Before Wallis

by Rachel Trethewey

  The prince had been assigned a private detective, which made assignations with Freda more difficult. Whenever Edward went anywhere by road a car with a detective in it had to follow him. He resented ‘this foul shadowing business’ but had to put up with it for his protection.32 There was an Irish threat between 9 and 14 August 1922 because Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan were to be hanged in Wandsworth Prison that week. The two ex-servicemen had shot the influential Ulster Unionist Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson on his doorstep in London on 22 June, acting on the orders of the Irish leader Michael Collins. Reggie Dunne was a friend of Collins and second-in-command in the London IRA.33 In such a tense political situation, the prince was told to keep out of London as much as possible that summer. He spent much of his time in Rugby playing polo while Freda was in Frinton. He knew that his ‘whining’ and ‘grousing’ were ‘foul’ for Freda but his letters continued to be full of self-pity and hints that he would like to give up being the Prince of Wales. He wrote to her: ‘Oh! Mine’s a “lovely” life now isn’t it Fredie darling; I so often think of chucking in the sponge especially lately but the knowledge that you love me my precious beloved sweet-heart does keep me going so marvellously and makes my foul life worth living.’34

  Freda did not only have her two lovers making demands, she also had a duty to her husband. During the November 1922 general election, Freda once again went down to his Southampton constituency to campaign for Duddie, who was standing as a National or Lloyd George Liberal. The Liberal party had split when Lloyd George and some of his colleagues decided to set up their own party, the National Liberal Party, which formed a coalition government with the Conservatives. However, in October 1922 Lloyd George resigned as prime minister because the Conservatives had withdrawn from the coalition. Duddie regretted the end of the coalition government and the split in the Liberal party and hoped that it would unite, but he remained loyal to his old friend Lloyd George. Sensing there was a good chance of taking the seat, Labour and Conservative activists made a special effort to defeat him. Duddie fought back, criticising ‘the old reactionary conservatives’ who belonged to a party ‘which for centuries had opposed all democratic reform and wanted to see things as they were, and not as they ought to be’.35 He told his constituents that he stood for the improvement of trade and increased employment, for strict economy and sound finance. He added that he believed in industrial co-operation and not industrial warfare.36 However, his progressive pleas fell on deaf ears. His constituents had complained about his absences from the constituency for years. His parliamentary duties and trips to Canada meant that he rarely visited Southampton. During the campaign, he was heckled by electors for failing to keep in touch. On election day they finally voted him out.37 Duddie was not the only Liberal MP to lose his seat; the general election was disastrous for both Liberal parties, with only sixty-two Liberals and fifty-three National Liberals elected.

  No longer a member of parliament, Duddie had to find a new focus for his life. In the Dissolution Honours he was made a privy councillor. In 1923 he became a member of the Council of the British Olympic Association, which made an appeal to raise £40,000 to give athletes a fair chance in the International Games that were to be held in Paris the following year.38 Duddie’s defeat also affected Freda and her lovers, because her husband spent increasingly long periods away from home in Canada promoting a scheme for trade between the two countries.39

  The pressure on Edward to find a suitable bride and get married increased as his friends and siblings got married. In April 1923 his brother Bertie married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. At first the newspapers had made a mistake and announced that the Prince of Wales was engaged to Lady Elizabeth. Her friends all teased her, bowing and calling her ‘Ma’am’. The diarist Henry ‘Chips’ Channon explained that although it couldn’t be true, everyone would have been delighted if it was.40 The palace had to issue an official denial. The following week the Duke of York proposed and was accepted. Bertie was the first English prince to marry a commoner with consent since 1660.41 Emphasising how close the Dudley Wards were to royal circles, Freda attended the wedding at Westminster Abbey with her husband.

  Edward got on very well with his new sister-in-law, who brought warmth and fun into the royal family. The Duchess of York enjoyed his company too. The newly married couple occasionally joined the Prince of Wales’s glamorous set. Elizabeth wrote in her diary about driving up from Windsor with Bertie to spend the evening with Freda and Edward at the Embassy Club. Many years later she wrote to her daughter, Queen Elizabeth, about going back to dances at York House after the theatre and the excitement of being partnered by the American star Fred Astaire.42 However, although the prince was pleased to see his brother settled it must have been hard for him to know that he could not make the same commitment to his great love.

  Marriage to Freda seemed as unlikely as ever. His mistress was more concerned about convention and what his family thought than Edward was, and she encouraged him to be discreet and not do anything silly. Many years later, she told one interviewer that she never tried to marry the prince and did not even want it, although he asked her to marry him often.43 The prince’s letters suggest that he was prepared to take the same steps with her that he later took at the abdication for love of Wallis Simpson. He wrote to Freda that the only thing he wanted in the world was ‘to be with you always’ and that it would break his heart if she stopped loving him. He promised ‘to just nip off with you at any moment and to any place in the world if you will make up your mind to do so – if you knew how very deeply and truly I loved you to the exclusion of all else in the world – you could not be unhappy and doubtful’.44 One of the prince’s closest confidants, Lord Brownlow, confirmed that Edward proposed to Mrs Dudley Ward and she said ‘No’ because she recognised the royal rules about divorce.45 Freda always told her lover that the idea of marrying or running away was ridiculous. As she was already married there would have to be a divorce, and his parents and the Church would never have allowed it. She kept telling him that she would not let him do such a stupid thing and eventually she persuaded him.46

  Michael also wanted to marry Freda. He could not stand sharing her with the prince forever. He told her that if she was unfaithful to him, ‘I shall strangle you and drown myself – it’s awful how I love you’.47 He begged her to do something about the situation soon instead of wasting so many years of their lives and spending so much time apart. In 1922 there was talk of the Dudley Wards divorcing, which worried the prince as he feared Freda would then marry his rival.48 However, Freda eventually decided against it because she feared that she would lose custody of her daughters. Until the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937, divorces in England were rare; there were fewer than 5,000 a year.49 In an era when there was still such a stigma attached to divorce, there was also a chance that Michael might have lost his position as a partner at Morgan Grenfell if he married a divorcee. J.P. Morgan Junior (known as Jack), the financier John Pierpoint’s son, was scrupulously Protestant and morally conservative. He ruled that staff at the Morgan bank were not permitted to divorce.50 Michael assured Freda that he would not mind if he lost his job and that they would still have plenty of money, but she would not take the risk.

  8

  INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

  Until Wallis, fidelity was not a word in Edward’s vocabulary. Knowing Michael was always in the background, the prince also had additional affairs, often with women who were in Freda’s circle. It was rumoured that he had a fling with Freda’s youngest sister, Vera. The two women were quite similar to look at, but Vera was not quite as slim and fine featured as her older sibling. Freda often had her sister to stay with her in London, so Edward saw her frequently. When they were together as a trio they had great fun, but the prince admitted that he was ‘kept quite busy keeping your noses in joint!!!’1 Edward and Vera became friends and she wrote to him when he went to India. When he could not get Freda on the phone he would have long chats with her sister as a second-
best substitute. Before Vera married, Freda and the prince had semi-seriously discussed the possibility of her sister becoming his wife. Although he dismissed the option, he admitted to loving Vera a little bit because she was Freda’s sister.2

  Another of the prince’s flings was with Freda’s and Rosemary’s friend Lady Victor Paget (Bridget). Bridget’s father, Baron Colebroke, was one of Edward VII’s lords-in-waiting and the family had lived at Royal Lodge, Windsor, for several years.3 During the war, Edward had often socialised with Bridget when he was on leave because she was in the same circle as Portia Stanley and Rosemary Leveson-Gower. In March 1916 the prince noted in his diary that Bridget was ‘quite attractive’ and played the piano ‘beautifully’.4 A few months later in May he wrote that she was ‘a lovely dancer’ and had taught him several foxtrot steps and the Viennese waltz, but at this time he preferred Portia.5 In 1922 Bridget married Lord Victor Paget, brother of Lord Anglesey. However, shortly after her marriage she was once again flirting with the prince. Like so many of the prince’s girlfriends, Bridget had a fashionably boyish figure and dressed very well. Edward assured Freda that he had only danced with her and they never saw each other in the daytime. He claimed that she meant nothing to him but her ‘sordid and melancholy view of life’ rather suited his.6 However, Bridget later admitted to being one of the prince’s mistresses.7 It seems Freda was not possessive about sharing Edward, provided she remained the number one woman in his life. It also seems that it was important to her that she was kept informed and thus, to a degree, in control of the situation. She knew that women threw themselves at the prince. As she told an interviewer, every woman who saw ‘that sad little face felt she had just the shoulder for him to cry on’.8

  However, Freda was not so sanguine about all his relationships. The first serious threat to her position came in 1923 when the prince became involved with Audrey Dudley Coats. Born Audrey James, she was the daughter of the American industrialist Willie James and his exuberant wife, Evie. There were rumours that Audrey’s mother was the illegitimate daughter of Edward VII or that she was his mistress. Whatever the truth, the then king was a regular visitor at the James’s large estate, West Dene, near Chichester. When Audrey was born Edward VII became her godfather.9

  According to her brother, Edward James, Audrey was not a very kind little girl. She teased him mercilessly. When she was about 10 years old and he was 4, she would kick his castle down in the nursery. She had been her father’s favourite child until Edward was born but, as the only son, he replaced her in Mr James’s affections. Her brother claimed that she had ‘an extraordinary animosity’ towards him for the rest of his life.10

  After her father’s death, Audrey was left £4,000 a year which enabled her, by the age of 17, to keep two fully staffed houses. Before his marriage, Lord Louis Mountbatten had been in love with Audrey. They were on the brink of getting engaged when the prince took Lord Louis on tour with him to Australia. Lord Louis wrote ecstatically to his mother about Audrey’s grey eyes, clear complexion and ‘most kissable mouth’. Apparently, all the men in London were after her and she knew just how to play them off against each other. After she had her tonsils and adenoids out she wrote a letter to one of her admirers saying she was only able to write one letter and of course her thoughts had turned to him. It turned out that she had written verbatim letters to six other men. Lord Louis recognised that she was ‘deceitful’ but he could not help admiring the ‘clever little minx’. He added: ‘How any girl can be so pretty and alive at the same time beats me.’11 He confessed that he would give anything to be married to her. However, his friends were wary and warned him not to rush into anything.

  Full page photographs of Audrey in The Sketch and on the cover of The Tatler show a girl with attitude; she looks very young but there is a moodiness and defiance in her eyes. Audrey was typical of the post-war single girl. Frances Donaldson, who was growing up at this time, set out how social conventions had changed. For the first time, girls were starting to have more freedom and go out without chaperones. High-spirited girls like Audrey deliberately set out to scandalise the older generation and find a new morality. Most did not give up their virginity as easily as they would have encouraged people to believe, but they gave the impression that they might because they liked to shock.12

  When Lord Louis returned to England after the Australian tour, Audrey refused to make up her mind about whether she would marry him or not. He sent the Prince of Wales to act as a go-between and get a straight answer. After discussing her relationship with his cousin, Audrey decided that it could not work and broke it off.13 In March 1922 she married Captain Muir Dudley Coats, heir to a cotton-manufacturing fortune at the Brompton Oratory. The joke in society was that Audrey had chosen the arms of Coats over a coat of arms.14 Muir had served in the Scots Guards during the war and he had been awarded the Military Cross. However, he had been so seriously wounded in the chest that he never fully recovered his health. Freda was a guest at the wedding; her daughters were going to be bridesmaids but on the day they were ill.

  After less than a year of marriage the Dudley Coats’ relationship was failing. Audrey was spending time with the Prince of Wales. Audrey was a keen horsewoman and she met Edward again out fox-hunting with the Belvoir Hunt. Since the war the prince had become a dedicated rider. He worried his family by taking part in point-to-points and steeplechases. His assistant private secretary, Tommy Lascelles, described steeplechasing as the riskiest sport of the era. He estimated that of their contemporaries who had died violent deaths, apart from the war, two-thirds were as a result of racing falls.15 Riding in a point-to-point in 1924, the prince had a bad fall that left him unconscious for half an hour and suffering from concussion. He had to remain in a dark room for a week and in bed for three more weeks. He spent this time crocheting – the skill Queen Mary had taught him as a child. He said it did for him what detective novels did for statesmen: it relaxed his mind.16 After this incident the Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, wrote to the king complaining about the unacceptable risk the heir to the throne was taking. His father agreed, and he asked Edward to give up steeplechasing and take part in hunting and polo instead, but the prince refused to listen.

  When he was not racing, Edward also enjoyed hunting regularly. He hunted first with the Pytchley Hunt, in Northamptonshire, then the Beaufort in Gloucestershire. When he moved to the Quorn, Cottesmore and the Belvoir in Leicestershire he rented a flat at Craven Lodge, a redbrick house which had been turned into a hunting club in Melton Mowbray. He enjoyed the social life during the hunting season, finding it lively and unpretentious. The prince discovered that riding helped him to switch off from his duties. It also fulfilled his need to excel and compete with other men on equal terms. He wanted to show that where physical courage and endurance mattered he could hold his own.17 Always needing to prove himself, Edward was attracted by danger and enjoyed taking risks. Out hunting, he would always choose the most direct and riskiest route and inevitably he regularly fell off. His falls were no more frequent than any other keen rider, but because he was the heir to the throne they were widely publicised and his propensity to fall off became an international joke. Caricaturists and comedians across the world ridiculed his riding abilities. Tommy Lascelles complained that the prince’s name was getting ‘a sort of pantomime association’.18

  When Freda visited her parents in Nottingham, she occasionally went hunting. There is a charming photograph of her outside Lamcote, holding a riding crop and looking very elegant in a riding habit. Beside her are her two little girls in matching hacking jackets, jodphurs and checked caps.19 However, the hunting field was more Audrey’s territory than Freda’s. She shared the prince’s risk-taking approach and was a courageous huntswoman. On one occasion, she had broken her arm in three places out hunting during the morning, but she just rode home, had a splint put on and hunted for the rest of the afternoon. She then had her arm re-set without an anaesthetic.20 A few years later, while hunting with the C
ottesmore, she broke a leg when her horse fell on her.21 It was a serious break; she had to have several operations and she spent many weeks in Melton Cottage Hospital. However, she would not let her injury stop her from socialising for long. Her hairdresser came regularly to the hospital to shingle her hair so that she looked her best to receive the many friends who visited her.22 Once back in London, while she was still unable to walk, she went out to dinner or the theatre in a carrying chair. She arrived draped in her Chinchilla cloak, which hid her splints and bandages. Although she was escorted by her two nurses there was always a fight among the young men in her circle over whom would be the chosen one to carry her to her table.23

  Audrey was the prince’s type of woman. Half-American, she was sexy and tough, with a harsh, rasping voice. She also had an irreverent streak and liked to shock. On one occasion, she made an entrance at a party by having herself announced as ‘Mahatma Gandhi’s mother’.24 However, it was Edward’s compassionate side that brought the couple together. In February 1923 Audrey gave birth to a son who only survived a few days. After she lost her baby the prince stepped in and comforted her. As Freda spent more time with Michael, Edward retaliated by visiting Audrey. The prince wrote to Freda that he had not forgiven her for enjoying herself at Wilton with Michael and he told her that he had spent two hours in the afternoon with Audrey as ‘a slight reprisal’. He added: ‘You want a d—d good shaking that’s what you want and it maddens me that I can’t give you one tonight. Bad, Bad Fredie.’25 As he grew more distant from Freda, the prince behaved increasingly badly. He drank too much and was often seen at the Embassy Club with Audrey. He later admitted to Freda that he went ‘quite mad and off my nut’ in April 1923.26