It was no good. Edward’s need for Wallis escalated to a suffocating degree. He telephoned her frequently throughout the day, sent her billets-doux and arranged for regular deliveries of grand bouquets of flowers. It was clear he felt that she, like no one else, understood him and only she could meet his emotional needs. The Conservative MP Victor Cazalet considered her “the one real friend he has ever had.” He added: “She does have a wonderful influence over him, but she knows how stubborn he is, and how difficult to influence.”36 Wallis bolstered Edward, she boosted his confidence, listened so attentively as he recited his speeches that she could later repeat them herself, supported his fragile ego, mothered and soothed. As she wrote to Aunt Bessie in late January: “I am implored on all sides not to leave him as he is so dependent on me and I am considered to be a good influence believe it or not and right in the things I try to influence him to do. Of course I am very fond of him and proud and want him to do his job well and he is so lonely and needs companionship and affection, otherwise he goes wrong.”37 Chips Channon observed: “It appears that the king is Mrs. Simpson’s absolute slave, and will go nowhere where she is not invited, and she, clever woman, is behaving well. She encourages the king to meet people of importance and to be polite; above all she makes him happy. The Empire ought to be grateful.”38
Edward VIII’s accession was greeted by his subjects with enthusiasm and hope. The new monarch, who in some moods liked his job, began his reign with impressive zeal. He carried out most of his ceremonial functions with affability and aplomb. At this time, the king was considered the “most popular man in the world,”39 according to the writer Philip Gibbs. Protected by the deference of the media, his adoring subjects had no idea about his unhealthy dependence on Wallis Simpson. They believed that the king’s charisma, modernity and interest in reform hailed a new, exciting era. However, this “faith and confidence in the new reign, which I shared with the majority of the British people, were not held by the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury,” according to Lord Beaverbrook.40 A seismic clash seemed inevitable. “Even if I had remained a bachelor, I would definitely have collided with the establishment,” Edward said later.41
Max Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born press baron and business tycoon, who was a self-made millionaire by the age of thirty, was to become a staunch ally of Edward’s. He astutely observed: “Members of the aristocracy wished to destroy the king. They deplored his liking for the company of married women and in particular Mrs. Simpson. They disliked his neglect of their circles with abhorrence for his addiction to what they called ‘Café Society’—they declared that Buckingham Palace was drifting into the status of an American nightclub.”42
Encouraged by Wallis, Edward at first worked diligently on his official red boxes. According to Wallis, weekends at Fort Belvedere continued, but with a difference. “There was a perceptible stiffening in protocol, a heightening of formality.” As more time was devoted to the documents of state, there was less time for the garden and “the forays against the last remaining stands of laurel all but came to an end.”43 The king kicked off reforms: he ended the prime ministerial custom of sending regular political reports to Buckingham Palace; he championed the King George’s Field Foundation, creating the provision of playing fields throughout the country as a memorial to his father; and he laid down new laws about formal decorations and dress. He dispensed with the frock coat as an item of court apparel, as well as with mourning caps, veils and crepe.
He also concerned himself with relative trivia, however. In an act of supreme hauteur, Edward dismissed the new design for stamps and coins of his profile because they had been sketched from his right side; believing that his left profile was more flattering, he insisted the illustrations be redone. Full of ideas, he liked change for change’s sake. Yet in few areas was his interest sustained, apart from those relating to finance. He showed a continuing and almost pathological preoccupation with money. While there was plenty of room for fiscal reform in certain domains of the royal palaces, the king betrayed a compulsive stinginess and lack of sensitivity to the devoted service of retainers. There was understandable resentment at Buckingham Palace from staff who had had their beer money cut down, when they were often loading cases of champagne or furniture destined for Mrs. Simpson’s flat.
One of the king’s many eccentricities was his obsessive concern with trifling matters of housekeeping. On one occasion he summoned the head housemaid at the Fort and asked her what happened to the guests’ soap after they had left the house. She informed him that it was taken to the servants’ quarters and used there. Edward instructed that all the used guest soap was to be brought to him for his own use. “The king used to complain about the most ridiculous things, like the fact that he never got a new bar of soap,” remembered John Julius Norwich. “That was literally the level of his concerns and standard of his conversation.”44
It was not long before Edward came into opposition with the Church, in the form of the archbishop of Canterbury. Cosmo Lang’s conservatism symbolized everything the king disliked and mistrusted about the old establishment. The day after George V’s funeral at Windsor, Lang had called at Buckingham Palace to pay his respects to Queen Mary. He then asked to see the new king. Edward was taken aback when the archbishop said to him: “I want you to know that whenever the king questioned your conduct I tried in your interest to present it in the most favourable light.”45 Edward later recalled that during their awkward audience, “Wallis’s name had of course not been mentioned, but I knew that the archbishop intended that I should know that she was the hidden burden of his discourse. He was clearly against our continued friendship. He would undoubtedly muster powerful forces in opposition to my project when I came to press it.”46 Of the king, Lang said: “It is clear that he knows little and I fear, cares little about the Church and its affairs.”47 Stanley Baldwin told his daughter Monica that once when he was waiting to see the king, the Duke of Kent came into the room and announced that his brother was “damning the whole root and stock of the Episcopacy. He has just shooed the Archbishop of Canterbury out of the house.”48
The king lacked the intellectual stamina to concentrate on serious state matters for long, particularly since, according to Baldwin, his infatuation with Mrs. Simpson “obliterated part of his mind.”49 Although the king had lost none of his power to bewitch when he responded to public crowds, he generally reacted to the outside world with impatience and anger because it kept him away from Wallis. Major Alexander Hardinge, his private secretary, wrote: “It was scarcely realised at this early stage how overwhelming and inexorable was the influence exerted on the king by the lady of the moment. As time went on it became clearer that every decision, big or small, was subordinate to her will. . . . It was she who filled his thoughts at all times, she alone who mattered, before her the affairs of state sank into insignificance.”50
Wallis, meanwhile, oscillated between a state of heady delight at her exalted court position and a burgeoning sense of isolation. In the early days of the king’s reign, she had been inundated by flattering and admiring letters from her society friends. The hostess and interior designer Sibyl Colefax wrote to Wallis that she had “grown every month more full of delighted admiration for not only your immense wisdom & lovely common (so miscalled!) sense, but also for your unfailing touch of being exactly right in all judgements & all kinds of moments in life at every angle.”51 Margot Oxford considered that she had “every quality to be liked—you are very natural, very kind, never pretend to know what you don’t know (a rare quality believe me) & a genuine desire to help the man you love in his every difficult task.”52 While Diana Cooper found her “good and kind and loveable—what more can one be?”53
“Though the king is in mourning,” Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie, “everyone is over anxious to see that I am asked to all small dinners in the official world, all sending messages via me. Isn’t it all funny and strange too? I’m just the same however and enjoying it all as a huge game
—laughing a lot inside and controlling my tongue and sense of humour on the outside.”54 On February 2, Chips Channon confided: “We are concerned that some of our friends should be trying to poison the Kents against Mrs. S. and hence the king, and are attempting to drive a wedge between the royal brothers.”55
Wallis was trying to prepare herself for what she considered the inevitable: permanent separation from the king. In early February she wrote to him: “I am sad because I miss you and being near and yet so far seems most unfair. Some day of course I must learn to be always alone for I will be in my heart also I must develop strength to look at papers containing your photographs and accounts of your activities—but also perhaps both of us will cease to want what is hardest to have and be content with the simple way.”56 To Aunt Bessie, she observed of being king: “It’s a very lonely job—and it’s a tragedy that he can’t bring himself to marry without loving. The English would prefer that he marry a duke’s daughter to one of the mangy foreign princesses left.”57
Wallis recalled in her memoirs: “In the back of my mind I had always known that the dream one day would have to end—somewhere, sometime, somehow. But I had characteristically refused to be dismayed by this prospect. I was prepared to take whatever hurt was in store for me, when the day of reckoning came.”58
What she was not prepared for was the heartache she felt when the day of reckoning came for her marriage to Ernest. In spite of his noblesse oblige, Ernest had tired of being a cuckold. He had developed a relationship with Wallis’s school friend Mary Raffray, spending time with her on his business trips to America. Although Wallis had encouraged the friendship, regularly hosting Mary as a houseguest, it stung when Mary fell in love with Ernest. She even expressed her shock to Aunt Bessie when she found an incriminating letter which told of their affair. Like her relationship with the Prince of Wales, it was another situation of which Wallis believed she could control the outcome but came to regret. Mary turned against Wallis, later writing about the level of her friend’s manipulation. “She tricked me into going to the opera,” she later wrote, “and then at the last minute failed to appear because she told everyone Ernest’s mistress was there. . . . She thought that she could use me as a scapegoat and did.”59
Mary, understandably, took Ernest’s side; yet beneath her hostility to Wallis lurked envy. Mary Raffray’s letters to her sister Buckie brim with her pride at being invited to weekends at the Fort and dinners at York House. She describes the delight she felt at being able to wander around Windsor Castle after houseguests from the Fort had driven over to see movies of the Grand National. “Wallis,” she told her sister, “is in the very thick of things, received and toadied to by everyone.”60 Mary later wrote to her sister, from a London hotel, of an unfortunate scene at Bryanston Court. When Wallis accused Mary of having seduced Ernest, Mary simply walked out of the room, packed up her things, phoned for a taxi and left Bryanston Court “and Wallis’s life forever.”61
Ernest, despite his new relationship, remained loyal to Wallis. His concern for her was revealed when he decided to challenge the king over his intentions. Like a Victorian father, he wanted to confront the errant suitor. In February, Ernest dined with the king at York House, taking his friend Bernard Rickatson-Hatt, editor in chief of Reuters, to witness what he felt he must say to the king. When the king rose after dinner, Ernest asked him to remain. Turning to Edward, he made a dramatic statement: Wallis, he said, would have to choose between them. He asked the king what he intended to do about it—did he intend to marry her? Edward VIII rose imperiously from his seat and said: “Do you really think that I would be crowned without Wallis by my side?”62 Rickatson-Hatt firmly believed that if it had not been for the king’s “obstinacy and jealousy,” and his obsessive need to have Wallis to himself regardless of whose life he trampled over, Wallis and Ernest “would have remained man and wife.”63
Wallis knew nothing of the dinner and was oblivious to the machinations that her husband’s meeting with the king set afoot. She later spoke of the bid to discredit her by powerful establishment men, writing two weeks after the abdication: “the pitiful tragedy of it all is that England still remains in the hands of the men that caused the tragedy—using a woman as their means.”64 Little did she know then, ten months beforehand, of the documents and memorandums drawn up after this encounter, with their malice towards her and undertone of hysteria.
Ernest’s meeting with the king triggered terror in court circles. Immediately after the York House dinner, Lord Davidson, a close ally of Baldwin, wrote a detailed account of Ernest’s meeting with Sir Maurice Jenks, who presided over the Masonic Lodge that Ernest had been admitted to through the king’s influence:
Simpson Mason asks to see Jenks Mason—the Mari Complaisant is now the sorrowing and devastated spouse. He tells Jenks that the king wants to marry Mrs. S, (unbelievable) & that he—S [Ernest]—would like to leave England only that would make divorce easier—what he wants is his wife back. S suggests he should see the P.M. SB [Stanley Baldwin] replies to this suggest [sic] with a flat negative. He is the king’s chief advisor not Mr. S’s. . . . Clive Wigram, SB and I have a frank talk. I am quite convinced Blackmail sticks out at every stage. HM has already paid large sums of money to Mrs. S and given valuable presents. I advocate most drastic steps (deportation) if it is true that S is an American but if he isn’t the situation is very delicate. The Masonic move is very clever. The POW [Prince of Wales] got S in on a lie—is now living in breach of the Masonic Law of chastity because of the lie he first told. S and Mrs. S, who is obviously a gold digger, have obviously got him on toast . . . Mrs. S is very close to [the German Ambassador Leopold von] Hoesch and has, if she likes to read them access to all Secret and Cabinet papers!!!!!65
Sir Maurice Jenks managed to reassure a jumpy Clive Wigram, the king’s private secretary, that, as a British subject, Ernest could not be deported. And that he was, in fact, an honorable man who, far from planning to blackmail the king, as courtiers fantasized, was keen to avoid a scandal. The Davidson memorandum illustrates the establishment’s panic at the mere hint of Wallis becoming queen. It also highlights the bubbling levels of paranoia engendered by the escalating international situation, that Wallis Simpson should be seriously suspected of passing on official state secrets to the Germans. Reports coming from the Fort that the king now left his red boxes open with state papers spilling out, barely bothering to read them, as he found them “complete drudgery,” were translated to mean that Wallis was avidly reading them and passing on the contents to the Nazis. Ministers began to starve the king of confidential information, screening Foreign Office papers before they were sent to him.
As rumors circulated amongst the government that Wallis “was in the pocket of the German ambassador” and had access to state papers, Clive Wigram approached the king. He told him that there was much concern over the safety of secret documents in his possession. “HM assured me that he was very careful, and read them going down to the Fort in his car,” Sir Clive reported. “As HM leaves about 3 am in his car, I did not feel there was much light to read!”66
Weekend guests at the Fort observed the king’s reluctance to tend to his dispatch boxes. Diana Cooper witnessed Wallis, far from exploiting Edward’s lax attitudes, repeatedly trying to persuade him to pay more attention to his kingly duties. “Wallis must not get too bossy,” she wrote. “I had rather she had not said to him at dinner that she wanted to encourage his reading his papers and documents, that he was inclined to have them read to him—but that it was essential he should learn to master the points in them. She is right of course, as he made haste to say. ‘Wallis is quite right. She always is. I shall learn it quite soon.’ ”67
Unsurprisingly, there are no mentions in the official records of Wallis’s attempts to positively influence the king. Instead, she is conveniently denounced as pro-Nazi, a character assassination which haunts her reputation to this day. Despite the fact that Wallis only met Ribbentrop twice at Lady Cunard’s,
and was the beneficiary of bouquets of flowers from him as he tried to inveigle his way into London society, wild rumors of her affair with him persist.
There is no evidence that any ardent German Nazi sympathizers ever visited Fort Belvedere, and nothing was ever found in the German state archives after the war to indicate that Wallis, or anybody else, passed on to the German government information gleaned from papers in the king’s keeping.68 Far from planning covert operations with German envoys, all of Wallis’s considerable energies and resources were deployed in the continuing struggle to “please, amuse, placate two men.”
On May 4, she wrote a startling confessional letter, running to over twenty pages, to her beloved Aunt Bessie. Detailing the new direction her life had been forced to take, the letter is infused with an unnerving sense of uncertainty and fresh sorrow. She tells her aunt that for the past year she has been living under the “most awful strain,” trying to juggle the two separate lives with Ernest and the king. Her nerves are shredded; she feels tired and irritable and her stomach is playing up again from stress. Trying to break it as gently to her aged aunt as possible, she confirms that she and Ernest are to split up. “Ernest and HM have talked the situation out so everything has been on a most friendly and arranged basis,” she explains. She hints that Ernest is in a new relationship, “having his own reason for allowing the world to call him the ‘complacent husband.’ ”69 She and Ernest are to separate, but she is not planning on divorce “at the moment.” Wallis then makes reference to the king’s wish to marry her: “The K on the other hand has another thing only on his mind. Whether I would allow such a drastic action depends on many things and events and I should never allow him if possible to prevent a rather stubborn character to do anything that would hurt the country and help the socialists.” She reassures Bessie that the king has settled a large sum of money on her, enough “for my lifetime.”70
The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor Page 11