by Diana Mosley
When he got home, the Prince composed a tune (if that is the right word) for the bagpipes, dedicated to Wallis. During his short stay at Balmoral he practised it near the castle until the King threw open a window and shouted at him to stop. There was evidently something about this particular melody that he disliked; none of the royal family minded the sound of bagpipes, and the Prince was addicted to them and played after dinner at the Fort.
Aunt Bessie asked her niece straight out whether the Prince was ‘rather taken’ with her. ‘These old eyes aren’t so old that they can’t see what’s in every glance.’ Wallis tried to reassure her aunt, ‘I know what I’m doing,’ but Mrs Merryman said: ‘Wiser people than you have been carried away, and I can see no happy outcome to such a situation.’
That autumn the Prince’s favourite brother and companion, Prince George, now Duke of Kent, married Princess Marina of Greece; the Prince of Wales became lonelier than ever and more dependent upon Wallis. The Simpsons were invited to all the wedding festivities and at the reception at Buckingham Palace the Prince brought Mrs Simpson up to the Queen, saving: ‘I want to introduce a great friend of mine.’ The Queen shook hands without thinking much about it, but two years later she said to Lady Airlie: ‘If I had only guessed then I might perhaps have been able to do something, but now it’s too late.’
In February 1935, Mrs Simpson and the Prince of Wales went to ski at Kitzbühl, taking Bruce Ogilvy and his wife Primrose and sister-in-law Olive. It was not a great success. Wallis made no attempt to learn to ski, so from Kitzbühl they went on to Vienna and Budapest. There was nothing the Prince enjoyed more than singing German songs and waltzing to the music of Lehar and Strauss.
The Prince and Wallis at Biarritz in August 1934: their first holiday together.
The Skiing party at Kitzbühl, February 1935. The Prince and Wallis are on the left, on the right is the Prince’s former equerry, Bruce Ogilvy.
This was the year of King George V’s Silver Jubilee; there were great demonstrations of love and loyalty all over England. The King was reported to have said: ‘They really seem to like me for myself.’ The truth is that the British people in the great majority love their Kings and Queens, they love hanging out flags and seeing processions and other excitements. Nineteen-thirty-five was a year when there was still terrible unemployment and widespread misery, and the free spectacle cheered everyone up while it lasted.
Edward VII, so unlike his son, would have had exactly the same enthusiastic reception had he lived long enough to celebrate a jubilee. Queen Victoria, who was in every imaginable way the opposite of Edward VII, was acclaimed at her Golden Jubilee and then at her Diamond Jubilee, and she was confidently expected to live for ever (see the Coronation service: ‘May the Queen live for ever’) so that her death caused consternation as well as sorrow. In England there is no such thing as a typical monarch, the fact that for long past each has been unlike the predecessor has not mattered in the least, one and all seem perfect to most of their subjects. The old joke
There’s a divinity doth hedge a king
Rough-hew him how we will,4
contains an important truth.
This loyal love is not extended to other members of the royal family, who are freely criticised, often with notable unfairness, though even now the gutter press is not so nasty at it was in Queen Victoria’s reign, when the birth of a prince or a princess to the Queen was greeted with complaints about yet another pensioner to be paid for from the public funds.
The Prince of Wales took Lord Cholmondeley’s villa at Cannes for his summer holiday that year. Besides Wallis he invited Lord and Lady Brownlow. Lord Sefton and a few other friends; his equerry was Major Jack Aird. They did not stay all the time at the villa, the Duke of Westminster took them for a cruise in his yacht, and they borrowed Sister Anne, Mrs Reginald Fellowes’ boat, for a trip to Porquerolles. Then they went back to Vienna, a journey which had to be arranged on the spur of the moment by Major Aird, with wagons-lits for the whole party. Wallis marvelled at the way difficulties vanished when the Prince wanted something; it evidently gave her a feeling of his omnipotence. She was also becoming accustomed to being warmly welcomed wherever she went, and with her frank and open nature she probably began to imagine, like George V, that people liked her for herself. After all, she had always been popular and nothing in her life hitherto had prepared her for what was in store.
King George V’s Silver Jubilee was celebrated in May 1935. The King and Queen drive up Ludgate Hill to take part in the thanksgiving service in St Paul’s Cathedral.
More modest celebrations in a Stepney backstreet. The King was heard to say: ‘They really seem to like me for myself.’
The King disapproved of Mediterranean holidays and thought the Prince should content himself with Balmoral, where the royal family gathered in August. Bruce Ogilvy writes: ‘I used to accompany the Prince to Balmoral, where he stayed as short a time as possible. We used to go out stalking which he liked better than grouse-driving as he got more exercise at it. It was sad that he and his father did not get on better, but it was the same with all his brothers and sister. King George V was a good king but a very unsympathetic father.’
Lady Airlie says that in her opinion ‘the Prince’s behaviour when his father hauled him over the coals for being the “worst-dressed man in London” and laid traps for him with orders and decorations, showed the utmost forbearance.’ It is not surprising that the Prince chose to put a thousand miles between himself and his father at holiday time, particularly since one of the guests at Balmoral was Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who loved gossiping with the King his heir. The Archbishop drove over to Airlie for luncheon and told Lady Airlie how concerned the King and Queen were about the Prince’s ‘latest friendship.’ ‘His Majesty believes that this affair is much more serious than the others. That is what worries him.’
The following winter the King, who had been ailing for some time, became seriously ill. The whole family including the Prince of Wales gathered at Sandringham for Christmas; early in January 1936 the King died, just forty-four years after Prince Eddy had died in the same house. A few weeks before his death the King had exclaimed passionately to the Queen, in front of Lady Algernon Gordon-Lennox,5 a very old friend: ‘I pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne.’
The Prince had certainly not earned this fierce resentment on the part of his father. Compared with Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales his conduct had been exemplary. He had worked very hard both at home and in his Empire tours. He had never, as his grandfather had more than once, figured in a public scandal or been obliged to give evidence in a squalid court case. It is difficult to resist the thought that in part the King’s dislike was due to jealousy. He felt no jealousy of the Duke of York, and he loved his nine-year-old granddaughter. As we know, a large part of his prayer was destined to be answered.
Notes
4 1066 and All That.
5 She repeated it to Mabell Lady Airlie, who immediately noted it down.
CHAPTER NINE
Loved by a King
I awoke one morning and found myself famous
Byron
THE NEW KING invited Wallis and a few other friends to watch the picturesque ceremony of the Proclamation of the Accession of King Edward VIII from a window in St James’ Palace. To her astonishment he himself suddenly appeared at her side. When the solemn and moving ceremony was over, and the Guards band had played ‘God Save the King’, they went downstairs together. ‘This has made me realise how different your life is going to he,’ said Wallis, to which he replied: ‘Wallis, there will be a difference of course. But nothing can ever change my feelings towards you.’ Then with a sudden smile he was gone.
The new King was busy from morning till night. As Prince of Wales he had always worked hard; it was after work that he had acquired the habit of calling at Bryanston Court to see Wallis rather
than sitting at York House with the equerries. There were now endless things to he seen to and duties to perform. The Court was in mourning, but when spring came the ‘damn weekends’ at the Fort continued as before, whenever the King could get away. The same group of people was invited: the Brownlows, Buists, Lord Sefton and the future Lady Sefton (who was an old American friend of Wallis’, ‘Foxie’ Gwynne), also the Duff Coopers, Anthony Edens and Euan Wallaces. Euan Wallace was a well-known Conservative Member of Parliament, Barbie Wallace (afterwards Mrs Herbert Agar), a daughter of Sir Edwin Lutyens, describes a visit to the Fort that summer where they stayed several times. On arrival, guests were handed a card: ‘Mourning will not be worn after 6 p.m.’
It was 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 a word to him before.
This is a notable tribute, not only to Wallis’ good manners but to her kindness. Sir Arthur Colefax was a famous bore; his wife was a lion-hunting hostess who caught plenty of lions, none of whom threw a word to their host. Lord Berners once said that the Government had offered Sir Arthur £30,000 ‘to bore the Channel Tunnel.’
Mrs Agar continues: ‘After dinner everyone drove to Windsor Castle for a film, during which endless footmen in royal livery crawled about on all fours (in order not to spoil the view of the screen) offering champagne. When the lights went on most of the guests were asleep.’
Lady Diana Cooper has described the putting out and putting in of cushions and mattresses round the swimming pool when the sun shone fitfully. The King wanted everything at the Fort to be informal, but it never quite was. When he mixed the cocktails and poured them out himself nobody forgot for an instant that he was the King. Wallis did not forget, but she accepted it more easily than anyone else. She was the pivot, the centre, the person towards whom what Lord Louis Mountbatten called his magnetic charm was principally directed. There is no doubt that everyone enjoyed visits to the Fort.
It was in May that the king gave a dinner party at York House to which he invited the Simpsons and Mr and Mrs Stanley Baldwin. With his ‘most Prince-Charming smile’ he said to Wallis: ‘It’s got to be done. Sooner or later my Prime Minister must meet my future wife.’ She immediately replied that any idea of her being his future wife was impossible and out of the question; ‘They’d never let you.’ ‘I’m well aware of all that,’ said the King, ‘but rest assured, I will manage it somehow.’ This is the first time marriage is mentioned in Wallis’ memoirs, and for several more months she continued to deny that there was any question of such a thing between her and the King, but they must obviously have discussed it many times already. It appears that in 1934 he had already made up his mind to marry her.
The guests at the dinner, besides the Baldwins, were the Mountbattens, the Duff Coopers, Lady Cunard, the Lindberghs and Admiral Sir Ernle Chatfield and Lady Chatfield. The list appeared next day in the Court Circular, but Ernest Simpson did not savour it as he would have once. It was the last time he was the King’s guest. He had found a sympathetic companion in Wallis’ old friend Mary Kirk, Mme Raffray, who was soon to be the third Mrs Simpson. Since her marriage had now broken down Wallis decided to divorce. She asked the King for the name of a solicitor and he suggested Mr Theodore Goddard. ‘From then on I acted on Mr Goddard’s advice,’ says Wallis. Whether his advice was always the very wisest is open to question. Mr Simpson left Bryanston Court and went to live at the Guards Club. Before bowing out of Wallis’ life he had an interview with the King, and, like a Victorian father with his daughter’s suitor, asked him his intentions.
Debutantes being presented to the King at Buckingham Palace in 1936. The occasion was ruined by rain and the King looked, and was, bored.
The Garter King of Arms read the Proclamation of Accession of Edward VIII, January 1936. Wallis watched from a window with the new King at her side.
The photograph portrait of Edward VIII which was to become the image on stamps and coins.
Once on the way back to Buckingham Palace after presenting new colours, a man pushed through the police line and threw a loaded revolver.
Shortly afterwards the King gave another dinner party, for Sir Samuel and Lady Maud Hoare, the Duke and Duchess of York, David Margesson the Chief Whip, the Willingdons, the Winston Churchills, Lady Diana Cooper, Lady Colefax and Wallis, but this time there was no Ernest Simpson, a fact registered by readers of the Court Circular which, formerly so dull, had now become a source of endless gossip and conjecture in London society. Sir Samuel Hoare was intrigued to meet the famous Mrs Simpson about whom everyone was talking. He noted that she was ‘very attractive and intelligent, very American and with little or no knowledge of English life.’
Among those who were incensed by the appearance of Mrs Simpson’s name in the Court Circular was Lady Astor, an American from Virginia who said that only members of old families from the American South should be allowed to become acquainted with the royal family. This nuance passed most English people by. In any case, as we have seen, she was barking up the wrong tree. Wallis’ family was very old by American standards and her father’s and mother’s families both came from Southern States.
Noteworthy about these dinner parties given by the King is not so much that Mrs Simpson was present (the King would never have had a party without her) as that many of the guests were prominent Tory politicians. Wallis, an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, was very well-informed, and on the whole she much preferred the company of politicians to any other. Lady Cunard and Lady Colefax were hostesses who invited interesting people to meet her and the King, and in common courtesy they had to be asked back. With the exception of his own relations, an Admiral and Charles Lindbergh, all the men at these dinners were members of the Houses of Parliament. This was something of a new departure; the boon companions of yester-year were less in evidence, If someone was an old friend and also a politician, like Winston Churchill, so much the better.
Now that her Prince was King Wallis was determined that he should devote himself to serious matters; she did not understand that in England a political King could be in deep trouble, or that the Monarch must, as far as humanly possible, be above politics, sitting firmly on the fence. Edward VIII had strong views on a number of subjects, too strong. Wallis with her sketchy knowledge of English affairs never realized that he might be more safely employed with his ‘tiresome golf’ or even (in private) with the good times she had so rigorously put behind her. She observed that everyone deferred to him, that his will was law; she failed to understand how limited was his power.
Sir Samuel Hoare had been involved in a major political row because of the Hoare-Laval Pact which decreed that Britain and France were to lift sanctions against Italy and allow it to keep some of its conquests in Abyssinia. He had had to resign, but was now back in office, and it was perhaps rather typical that Edward VIII should give a dinner party for him. The King was, and remained, an Empire man. He probably thought Abyssinia would be better administered by Italians than by Haile Selassie. He had given years of his life to the British Empire, and he thought it absurd hypocrisy to deny colonies to other European powers, simply because they were acquiring them a few years later than the British.
From this time on the American press began printing more and more stories about the romance. What had previously been given the odd mention now and again became a steady stream of comment about the King of England and the lady from Baltimore. The English newspapers did not refer to it, and American publications appeared on
the news stands with bits cut out of them, because of the threat of libel and vast damages which always hangs over the English distributors just as it does over writers and publishers.
Wallis continued to give small dinners at her flat to which people flocked in order to see the King and gauge the temperature of the romance. She invited Harold Nicolson, who wrote in his diary that Lady Oxford, Lady Cunard and Lady Colefax were all present and each of these noted personalities furious at the other two having been asked. ‘Something snobbish in me is rather saddened by all this. Mrs Simpson is a perfectly harmless type of American, but the whole setting is slightly second rate.’ This sour comment is reminiscent of Groucho Marx: ‘I wouldn’t want to join a club which would have me for a member.’
