built in the early 1930s, it became known as ‘Chateau des R
ois’, as it was successively occupied by the Windsors, King Leopold III of Belgium, and Queen Marie Jose of Italy.22

  A three-storey, gleaming white villa with green shutters and matching awnings, behind high walls and hedges, it was set in twelve acres of garden and woodland, with fir, pine, yew, eucalyptus and cypress trees, reached by a narrow winding road from the port. It included a tennis court, servants’ quarters, greenhouses, garages, and on either side of the entrance gate was a small lodge that provided accommodation for the staff.

  The house was built round a huge central hall, dominated by the Duke’s red and gold Order of Garter banner, which ran the full depth of the house, off which led large rooms with 25-foot-high ceilings and tall, mirrored doors. On the right of the hall was the dining room, which could seat twenty-four and where hung Alfred Munnings’ The Prince of Wales on Forest Witch, whilst on the left was a drawing room and panelled library.

  Everything had been decorated by their friend Elsie Mendl in Buckingham Palace colours of white, red and gold. Dining chairs were of red leather with black and gold backs, the red and white library was dominated by a huge portrait of Queen Mary over the marble fireplace, and there was a Steinway grand piano at which the Duke would play – when the Duchess was absent. There were mirrors over the fireplaces and on many doors – a mark of Wallis’s style – and glass, china, furniture and linen from Fort Belvedere and York House.

  A marble staircase twisted to the first-floor gallery and their bedrooms: Wallis’s bedroom decorated with trompe-l’oeil images symbolising her past – one was a pack of cards with a king of hearts falling down – in soft pink and apricot, his in scarlet and beige. Wallis’s bathroom was in scarlet and black and boasted a stone tub, gilded, and with a swan’s neck at each end.

  There were two guest rooms – the Rose Room and the Venetian Room in red and gold, with two striking antique beds and a bow-fronted Venetian chest, and then four more guest rooms on the second floor – the Directoire, the Blue Room, the Wedgewood and the Toile de Jouy – each with a pair of antique beds, with rugs, curtains, bed covers, cushions, towels and even stationery in matching colours.