Wallis didn’t have to wait too long. Three days later, Edward made the decision to abdicate. Having done so, he said he felt a tremendous sense of relief and happiness. The formal Instrument of Abdication was executed at ten a.m. on December 10, 1936. And on December 11, at 1:52 Greenwich Mean Time, Edward VIII renounced his throne, the first English monarch to voluntarily relinquish the crown. In a radio broadcast that day, the sovereign told his former subjects, “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility, and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love. . . . The other person most nearly concerned has tried, up to the last, to persuade me to take a different course. . . .”
Listening to the wireless from where she was staying in France, Wallis sobbed uncontrollably. She had been adamant that Edward remain on the throne at all costs, even if it meant that she would have to make the greatest, most painful sacrifice of all and renounce him; however, there is also a substantial amount of correspondence between high-level Nazis to the effect that Wallis was desperate to become Queen of England. This contradiction would indicate that despite her personal ambitions, Wallis may have recognized that the only way for Edward to accomplish the political agenda they so fervently supported was for him to stay on the throne and for her to back away. Additionally, on December 6, Wallis had written to Edward confiding her fear that if he did choose to abdicate, she would be put “in the wrong light to the entire world because they will say I could have prevented it.”
Made public in the year 2000, though signed by Mrs. Simpson shortly before Edward’s abdication, was a statement Wallis had written with the aid of two friends and advisers—Herman Rogers and Edward’s lord-in-waiting, Perry Brownlow—to the effect that she was willing “to withdraw forthwith from a situation that has been rendered both unhappy and untenable.”
There was a good reason for the government to suppress Wallis’s declaration. Although journalists in the United States and on the European continent had kept their readers informed of “Windsor and Wally’s affair,” the English press did not publish the story of the king’s impending abdication until a week before the event. Their intention was to prevent an informed (and consequently sympathetic) public from upsetting the Establishment’s intention to replace Edward with his younger brother Albert, the more pliant Duke of York.
The Church’s opinion of a royal’s exercising his duty over his desire was crystal clear. Deriding Edward’s decision, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, intoned over the wireless, “From God he had received a high and sacred trust. Yet by his own will he has abdicated—he has surrendered the trust. With characteristic frankness he has told us his motive. It was a craving for private happiness. Strange and sad it must be that for such a motive, however strongly it pressed upon his heart, he should have disappointed hopes so high and abandoned a trust so great.”
One person close to the throne who never forgave Edward for choosing love over duty was the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who was married to the shy, stammering Duke of York. Because Edward had no children, his abdication meant that her husband, next in the line of succession, was now the monarch. The new queen consort blamed Edward for ruining his brother’s life as well as his health with his appalling act of selfishness.
On December 12, 1936, the day after his abdication, Edward sailed for France. In accordance with an alleged “agreement” with the new king, George VI (formerly Albert, Duke of York), Windsor and Wally would never again reside in England. Edward wrote in his memoirs, “HMS Fury slid silently and unescorted out of Ports-mouth Harbor. Watching the shore of England recede, I was swept by many emotions. If it had been hard to give up the throne, it had been even harder to give up my country. . . . The drawbridges were going up behind me.”
Edward’s own mother set the tone for the way the royal family would treat him from then on. In response to a question about when the former king might return to his homeland, Queen Mary replied, “Not until he comes to my funeral.”
Wallis was concerned about how Edward would fare in exile. She also despaired of the fact that a mention of their impending marriage would be pointedly omitted from the Court Circular and that the royal family was intent on denying her the use of the title “Her Royal Highness.” On January 3, 1937, she wrote to Edward, “It is all a great pity because I loathe being undignified and also of joining the countless titles that roam around Europe meaning nothing.”
On March 8, the former King Edward VIII was granted the title Duke of Windsor. It never sat well with the other royals that—HRH or no—Wallis would now be a duchess.
Wallis obtained her decree absolute on May 3, and their formal engagement was announced eight days later. She married Edward on June 3, in a tiny French town at the home of Charles Bedaux, an entrepreneurial expat American businessman who was developing a workforce production system for Adolf Hitler. The bride wore a silk crepe suit by Mainbocher with a floor-length skirt and long-sleeved jacket in a shade of grayish robin’s-egg blue that would henceforth be known as “Wallis blue.” Her wedding ring, similar to that worn by several queens of England, was fashioned of Welsh gold by a loyal former subject. Edward was dressed in the traditional striped trousers and black morning coat, with a white carnation, his favorite flower, in his lapel.
Unfortunately for the bridal couple, who were both Protestant, the Church of England (of which Edward, when king, had been the Supreme Governor) prohibited a religious wedding ceremony to someone who had been divorced, as long as their former spouses still lived, and Wallis clearly fit the profile. But the Reverend Robert Anderson Jardine of a tiny parish near Durham believed that Edward should not be denied the blessing of God on this terribly special day, and traveled to France of his own accord to conduct the ceremony. On his arrival, however, he was forbidden to officiate by the Bishop of Durham as well as by the Archbishops of York and Canterbury. Although someone had fetched a Protestant cross from the neighboring village, the civil ceremony was conducted in French by the mayor of Monts, Charles Mercier.
No member of the royal family or the court was present at the wedding, on instructions of George VI. Edward felt very hurt by this edict, and up till the last minute maintained hope that any of his relations might turn up after all.
Wallis would later write, “If ever there was a marriage that started off inauspiciously, resented and vilifed, with many hopes and probably prayers for its failure, it was ours.”
The newlyweds and their 266 pieces of luggage honeymooned on the Orient Express in a private railway car coupled to the train, which had been loaned to them by Benito Mussolini. Among other destinations, they visited Munich, where Hitler warmly received them, chatting with the newlyweds for two hours. When Hitler had learned of Edward’s abdication, he lamented, “I have lost a friend to my cause!”
The Windsors now enjoyed the life of expatriates in France and Austria, discreetly exiled from England for their pro-Nazi sympathies at a time when Hitler’s rise to power was becoming more ominous by the day and an increasing threat to Britain. When they traveled—and many of their visits were in pro-Fascist towns—word came down from the highest level in England that only a third-string minister or administrator (at best) be sent to meet them, and that they should be honored with no more than “a bite of luncheon.”
With specific regard to Germany, British consular officials stationed there were instructed not to meet the Windsors. “The Embassy must scrupulously avoid in any way giving the appearance that His Majesty the king and His Majesty’s government countenance the proposed tour.” It was bad enough that a member of the royal family was publicly expressing his personal political views, which he or she is expressly forbidden to do; but it was also feared both at Whitehall and Buckingham Palace that Edward was trying to regain his throne with the help of the Third Reich. Letters from Hitler himself, as well as others in his government, fully confirm that conjecture.
Although Wallis had been the o
ne to waver when it came to tying the knot, by all accounts, she was the one who took command of their marriage, ordering Edward about as if he was a lackey. Even when he was still King of England, after she commanded him, in front of a group of their friends, to “take off my dirty little shoes and bring me another pair,” Edward fell to his knees and removed her footwear, relishing every moment of his humility. No wonder that their social set referred to him as Wallis’s “lapdog.”
One evening during a dinner party the Duke of Windsor asked the butler to deliver a message to the chauffeur regarding his plans for the following day. Wallis raised her hands and slammed them on the table. “Never—never again will you give orders in my house!” the duchess shouted. Then in a belated effort to smooth things over, Wallis explained to the mortified guests, “You see, the duke is in charge of everything that happens outside the house, and I on the inside.”
Utterly cowed by his wife’s outburst, Edward mumbled his apologies.
Philip Ziegler, Edward VIII’s official biographer, wrote that the king was an utter sadomasochist where Wallis was concerned. “He relished the contempt and bullying she bestowed on him.” And in a rare move for an official personal attendant, Edward’s friend and equerry Edward Dudley “Fruity” Metcalfe (to whom he was intimately attached, and with whom he may have had a full-blown sexual affair) openly shared his opinion of Wallis with their mutual friends: “God, that woman’s a bitch! She’ll play hell with him before long.”
But to Edward, it had been worth exchanging his kingdom for this former Baltimore colt, despite the oft-repeated joke that the king, who had once been Admiral of the Fleet, had become “the third mate on an American tramp.”
“No one will ever know how hard I work to try to make the little man feel busy,” Wallis once confided to a friend during their post-abdication peregrinations. Nevertheless, her life was a balancing act. After what had begun (from her point of view) as merely a thrilling fling, Wallis had come to care for Edward deeply. And although she often felt suffocated by his relentless adoration, she could not forsake him once he had abandoned his throne for her.
Wallis had another feather in her cap, which may have kept her husband intrigued. According to the MI6 file on Wallis known as the China Dossier—the existence of which is still disputed among historians and biographers—during her Asian sojourn in the 1920s she had allegedly visited a number of high-end brothels called “singsong houses,” where she learned some of the local prostitutes’ more exotic sexual practices, and indulged in them herself. According to sources close to the couple, the duke and Wallis enjoyed sexual role-playing and he was an avid foot fetishist.
The Windsors’ Nazi and Fascist connections were also common knowledge for years. Both the British Secret Intelligence Service and the U.S. State Department were aware that Wallis was the source of various leaks to prominent diplomats with close ties to Hitler and Mussolini. Wallis and Edward partied with several other pro-Nazi and/or Fascist sympathizers among the English aristocracy. And during World War II, the British government was convinced that the duke and duchess were disseminating crucial information to their contacts in Paris. Edward and Wallis met openly with Third Reich officials at the highest level, passed sensitive information to them regarding British maneuvers, and were actively scheming to return to England, where they would run a shadow court from the Duke of Westminster’s estate until such time as Edward could, with Nazi assistance, regain his throne.
Rudolph Hess reported to Hitler, “The Duke is proud of his German blood. Says he is more German than English. There is no need to lose a single German life in invading Britain. The Duke and his wife will deliver the goods.”
In 1939, Edward was assigned to the British military mission in France. But when the English government suspected him of communicating with the enemy (an act of treason) and possibly conspiring with the Germans to arrange a negotiated peace—which was in opposition to the British government’s agenda, and for which Edward had no authority—the duke and duchess were informally exiled to a place where their pro-Nazi sentiments could do little to harm British policy.
George VI put an ocean between the crown and his older brother, sending Edward to Nassau, as Governor and Commander in Chief of the Bahamas. Wallis in particular was miserable there. In an attempt to feel more at home, she had Government House, their official residence, redone at tremendous expense, hiring an interior decorator from New York City and installing air conditioning, much to the anger of the Bahamians. Although the Windsors endeavored to demonstrate that they had a social conscience, and Wallis actively involved herself in several charitable war efforts there, they were bored out of their minds in the Bahamas and managed to spend as little time there as possible, taking off for shopping sprees in Manhattan or Palm Springs, and living large while their countrymen and -women endured the dangers and deprivations of wartime. It was reported that Wallis’s annual clothing budget at the time was somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000 (well over $383,000 today).
Wallis once told the legendary society hostess Elsa Maxwell, “My husband gave up everything for me. I am not a beautiful woman. I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is dress better than anyone else. If everyone looks at me when I enter a room, my husband can feel proud of me. That’s my chief responsibility.”
The duchess was always fashion-conscious for her husband as well. Wallis had been telling him for years that white dinner jackets at black-tie parties were passé, but the duke insisted on remaining unfashionable—high treason to his wife. One night, at a Palm Beach soiree during their post-Bahamian years, Wallis grabbed a tray of hors d’oeuvres from a passing waiter, shoved them into Edward’s hands, and exclaimed, “Here! If you’re going to dress like a waiter, you might as well act like one!”
Edward never seemed put off by his wife’s insults; no matter what she said or did, he worshipped the ground her “dirty little shoes” had trod upon. But his devotion was occasionally taken for granted. During the course of their marriage Wallis did not remain faithful to her “lapdog,” though their contemporaries never believed that sex was the glue that kept the couple together. Although their courtship and marriage were seen as the “romance of the century,” the duke and duchess always maintained separate bedrooms.
While she and Edward were engaged, Wallis was also sleeping with Guy Marcus Trundle, a pro-Nazi gigolo who was an employee of the Ford Motor Company. And shortly after her royal marriage, she took another lover, William Christian Bullitt, the U.S. Ambassador to France—a closet bisexual who worshipped Hitler and who had strong connections to Mussolini. The prominent fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli allowed Wallis to use her atelier for her clandestine trysts with both Trundle and Bullitt, finding ways to distract Edward by securing invitations for him to society events while his beloved Wallis was having one of her “fittings.”
Thirteen years after Wallis wed Edward, she embarked on an odd sort of affair with Jimmy Donahue, a gay American playboy twenty years her junior, who was also fond of liquor and pills. Donahue often traveled with the Windsors as a threesome, and the duke didn’t seem to mind when Wallis and Jimmy, their heads conspiratorially inclined toward each other, giggled like a pair of schoolgirls. Edward also didn’t much object to his wife’s traveling alone with Donahue, despite Jimmy’s provocative endorsement of Wally’s talents. “She’s marvelous! She’s the best cock sucker I’ve ever known!”
Their affair lasted into the mid-1950s, until the night when a drunken Jimmy kicked Wallis so hard in the shin that she bled. The duke ordered him to pack his bags immediately and never to darken their doorstep again. Donahue eventually committed suicide.
From the postwar years until Wallis and Edward grew too frail and infirm to travel, they enjoyed the peripatetic lifestyle of the bon vivant. Still personae non grata with the royal family, they did little but attend parties and galas, shop, and play golf. Sometimes her husband’s frustration at having nothing of import to do took its toll on Wallis, w
ho keenly felt the burden of having to constantly stroke the royal ego and keep him cheered. “You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance!” she once lamented to a friend.
In 1967, a commemorative article published in syndicated newspapers, celebrating the Windsors’ thirtieth wedding anniversary, included the semi-serious “Duke’s Formula for a Happy Marriage,” in which each of the Windsors contributed their respective recipes for happiness, beginning with Edward’s advice: Don’t ask questions. If you got the right answer it might hurt. If you didn’t, it surely would. If she absentmindedly calls you Ernest or Winfield, don’t comment; at least she has your role fixed in her thoughts. . . . Don’t let marriage interfere with your old customs. Step out to an occasional nightclub, but with your wife just to keep in practice. This will make her feel that whatever pleasures you used to have in such frivolities were incomplete until you met her. If she shows an inclination to go with you to your tailor, ignore it. This is a major encroachment upon your freedom. A minor menace is the selection of your ties, socks, and pyjamas. There is nothing you can do about this. . . . Always praise the way she wears her hair. If possible, like it. She will wear it that way anyway.
Wallis then contributed her witty but telling suggestions: Be first to decide any question, no matter how trivial. After you’ve made the decision, ask your husband what he thinks. All men like to be deferred to. . . . Praise any little accomplishments he may have, such as skirling bagpipes. At least you know where he is when he is playing. Tell him how strong he is, and praise him for his character. But suggest that all decisions be mutual. . . . Make him think this love, the only real one of your life, will last forever.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 47
