His obsessive desire for Wallis now left no room for Ernest. “I do hate and loathe the present situation . . . and am just going mad at the mere thought (let alone knowing) that you are alone there with Ernest. God bless WE forever my Wallis. You know your David will love you and look after you so long as he has breath in his eanum body.”84
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I. When Chips Channon’s diaries were published in 1967, his views on the royal family were seen as so controversial that certain names were redacted. In this instance it is likely that he is referring to the Duchess of York and then the battle between the king’s camp and the York camp, which would include the attitude of the king and queen.
4
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God Bless WE
The prince’s attempts to speak to his father at any length about his personal life were thwarted by events. On November 6, 1935, Edward’s brother Prince Harry was married in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace to Lady Alice Scott. Eminently suitable, she was the third daughter of the king’s friend the Duke of Buccleuch. Sadly, the duke died just before the wedding, rendering it a quiet affair. Queen Mary recorded in her diary how charming the bridesmaids looked: “Lilibet and MargaretI looked too sweet.”1 In his diary, King George wrote: “Now all the children are married but David.” In a state of resigned despair, weakened by concerns over Edward’s private life, he memorably said: “I pray to God my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne.”2
Later that month, the general election saw the National Government return to power with a reduced majority and Stanley Baldwin enjoying his third term as prime minister. The prince sensed that his father was too engrossed with the political aspect of his duties to be disturbed. Then, a bitter blow befell the royal family. On the day that the seventy-year-old king was due to open Parliament, his favorite sister, Princess Victoria, died. The siblings were exceptionally close; King George would begin each day with a telephone call to her at her Buckinghamshire house, Coppins, in Iver, at 9:30 a.m. Weighed down by grief, it was the first time in his life that the king had canceled a state ceremony. His health rapidly deteriorated and he never appeared in public again.3 His family believed that the loss of his beloved sister sounded his own death knell.
Aware that King George’s life was ebbing away, all efforts were made by the family to try and ensure that Christmas at Sandringham was especially memorable. In the White Ballroom, nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth romped around the Christmas tree with her younger sister, Margaret, their childish effervescence lightening the somber mood. Edward, the only family member not to have a spouse by his side, felt “detached and lonely.” He later wrote: “my brothers were secure in their private lives; whereas I was caught up in an inner conflict and would have no peace of mind until I had resolved it.”4 On Boxing Day he wrote to Wallis from Sandringham: “I couldn’t believe it was possible to miss this way but it’s so lovely although hell while it lasts. It really is terrible here and so much the worst Xmas I’ve ever had to spend with the family. . . . Oh! to be alone for ages and ages and then—ages and ages. God bless WE sweetheart but I’m sure he does—he must. Your David.”5
Wallis and the prince saw in the new year together at a house party at Melton Mowbray, hosted by their friends the Buists. Both dressed as pirates for the evening fancy dress gala. Ernest was again absent—he had traveled to Canada for business. The prince’s need for Wallis to be permanently at his side was now insatiable. On New Year’s morning he sent a note to her room: “Your lovely New Year message helped a boy a lot in his lonely drowsy and he was feeling sad. . . . Oh! my Wallis I know we’ll have Viel Glück to make us one this year.”
The deteriorating health of the king dominated the thoughts of the nation over New Year. Suffering from a chronic bronchial complaint, King George continued his daily habit of riding out on his white pony, Jock. With Queen Mary walking beside him, he looked his last upon the gardens and grounds of Sandringham, the home he had enjoyed most in the world.
On January 16, Edward hosted a day’s shoot in Windsor Great Park. Duff Cooper noted that the Prince of Wales was “in the highest spirits.” It was snowing and bitterly cold when the party broke for lunch at the Fort.6 That afternoon, the prince received an urgent note, while still in the field, from his mother. “I think you ought to know that Papa is not very well,” she had written. Lord Dawson, the king’s physician, was “not too pleased with Papa’s state at the present moment.” The note was carefully worded so as not to arouse undue concern in the heir to the throne, while she was similarly anxious that his sudden arrival must not alert the suspicions of the king to his own perilous condition. Edward hastened back to the Fort, where Wallis was waiting for him, and silently handed her the note. As she was reading it, he telephoned his pilot to tell him to have his airplane ready to fly him the following morning to Norfolk.
At Sandringham, he found his father sitting in front of the fire in his old Tibetan dressing gown, gazing through the window at the church tower jutting above the leafless winter trees.
On Saturday night, as all the members of his family were gathering, Edward wrote to Wallis, his longing and loneliness palpable:
My own sweetheart,
Just a line to say I love you more and more and more and need you so to be with me at this difficult time. There is no hope whatsoever for the king it’s only a matter of how long. . . . But I do long long [sic] to see you even for a few minutes my Wallis it would help so much. . . . You are all and everything I have in life and WE must hold each other so tight. It will all work out right for us. God Bless WE.7
That evening, Chips Channon wrote: “My heart goes out to the Prince of Wales tonight, as he will mind so terribly being King. His loneliness, his seclusion, his isolation will be almost more than this highly strung and unimaginative nature can bear. Never has a man been so in love. . . . How will they arrange their lives, these people?”8
On Sunday, January 19, Edward drove up to London to inform Mr. Baldwin that the king was dying—expiring painfully from bronchitis. The prince joined Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin for tea at No. 10 Downing Street. The heir apparent appeared unmoved when Stanley Baldwin announced: “I wonder if you know, Sir, that another great Englishman died yesterday?”9 The prince, no great fan of literature, was unaware that it was Rudyard Kipling, Baldwin’s first cousin.
The following day, Queen Mary recorded in her diary: “G. about the same, sat with him from time to time—did not go to church as the place was surrounded by reporters & photographers, too heartless.”10 Meanwhile, privy councillors gathered in the king’s study as the red dispatch boxes piled up; matters of state would wait for no one, not even death. The dying king was propped up in a chair and, with a shaky hand, pen held in place by Lord Dawson, managed two marks to appoint a Council of State, composed of the queen and their four sons. Edward recalled: “Signing documents provided a distraction from the strain of waiting. It is a harrowing experience to watch anyone die, let alone one’s father, and especially when one’s father is king. When a king starts to die, the whole world crowds in for the death watch. Inside the Big House, a sad quiet came over our family circle.”11
Cosmo Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury, later recorded that at tea time on Monday, January 20, the Prince of Wales was “touchingly attentive to the Queen.”12
Soon afterwards, a news bulletin was issued to announce that “the king’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.” Dawson had already taken the precaution of telephoning his wife in London to ask Lady Dawson that she “advise The Times to hold back publication.” This was to ensure that the death was reported in respectable morning papers rather than in “the less appropriate evening journals.”13 At eleven o’clock in the evening, Lord Dawson gave the king two injections: a mixture of morphine and cocaine to hasten his passing.14II
At five to midnight, the king died. No sooner had King George V died than Queen Mary, with characteristic
sangfroid, took the hand of her eldest son and kissed it. Edward’s brother George, Duke of Kent, who was standing beside her, stepped forward and followed her example. Although he recognized that this form of homage was by custom his due, Edward was momentarily embarrassed by it. “Nevertheless, these two spontaneous gestures served to remind me, however needlessly, that I was now King.”15 He was His Most Excellent Majesty Edward the Eighth, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India.
The new king began crying hysterically. His sudden undignified outburst of grief stunned his family. He kept embracing his mother, weeping against her. Was he lamenting his father or mourning the biting reality of his new position? His emotion was “frantic and unreasonable,” wrote an appalled Helen Hardinge, wife of King George’s assistant private secretary. “In its outward manifestation, it far exceeded that of his mother and three brothers, although they had loved King George at least as much as he had. . . . While he demanded attention for his own feelings, he seemed completely unaware of those of others.”16
Shortly afterwards, Edward left his family and went to telephone Wallis, who was dining with friends, the Lawson-Johnstons, after a charity film premiere. “It’s all over,” he told her. “I could think of nothing better to say than ‘I’m so very sorry,’ ” Wallis later recalled.17 Grief and its close ally, shock, create the most uncharacteristic individual reactions. The future monarch had barely left his father’s deathbed when he ordered that the clocks at Sandringham, which had always been kept half an hour fast to give extra daylight for shooting, be put back to normal time. “I wonder what other customs will be put back also,” ruminated a concerned Cosmo Lang.18
King Edward VIII immediately broke with tradition by flying to London—the first time a British monarch had traveled in an airplane—and further surprised courtiers by watching his own proclamation ceremony, in which he was declared king-emperor, from a window in St. James’s Palace, Wallis and Ernest standing close behind him. As he surveyed the historic scene, with mace bearers and trumpeters in state dress and the “tremendous words rolled out,” Edward was “swept by conflicting emotions. There was a flash of pride in becoming King-Emperor of the vast and liberal Commonwealth I knew so well. At the same time, these words seemed to tell me that my relations with Wallis had suddenly entered a more significant stage.”19 As they walked away, Wallis turned to Edward. “It was all very moving,” she said. “But it has also made me realize how different your life is going to be.”20
Chips Channon wrote of the proclamation: “It was a fleeting brilliant ceremony. . . . Afterwards, I saw a large black car (the king’s) drive away, with the blinds pulled half down. The crowd bowed, thinking that it contained the Duchess of Kent but I saw Mrs. Simpson.”21 Like the rest of society, Chips was “riveted by the position of Mrs. S. No man has ever been so in love as the present King but can she be another Mrs. Fitzherbert?III If he drops her she will fall—fall—into the nothingness from whence she came but I hope he will not, for she is a good kindly woman, who has had an excellent influence on the young monarch.”22
On January 20, Stanley Baldwin called Duff Cooper into the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. To Duff’s surprise, Baldwin wanted to talk to him about the prince’s relationship with Mrs. Simpson. “If she were what I call a respectable whore, I wouldn’t mind,” Baldwin told Cooper.23 Cooper assumed that he meant somebody whom the prince occasionally saw in secret but did not spend his whole time with.
“It was perfectly all right for a gentleman to have affairs with married ladies, not girls, always married women,” explained Duff Cooper’s son, John Julius Norwich. “People knew that affairs were going on and they put people next door to each other in country house weekends. That was fine. What mattered was the way that things looked. It was the outside show that counted and appearances had to be maintained.”24
In his meeting with the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin suggested to Duff that he tell Mrs. Simpson “to clear out—for a bit at any rate” as he felt that that “would be the best thing that could happen.” Cooper decided that he would “certainly do nothing of the kind. She would tell the prince who would never forgive me.”25
Later that day, the prince received an idolatrous letter from Ernest Simpson. Characteristic of Ernest’s decency, despite the fact that the new king was responsible for the collapse of his marriage, he wrote to his monarch as his “devoted, loyal subject.” The dignified Ernest offered him the “warmest sentiments that friendship can engender.”26 Ernest “has of course been marvelous about it all,” Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie. “He has the makeup of a saint and is much too good for ‘the likes of me.’ ”27
On January 23, Edward marched with his brothers behind the gun carriage taking the body of their father to lie in state at Westminster Hall. The new king, who at forty-one still appeared boyishly young, looked lost and bewildered, dwarfed in a heavy, long overcoat. As the cortège made its way into New Palace Yard, the jeweled Maltese cross on top of the imperial crown—set with a square sapphire, eight medium-sized diamonds and 192 smaller diamonds—came loose. The jolting of the heavy gun carriage caused it to fall to the ground. Out of the corner of his eye, Edward caught sight of a flash of light dancing upon the pavement. He resisted the urge to retrieve the cross, resolutely marching on, barely breaking step, as a Grenadier Guardsman scooped up the cross with one hand and dropped it into his pocket. This strange occurrence was considered a bad omen. “Christ! What will happen next?”28 King Edward was heard to say. “A fitting motto,” MP Walter Elliot remarked to his companion, “for the coming reign.”29
Over the four days in which the king lay in state, over a million people paid their respects before the purple-draped catafalque containing his coffin. On the day of the funeral procession at Westminster Abbey, which was to be followed by a service at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, Edward had arranged for Wallis to watch from St. James’s Palace. According to Chips Channon: “half the house had been commandeered for Mrs. Simpson and her party. I didn’t see her. Apparently she did not go to Windsor [for the burial] having refused, with dignity, I consider, the offered invitation.”30
Edward and Wallis saw less of each other during this period due to the immense commitments placed upon the new king. If Wallis assumed that his duties as monarch would eclipse his need for her, she could not have been more mistaken. The king found his exalted new position an intolerable burden, exacerbating his loneliness. Seeking relief and emotional succor, the only person he could turn to was Wallis. With her he could relax and confide, while she provided a warm antidote to sterile and strategic court life. Although they could not physically spend as much time together as before, his desperation to be permanently with her intensified. Tommy Lascelles’s view of it was: “the Prince of Wales was caught napping by his father’s death . . . he had expected the old man to last several years more, and he had, in all probability, already made up his mind to renounce his claim to the throne, and to marry Mrs. S. I know that, long before this, he had confided to several American friends of his that he could never face being king.”31
On January 22, King George V’s will was read at Sandringham. Each of his brothers received about £750,000 in cash—worth around £28 million today. Edward was left no money, and was prevented from selling any of the inherited assets such as a rare stamp collection and a stud of valuable racehorses. Furious, he kept repeating: “My brothers and sister have got large sums, but I have been left out.”32 Advisors tried to reassure him that his father, who had received no cash either when he became king, would have assumed that, as Prince of Wales, he had built up a substantial fortune from the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall.
Lascelles, who passed the king in the corridor after the reading of the will, recalled he had a “face blacker than any thunderstorm.”33 Edward went immediately to telephone Wallis. He told her that while he had a crown, which he didn’t want, he had no fortune
, which they had both keenly anticipated. Although as Prince of Wales he had already accumulated great wealth and could expect to do so again out of savings from the civil list and the privy purse, he had believed that another vast fortune would soon be his. His disappointment was compounded because he feared letting down the woman he loved and desperately wanted to impress.
Of the thousands of people who wrote to the new king offering condolences for his father’s death, only Lady Diana Cooper, it seemed, mentioned Wallis. Edward replied: “Dear Diana—Your letter was most kind and human. Wallis . . . is and always will be the most wonderful friend and help to me. She gives me the courage to carry on. Yours Sincerely Edward RI.”34
The prince’s advisors were aware of the beneficial influence Wallis had on Edward in the early days of his “Kinging,” as he called it. Duff Cooper recalled sitting next to Wallis after a formal day in which the Privy Council addressed the new monarch. “She talked to me a great deal about the king,” he said. “I told her how well his informal little speech had gone with the Privy Council whereupon she repeated it word for word. . . . She talked very sensibly—said she has not allowed him to come to her flat since his father’s death, and had insisted on his using the large Daimler type of motor car in which people could see him—and even suggested that it would be better if she were to go away altogether.”35
The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor Page 10