Traitor King

by Andrew Lownie

  Other tributes were more measured. The Times obituary confined itself to the facts with few references to Wallis, whom it called ‘Mrs Simpson’ throughout. To Richard Nixon, who had hosted a white tie dinner for the couple at the White House a few years earlier, ‘He was a man of noble spirit and high ideals, for whom millions of Americans felt deep respect and affection.’31

  * * *

  On 31 May the Duke’s body was flown to RAF Benson, where it was met by a Royal Guard of Honour, by the Duke and Duchess of Kent, members of the government and the French Ambassador. A band played the first six bars of the National Anthem. The coffin, its whole length covered by flowers from the Duchess, lay overnight in the RAF chapel with RAF officers keeping a vigil. It bore a simple inscription:

  HRH The Prince Edward Albert Christian George

  Andrew Patrick David, Duke of Windsor

  Born 1894 Died 1972

  King Edward VIII

  20 January–11 December 1936

  The next day, the body was taken to St George’s Chapel at Windsor, where it lay in state for two days whilst 60,000 mourners filed past.

  On 2 June, the Duchess, who had been too distressed to accompany her husband’s body, flew to London in an aeroplane of the Queen’s Flight accompanied by Grace Dudley, Mary Soames, John Utter, whom she had tried to dismiss only ten days before, the Duke’s American doctor and a former equerry, Douglas Greenacre. She was met at Heathrow by Mountbatten and driven to stay at Buckingham Palace – the first time she had been there since a State Ball in May 1935, celebrating George V’s Silver Jubilee, and the first time she had appeared in the Court Circular.

  ‘She said how extremely nervous she was of having to confront the whole Royal Family without David to support her,’ wrote Mountbatten in his diary. ‘She had only seen them once before briefly at the unveiling of Queen Mary’s Memorial at Marlborough House, and then he had been with her. This was going to be very different and she was really apprehensive. Wallis was particularly worried about Elizabeth the Queen Mother who, she said, had never approved of her,’ but Mountbatten reassured her that, ‘She is so deeply sorry for you in your present grief and remembers what she felt like when her own husband died.’32

  But her apprehensions were confirmed. ‘They were polite to me, polite and kind, especially the Queen. Royalty is always polite and kind. But they were cold.’33 A former courtier confirms the reaction. ‘The Queen didn’t want to have much to do with Wallis. Dinner was given in the Chinese Room – with anybody else, it would have been in the Queen’s own dining room. She preferred to go down to where Wallis was set up. It was okay – everybody behaved decently. Charles was there, and helpful. But there was certainly no outpouring of love between the Queen and the Duchess of Windsor or vice versa.’34

  The next day Wallis was invited to the Trooping of the Colour with the Queen wearing a black armband and a minute’s silence in the Duke’s honour. Heavily sedated, Wallis chose to watch it on television from a neighbouring building, though a few press pictures captured her at a window, her face gaunt, her eyes sad.

  That evening Mountbatten and Prince Charles took her to St George’s Chapel to see her husband lying in state after the crowds had gone. Mountbatten later wrote how she stood ‘for a few moments alone, her head bowed in grief . . . At the end she stood again looking at the coffin and said in the saddest imaginable voice, “He was my entire life. I can’t begin to think what I am going to do without him, he gave up so much for me and now he has gone. I always hoped that I would die before him.”’35

  Prince Charles remembered how she ‘stood alone, a frail, tiny, black figure, gazing at the coffin and finally bowing briefly . . . As we stood, she kept saying, “He gave up so much for so little” – pointing at herself with a strange grin.’36 It was her thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.

  The hour-long funeral took place on the Monday in St George’s Chapel, attended by the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, with Wallis dressed in a simple black dress and coat quickly run up by Givenchy. Several times during the service, Wallis appeared confused and the Queen had to help her find her place in the order of service. Clarissa Avon told Cecil Beaton, one of the guests, how the ‘Queen showed a motherly and nanny-like tenderness and kept putting her hand on the Duchess’s arm and glove.’37

  ‘Wonderful as the service was, I was not moved by the death of this man who for less than a year had been our King,’ wrote Beaton in his diary:

  History will make his love story into a romance. In fact, for us so close, it is hard to see that. Wallis has been a good friend to me, I like her. She is a good friend to all her friends. There is no malice in her. There is nothing dislikeable. She is just not of the degree that has reason to be around the Throne . . .38

  After the service, there was a lunch for forty in the state dining room. ‘I was seated with the sun shining in my eyes,’ Wallis told her friend the Countess of Romanones – not always a reliable source. ‘I was in pain from it. I sat next to the Duke of Edinburgh, who I had always imagined would be better, kinder, perhaps more human than the others, but you know, Aline, he is just a four-flusher. Not he, or anyone else, offered me any solicitude or sympathy whatsoever.’39

  After the lunch, the party moved to the committal at Frogmore and burial at a site the Duke had chosen, near where he had played as a boy, and where it had been agreed Wallis would also be buried. The Duchess was shocked by how little space was left for her ‘just a sliver, up against a hedge. I looked at the archbishop and said, “I realize that I am a very thin, small woman, but I do not think that even I could fit into that miserable little narrow piece of ground next to His Royal Highness’s burial plot.”’

  ‘I don’t see that there’s much that can be done about it. You’ll fit, all right,’ he replied.40

  The Lord Chamberlain then escorted her party back to the airport. As she left the plane, she thanked the pilot. ‘You must come out and see us, next time you’re here. The Duke would so enjoy meeting you!’41

  1 For more on his clothes, see Elizabeth Dawson, ‘Comfort and Freedom: The Duke of Windsor’s Wardrobe’, Costume: The Journal of the Costume Society, 1 June 2013, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 198–215.

  2 Bryan and Murphy, p. xvii.

  3 McCall’s magazine, February 1961.

  4 $450K today.

  5 Sunday Dispatch, 22 January 1961.

  6 Los Angeles Times, 29 December 1962.

  7 31 December 1962, Payn and Morley, p. 520.

  8 King, p. 455.

  9 About $3.5 million today.

  10 New York Times, 29 May 1972.

  11 Los Angeles Times, 15 December 1966.

  12 King, p. 457.

  13 They always occupied cabins U87, U89 and U91, known as the ‘Duck Suite’, which consisted of two bedrooms and a sitting room in-between, with a valet and maid in two nearby inside cabins.

  14 Wallis revealed she was an insomniac, who read detective novels to get to sleep and would like to have headed an advertising agency. The interview can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=I02fZDd-BBc&t=4s

  15 Jonathan Dimbleby, The Prince of Wales (Little, Brown, 1994), pp.178–9.

  16 Birmingham, p. 257.

  17 Cyrus Sulzberger, An Age of Mediocrity (Macmillan, 1973), p. 581. The Duke was in fact seventy-five.

  18 Cecil Beaton, The Parting Years (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978), pp. 110–11.

  19 Melvyn Bragg, Richard Burton: A Life (Little, Brown, 1988) , p. 393.

  20 Hugo Vickers (ed.), The Unexpurgated Beaton (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002), p. 212.

  21 Bryan and Murphy, p. 545.

  22 Charles Murphy to Joe Bryan, 3 April 1972, Murphy papers, Mss 5.9 B 8405:97–119, Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

  23 Bryan and Murphy, p. 546.

  24 Bryan and Murphy, p. 546.

  25 Interview quoted Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 334.

  26 ‘The Dear Romance’, Vanity Fair, June 1986. Murphy, p. 548 says the same.

  2
7 Shanley interview, quoted King, p. 473.

  28 Vickers, Unexpurgated Beaton, p. 252.

  29 Philip Ziegler (ed.), From Shore to Shore: The Final Years (Collins, 1989), p. 251.

  30 MB1/K45, Mountbatten papers, Hartley Archives, Southampton University.

  31 New York Times, 29 May 1972.

  32 Ziegler, From Shore to Shore, p. 253.

  33 Bryan and Murphy, p. 551.

  34 Ben Pimlott, The Queen: A Biography of Queen Elizabeth II (Collins, 1996), pp. 408–9.

  35 Ziegler, From Shore to Shore, pp. 253–4.

  36 Dimbleby, p. 180.

  37 Unexpurgated Beaton, p. 256.

  38 Ibid, p. 256.

  39 ‘The Dear Romance’, Vanity Fair, June 1986.

  40 Ibid. The hedge was later moved to accommodate her.

  41 Bryan and Murphy, p. 556.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Duchess Alone

  Wallis returned to a home filled with reminders of their life together. She may have strained at his devotion and her lack of freedom, but he had given purpose and structure to her life. Now at seventy-six, she was a widow with no immediate family and a dwindling circle of friends. ‘I think that the Duke was more in love with the Duchess than the Duchess with him,’ the Countess of Romanones later claimed, ‘but by the time he was dying, she had begun to realise how much in love with him she was. He meant more to her than anyone.’1

  The house became a shrine with everything left as it had been. ‘His suits still hang in his dressing-room cupboards. His shirts are stacked in their drawers, his toilet articles spread in his bathroom, his desk ready for instant use, with supplies of pipe cleaners and assorted stationery, all as during his lifetime.’2

  She was terrified that she would not have enough money and that the French Government would end the agreement over the house. The Mill, which had been on the market for two years, was sold to a Swiss millionaire for £350,000, together with the 3.5 acres in Marbella for £82,000.3

  In fact, Wallis inherited everything – nothing was left to charity, friends, godchildren or staff.4 She received $19,500 from the United Kingdom and $2.5 million of French assets, the Queen continued the annual allowance, now reduced to £5,000, the French did not impose death duties, and she remained immune from tax during her lifetime, but the Paris staff was still reduced from twenty-five to fourteen.5

  One of those to go was Sydney, the butler, who had been with the Windsors since the Bahamas. His wife had just died, requiring him to put his three small children to bed. Having failed to engage a nurse or housekeeper, he asked if he might begin going home at five. Wallis’s response had been, ‘If you go at five, don’t come back.’ He left and did not come back.6

  Later in June, the art historian Roy Strong dined with the Windsors’ friends Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, with Cecil Beaton amongst the guests. Strong recollected Charles Wrightsman telling him that:

  The Duchess was, however, the ‘bad lot’, a chronic insomniac who needed only three hours’ sleep and demanded that people talk to her till four in the morning. She sponged off everyone and had boyfriends, in particular Jimmy Donohoe (sic), whom she had times with on her own at Palm Beach, the Duke arriving later. Charlie Wrightsman categorised her as the ‘nurse’. He was like a child of ten. The Duchess ran the whole show, embarking on memoirs and television for the money. She had invested in jewellery, which was a mistake, because on his death her income collapsed as certain revenues from Wales ceased to come any more. She had been virtually doped for his funeral and it was thought safer to take her into the Palace rather than having her freak out at Claridge’s.7

  At the lunch at the funeral, Wallis had deliberately been placed between Mountbatten and Prince Philip, whose task was to persuade her to part with sensitive papers and royal heirlooms. ‘Within a day or two of her return to Paris, a truck drew up and whisked them away,’ wrote Kenneth Rose in his diary. ‘They are now in the Royal Archives at Windsor.’8

  Exactly what was removed to the Royal Archives, when and whether it was all above board, has never been clear. The Duchess’s lawyer, Maître Blum, later claimed ‘that two individuals, authorised either by Lord Mountbatten, or “some other person” acting upon what she alleged to be Royal authority, had somehow obtained the keys to the Duke’s boxes and confidential filing cabinet and burgled the contents . . . The contents included the Duke’s private correspondence, the documents of divorce from Win Spencer and Ernest Simpson . . . and a certain amount of the Duchess’s personal correspondence.’9

  But, according to Kenneth de Courcy, the first consignment of papers was handed to the Queen’s Librarian Sir Robin Mackworth-Young with the Duchess present on 15 June 1972. A second tranche, again collected with the Duchess’s knowledge, was picked up on 13 December.10 A third was picked up by Mackworth-Young on 22 July 1977.11

  Mountbatten now found the opportunity to drop in more often, anxious to know what would happen to her wealth and possessions after her death. He suggested that some of the jewellery might be given to some of the younger female royals; that he might serve as an executor of her will; the setting up of a Duke of Windsor Foundation chaired by Prince Charles and with Rear Admiral Philip de Gaulle, son of the President, as the French trustee; and that she might support the United World Colleges, of which Mountbatten was International President. Eventually Mountbatten was told not to visit her by her doctor, Jean Thin, because it raised her blood pressure.

  Initially enthusiastic, at the beginning of 1973 she decided against the foundation, dismissed her London solicitor, Sir Godfrey Morley of Allen and Overy, and appointed Suzanne Blum to act for her exclusively in future. It was to mark an important new chapter in the Duchess’s life.

  Blum had been born in north-west France in 1898 and had graduated from the University of Poitiers in 1921. In the same year she had married Paul Weill, later the Paris representative of Allen and Overy. She had built a successful and high-profile practice, representing Rita Hayworth in her divorce from the Aly Khan in 1958, and her Hollywood clients included Charlie Chaplin, Jack Warner, Darryl F. Zanuck, Walt Disney, Douglas Fairbanks and Merle Oberon. One of her first briefs had been successfully defending Warner Brothers against an action brought by the composer Igor Stravinsky for misuse of his music.

  She had first been introduced to the Windsors in 1937, through the US ambassador William Bullitt, but had only started acting for the Windsors shortly after the Second World War. From 1973 her influence over the Duchess would be absolute. In March 1973, partly as a thank you for their generosity, Wallis signed an agreement to give the French government almost 140 pieces of furniture worth £750,000 and works of art.12 Her gold boxes, some costing £25,000 each, were donated to the Louvre, a Stubbs picture went to Versailles, and some porcelain to the National Ceramics Museum at Sèvres.13

  Writing to Joe Bryan that month, Charles Murphy related how:

  Biddy Mokcton (sic), now back in London, has called me here in great distress. A classical situation seems to have taken shape. Morley has been fired. Utter has taken over the management of the household. An English nurse from the staff of the American Hospital, who brought the Duchess home and has been with her four weeks or so, says that his (Utter’s) office is maneuvering (sic) to take over the possessions. Most correspondence he throws into the waste basket. She has seen him do it. He allows few calls to go through to the Duchess. The effect is to persuade her that she is quite alone except for him. Even Biddy Monckton, who gave up her own comfort to be with the Duchess, was required by Utter, until the last visit, to stay in a hotel.

  It seems that Utter has made an art of cultivating the affection of rich elderly ladies who leave their possessions to him. I shall tell you this: the other day as I left the gate, Boyer, the English chauffeur, was standing outside. ‘I must see you, Mr Murphy. You can’t believe what is going on in that house. It will shock you.’ Later, I told him. Think of the value of the jewels, the jewelry, the little bibelots and Meissen, that today are
no longer under surveillance . . .14

  Wallis became increasingly obsessed with security. Beside the spiked fence and guarded gate and alarm system, she kept a pistol on her night table – unknown to her it was a fake – and hired a former French paratrooper to patrol the grounds. She began to drink more heavily – preferably vodka in a silver cup – and to become more reclusive.

  She still sat on the boards of the American Hospital and the Animal Society, but contributed little in time or money. When her secretary John Utter tried to persuade her to visit hospital patients ‘to redeem her image’, she refused.15 She turned down a suggestion from Jackie Onassis, now a publisher, to write another volume of memoirs, but in March 1975 she put many of her documents in the care of Maître Blum, with instructions that they be turned into a book. She had always been interested in cancer research, and as a means of thanking the French for years of low rent, she now wrote a new will making the Pasteur Medical Institute her main beneficiary.

  She still saw some friends and travelled. In May 1973, the businesswoman Francine Farkas lent Wallis her villa at Cap Ferrat – as a thank you, Wallis gave her a silver urn with the royal crest. Farkas had met the Windsors through her husband, Alexander Farkas, who ran the department store Alexanders. The couples had met whenever the Windsors were in New York or the Farkas’s in France.

  ‘Her life was devoted to him and his needs,’ recollected Ms Farkas:

  She would even check if there were bones in his sole filet at a restaurant. Her conversation was animated and she could talk engagingly about business, politics and especially food about which she knew more about than anyone I knew. Everything was done to perfection and when entertaining she’d have a small string quartet playing in the dining room gallery. He was the most charming person with real presence. Though a small man physically, people parted in front of him. He loved gardening and I remember how he showed me how to cut roses correctly, always the fifth rose down. People liked being with them. She always held court. She was like an older sister to me, someone who one valued being around.16