It was all part of 'buttering up the new King at the expense of the old one', thought Geoffrey Wells. 'It's dreadful - not one honest voice.' Usually an enthusiastic cinema-goer, his last visit had made him miserable. 'The News all King - awful stuff', he complained in his diary. 'Played God Save the King, and all stood up, but after what had gone before I could have been kicked from one side of the hall to the other more bearably than standing in that solemn crowd. So I sat tight.' Wells believed that Edward had behaved 'like a man':
I can respect a King who acted, however dictatorially, as a King, even tho' I opposed him to the death: but I could not respect those (Baldwin etc) who set up a King and then demand that he behave like a dummy.35
Meanwhile, Society behaved as if there had been a royal death. The new King's family cancelled all invitations, as did many London hostesses. At a party for Sir Thomas Beecham, organized by Emerald Cunard, most women wore black36 (although according to one report, 'Lady Mountbatten looked almost startlingly gay in a dress of aquamarine blue, paillettes matching her aquamarine necklace and a wrap of bright blue ostrich feathers'37). Back in London after a brief visit to Edward in Austria, Perry Brownlow was horrified to find himself ostracized. He telephoned Diana Vreeland late one night and asked her to come and see him and his wife, Kitty. Since his return two weeks before, he told Diana and her husband, Reed, everyone had been turning their back on him - 'This is my life: today I walk into White's and every man leaves the bar.' He was shocked to be snubbed in this way by his fellow members of White's, the grandest of gentlemen's clubs in London, in St James's. 'I walk down Seymour Street, where Kitty and I have lived all these years', he told them, 'and if I see a friend he crosses to the other side of the street. Nobody - but nobody - speaks to me in London. It's as if people really believed I was a party to the abdication - to a conspiracy!!'38 'I stayed there two days with him,' he sighed. 'Now I'm back in London, and this is my reward - I am completely, totally alone.'39 Brownlow soon received yet another punishment for his loyalty to Edward - dismissal from his position of Lord-in-Waiting. He was summarily replaced by the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, but was not even told officially - he knew only because he read about it for himself in the Court Circular.
Lord Brownlow 'came to see Stan', wrote Lucy Baldwin in her diary on 18 December, adding that he was 'Very harried & very worried at the odium he has earned by looking after Mrs Simpson for King Edward.'40 He also wrote to Lord Cromer, who was Lord Chamberlain, objecting in the strongest terms.
But Brownlow's loyal efforts on Edward's behalf were appreciated in some quarters. 'I, as one of the poor,' wrote a Towcester woman, 'wish to thank you for your brave deed in standing by the Duke of Winsor [sic] and Mrs Simpson, we have only praise for your good deed.'42 Wallis herself was grateful beyond measure. 'I can never make you realize my gratitude and appreciation for everything you did for me', she wrote from Cannes on 18 December - 'to go into it only brings tears so you will understand won't you?'45 Feeling hated by so many people in England, Wallis found great comfort in Brownlow's staunch support. 'There is nothing I can begin to say about Perry's friendship for us', she wrote to Edward. 'It has been absolutely marvellous in every way. Do tell him. I can't because I begin to cry, I have never seen anything like it.'44
Others were made to suffer for their friendship with Edward and Wallis. 'The other day in my presence', Queen Mary wrote to Prince Paul, the regent of Yugoslavia,
Bertie told George he wished him and Marina never to see Lady Cunard again and George said he would not do so. I fear she has done David a great deal of harm as there is no doubt that she was great friends with Mrs Simpson at one time and gave parties for her. Under the circumstances I feel none of us, in fact people in society, should meet her.
She was sure that
you will agree one should not meet her again after what has happened and I am hoping that George and Marina will no longer see certain people who alas were friends of Mrs S and Lady Cunard's and also David's ... As you may imagine I feel very strongly on the matter but several people have mentioned to me what harm she has done.45
George and Marina were picked out for this special attention because of the close friendship between George and Edward and because the Kents had often been in the company of Edward and Wallis at Fort Belvedere.
Everyone in Society understood that a purge was underway. 'Are we all on the "Black List"?' wondered Chips Channon. 'Are the Sutherlands, the Marlboroughs, the Stanleys?'46 Queen Elizabeth thanked Lady Londonderry for her 'thoughtfulness' in inquiring whether or not certain people should be invited to a party. She told her that 'Lady Cunard is really the only one that we do not want to meet just now. The bitter months of last autumn & winter are still so fresh in our minds.' Her presence, she added, 'would inevitably bring so many sad thoughts, that we would prefer not to meet her . . . There is nobody else on your little list, except possibly poor Mrs Corrigan [an American hostess], who one could take any exception to, and I do appreciate your tact and kindness in writing.'47
Whereas Brownlow was punished, Hardinge flourished under the new royal regime. 'For your ear only,' he wrote to Dawson, 'I am staying on as P.S. [Private Secretary] to our new King - to which, when I am rested, I am immensely looking forward.'48 Soon afterwards, at the beginning of 1937, Hardinge became one of the youngest Knights of the Bath on the Civil List. Wigram was rewarded, too. 'I am glad to see Clive Wigram is to be Permanent Lord in Waiting, a new post, that he may be always about the King', noted George Trevelyan. 'He was G V's prop and staff, but E had no use for him.'49 Almost from the start it appeared that Louis Mountbatten, Edward's cousin, 'was going to cross the chasm safely from one reign to the next.' He was appointed Personal Naval Aide-de-Camp to the new King and was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order.50 Charles Lambe, who became the sole attendant on the Duke of Windsor in January 1937, later returned to work in the Royal Household for George VI, at the King's special request. Joey Legh, who went with Edward into exile after his abdication broadcast, came back to England when the new King asked him to be his Master of the Household. Edward's second Assistant Private Secretary, Sir Godfrey Thomas, was transferred to the service of Harry, the Duke of Gloucester, as his Private Secretary.
Osbert Sitwell wrote a nasty poem, 'Rat Week', which claimed that as soon as the King had abdicated, all his friends - and Wallis's, too - deserted them. Sitwell adored Elizabeth, the new Queen. He had been a regular visitor at the Yorks' home on 145 Piccadilly and they shared many close friends, including Mrs Greville. Sitwell, who saw himself as an aesthete of the highest refinement, despised Edward, regarding him as a Philistine with no proper taste or appreciation of art. He shuddered at Edward's love for an American from Baltimore and he dismissed his interest in the life of working-class families as irrelevant and even unpleasant. Sitwell had already used poetry to savage his enemies, who ranged from Churchill and Beaverbrook to Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence and his two prize foes, Noel Coward and Wyndham Lewis.51 Now he attacked the former King and his beloved, by disparaging their friends:
Where are the friends of yesterday
That fawned on Him,
That flattered Her;
Where are the friends of yesterday, Submitting to His every whim,
Offering praise of Her as myrrh To Him?52
'Rat Week' was accurate in so far as some people had indeed behaved very badly towards old friends. 'Ratting', it seemed, was de rigeur.5' But Sitwell's poem was riddled with untruths. Despite Wallis's bad press - 'No one has been more victimized by gossip and scandal', said Churchill54 - her close friends did not desert her. It was true that the English 'set' on the Riviera generally shunned Wallis, but she and Sybil Colefax - a genuine friend - spent Christmas Day together, two weeks after the abdication, at Villa Mauresque, the home of the writer Somerset Maugham. In March 1937, Maugham wrote to a friend that in the early part of the previous winter,
We saw a certain amount of Mrs Simpson and as you know she came t
o stay here. I had known her years ago before she became a figure of world-wide importance and the strange thing about her is that she has not altered at all. She has always been very loyal to her old friends and that I think is one of the qualities that has done her most harm.
He added, 'I think she had a very difficult role to play and I doubt whether any woman could have played it successfully.'55 Daisy Fel- lowes was another old friend who was delighted to see Wallis in the South of France. And Wallis's old friends from Peking, Herman and Katherine Rogers, who looked after her at Lou Viei, remained loyal and loving even though their lives were thrown into disarray by the drama of Wallis's sudden arrival and her long stay, with an army of journalists continually camped outside their gates.
Nor was Edward rejected by his genuine friends. Duff Cooper, writing his memoirs in the fifties, fondly recalled Edward's 'sympathy with suffering, courage and sincerity'.56 Lord Brownlow, who had lost and suffered so much through his loyalty to Edward, remained defiant for the rest of his life. At Belton House, his country estate in Lincolnshire, photographs of Edward and Wallis covered the desks and tables - and many of them have stayed there ever since.
Winston Churchill suffered from feelings of almost fatalistic depression, according to his daughter Mary.57 He was at an extremely low point in his political fortunes and was resented by the new King and Queen - for his loyalty to Edward, and for his energetic opposition to the policy of appeasement to Nazi Germany. He continued to look out for Edward's interests, and reported in a letter to his wife, Clementine, that 'HMG [Her Majesty's Government] are preparing a dossier about the D of W's finances, debts and spendings on acct of Cutie [Wallis] wh[ich] I fear they mean to use to his detriment when the Civil List is considered.' Churchill's letter ended with a postscript: ' "Odi quem laeseris" (Hate whom you have injured) as the Romans used to say—.'58 Clementine Churchill had not shared her husband's support for Edward as King, but she did share his revulsion at the way people suddenly turned their backs on their former sovereign. She made her feelings known at a dinner held by Chips Channon for a couple called the Granards which was attended by the Churchills and some other friends. Channon was in any case concerned that his guests were 'a little too Edward VIII for the Granards' - that it was 'a thoroughly "Cavalier" collection'. When, predictably, Lord Granard attacked the former King, Mrs Churchill 'turned on him and asked crushingly, "If you feel that way, why did you invite Mrs Simpson to your house and put her on your right?" '59 (By putting Wallis on his right, he had been treating her as the female guest of honour and therefore, by implication, as Edward's wife.)
Cinema-goers in America made their feelings known. At the Embassy Theater in Times Square in New York City, reported Time magazine, the newsreel reports on the abdication were watched noisily:
Prince Edward (cheers); Mrs Simpson (cheers); her first husband Commander Spencer, USN (boos); her second and present husband Mr Simpson (cheers and boos); new King George and Queen Elizabeth (boos); Prime Minister Baldwin (prolonged catcalls and boos); King Edward and Mrs Simpson bathing in Mediterranean (cheers).60
Well-meant offers of help were sent to Edward from the USA. 'Why in screaming thunder don't you marry Wally and come to Hobbs New Mexico. A welcome awaits you', urged one telegram.61 Another, from Mississippi, promised him 'true Southern hospitality and plantation life'.62 In Canada, people quickly forgot about the crisis of Edward's abdication, which worried Sir Francis Floud, the British High Commissioner in Ottawa. Although this might simply have been because 'it takes a great deal to disturb the self-centredness of the Canadian', he wrote to the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs in London on 2.2 December, there was an obvious danger that respect for the Crown in Canada was deteriorating.63
Edward had arrived at Enzesfeld Castle in Austria on Monday 14 December, the day after the Archbishop's speech. He now had to endure a period of suffering that was even more terrible than the last few weeks. He could not see the woman he loved, for whom he had given up a throne, because their lawyers had advised them not to be together at any time until the decree nisi was made absolute. Not until then, in five months time, would they finally be able to marry. Even this was not certain. On the one hand, the affidavit that had been served just days before the abdication, alleging collusion in the Simpsons' divorce, had now been withdrawn as a result of Edward's farewell speech to the nation. The man who had submitted it did not 'feel justified,' he wrote to Goddard, 'in view of the Broadcast at 10 o'clock on Friday evening last to which I listened, in pursuing the matter further.'64 But on the other hand, a further affidavit had followed, and the King's Proctor was bound to launch an investigation.65
When Perry Brownlow went to see Edward at Enzesfeld, 'a footman took him though this cold, lonely castle to a room. He went into the room and there he saw the Duke - who looked just like a little schoolboy sound asleep, with sun coming across his blond hair. His bed was surrounded by chairs . . . and on each chair was a picture of his beloved Wallis.' His love, said Lord Brownlow, 'was an obsession. No greater love has ever existed.'66
For Wallis at Lou Viei, this further trial of waiting and worry was unbearable. 'Darling,' she wrote to Edward, 'I want to leave here I want to see you touch you I want to run my own house I want to be married and to you.'6 Her heart, she said, was 'so full of love for you and the agony of not being able to see you after all you have been through is pathetic. At the moment we have the whole world against us and our love ... I love you David and 1 am holding so tight.'68 In fact, the 'whole world' was not against them and their love - but it was impossible for her to know this. She hated the notoriety that had attached itself to her name and learned with horror that Madame Tussaud's had put up a waxwork of her. She asked Walter Monckton to investigate, and he reported back: 'The figure of Mrs S is in the Grand Hall. It stands alone in an alcove draped with black velvet cushions. She is represented in a standing position wearing a red evening dress. There is nothing remarkable about the figure.' She was placed between a group on one side which included Voltaire, Marie Antoinette, Joan of Arc and Louis XIV, and a group on the other side with Ailenby, French, Haig, Kitchener, Roberts and Wellington.69
To her friend Sybil Colefax, Wallis sent letters expressing her hurt and distress at Edward's treatment. 'I am more than discouraged', she wrote, 'by the propaganda allowed in England against the Duke . . . when the records of his speech were not allowed in England.' Surely, she added, 'it is an organized campaign and not very creditable considering it is against one man who has shown nothing but loyalty to his country.' Every night, she said, 'in spite of bishops I pray to god not to let me become bitter.' The strain had been dreadful and seemed to be reflected in the storms shaking the house: 'The weather is not quieting - every day a wild wind rushing up the valley shrieking, screaming until I think I shall go mad.'70 She thanked Sybil for sticking by her. 'As you know,' she told her, 'your friendship makes me very happy.'71
Telephone calls between Austria and Cannes were frequently interrupted by line failure, and in any case it was difficult for Wallis and Edward to hear each other. In her loneliness, Wallis felt vulnerable and feared he might not love her any more. 'I look a hundred and weigh no [pounds],' she wrote in despair, 'you won't love me when you see the wreck England has made me.'72 Her love for Edward never wavered, but her confidence did, and at moments she even became jealous of Edward's hostess, Kitty, the Baroness Eugene de Rothschild. At first, Wallis had felt warmly towards her. Before Edward's arrival, she wrote to her, asking, 'Dear Kitty - be kind to him. He is honest and good and really worthy of affection. They simply haven't understood.'73 But shortly after Edward had settled down at Enzesfeld Castle, she began to suffer pangs of insecurity. 'I long for you and love you,' she told him, 'but become eanum suspicious of "all of you". It is odd the hostess remaining on. Must be that fatal charm!'74 Her jealousy was fed by the rumours that circulated about each of them. 'I have a letter from a woman in Paris,' she wrote in misery to Edward saying that Kitty
&n
bsp; has arrived full of new rumours, additional gossip, etc. I can only pray to God that in your loneliness you haven't flirted with her (I suspect that) or told everything about yourself - finances, family matters or hurt feelings over your brothers [sic] treatment of you because Paris will be full of that and once on the telephone she hinted to me that London wasn't treating you well ... I know my sweet you have a way of telling too much to strangers and heaven knows the Rothschilds were that when you arrived.75
Edward replied with understanding and devotion. 'I know WE will so hold tight', he assured her. He knew she would trust him, and was certain that she would never take any notice of anything or rotten gossip that any foul woman or women may try to spread. I hate them all darling and despise them all so. So you do so too and never never believe a word of it because it never never would or will be true.76
One great comfort to Wallis was the arrival of both her Aunt Bessie and Wallis's maid, Mary Burke, who left London together on 18 December for Cannes, bringing Wallis's clothes. Bessie stayed at the Carlton Hotel to be near her niece. The day before her departure, she sent Edward a letter telling him 'how constantly I have held you in my thoughts since you left, and, Sir, with what affectionate regard you will always remain there.'77 Edward replied with equally loving affection, happy that she would soon be with Wallis.78
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