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

by Anna Pasternak

  The Windsors were oblivious to the elaborate plot, code-named Operation Willi, which entailed keeping the couple in Spain until Germany invaded Britain. Within days of the duke and duchess arriving in Madrid, German diplomats were working with their Spanish allies to try to convince the former king to remain in Spain. The couple were offered a small fortune and the mountaintop palace of Ronda, Málaga province, to sit out the war. The duke immediately notified Churchill, who insisted that the duke and duchess move to neighboring Portugal. The Foreign Office duly instructed Ambassador Hoare: “Please invite Their Royal Highnesses to proceed to Lisbon.” The palace was furious, pointing out the breach of etiquette. At a critical moment in the war, the king’s private secretary found time to chastise the Foreign Office for using the forbidden words “Their Royal Highnesses.”

  Meanwhile, Hitler ordered Walter Schellenberg, who was to become his spy chief in 1944, to travel to Lisbon to entice, or if necessary kidnap, the Windsors. Though Operation Willi came to nothing, when Churchill was shown the dossier after the war, he responded that the documents were “tendentious and unreliable” and should be destroyed for fear of damaging the monarchy. In 1957 the documents, known as the Marburg Papers, were published. They inspired persistent rumors that the duke was a Nazi sympathizer, yet were dismissed as self-serving misrepresentations.83

  When the couple arrived in Lisbon, they found that the flying boats had been sent back to their bases due to the gridlock over the duke’s incessant negotiations with Churchill. Wallis tried to persuade Edward that this “was a poor time to stand on a point of pride.”84 While she acknowledged that she desired recognition from her husband’s family, this was not, she pointed out, a “mere desire for social status. Rather, I wanted it for the reason that I dreaded being condemned to go through the rest of our lives together as the woman who had come between David and his family.”85

  Sir Samuel Hoare pushed for the Windsors to be received by the king and queen, and for this meeting, if only for fifteen minutes, to be recorded in the Court Circular. Churchill sent a noncommittal reply, explaining that it would be sensible to consider everything when the couple had returned to England. An incensed Edward would not yield. He told the prime minister that he would not and could not return home as long as his conditions were ignored. Churchill was forced to remind the duke that he was still a serving officer in the British army and that his refusal to obey orders would have serious consequences. “I most strongly urge immediate compliance with the wishes of Government,”86 read the angry telegram, with its veiled threat of court-martial.

  After having time to stew, Edward informed Churchill that he was ready to serve anywhere the king and prime minister designated. On July 4, Churchill sent the duke a further telegram, offering him a governorship over four thousand miles away from Britain, in the Bahamas. He was also given the rather meaningless role of “Goodwill Ambassador to the Western Hemisphere.” The former king and emperor accepted, telling Churchill: “I am sure that you have done your best for me in a difficult situation.”87 As governor of the Bahamas, it was hoped, the duke could be kept out of harm’s way for the duration of the war.

  No one viewed the appointment with any enthusiasm, apart from King George, who arranged to send Edward the accoutrements for ceremonial dress: the Garter, other orders and the Royal Victorian Chain. To the duke and duchess, it was another form of exile, while Queen Elizabeth tried to scuttle the entire plan on the basis that Wallis might be afforded a measure of official deference. Queen Mary would not even accept that the appointment had been intended. The issue, she believed, had arisen from a misunderstanding between Churchill and the duke. She wrote to the Countess of Athlone: “A great mistake to my mind on account of her.”88

  On August 1, 1940, at three in the afternoon, the Windsors sailed from Lisbon across the Atlantic on the American liner SS Excalibur. The sigh of relief from the British government, determined to diminish the duke’s ongoing propaganda value to the Nazi regime, was almost audible.

  11

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  A Shadow King

  Wallis, while sad to leave Europe, was determined to shine in her first official role. “Much would be expected of David and even more of me as the wife of the Governor,” she said. “I was anxious to do well for David’s sake, knowing how much he wanted to make a success of his new post.”1

  Winston Churchill wrote amiably to the duke: “I am sure that Your Royal Highness and the Duchess will lend a distinction and a dignity to the Governorship.”2 Arrangements were made at Cabinet level to transport the royal couple as far as Bermuda, where they would be transferred to a Canadian ship, Lady Somers, bound for Nassau, the Bahamian capital. A full-scale reception ceremony had been arranged for the duke and duchess when they landed from the launch at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club. In spite of the overwhelming heat, Wallis looked crisp in a white tailored suit, her flamingo brooch gleaming on her lapel.

  “The Duke, not surprisingly, carried out his inspection and did all that was required of him in a manner made perfect by a lifetime of training,” said the Government House aide-de-camp, Frank Giles. “But his brow darkened when he saw what he could not avoid seeing: the failure of [any] of the greeting wives to curtsey to the Duchess.”3 On his journey to the Bahamas, Edward had been comforted by only one thought: that the wife of a British governor had a settled status with which nothing could interfere. Immediately after the landing ceremonies, he went to complain to Giles over what he perceived as a deliberate snub to his wife. “Who ordered this?” Edward demanded angrily.

  “Without saying anything I reached into a file of deciphered cables and handed him the one we had received from London, giving instructions on etiquette and modes of address,” said Giles. “The Duke, it said, should be accorded a half-curtsey, but not the Duchess, who should be addressed as ‘Your Grace.’ ” The duke read the telegram, sent from Lord Lloyd, the secretary of state for the colonies, “uttered a wordless expression of disgust and turned on his heel.”4

  And so the campaign against Wallis continued. Giles, however, developed a quiet admiration for the duchess during that first week spent with the Windsors in Bermuda. “She is a very clever woman,” he noted. “. . . More than all the charm of her physical appearance, though, is her manner: she has, to an infinite degree, that really great gift of making you feel that you are the very person whom she has been waiting all her life to meet. With old and young and clever and stupid alike she exercises this charm,” he continued. “. . . I never saw anyone who could resist the spell—they were all delighted and intrigued. . . . She is never anything but stately, and when she had to wave to the crowds on her arrival, and subsequently whenever we drove through [Hamilton], she did it with ease and charm and grace which suggested that she had been at it all her life.”5

  Government House stands on a hill, and from its pillared facade the view sweeps down to the sea, while from the back it looks over the gardens to the town of Nassau. As the Lady Somers entered the harbor and Wallis came on deck, Edward pointed out their future home. In the distance, it reminded Wallis of the southern plantation houses of her childhood, with spacious verandas, shuttered windows and swaying palms. On the morning of August 17, the Windsors, accompanied by a flotilla of bunting-covered craft sounding their horns in welcome, landed at Nassau. The royal couple walked breezily down the gangplank, Edward in his new field marshal’s uniform, to be greeted by the waiting crowds, followed by their cairn terriers and fifty-seven pieces of luggage.

  In 1940 the population of the Bahamas island group was around seventy thousand inhabitants, over 85 percent of whom had black African ancestry. A small colony of the British Empire, the Bahamas was physically and economically undeveloped and offered limited educational and industrial opportunities for its citizens. It openly exhibited racial discriminatory practices which, according to Sir Orville Turnquest, who became the fifth Bahamian governor general in 1995, the Duke of Windsor did nothing to address. “No black man or woman,
unless as a servant or worker, was allowed to officially enter [Government House] during the duke’s tenure,”6 he said.

  On the day of the duke’s official reception at Government House, September 2, 1940, the summer heat was at its most intense. Both the duke and the chief justice poured with perspiration to the extent that their official signatures became two blots on the page. After the duke was sworn in, he and Wallis retired to the gardens to be interviewed by the press. When the duke was asked about the scope of his role as “goodwill ambassador to the Western Hemisphere,” he replied pointedly: “I very much doubt that the British government has it in mind at present that my official activities should extend beyond the confines of the Bahama islands.”7

  Privately, the Windsors grumbled about the triviality of their roles and the challenges of being in the outpost, yet publicly, they were conscientious and enthusiastic. Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie on August 7, 1940: “Naturally we loathe the job but it was the only way out of a difficult situation—as we did not want to return to England except under our own conditions.”8 She later described Nassau as “their Elba,” likening the duke’s appointment to Napoleon’s island exile after he abdicated in 1814. The duke expressed equally negative sentiments about his tenure in the Bahamas; he later told Lady Diana Cooper: “It is very hard, once you’ve been King Emperor, to govern the Bahamas.”9 Regardless, the duke, schooled by Wallis to perfection, performed his official duties diligently with good grace. It was as if he were determined to demonstrate that if he was given a job to do, with his wife to support him, he would always excel.

  “It was cruel [of the government] to send them to the Bahamas,” believes Julie Le Corne, a resident of Nassau. “Government House was in a terrible state. It was not up to the standard of the duke and duchess. But the duchess surprised everyone; she wasn’t sitting up on Government Hill having her nails done, she really got stuck in. There was such a negative view of her in the press, yet she was a really nice woman. My mother volunteered with her in the Services Canteen and said how kind and thoughtful she was.”10 On closer inspection, Government House, riddled with termites, was deemed uninhabitable for the royal couple. After a chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling in the drawing room where Wallis was sitting, the couple moved out. The building was renovated with a grant from the local legislature combined with the Windsors’ own financial contribution. A complete internal overhaul included the installation of air-conditioning in each of the major rooms in the residence, while a new three-storey west wing (still known as the Windsor Wing) was added to house four guest suites to accommodate the duke’s personal staff. While the building work was completed, Wallis and Edward were loaned the palatial home of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Sigrist, on Prospect Ridge. Frederick Sigrist was a British aviation pioneer and millionaire who had founded the Hawker Aircraft Company. Longtime residents of the Bahamas, the Sigrists spent their summers abroad. When they returned in November, the Windsors again relocated, taking up residence at Westbourne, the country mansion of Sir Harry Oakes, a British-Canadian gold mine owner and one of the wealthiest men in the world. An unhappy Wallis disdainfully referred to his sprawling house as “a shack by the sea.”11

  At the Windsors’ first social appearance on the islands, at the exclusive Emerald Beach Club in Nassau, Lady Jane Williams-Taylor, the acknowledged leader of local society, did not curtsy to Wallis. When the waiters brought the platters of food, they served the duke before the duchess. The duke, furious, instructed them to “serve the Duchess first.” Their host, Sir Frederick Williams-Taylor, an elderly Canadian millionaire and president of the club, damningly omitted any reference to Wallis in his welcome speech. In his reply, the duke gave a blistering illustration of royal displeasure. He told the assembled audience that in the original text of the speech, which had been submitted to him before dinner, the welcome had included the duchess. The fact that she was not mentioned in the spoken version was, he felt sure, due to the dim lighting at the speaker’s table. This, he imagined, would never happen again.12

  Guests at Emerald Beach observed that “while the duke was having his say, it was the most magnificently embarrassing moment of their lives.” As Lady Williams-Taylor remembered, when the duchess started to rise with the rest of the guests, the duke said: “You don’t have to stand up for me, darling.” The duchess quickly countered: “It’s a pleasure to stand up for you, darling.”13

  “Wallis was incredibly popular on the island,” said Ann Pleydell-Bouverie, whose parents knew the duke and duchess well. “She was well bred in an American sense and had perfect manners. My mother worked in the Red Cross with her and said she never heard anyone say a bad word about Wallis.” She would bring “bags of little beads to teach local women and children to make craft.”14 The duchess became president of the Red Cross and started up two infant welfare clinics on New Providence Island. The clinics were modern and well run; Wallis bought a car for the visiting welfare nurse and attended clinic days. She organized the United Services Canteen for British and American servicemen, and arranged social events for them. She also supervised the interior decoration of Government House, lightening the heavy Victoriana with chintz and pale-green carpets. She hung her own portrait by Gerald Brockhurst over the mantelpiece and placed a rather severe photograph of Queen Mary on the duke’s desk. Rumors of her extravagance were fueled when she flew in an interior designer from New York and shipped in exquisite period pieces of French furniture, some of which remain to this day.

  “The duchess has always been the subject of silly stories, and it was widely believed that she went to get her hair done in Miami once a week,” said Diana Mosley. “In fact, she disliked flying, and there are plenty of hairdressers in Nassau, but she did sometimes make shopping expeditions to Miami to buy garden furniture.”15

  “The duke and duchess threw wonderful parties and entertained beautifully,” said Julie Le Corne. Her father, Charles Bethell, introduced the Windsors to Nassau society. The duke went duck shooting with Bethell, but it was Wallis who “intrigued” their host. “My father said that the duke was quite a bore but that the duchess was lovely. At cocktail parties the duchess would always gravitate to my father and talk to him. The duke would come and pull her away but at the next party, she would find my father again and the conversation would pick up exactly where they had left off. Wallis was very bright, captivating company and my father found her elegant and enigmatic.”16

  Wallis wrote to Sir Walter Monckton, who was working for British intelligence, running the government’s information department in Cairo, in October. “There is no doubt that England carries on propaganda against us in the States in a sort of whispering campaign of the most outrageous lies against us—such as the hairdresser. There are many ways to twist things,” Wallis said. “There will always be the court and the courtiers engaged in fifth column activities against us . . . it makes tears come to my eyes to see the duke doing this ridiculous job and making good speeches as though he were talking to the labouring classes of England and inspiring them to work . . . better to be in a shelter or called anything than buried alive here.”17

  In March 1941 the duke made a foolish indiscretion while being interviewed by the American novelist and broadcaster Fulton Oursler for Liberty magazine. The article gave the impression that the duke held no hope of a British victory in the war, and was swiftly reprinted by the Sunday Dispatch in London. Churchill was livid; he saw the duke’s attitude as “defeatist and pro Nazi,” and by implication approving of the isolationist stance of keeping America out of the war, though Edward later claimed that Oursler had put words in his mouth. Churchill instructed the duke to seek advice before making public statements of this kind. The querulous duke threatened to resign as governor, “if, as your message infers, I am more of a detriment than of assistance in these vital Anglo-American relations.”18

  Wallis made her position clear on the issue of whether America should enter the war. “I think it’s all hideous and if one’s in it one must pull
for it,” she told Monckton. “I am in complete disagreement, however, with the idea that if you mention peace, you are pro-Nazi and there is no relation between the two that I can conjure up. And when free speech is taken from us that is alarming.”19

  The duke leapt upon the court’s right to free speech when an article in Life quoted the queen as referring to Wallis as “that woman.” Edward wrote to Churchill: “I understand that articles about the Royal Family are censored in Britain before release, and this remark is a direct insult to my wife”—again using the opportunity to rage about “the chronic anomaly of my wife not having the same official status as myself.”20 Losing all patience, he snapped at Churchill: “I have both enjoyed and valued your friendship in the past but after the tone of your recent messages to me here I find it difficult to believe that you are still the friend you used to be.”21

  Churchill suggested that a “competent American publicist” instruct the duke before a proposed visit to the United States. Wallis, in favor of a press secretary, complained to Monckton that the couple had been on their own for four years when it came to dealing with the press and their endless falsifications. “The real truth, Walter, is that the government simply do not care what sort of stuff is printed and hide behind or blame us by saying ‘what a pity such things are written.’ ”22 She conceded it was unlikely that they would ever receive any real assistance or guidance from official sources. “It’s always the same and will never change. However, if we didn’t have to work for them it wouldn’t be so difficult. Alas, we shall have to carry on I suppose for the duration but with victory won, we’re off!!”23