The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor

by Anna Pasternak

  She concludes wearily: “I am 40 and I feel I must follow my own instincts as regards my life and am quite prepared to pay for a mistake. I know I can only control the financial side of the future and that I can’t insure against heartache, loneliness etc. but if the worst happens I shall have to be like the Arabs and fold my tent and steal silently away.”71

  Wallis knew that the king’s formerly “pleasant daydream” to marry her, which had previously been “tantalizingly remote and evanescent,”72 was now hardening into a resolution. While this was undeniably flattering, Wallis could not entertain how it could ever become feasible—or was even desirable for her.

  One spring day, she and Edward were sitting in the garden at the Fort, when the king mentioned that he had invited the prime minister to dinner in London and wished for Wallis to be present. “Then he paused, and after a moment, with his most Prince Charming smile said: ‘It’s got to be done. Sooner or later my Prime Minister must meet my wife.”73 Far from being elated, Wallis was “filled with apprehension.” “David,” she exclaimed, “you mustn’t talk this way. The idea is impossible. They’d never let you.”74 Edward’s lighthearted insouciance continued, despite Wallis’s protests—until she mentioned his mother.

  “Yes, that may be difficult,” he conceded. Wallis relaxed inside. “Being convinced that even his strongest hopes would be unavailing against his mother’s unwavering principles,” she later wrote, “I could not take his aspirations seriously.”75

  On May 27, the king held a dinner party at St. James’s Palace. Wallis took care of the menu and table decorations. Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Lord and Lady Wigram, Mr. Duff and Lady Diana Cooper, Lord and Lady Chatfield, Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh, Lady Cunard, and Mr. and Mrs. Simpson were invited. The following morning, Edward published this exact list of his guests in the Court Circular (published daily in the major national newspapers). Using this official listing to publicly announce his friendship with the Simpsons was considered wholly unusual. But the king had a point to make, and he had already set his campaign to marry Wallis in motion. This was the last time that Ernest would ever be the king’s guest, a fact noted by avid followers of the Court Circular; once considered dreary and dull, the listing became, according to Lady Diana Mosley, “a source of endless gossip and conjecture in London society.”76

  It was considered equally singular when, that spring, the king bought an American station wagon, a car almost unheard of in England. One afternoon, when he and Wallis were at the Fort, Edward declared: “Let’s drive over to Royal Lodge. I want to show Bertie the car.”77 He took Wallis and his house party to see the Duke and Duchess of York at their home, Royal Lodge, in Windsor Great Park. Edward showed his brother the car, briefly driving off with him, leaving Wallis and the guests with the Duchess of York. This cannot have been easy for Wallis, as she had already experienced the duchess’s froideur at Prince George’s wedding. After touring the gardens, the party went inside for tea. In the drawing room, they were joined by Princess Elizabeth, aged ten, and Princess Margaret Rose, then nearly six. “They were both so blonde, so beautifully mannered, so brightly scrubbed, that they might have stepped straight from the pages of a picture book,” Wallis observed.78

  The young princesses’ Scottish governess, Marion Crawford, who accompanied the girls into tea, later said of Wallis: “She was a smart, attractive woman, already middle aged, but with that immediate friendliness American women have. She appeared to be entirely at her ease; if anything, rather too much so.”79 Crawford was taken aback by Wallis’s “distinctly proprietary way of speaking to the new king. I remember she drew him to the window and suggested how certain trees might be moved, and a part of a hill taken away to improve the view.”80

  The king and his sister-in-law held most of the conversation, with the nervous duke throwing in the occasional word. After an hour, the party took their leave. “I left with the distinct impression that while the Duke of York was sold on the American station wagon, the duchess was not sold on David’s other American interest,” Wallis said, with polished understatement.81 While Marion Crawford wrote: “I have never admired the duke and duchess more than on that afternoon. With quiet and charming dignity they made the best of this awkward occasion and gave no sign whatever of their feelings. But the atmosphere was not a comfortable one.”82

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  That summer, weekends continued at the Fort whenever possible. Barbie Wallace, a daughter of Sir Edwin Lutyens, stayed several times with her husband, the Conservative MP Euan Wallace. “It was,” she wrote:

  an Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere and the only royal occasions I have ever enjoyed. I have always felt it’s torture to be with royalty as one can’t do right. . . . If one talks to them one’s a snob, if one doesn’t one’s not pulling one’s weight. With life at the Fort it was quite different. Wallis was very formal with the king, plenty of curtsies and Your Majesty, but managed to make everyone happy and at ease and of course, delicious food. Wallis was a wonderful hostess and had the best manners I’ve ever seen. She always talked to everyone and even engaged Sir Arthur Colefax in animated conversation. No one had ever spoken to him before.83

  This was a tribute not just to Wallis’s etiquette but also to her kindness. Sir Arthur Colefax, a Conservative politician and husband of Wallis’s friend Sibyl, was a legendary bore. (Society figure Lord Berners, a composer and novelist, once quipped that the government had offered Sir Arthur “£30,000 to bore the Channel Tunnel.”84) After dinner, the guests were driven to Windsor Castle to watch a film. “Endless footmen in royal livery crawled about on all fours (in order not to spoil the view of the screen) offering champagne,” recalled Barbie Wallace. “When the lights went on most of the guests were asleep.”85

  While rising splendidly to the demands of acting as an unofficial shadow queen, Wallis confided to Aunt Bessie the toll her prestigious position was taking. Her health was poor again, with physical ailments caused by the continuing emotional turmoil and pressure. She complained of the “luncheons and dinners without a breathing space, with so many problems revolving in my mind.”86 Existing in limbo, uncertain of her future, was understandably taxing. “Life is very full at the moment and should grow more and more so and I can only hope that HM will remain fond of me for some more time—but I don’t plan my future relying on that in any way.”87

  Ernest had moved out of Bryanston Court and taken rooms at his club, the Guards’. He wrote Wallis a heartrending farewell letter: “I think something in me quietly died when I closed the door of the flat for the last time this evening. I have no tears left to shed. I know that somewhere in your heart there is a small flame burning for me. Guard it carefully my darling and don’t let it go out—if only in memory of the sacred lovely things that have been. Someday I pray God will fan it into a blaze again and bring you back to me.”88

  Wallis nursed deep unhappiness and self-reproach at her treatment of the blameless, decent Ernest. This served to increase her feelings of self-criticism and unworthiness. “I’m sorry to be a source of worry to you and not of pleasure,”89 she apologized to Bessie. The American press was abuzz with her relationship, while at home, the name Mrs. Simpson still meant nothing to the British public at large. It was well known to the members of the Cabinet, however, the court and a tiny circle of informed Londoners. Ramsay MacDonald spoke out about the king’s “appalling obstinacy” in sending Wallis to Ascot in a royal carriage and including her in court circulars. He famously told Harold Nicolson that it would not have mattered so much if she had been a widow: “The people of this country do not mind fornication but they loathe adultery.”90

  Chips Channon detected Wallis’s distress. “The Simpson scandal is growing, and she, poor Wallis, looks unhappy. The world is closing in around her, the flatterers, the sycophants and the malice. It is a curious social juxtaposition that casts me in the role of Defender of the King. But I do, and very strongly in society, not for loyalty so much as in admiration and affect
ion for Wallis, and in indignation against those who attack her.”91

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  I. The princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.

  II. Lord Dawson subsequently campaigned against euthanasia in the House of Lords. A popular ditty emerged after King George’s death: “Lord Dawson of Penn / Killed many men / That’s why we sing / God Save the King.”

  III. Twice-widowed Maria Fitzherbert was the secret wife of King George IV. As her Roman Catholic beliefs would not allow her to be the prince’s mistress and King George III would not allow his son to marry a Roman Catholic nor a commoner, George married her in secret in 1785 in a union that was not deemed legal.

  5

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  Down with the American Harlot

  In July 1936 the king presented new colors to various battalions of the Brigade of Guards. He addressed the troops in Hyde Park in a speech that he had drafted himself, before sending it to Winston Churchill for tightening and emboldening. Edward chose to stress the horrors of war: “Humanity cries out for peace and the assurance of peace, and you will find in peace opportunities of duty and service as noble as any.”1

  “David did it beautifully,” noted Queen Mary.2 As the king rode back towards Constitution Hill, he coolly dodged an assassination attempt. From the crowd, a mentally unstable man wearing a brown suit pulled out a loaded revolver. He was grappled to the ground by a policeman and the gun was thrown onto the road at the feet of the king’s horse. John Aird, who had accused Edward of being lily-livered on the Guinness yacht the previous summer, now wrote: “I have held the opinion that HM is a coward but after today I must reconsider my opinion and give HM fullest marks for not looking round, even when it happened. The King rode on in complete calm, not even quickening the horse’s pace.”3

  The sovereign’s unruffled response won him further praise from his adoring public, who were looking ahead with excitement to his coronation, due the following May. Preparations were well under way; thousands of new prayer books had been produced for the occasion, as well as flags, souvenirs, bunting, colored lights and over seven million coronation mugs.4 The king’s intention to be crowned must have held fast in his early months as monarch. He sat for a coronation portrait wearing the imperial robe of purple velvet, and a cape of ermine and silk. Painted by Albert Collings, the eminent royal artist of the day, it depicted a handsome, thoughtful, incredibly youthful-looking monarch standing next to a velvet cushion on which rested the crown and a bejeweled golden orb.5

  Queen Mary was meanwhile preparing to move from Buckingham Palace to Marlborough House, anticipating that Edward would take over Buckingham Palace that autumn. She spent the early part of the summer sorting out her own possessions from those he was to inherit. On July 13, she divested herself of the crown jewels, which, she wrote, “have been in my care since 1910—Felt very sad at parting.”6

  Edward, who saw his mother regularly during this time, was sensitive both to her grief and the strain created by this transition. On July 30, she left Buckingham Palace and drove to Sandringham. Edward came to bid her farewell. On arrival in Norfolk, she wrote to her son: “I fear I was very quiet today when you came to see me but I feel sure you realised that I felt very sad at leaving those lovely comfortable rooms which have been my happy Home for 25 years, & that I was terribly afraid of breaking down—It was dear of you to come & see me off & I thank you with all my heart.”7

  Whenever he seemed to hold his parents’ good favor, Edward was incapable of sustaining it. Instead of following his father’s tradition of spending August quietly at Balmoral on the grouse moors, the new king raised eyebrows by preferring to take a Mediterranean summer sojourn. As he planned his holiday, Edward was “conscious of the clouds that were rolling up on the horizon—not only clouds of war but clouds of private trouble for me.” While the British press maintained a deferential silence, “the American press had become fascinated with my friendship for Wallis, and now pursued us everywhere.”8

  The king had originally wanted to take a villa near Cannes, so John Aird was dispatched to find somewhere suitable. The actress Maxine Elliot was asked to lend the king her villa, Le Château de l’Horizon, which boasted a twenty-five-foot slide down which her houseguests, who included Winston Churchill, shot from the edge of the saltwater swimming pool into the Mediterranean. Edward had visited L’Horizon before and liked it, describing “the long marble chute from the lower terrace down to the sea. Zzzzip! Splash! Wonderful!”9 However, the British ambassador in Paris warned against a visit to the South of France, due to the political instability in the area caused by the Spanish Civil War. “I really am very annoyed with the FO for having messed up my holiday in this stupid manner,” Edward wrote to his mother. Instead he decided to charter a yacht and cruise from the Adriatic to the Bosphorus. Lady Yule’s vessel, the Nahlin, was declared suitable, even if it was, according to Diana Cooper, “furnished rather like a Calais whore-shop.”10 In spite of its gaudy interior, Wallis declared it “a lovely comfortable boat.”11 At the king’s request, all the books were removed from the yacht’s library, as an extra bedroom was deemed more useful. A plentiful supply of golf balls was stowed aboard for one of Edward’s favorite pastimes: driving them into the sea.

  Although he wanted to start the cruise in Venice, the Foreign Office advised against it due to Mussolini’s intervention in the civil war in Spain. Edward was irritated that his party would now embark at the less romantic port of Šibenik on August 10. Crates and cases addressed to the “Duke of Lancaster”—the king’s ducal alias—were carried on board. On August 8, Wallis and the king left England on an aircraft of the King’s Flight. In Paris that evening, they met some of their guests and boarded a private coach attached to the Orient Express, whereby they continued to Yugoslavia. There, they were met by the yacht and two destroyers, HMS Grafton and Glowworm, known on board as the “Nanny-boats,” which were to accompany the ship.

  The guests, who were staggered throughout the trip, included Duff and Diana Cooper, Lord Sefton, Helen Fitzgerald and old friends of Edward’s and Wallis’s, the Butlers and the Rogerses. From the royal household, John Aird, Godfrey Thomas and Tommy Lascelles were present. “Outwardly as respectable as a boatload of archdeacons,” commented Lascelles. “But the fact remains that the two chief passengers (the king and the earl) were cohabiting with other men’s wives.”12

  “To my parents’ great surprise, they were invited to spend a week in Greece on the Nahlin cruise,” said John Julius Norwich. “A good deal of reasoning behind this invitation was that the king had determined to marry Mrs. Simpson and at this stage, he thought he could get away with it without abdication. Because my Papa had an extremely good reputation for womanizing, the king thought that he would have far greater sympathy with him and his situation than the rest of the cabinet. The king would not have got far with Neville Chamberlain, for example.”13

  The voyage attracted a blaze of publicity. Thanks to the efforts of the American press, twenty thousand locals assembled in Yugoslavia to welcome the royal party. Due to the newspaper coverage, this laughing, shouting mob seemed as interested in Mrs. Simpson as the king; no English crowd would have recognized her at this time. The Daily Telegraph even omitted Mrs. Simpson’s name from the Nahlin guest list. This exuberant welcome was repeated at every port of call, the American press avidly in tow. In Dubrovnik, they were greeted with cries of “Živela ljubav!”—the equivalent of “Vive l’amour!”

  Swept up in euphoria, Wallis and Edward were buoyed by these displays of approval for their fairy-tale romance. Far from being a warning of the savage attention their union would attract now that their relationship was “becoming the property of the whole world,” they could not have taken the ramifications less seriously. “I was oblivious to the dangerous undercurrents of this charming and seemingly irrelevant incident,” Wallis later recalled. “It delighted both of us that strangers of uncomplicated hearts should spontaneously wish us well.”14

  Lady Diana Cooper, who sp
ent the cruise suffering from a septic throat, boarded the ship with Duff in Split. She was taken aback by the king’s informality: he sported little shorts, straw sandals and two crucifixes on a chain round his neck. Wallis wore duplicates of the crosses on a charm bracelet on her wrist. When they went ashore to visit a local village, they were greeted by “a million children and gay folk smiling and cheering.” Diana waspishly added that half of them didn’t know which one was the king and must have been surprised when they were told. “He had no hat (the child’s hair gleaming), espadrilles, the same little shorts and a tiny blue-and-white singlet bought in one of their own villages.”15

  The trip created the unfavorable impression in the press that the king, his mistress and a group of hangers-on were carousing the eastern Mediterranean, shocking locals with their underdressed attire and overcasual attitudes. While the king made undignified appearances everywhere—he sailed through the Corinth Canal, dined in a disreputable Athens bistro and wandered naked around a Turkish bath in Vienna—he also gained a measure of diplomatic goodwill. He met with dignitaries such as Turkey’s great secular head of state, Kemal Atatürk, with whom he conversed in German. This was the first visit in history by a British king to the country. “Psychologically, it transformed the attitude of the Turkish people towards Britain, to whom they had grown used, from the outbreak of First World War, as an enemy,” wrote Lord Kinross.16