Traitor King

by Andrew Lownie

  His life revolved around golf, gardening, being entertained, discussing his investments and musing about politics with the similarly minded – generally rich American businessmen who were antisemitic and anti-communist. The problem was that the Duke wanted status not a job, to be recognised rather than to contribute.

  Patten was back dining with the Windsors in February. ‘Awful evening at the Windsors,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘the Duchess determined to play word games, despite her complete lack of education and the competition of Lady Diana Cooper, who learned history with her mother’s milk . . . the Duke couldn’t remember Metternich and Castlereagh and the Duchess to help him screamed, ‘Your turn, David, now take someone we all know.’3

  ‘The Duke of Windsor came to see me this morning at his own request,’ noted Duff Cooper in his diary:

  I thought he wanted to consult me about something – but not at all. He sat here for nearly an hour chattering about one thing and another. I expect the truth is that he is so désoeuvré that Wallis, to get him out of the house, said, ‘Why don’t you go round to see Duff one morning and have an interesting talk about politics.’4

  After the Boulevard Suchet house was sold, the Windsors moved to an apartment at the Ritz and then moved back to La Croë. It had billeted Italians and German troops during the war and was in a sorry state, with curtains and oil paintings stolen, mines in the garden, rusting radar on the roof and huge pillboxes on the sea wall. Wallis, never happier than when making a new home, set about restoring it and their pre-war life. Within a month she had a staff of twenty-two and was entertaining furiously, helped by the fact that, as a major-general, the Duke was entitled to draw rations from the British Army depot at Marseilles.

  Here the couple lived the life denied to them in reality; here Wallis was given the status denied to her by the Royal Family. Georges Sanègre, who worked for the Windsors for almost forty years, was taken aside when he first joined the staff by Wilmott the butler. ‘I have been instructed by the duke that all staff must bow or curtsy to the duchess and call her Your Royal Highness. You must never speak first, but wait until she has spoken to you; never turn your back to her, but take several paces backwards and then turn to leave her presence.’5

  The Windsors always dressed for dinner – he in dinner jacket or kilt, she in long dress and jewels, and close attention was paid to the food, flowers and guests. They brought in well-known entertainers such as Maurice Chevalier, and guests might include Noël Coward. Once when a member of staff was surprised there were only six for dinner, Wallis quickly replied, indeed, ‘but they are all kings.’6

  Without any purpose in life, the Windsors’ purpose became to entertain and be entertained. If they could not live in a royal palace or be posted to an embassy, they would create the ambience of one themselves. Their lives would become a spectacle. One guest remembered them taking a party to a gala in Monte Carlo. ‘She had on every jewel. He wore a kilt. It was like watching a couple in pantomime – the studied gestures, the automatic smiles.’7

  ‘In the evening the Windsors arrived,’ wrote Noël Coward in his diary in spring 1946:

  The hotel got itself into a fine frizz . . . I gave them a delicious dinner: consommé, marrow on toast, grilled langoustine, tournedos with sauce béarnaise, and chocolate soufflé. Poor starving France. After that we went to the Casino and Wallis and I gambled until 5 a.m. She was very gay and it was most enjoyable. The Duke sat rather dolefully at one of the smaller tables.8

  ‘You can’t imagine the sense of luxury at La Croë in that first summer after the war,’ said the French socialite and friend of the Windsors, the Baronne de Cabrol. ‘It was a really grand villa and to amuse us, the Duchess arranged to serve dinner in a different room each night over the ten days we stayed there.’9

  ‘A dull reception at the Chamber of Commerce followed by a call on the Windsors – in a small apartment at the Ritz,’ wrote Duff Cooper in his diary later:

  Wallis was looking strikingly plain. It is sad to think that he gave up the position of King-Emperor not to live in an island of the Hesperides with the Queen of Beauty, but to share an apartment on the third floor of the Ritz with this harsh-voiced, ageing woman who was never even very pretty.10

  In plotting their return to mainstream British life, the royal couple continued to rely heavily on the advice of Kenneth de Courcy. Referring to ‘the subject we discussed in Paris’, the Duke wrote to de Courcy in March 1946:

  It certainly is a situation of great delicacy but, at the same time, one in which it would seem I hold fifty per cent of the bargaining power in order that the Duchess and I can plan for the future in the most constructive and convenient way. For obvious reasons, I prefer to say no more in this letter but look forward to another talk with you when there is an opportunity which I hope may be soon.11

  In May, de Courcy stayed with them in the South of France to ‘discuss world affairs and possible future activities.’12 Those future activities soon became clear. De Courcy saw Lord Clarendon, the Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household, asking if Fort Belvedere could be made available to the Duke as he ‘was proposing to make some statement to the press in America retailing all his grievances against the King and the British government.’ Clarendon reported the blackmail to Tommy Lascelles, who contacted Guy Liddell of MI5 and it was agreed ‘to take the risk of the Duke giving a statement to the press which he does not think would cut much ice.’13

  * * *

  In October 1946, the couple paid a short visit to the United Kingdom, the Duke again lobbying George VI for a job. The trip was by way of an experiment to gauge the public reaction of their return to Britain – one that did not start well when it was revealed that three army lorries were required to transport their luggage. They were lent Ednam Lodge in Berkshire for a month by their friend William Ward, the 3rd Earl of Dudley, and it was there on 16 October that the Duchess was robbed of some of her jewellery, a cause célèbre that made news headlines around the world – much of it critical of the Windsors.

  Whilst the couple were in London for the evening and staff were downstairs, a cat burglar climbed a drainpipe, crossed a flat roof and entered through the open window of the Duchess’s secretary. Wallis had rejected an offer to put her jewellery in the house safe and instead it was simply kept under her bed. Accounts vary, but it is said that some £250,000 of jewels were stolen, though some items were later found abandoned on a local golf course, including a string of pearls valued then at £5,000 and gifted to the Duke by Queen Alexandra.14

  The whole episode was distressing for everyone. The Countess of Dudley later wrote that Wallis showed:

  an unpleasant and to me unexpected side of her character . . . She wanted all the servants put through a kind of third degree. But I would have none of this, all of them except for one kitchen maid being old and devoted staff of long standing . . . the Duke was both demented with worry and near to tears.15

  The robbery received wide publicity and did not endear the Windsors to a Britain living with rationing. When asked what jewellery she had been wearing that night, Wallis replied, as if perfectly obvious, ‘A fool would know that with tweeds or other daytime clothes one wears gold, and that with evening clothes one wears platinum.’16

  Mysteries remain about the burglary, raising suspicions of an inside job – possibly, according to rumours, even sponsored by the Royal Family keen to recover gifts made to the Duke. None of the Dudleys’ guard dogs had barked and a detective at the front door had heard nothing. In 2003 the Scotland Yard case files were released, naming a well-known local burglar called Leslie Holmes.17 Holmes was imprisoned for five years in 1947 for other housebreaking offences and asked for twenty-six other cases to be taken into consideration, but he never confessed to the crime.

  Other suspects included two criminals operating in the South of France, Rodney Mundy and Campbell Muir,18 and both Suzy Menkes and Hugo Vickers have named a Norfolk burglar, Richard Dunphie, who confessed in 1960.<
br />
  The official historian of the Queen’s jewels, Leslie Field, later claimed:

  I believe the Duchess of Windsor defrauded the insurers by overstating the numbers and identifications of the jewels which had been disposed of. At least thirty items she named as being stolen turned up in the Sotheby’s catalogue at Geneva in April 1987 and were sold for high prices. She clearly could never wear those jewels again after she and her husband had collected the insurance. They had from the beginning been in a strong-box in Paris and remained there.19

  Meanwhile, the debate about the future of the captured German documents continued. ‘I feel sure they would not hesitate to remove any which showed appeasement policies of high British personalities in an unfavourable light,’ minuted Freeman Matthews, the Director of the State Department’s Office of European Affairs, to the US Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, in January 1946, concerned about the various British attempts to suppress the Windsor material. ‘We have on occasion had difficulty obtaining microfilm copies of certain documents. The British, on one occasion, formally requested us to sanction the destruction of certain documents dealing with the Duke of Windsor’s passage through Spain and Portugal in the summer of 1940.’20

  In June 1946, an Anglo-American agreement was signed for publication of selections of the captured German diplomatic documents, but the file on the Duke was not included in the archive given to the British and American historians.

  In November 1946, Newsweek leaked the story of the Marburg file, to the irritation of Lord Inverchapel, the British ambassador in Washington, who wrote a ‘Top Secret and Personal’ letter to the Under Secretary of State, Dean Acheson: ‘I am at a loss to know what explanation I can give to the Foreign Office with regard to this leakage in view of the special precautions which your Department agreed to undertake . . .’21

  Rumours were already rife in British circles about the file. Bruce Lockhart noted in his diary the same month: ‘Jack Wheeler-Bennett in his sifting of the German documents has found some damaging material on the Duke of Windsor. There are various protocols of Nazi conversations with him, including one at Lisbon during the war.’22

  At the foreign minister’s meeting in Moscow in March 1947, Bevin, an unlikely protector of the Royal Family, sent urgent requests to the new US secretary of state George Marshall, trying to suppress the Marburg file. In a ‘Personal, For Your Eyes Only’ telegram, Marshall asked Acheson about the microfilm copy of the Windsor file. ‘Bevin says only other copy was destroyed by Foreign Office, and asks that we destroy ours to avoid possibility of a leak to great embarrassment of Windsor’s brother. Please attend to this for me and reply for my eyes only.’23

  In August 1947, Owen Morshead and Anthony Blunt flew to Huis Doorn, the home of Kaiser Wilhelm II, after Wheeler-Bennett had found a reference in the captured German documents to his son Frederich Wilhelm being used as a royal intermediary by Hitler. They returned with the Kaiser’s Garter insignia and a portrait of the Duke of Clarence, but reported ‘no documentary material was found’.

  However, the story of the German documents was not over yet.24

  1 Susan Alsop, To Marietta from Paris 1945–1960 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), pp. 54–5. Patten continued to dine with the Windsors until April 1953, when her husband got into a row with the Duke after he called General Marshall a communist. Alsop, pp. 220–1.

  2 Cleveland Amory notes, CAP, Box 85, quoted Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 293.

  3 Alsop, p. 67.

  4 14 March 1946, John Julius Norwich (ed.), The Duff Cooper Diaries: 1915–1951 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 403. Désoeuvré means ‘with nothing to do’ or ‘at a loose end’.

  5 Parker, p. 245.

  6 Parker, p. 246.

  7 Bryan and Murphy, p. 463.

  8 6 April 1946, Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley (ed.), The Noël Coward Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 55.

  9 Suzy Menkes, The Windsor Style (Grafton, 1987), p. 76.

  10 7 June 1946, John Julius Norwich, p. 412.

  11 Duke of Windsor to de Courcy, 19 March 1946, de Courcy Box 3, Folder 5, Hoover Institute.

  12 Duke of Windsor to de Courcy, 15 April 1946, de Courcy Box 3, Folder 5, Hoover Institute.

  13 16 May 1946, KV4/467, TNA.

  14 Hugo Vickers, Behind Closed Doors (Hutchinson, 2011), p. 339, says only eleven pieces were stolen. Bryan and Murphy, p. 458, quoting a member of the Duke’s staff, says the jewels were insured for £400,000, but in fact the insurers paid out £800,000. £250K and £5K is £10.7 million and £214K in today’s money.

  15 Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, Laughter from a Cloud (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), pp. 104–5. To make up for the loss, he supposedly bought new jewels worth £75,000.

  16 Evening Standard, 17 October 1946.

  17 MEPO 2/9149, TNA, though parts still remain closed. Holmes’s granddaughter Harry Leavey wrote a fictionalised account of the robbery, The Duchess and the Soldier’s Revenge.

  18 Los Angeles Times, 1 January 1950.

  19 Higham, Mrs Simpson, pp. 428–9.

  20 Freeman Matthews to James Byrnes, 31 January 1946, Record Group 59, CF 1945–49 (Conf), Box 5703, FW 840.414/1-2946, NARA, quoted Morton, 17 Carnations, p. 288.

  21 Inverchapel to Acheson, 2 November 1946, FO 371/55526, TNA.

  22 23 November 1946, Young, Vol 2, p. 572.

  23 NA 841.001/3-157, NARA. Declassified in 1988 it carries a manuscript note ‘no record in RM/R as of 2,28/58’. No copy of microfilm appears to exist in any archive. We don’t know what it is, but its contents must have been highly sensitive.’ Acheson’s reply is also missing from the files.

  24 Owen Morshead to Tommy Lascelles, 28 September 1947, FO 371/1698, TNA.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Wandering Windsors

  The Windsors spent the winter of 1947 with Arthur Vernay at his home in the Bahamas, the first time the couple had returned to the island since 1945. They had met Vernay, an English-born American art and antiques dealer, decorator, big-game hunter, and explorer, during the war and were to subsequently spend many winters with him in the Bahamas.1

  From there they moved on to Robert Young in Palm Beach. Though never totally accepted in Newport or New York, the Windsors loved Palm Beach, where the Duke regularly played golf and they were treated as royalty, with bows, curtsies, positions at the head of table and being served first. Protocol required that no one could leave until they did, which often led to tensions, as the Duke enjoyed lingering. ‘Sometimes at parties, for no apparent reason, the Duke would insist on speaking only in German,’ one biographer remembered:

  Since German was a language with which most of the Palm Beach winter colony was not familiar, there were often evenings when, for long periods, no one had the slightest idea what the Duke was talking about. During the day, the male members of the Everglades Club would draw straws to see who would play golf with the Duke. The loser got him as a golfing partner; he was, it seemed, a painfully slow player, planning and discussing his shots for what felt like hours.2

  King Leopold of Belgium, a regular golfing partner, remembered how the Duke was ‘always eager to win and tended to forget his score. Once I saw David take three shots in a trap, then give himself a five.’3

  * * *

  In May 1947, the Windsors returned to London from the United States. Asked about a new job, the Duke replied, ‘I might do something sometime, but I have nothing definite in mind. I never take life easy. I never have and I never shall.’4 The Duke took the opportunity to lobby Clement Attlee for a job and see his mother on her eightieth birthday – though he was not invited to the birthday lunch. Cynthia Gladwyn, who saw the couple at a tea given by Sibyl Colefax, leaves a portrait of the former king:5

  At first glance he appears extraordinarily youthful, a boyish figure and his small retroussé nose giving him a very juvenile look. But as one examines him more carefully, one is almost unpleasantly shocked to see how old, wrinkled, and worried his face is and how pathetic
his expression. His hair is golden and I fancy must be dyed, for he must be over fifty . . . He was amiable and alert, but one was terribly aware of his instability. He talked a great deal, not interestingly, but keenly – in fact he hardly drew breath. We discussed conferences, the Russians, servant difficulties, the French, places he’d been to, and so on. I envy his remarkable memory, he appeared to remember dates and names with ease and accuracy. He spoke with a profound American accent, and used American expressions which rather jarred on me. He kept looking at his watch and wondering why the Duchess didn’t arrive, and finally dashed into the next room to telephone to find out what had detained her.6

  When Princess Elizabeth shortly afterwards announced her engagement to Philip Mountbatten, there was no invitation to the November wedding – the Windsors were the only close relations not amongst the 2,200 guests.

  ‘I am always hoping that one day you will tell me to bring Wallis to see you, as it makes me very sad to think that you and she have never really met,’ wrote the Duke to Queen Mary. ‘It would indeed be tragic if you, my mother, had never known the girl I married and who has made me so blissfully happy.’7

  Instead they returned to the Waldorf Towers, where they had become friends with the composer Cole Porter, who also had an apartment there, and where on Christmas Eve they hosted a large dinner.

  ‘We were a party of some twenty,’ remembered the journalist Cecil Roberts:

  I was astonished on entering their suite, which they kept permanently, by its almost regal magnificence. There were full-length paintings of George III and George IV in their coronation robes. Others of the duke’s ancestors were there, some in the Garter regalia, all illuminated, in the long salon. Two footmen wore liveries. It was a full-dress affair, the ladies décolleté, with jewels. The duchess wore a small tiara on her black, tightly drawn-back hair. A cerise silk gown moulded her svelte figure. The dining-room shone with silver, cut glass, flowers. The serviettes were embroidered with the royal arms. This did not look like exile.