The Duchess of Windsor

by Diana Mosley

  For his summer holiday the King chartered a yacht, the Nahlin, and cruised along the Dalmatian coast, through the Corinth Canal via Athens to Istanbul, escorted by two destroyers. Besides Wallis he invited the Duff Coopers, Herman and Katherine Rogers, Lord Sefton and a few more, also the private secretaries Godfrey Thomas and Alan (‘Tommy’) Lascelles, with Jack Aird as equerry. Wherever the yacht appeared, crowds of people sprang from nowhere to welcome the King, and Mrs Simpson too. Even peasants from the remote villages in Yugoslavia seemed to know that the King was in love. Whenever he and Wallis went ashore they were mobbed by adoring throngs shouting: ‘Long live the King!’ and ‘Long live love!’ Wallis was astonished to find that what she had fondly imagined was her private life seemed to be known to the whole world, except that is, in England, because the English newspapers had still published nothing at all about it. Whether or not the King was astonished he behaved in a recklessly indiscreet manner, always at Wallis’ side. He saw no reason to conceal his feelings any more than have kings all through history.

  Wallis with her Cairn terrier, Pookie.

  The cruise on the Nahlin in the summer of 1936. Above: Wallis with the King at Pompeii. Below: Katherine Rogers with Wallis and the King at Portofino.

  Lunch aboard the Nahlin, with on the left, Wallis and the King of Greece, and on the right, the King and Mrs Fitzgerald.

  Wallis on the bridge of the Nahlin.

  When they dined with the King of Greece the host sat between Wallis and Lady Diana Cooper, who says Wallis was splendid, ‘the wisecracks following in quick succession, the King [of Greece] clearly very admiring and amused.’ At that time everyone was admiring and amused; Wallis wisely lived for the moment and did not peer into the future.

  When the yacht reached Athens and King Edward was invited to meet the English colony at the British Legation Wallis refused to go too, saying his subjects wanted to see him. This put him in a bad humour, but he probably realised she was right. He says in his memoirs that as the boat made her leisurely way through the ruffled water of the Balkans he was conscious of clouds rolling up on the horizon; ‘not only clouds of war, but clouds of private trouble for me; for the American press had become fascinated with my friendship for Wallis, and now pursued us everywhere.’ The best description of the cruise of the Nahlin is Lady Diana Cooper’s in The Light of Common Day, because she so clearly perceives the strangeness of the situation. Everyone had a lovely time. but for the King and Wallis it was the end of the beginning.

  After meeting Mustapha Kemal in Turkey they took the Orient Express, driven part of the way by the engine-driver Tsar, Boris of Bulgaria.

  The King flew home from Zurich while Wallis went on to Paris. Her letters were waiting for her there, and they gave her a shock. Among them were newspaper cuttings from America, and she suddenly realised that she was being discussed the world over. Even Aunt Bessie’s letters enclosed cuttings, none of them either accurate or reassuring. When the King telephoned she told him but he made light of it, pretending to think it was only his Long Island experience over again.

  There is no such insulated little world as a yacht, and although they had been acclaimed by crowds, and entertained by the Regent of Yugoslavia, the King of Greece and the dictator of Turkey, Wallis had been out of touch with reality. Once again she had experienced the magic power of the King, to whom everyone deferred and who seemed to be universally loved, yet whose attention was concentrated exclusively upon her. It was the last time she was able to enjoy the extraordinary situation she was living in. Even on board the Nahlin she must have wondered how it would all end and what the future could be. The King’s love and his strong obstinate will seemed as if they could command and the world would obey, and yet … There were undoubtedly moments when she would have been more than relieved to be able to step down from the impossible pedestal upon which the King had set her.

  And now her letters, and the press cuttings, gave her a rough jolt.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Storm Clouds

  A Protestant, if he wants aid or advice on any matter,

  can only go to his solicitor.

  Disraeli

  WHEN SHE GOT back to London Wallis saw Mr Goddard, her solicitor, about her impending divorce. He had devised a rather foolish plan whereby her petition should be heard at Ipswich, and he had taken a house for her at Felixstowe so that she could be resident within the jurisdiction of the court. If Mr Goddard really believed his little stratagem would work, and that journalists would not be present for the hearing at Ipswich he was mistaken. It simply made the whole business more noticeable and intriguing than if the divorce had been heard in London in the ordinary way. However, Wallis fell in with his plans, and it is more than possible that he convinced her the whole thing would slip through unnoticed at Ipswich.

  Meanwhile the King went up to Balmoral and invited a few friends. Unlike King George V he did not ask the Archbishop of Canterbury, but he had the Marlboroughs, the Buccleuchs and the Roseberys as well as Wallis. Cecil Beaton, who saw a home movie of these guests, noted how the tall, badly or boringly dressed Englishwomen with their untidy hair contrasted with the neat and perfectly turned-out Wallis. Once again her name figured in the Court Circular.

  The Bryanston Court flat had now been given up, and Wallis took a furnished house in Cumberland Terrace, Regents Park. The King told her of new and disturbing happenings. Mr Baldwin had asked for an audience with him at the Fort. When the Prime Minister returned from his usual protracted holiday, during which he refused even to look at the newspapers, he had found on his desk innumerable press cuttings from America and elsewhere in the world, notably from the Dominions, about Wallis and the King. He told the King he was very worried about the Simpsons’ divorce and suggested he might persuade Wallis to withdraw her petition. The King indignantly refused. Mr Baldwin also told him that although hitherto the English newspapers had not published the story, before long they were bound to break silence. The King himself had asked two powerful newspaper owners, Lord Beaverbrook and Esmond Harmsworth, to try and arrange for the Ipswich divorce to be reported in a routine way.

  The King and Wallis entertaining at Balmoral: the King, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Esmond Harmsworth, Mrs Rogers, Wallis, Mrs Buist and Lady Mountbatten.

  Theodore Goddard, the London sollicitor who handled Wallis’ divorce from Ernest Simpson.

  Wallis went to Felixstowe with her friends Mr and Mrs George Hunter to wait for her divorce. The hearing was set down for 27 October. The cottage Mr Goddard had taken for her was uncomfortable, the surroundings melancholy in the extreme. When the day came Wallis packed ready to go back to London the moment the proceedings were over. Norman Birkett KC was her counsel; she felt there was deep hostility in the attitude of the judge. However. ‘almost reluctantly’, as it seemed to her, he granted her a decree nisi. Wallis made her way through crowding journalists to her car and left for London.

  In those days divorce was still based on ecclesiastical law. Six months had to pass before the divorce could be made absolute, six months of chastity for the petitioner. If he or she could be suspected of having a love affair, or even the opportunity for sexual intercourse could be shown to have existed, the King’s Proctor could intervene, the divorce petition would fail and the parties would remain married. This barbarous practice is now a thing of the past, and the best of all grounds for divorce, namely the desire of both parties to a marriage to dissolve it, is no longer ‘collusion.’ The marriage contract can be terminated without hypocrisy by mutual consent. But as the law then stood it is easy to see that Wallis could have been a target for ill-intentioned hostility.

  Early in November Mrs Merryman arrived, and she stayed at Wallis’ side throughout the following weeks, the best of chaperons.

  The State Opening of Parliament took place on 3 November. The Times reported: ‘One more page in the history of Parliament has been written. A young King has made his first speech from the Throne. Not alone the fact that his was a Thron
e by itself, but his whole Royal demeanour made one feel that “in himself was all his state”.’ His first speech from the Throne was also his last. Harold Nicolson commented on how young he looked, ‘like a boy of eighteen’, and upon the cockney accent in which he read the Government’s speech. On 11 November he laid the traditional wreath of poppies on the Cenotaph, and that night he went down to Portland where he spent two days with the Home Fleet. This was the sort of occasion where all his talents of camaraderie and charm allied to dignity and authority shone at their supreme best. None of the sailors, of whatever rank, who saw him then could ever forget the experience.

  Wallis with her aunt, Mrs Merryman, at Fort Belvedere in November 1936.

  Edward VIII leaving Parliament after the State Opening of 3 November 1936.

  It was on Friday 13 November, after his return to the Fort where Wallis and Aunt Bessie awaited him, that the King received the famous letter from his Private Secretary Alec Hardinge setting in train the events which culminated in the Abdication. Hardinge warned him that the silence of the press was not going to be maintained much longer, and that when the storm burst the Government might very well resign, and he had ‘reason to know’ that the King would find it impossible to get anybody to form a new one. The letter ended: ‘If Your Majesty will permit me to say so, there is only one step which holds out any prospect of avoiding this dangerous situation, and that is for Mrs Simpson to go abroad without further delay, and I would beg Your Majesty to give this proposal your earnest consideration before the position has become inevitable. Owing to the changing attitude of the Press the matter has become one of great urgency.’

  Upon reading this letter the King sent for Walter Monckton to meet him at Windsor on the Sunday. Monckton was an old friend from Oxford days; he was an eminent lawyer and a man of the world, quite outstanding for his intelligence and extreme niceness. Since 1932 he had been Attorney-General to the Prince of Wales and to the Duchy of Cornwall: they had become close friends. He now asked Monckton to act for him as his personal adviser and liaison with Downing Street in place of Hardinge. ‘With a gallantry consistent with his generous spirit he immediately volunteered to serve me’ wrote the King in his memoirs. It was obvious that Hardinge must have talked with the Prime Minister before writing his letter, and the King resolved to see Mr Baldwin as soon as possible.

  At the Fort he showed Wallis the letter, and he said to her as he had said to Monckton: ‘If the Government is opposed to our marriage then I am prepared to go.’ This alarmed her, and she implored him not to be impetuous. ‘There must be some other way,’ she said; but the King answered: ‘I don’t believe there can be—after this. I cannot leave the challenge hanging in the air another day.’

  Wallis wanted to go abroad at once, but this he refused to allow. She tried to show him how hopeless was their position, and that for him to go on fighting could only end in tragedy for him, but he would not listen. Instead he told her he would send for Mr Baldwin and tell him ‘that if the country won’t approve our marriage. I’m prepared to go.’ Wallis went hack to Cumberland Terrace. She was really frightened, she felt the trap closing. She says she often reproached herself for not leaving England there and then; she was prevented from doing so by his strong desire that she should stay, and by the near-certainty that if she did go. he would follow, ‘like a doting mallard,’ as Shakespeare said of Antony.

  According to Harold Nicolson she told Lady Colefax this, and when asked whether the King had suggested marriage Wallis said ‘of course not’ whereupon Lady Colefax obtained her permission to go and tell Neville Chamberlain this piece of good news. But all the Ministers knew already, from Mr Baldwin, that the King was determined to marry Mrs Simpson. Lady Colefax and Harold Nicolson agreed ‘that it is quite possible for the King to have spoken to Baldwin before raising the matter with Wallis herself.’ It is worth quoting this just to show how credulous people can become at a moment of crisis, when rumours are flying. Did Lady Colefax really imagine that to her impertinent question Wallis would say ‘Yes. I’m to be Queen of the May’, for her reply to be retailed all over London? Lady Colefax was a silly person, but Harold Nicolson agreed with her and swallowed the unlikely tale that the King had ‘proposed’ to Baldwin but not to Wallis.

  Meanwhile the King tried to get hold of Lord Beaverbrook, only to discover that he had sailed to America. The King telephoned him and he agreed to turn round and come back on the same ship, the Bremen. Much as Beaverbrook liked to spend the winter in the Arizona desert where his chronic asthma disappeared, he liked even better to be where the news was, in the eye of the storm. He also relished the thought of yet one more clash with his old adversary Stanley Baldwin.

  The King duly saw the Prime Minister, who told him that he and his senior colleagues were very worried at the prospect of the King’s marriage to a divorced lady. He added that whomsoever he married would have to be Queen, and delivered himself of a speech about ‘what the people would tolerate and what they would not’, just as if he were the Gallup Poll incarnate, as the King wrote years later. The King then said: ‘I intend to marry Mrs Simpson as soon as she is free to marry,’ and he added that if the Government opposed the marriage he was prepared to go. ‘At the mention of the possibility of my leaving the Throne, he was startled.’

  That evening the King proposed himself for dinner with his mother in order to tell her of his conversation with the Prime Minister. The idea of his marriage had not hitherto been mentioned between them. With the Queen was the Princess Royal, and ‘as I went on and they comprehended that even the alternative of abdication would not deter me from my course, I became conscious of their growing consternation.’ When he asked his mother to allow him to bring Wallis to see her—‘If you were to meet her you would then understand what she means to me, and why I cannot give her up’—Queen Mary refused. She apparently did not tell her son that she had given her word to George V that she would never receive Mrs Simpson, though this is what she told Lady Airlie, (adding: ‘He’s very much in love with her, poor boy.’). She was also silent about the late King’s passionate prayer that the Duke of York should succeed him.

  Stanley Baldwin’s ‘black beetle’ car outside the Fort.

  When they parted, Queen Mary wished him well for his forthcoming visit to the South Wales coal-fields.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Abdication

  Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things;

  The good of subjects is the end of Kings.

  Defoe

  AMID ALL THE anxiety connected with his determination to marry whatever the cost, the King went down to South Wales, a two-day tour planned months before. At Brynmawr a long discussion had taken place in the local council as to what they should do to celebrate the King’s visit, and it was decided to hang a banner across the road he would take, inscribed: ‘We Need Your Help.’ It was at Dowlais, at a derelict steelworks, that he spoke the famous words: ‘Something must be done.’ Photographs of the visit show the white, pinched faces of the men who formed a lane through which he walked. They also show the Minister and other officials who accompanied him trying to box him in as far as they could, but he refused to keep to the official route, determined to see as many people as possible.

  He had visited the Rhondda Valley before as Prince of Wales, and what he found most shocking was the intractability of the unemployment problem in the distressed areas. In 1932 he had been there when unemployment nationwide was at its peak of almost three millions. By 1936 the total figure had gone down, but South Wales had not shared in the relative prosperity, mostly concentrated in the Home Counties and the Midlands. What Disraeli called ‘the two nations’ was no longer only a social division but also to a certain extent a geographical division; there were areas where nobody was employed, everyone was poor and everyone was hungry.

  In towns like Brynmawr nothing changed as year followed year. The people had almost lost hope, yet they hung out Union Jacks, put on their tidiest clothes and stood for ho
urs in the cold to see the King. A few years before they had put up a banner ‘Welcome to Our Prince.’ Now it was ‘We Need Your Help.’ His anger on their behalf, his sympathy and understanding of their plight, and the magic of his personality, combined to make him ‘a folk legend.’6

  Nothing that happened afterwards ever altered the love that ordinary people bore King Edward VIII. It was a fact, sometimes awkward, that had to be taken into account every time his future and in particular his place of residence was under discussion.

  The King’s visit to the coal-fields of South Wales, November 1936. He is talking to unemployed miners at Abertillery.

  At the time, the response to his words underlined as hardly anything else could have done his complete impotence. If it gave an added impetus to Mr Baldwin’s desire to be rid of him, it also perhaps helped to make him see the futility of his role. If, faced with the terrible, hopeless suffering’7 of a large segment of his subjects (as they were picturesquely called) he could not even say that something must be done about it, there was very little point in being King. Because, incredible though it may seem, he was criticized for what he had said. His words annoyed the lethargic Mr Baldwin, who never bestirred himself if he could help it; they were words that made the headlines in the papers, and they forced the politicians at Westminster, cushioned by their safe Tory majority, to think about a problem they were only too apt to ignore. He himself called what he had said ‘the minimum humanitarian response that I could have made to what I had seen’: the dingy houses, dismal ruined industry. the white-faced men and women of the Rhondda and Monmouth valleys. The politicians were not inhumane, but they were totally inadequate to their task and had no idea what to do about the situation, and this made them resentful of criticism, even implied criticism.