Before Wallis
Page 4
I quite agree with you that our mutual letters are more intimate, that is natural when mother and son understand each other, which thank God we do – and those long talks were a great blessing to our feelings I know and have cleared up clouds which were gathering on the horizon and have altogether simplified matters.26
Edward always blamed his father more than his mother for his cold upbringing. He believed that the Duke of York, the future George V, had a repressive influence on his wife. George had a bad temper and controlling nature and he certainly did not like to be crossed. Running his household as though he was the captain of a ship and his children naval cadets, he was a strict disciplinarian who at times bullied his children by ranting at them. They grew to fear a summons to his library where they might be rebuked for the slightest misdemeanour. He placed an almost obsessive importance on punctuality, deportment and dress. Like his wife, he was undemonstrative. Prince Edward could recall only one time in his childhood when his father embraced him.27
As his children grew older the duke alternated between saying he wanted to be their best friend and criticising their every action. His ‘awkward jocularity’ made them squirm while his angry outbursts intimidated them.28 Even once they became adults he wanted to control their lives. George V had difficult relationships with all his sons, but the greatest clash was between Prince Edward and his father. As heir to the throne much was expected of the Prince of Wales, but Edward was a very different character from his father and he rebelled against his rigid regime.29 This rebellion affected every aspect of the prince’s life. Recent writers consider that the prince verged on anorexia; his distorted body image meant that he dreaded becoming fat, so he ate very little and exercised excessively.30 Concerned about his son’s erratic habits, his father encouraged him to take less exercise, eat more, rest more and smoke less. Edward ignored his advice. As the years went by he would increasingly define himself by always being the complete opposite to his father.
Both Queen Mary and King George brought their children up to believe that they were not different from or better than anyone else – meaning the well born.31 However, as Edward soon learnt, because he was the heir to the throne people always treated him differently.32 From an early age, he hated anything that set him apart; he did not want to be a prince on a pedestal, but rather to be treated like an ordinary man.33 The women who appealed to him most treated him as a man, not a monarch in waiting. He needed a partner who saw herself as an equal and not a subject.
3
THE GIRL OF GIRLS
If the Prince of Wales was not going to marry royalty, wedding the daughter of the Duke of Sutherland would be the next best thing. However, it was not just her aristocratic background that made Rosemary such an alluring prospect for the prince. It was her personality. After meeting Rosemary again in July 1917, it was clear that she had made a lasting impression on Edward and he wanted to get to know her better. A few weeks after the royal visit, the prince went to see Rosemary at her mother’s hospital. They walked on the beach, went to the cinema in Calais and dined at a hotel. According to Edward they had ‘great fun’ together.1 By September he was discussing her with his mother. He confided that he thought Rosemary was ‘very attractive though very cold!!!!’2 In fact this was the perfect combination to attract the prince and, rather than being negative, the fact that he considered her ‘cold’ was an essential element of her appeal. As thousands of pretty girls threw themselves at him, in awe of his position and treating him as a demi-god, the fact that Rosemary did not seem in the least impressed by him made her a challenge. As was to be repeated in his later relationships with Freda Dudley Ward and Wallis Simpson, he was attracted to women who could be cool towards him.
It seems Queen Mary did not approve of Rosemary because in his next letter Edward was keen to play down his interest in the duke’s daughter. He wrote: ‘When I told you I thought “R” looking attractive at Calais the other day I didn’t mean I was really struck and you need have no fear of my having any designs on her!! Of course when one hasn’t seen a lady for weeks and weeks as I hadn’t that Sunday, any nice-looking girl looks attractive and rather strikes one at the time; “mais ca passe”.’3 However, it seems that Edward was protesting too much and, as usual, writing what his recipient wanted to hear. Rosemary’s elusive quality intrigued the prince and no doubt he realised that he would have to work hard to win her over. Other eligible bachelors had tried before and failed. Everyone who knew Rosemary agreed that she was special: known as ‘the girl of girls’, many men fell in love with her.4 Attractive rather than conventionally beautiful, she was 5ft 6in tall and very slim, with wavy blonde hair, large blue eyes, a slightly turned-up nose and a radiant smile. She spoke in a distinctive husky voice.5 Lady Cynthia Asquith, who looked very much like Rosemary and was often mistaken for her, described her ‘snub face and slap-dash voice – very in-loveable’.6 Lady Diana Manners, who saw Rosemary as a rival, wrote that ‘she had lank primrose-coloured hair, a raucous voice, a laugh that quickened the sad to gaiety, a wide mouth and a general look of bedraggled apple blossom’.7
It was Rosemary’s sense of fun and her distinctive laugh that were most appealing. Her mother’s friend, the author J.M. Barrie, recalled how, as she was approaching womanhood, he used to take her to plays but he had to take her out halfway through as, if something appealed to her sense of the absurd, she would not be able to stop laughing. Even when she was fishing near her Scottish home, she would burst out laughing, alerting her intended victims and preventing her from landing many fish.8 The author of Peter Pan was so charmed by his young friend that he based the heroine in the play Mary Rose on her.9 Her friend Lady Victor Paget described Rosemary as ‘the most enchanting personality of anyone I ever knew’.10 In some ways Rosemary was unworldly. One journalist described her as ‘entrancingly absent-minded, there were moments when her spirit seemed to have wandered off into another world and she would suddenly come back to earth with a laugh at her inattention’.11
In 1909 Rosemary went to finishing schools in Dresden and then Paris. In Germany, she was taught to play the piano by one of the best teachers, Herr Pachmann. However, she showed no more aptitude for music than she had for academic study. Herr Pachmann asked her to play a piece to him and when she had finished he took her music and threw it on the floor, declaring that she was the worst pianist he had ever heard and nothing on earth would induce him to teach her.12 After finishing school, Rosemary ‘came out’ in society. Her great friend Monica Grenfell also made her debut in the season of 1911. Before the parties began the girls went to Paris together to get their ‘coming out’ trousseau and to experiment with the latest Parisian hairstyles. Monica was given extravagant coming-out presents, including a long, Renaissance necklace of pearls and emeralds and a string of pearls that had belonged to the French Empress Marie Louise. On seeing the gifts, Rosemary said, with her characteristic sense of humour, that Monica was certain to be murdered for her jewels. She added: ‘Look at me, with nothing but my handsome set of Sutherland cairngorms.’13
Photographed in a white lace dress, with curls escaping from a lace mob cap, a serious-looking Rosemary was dubbed ‘the debutante of the season’ by society newspapers.14 The Tatler described her as being like her mother and aunts, ‘a daring and distinctive personality’.15 She was soon caught up in the social maelstrom, attending balls in London and house parties in stately homes across the country. Monica described those happy, carefree pre-war days. She wrote that they ‘shared all the happiness as a band of close friends, united by affection and laughter and we rushed to meet all the fun’.16 The Prince of Wales’s great friend Lord Desmond Fitzgerald was part of this close-knit circle and mooted as a possible husband for Monica, while Monica’s brother Billy Grenfell was one of Rosemary’s early admirers. He wrote to his mother that she was ‘looking delicious’ and added that after spending most of the day with her and another girl he had ‘nearly lost my reason to all those delectable girls’.17 However, it was Joh
n Manners, Marquess of Granby, the son of the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, who fell most deeply in love with Rosemary. The Rutlands and the Sutherlands had known each other for years. Stafford House and the Rutlands’ London home looked out on to Green Park where the children used to meet with their nannies.18
When Rosemary came out John Manners became her most serious suitor. She was photographed in a cardigan and tweeds at a shooting party at Belvoir Castle, the Rutlands’ estate. However, Rosemary was not an easy conquest. Lady Diana wrote: ‘She was boy-shy (what a ghastly expression) and accepted his proposal of marriage and unending adoration with hesitation, almost reluctance.’ In January 1913, an imminent engagement was rumoured in the newspapers, jewels had been bought and everyone was very happy, but then Rosemary became ill and had to undergo an operation for appendicitis. During her convalescence she confessed to her mother that she wanted to end her engagement. Millicent, who was described by Lady Diana as ‘a true Edwardian schemer and large-scale liar for the public good’, sent for John and told him, with tears in her eyes, that the doctors, having peered into all parts of his beloved bride, said that she was biologically ‘infantile and quite undeveloped and would never have any children’. As John loved Rosemary so much, he said that he was still willing to marry her. However, Rosemary had made up her mind and broke off the engagement, plunging her ex-fiancé into depression for several years after losing her.19
For Rosemary romance was placed firmly on the back burner once the First World War began. Nothing would ever be the same again for her or her friends. So many of the vibrant youthful circle who had socialised together in those pre-war days were killed that those who survived clung to each other in a search for solace. When Monica’s eldest brother, Julian Grenfell, was killed in the spring of 1915, Rosemary immediately rushed to see her great friend. She drove over to the hospital where Monica was nursing and persuaded her to come to her mother’s hospital for a break, promising that she could be given a lift back in an ambulance which had to come to Boulogne the next day. Monica wrote that she was ‘enchanted’ to be with her friend because she loved Rosemary more than anybody outside her own family circle. After working together on the wards at Millicent’s hospital, the girls had tea in a shop in Boulogne. When they saw two hungry children gazing wistfully through the tea shop window Rosemary invited them in and gave them the two best cakes available.
It was a lovely summer afternoon and the girls then drove through the countryside. As they looked up they saw two specks in the sky which were aeroplanes flying close together. A second later a bomb was dropped in the canal next to the road just a short distance in front of them and mud and water splattered across their route. Another bomb then dropped in the field to their right. Monica and Rosemary had been lucky to survive; shaken but not daunted by their experience, they returned to the hospital. That evening the girls had dinner at a long table in a tent with Millicent and the other nurses and doctors. Afterwards, they stayed up late talking by candlelight in the small cottage where Rosemary had a bedroom. The next day Rosemary was on duty alone in her ward during the afternoon, so Monica joined her to help. Monica wrote that her friend was obviously adored by the patients. Rosemary had been told to rearrange the beds and lockers in the ward and while doing this the girls bumped into a cluster of crutches which fell around a badly injured patient. Luckily, none of the crutches touched him and both he and the other patients were cheered up by the incident. Later that afternoon, Monica returned in the ambulance to her own hospital. Two days later she heard that her second brother Billy had also been killed.20
Whenever Rosemary was back in England she visited her friends’ bereaved mother, Ettie Desborough. In December 1916 Ettie and Monica organised a house party at Panshanger, one of the Desboroughs’ homes. It was their first attempt to socialise since their double loss; mother and daughter had gathered together a few of the friends they loved dearly who were home on leave. All the carefully selected guests were close enough to the family to understand what a heroic effort it required from Ettie to make the weekend a success.21 At the house party Rosemary had a flirtation with the charming pursuer of beautiful women, Duff Cooper, who was in a relationship with John Manners’s sister Lady Diana. As Rosemary and Diana had a similar type of blonde beauty, Duff was attracted to both aristocratic young women. His love affair with Diana was very serious, but at the house party he was enchanted by Rosemary. She was on leave from nursing in France after a record-long term working at her mother’s hospital. The surgeons had grown so accustomed to having her help that they told her very earnestly that they could not do without her. However, Millicent knew Rosemary needed respite from the unrelenting pace and had insisted she went to England.22
At Panshanger, Duff and Rosemary played tennis together then in the evening she helped with some of the old party games they used to play before the war. That night Duff wrote in his diary that he had been unfaithful to Diana in his thoughts about Rosemary and the flirtation made him question how much he loved his girlfriend.23 When Duff returned to London, Diana was suspicious and questioned him about her rival. He admitted that he had been attracted to Rosemary but denied that he was in love with her.24 However, when he saw Rosemary again a few weeks later he felt such a strong attraction to her that he found he could not speak to her at all. He drank a great deal to try to get up courage but still he could not do it. Afterwards he came home and wrote a ‘silly’ letter to her. A few days later Rosemary sent a rather abrupt reply. When he saw her again at a dinner party she complained that she had not liked the letter he had written to her. However, before she was due to return to France, Duff persuaded her to dine with him and a group of friends. Duff described Rosemary as looking ‘lovelier than ever’ but he did not make any progress with her and instead got drunk and ended the evening having a terrible quarrel with Diana.25
It seems Rosemary was enjoying the flirtation but did not take it seriously. Her mother wrote to her: ‘Darling child, Your letter made me laugh […] you will have to tear yourself away from the fleshpots and come out here Sunday 28th January.’26 However, Rosemary’s return to France was delayed because she was still run down and suffering from a liver complaint. Her mother insisted that she should go to the spa at Harrogate for a three-week cure where she could have massages and rebuild her strength. As soon as she was better, Rosemary returned to France to take over running the hospital and to give her mother a much-needed break.
In December 1917, Duff and Rosemary were thrown together again at another of Ettie Desborough’s house parties. Duff thought Rosemary was looking ‘most beautiful’ but, as in her relationship with the Prince of Wales, it was not just a physical attraction. Duff and Rosemary went for a short walk together before tea. Walking down an avenue of stark, leafless trees as the sun set on a cold, bleak winter afternoon, they discussed their friends who had been killed in the war. During the house party, the reality of what the tragedy of the war meant at home in Britain was reinforced for Rosemary. She had spent so much of her childhood at the Desboroughs’ homes, growing up with Monica but also with Julian and Billy, who were now dead. The house must have felt full of ghosts that wintry weekend. One death of their friends followed so closely upon another that, as Duff wrote, they had not had time ‘to find new words for our new sorrow’.27 Duff’s and Rosemary’s depressed moods matched, and they found that they shared each other’s ‘rather gloomy hopeless views’.28 When they talked about a future life Rosemary told Duff that increasingly she was coming to believe in complete annihilation. After their talk, Duff wrote in his diary: ‘If I could love anybody besides Diana I think it would be her.’29
Evidently Rosemary had enjoyed Duff’s company too, because at the end of the month she invited him to stay at Calcot, a house taken by her uncle and aunt, Lord and Lady Rosslyn. There were only four people there: a mutual friend, Michael Herbert, cousin of the Earl of Pembroke, Duff, Rosemary and Lady Rosslyn. After dinner, they sat up until one in the morning playing ‘Truth’ by f
irelight. Duff admitted to his diary that he found himself falling in love with Rosemary again and feeling jealous of Michael Herbert, who sat beside her. The next day Michael left after lunch and the remaining three went for a walk with five dogs and a pet goat. After tea Rosemary and Duff had a long talk; he told her that he loved her, but she said that he mustn’t. She was very fond of him but could not be in love with him.30 Although they had found consolation in each other’s company, the flirtation between Rosemary and Duff came to nothing, perhaps because the prince was courting her at the same time. Duff soon returned to a jealous Diana.