That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor

by Anne Sebba

  At the same time, several royal courtiers now started openly to voice their disquiet over Mrs Simpson. Halsey warned that the newspapers would not stay silent for much longer about the forty-one-year-old Prince’s unsuitable attachment to a married woman. As Wallis recognized after her return from skiing, there w Ciine-yas scarcely an evening when she was not with the Duke at the theatre, at an embassy reception or for dinner. She described Jubilee Year as a wave that was bearing her upwards, surging ever faster and higher. She told her aunt that she was invited everywhere in the hope that the Prince would follow in her wake. Society was madly gossiping, and the arch-gossiper Chips Channon noted astutely on 5 April, following a luncheon party he hosted to do a ‘politesse’ to Mrs Simpson: ‘She is a jolly, plain, intelligent, quiet, unpretentious and unprepossessing little woman, but as I wrote to Paul of Yugoslavia today, she has already the air of a personage who walks into a room as though she almost expected to be curtsied to. At least, she wouldn’t be too surprised. She has complete power over the Prince of Wales.’

  But society was forming two camps. There were those, broadly speaking of ancient lineage, who stood squarely behind the King, found her unacceptable and did their best to avoid her if possible – the establishment. The Duchess of York had said openly she would no longer meet Mrs Simpson, which resulted in her group having to make a hasty retreat when ‘that woman’ walked in to the same party. Helen Hardinge (née Gascoyne-Cecil), a friend of the Yorks, explained that ‘Of course, we did not seek her company, ourselves.’ She and her husband Alexander (Alec) Hardinge, Assistant Private Secretary to the King, both came from families not of vast wealth but involved in public service as diplomats, colonial administrators or soldiers for generations, several of whom had given their lives in the service of their country. Alec had met Wallis only once by 1935 and Helen insisted that she and he were ‘quite uncensorious’, as servants of the King must be, even if the idea of a woman with two living husbands consorting with the heir to the throne was distasteful. They did their best not to confront Wallis but they had friends in society who, if they came across her, could not avoid her.

  Helen wrote about one who, when introduced to Wallis at a party,

  absolutely refused to shake hands with her.

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘it was quite easy. I dropped my handbag just as she got to me so I had to stoop down to find it.’

  Others, many of whom had American connections and money and were new to London – ‘the Ritz Bar Set’ as they were often called – felt differently. ‘To them Mrs Simpson seemed to provide a heaven-sent opportunity to enter Royal society.’

  At the end of May Channon noted a revealing scene in Lady Cunard’s box at the opera. Emerald Cunard, the former American heiress Maud Burke, had married Sir Bache Cunard but lived separately from him and was widely known as a patron of the arts and mistress of Sir Thomas Beecham. ‘I was interested to see’, wrote Channon, ‘what an extraordinary hold Mrs Simpson has over the Prince. In the interval she told him to hurry away as he would be late in joining the Queen at the LCC [London County Council] Ball – and she made him take a cigar out of his breast pocket. “It doesn’t look very pretty,” she said. He went, but was back in half an hour.’

  Lord Wigram, a sixty-three-year-old former soldier and experienced courtier who had served his sovereign for two generations, decided it was time for action. Urged on by Halsey, he paid a special visit to the Prince after this holiday to convey how worrie Cey itd the King was about his private life. But he was merely the first of many to receive a princely rebuff. ‘The Prince’, he reported, ‘said he was astonished that anyone could take offence about his personal friends. Mrs Simpson was a charming, cultivated woman.’ This was more or less the attitude he took throughout the rest of his life. He believed that Wallis was a uniquely wonderful woman and that anyone who did not share those views, having met her, was blind to the facts. Wigram’s shot across the bows had, as Godfrey Thomas, who was closer to the Prince, was well aware, been totally ineffective.

  It was not only the King but the government which was now concerned about this unorthodox alliance. A surveillance report by Special Branch in June 1935 sent to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police indicated that the Simpsons’ activities were already being monitored because it was believed that Wallis was not only juggling Ernest and the Prince of Wales but also seeing another man whose identity they had not yet ascertained. A week later, the man they suspected was revealed as Guy Marcus Trundle. Trundle, a vicar’s son born in York and a well-known rake, was said to be a married man and a motorcar salesman employed by the Ford Motor Company. According to this report, ‘Trundle is described as a very charming adventurer, very good looking, well bred and an excellent dancer … He meets Mrs Simpson quite openly at informal social gatherings as a personal friend, but secret meetings are made by appointment when intimate relations take place. Trundle receives money from Mrs Simpson as well as expensive presents. He has admitted this.’

  It’s a curious story. Clearly detectives were now talking to those who knew the Simpsons, including their staff, in the hope of finding some indiscretions. While it is quite possible that Trundle met Wallis Simpson and that this led him to boast about ‘intimate relations’ – after all, he was known to boast that every woman he met fell for him – it is highly unlikely that they had any personal relationship. But it was also not out of character for Wallis to enjoy making men jealous. It was part of the flirtatious and promiscuous behaviour pattern which provided her with continual reassurance of her attractiveness to men, and one meeting with a rogue such as Trundle would have been enough to inflame the Prince’s ardour, had she chosen to tell him. The Special Branch reports are bald but, as Stephen Cretney makes clear in his account of the abdication crisis, ‘whether they could have been sustained in legal proceedings is not clear’.

  But there is another line in the report which states: ‘Mrs Simpson has said that her husband is now suspicious of her association with other men as he thinks this will eventually cause trouble with POW.’ If this is what she told Trundle, which he repeated, it gives further evidence that the man Wallis most wanted to keep was Ernest and that she was using the Prince of Wales for the time being, intending to revert to Ernest as soon as the shine faded. Ernest, according to the report, ‘is bragging to the effect that he expects to get “high honours” before very long. He says that P.O.W will succeed his father at no distant date. He has mentioned that he expects, at least, to be created a Baron. He is very talkative when in drink.’ The report was obviously circulated to a select few in the government as Sir Edward Peacock, Receiver General to the Duchy of Cornwall, and responsible for the royal finances at many levels, later told Joseph Kennedy when he became US ambassador, that ‘they all had evidence Wallie [sic] was having an affair with a young man and of course this embittered the Cabinet more than ever. Peacock is convinced’, added Kennedy, ‘they would have gladly taken an American for Queen but not Wallie.’

  King George did manage one conversation about Wallis Simpson with his son at this time. The King insisted he could not invite his son’s mistress to the forthcoming Court Ball. The Prince swore to his father that Mrs Simpson was not his mistress. The King relented and she was therefore invited. But although there are various reports of the Prince having always protested that he had not had sexual intercourse with Mrs Simpson before they married, this was of course open to dispute then as it is now. His servants and staff knew that one of the bedrooms at the Fort, previously a dressing room situated between Wallis’s and the Prince’s bedrooms, had now been allocated to her as an extra room allowing unimpeded access between the rooms. Courtiers au fait with the latest gossip were more horrified than ever, believing now that their future sovereign was a liar as well as an adulterer. Wigram wrote: ‘Apart from actually seeing HRH and Mrs S in bed together they [the staff] had positive proof that HRH lived with her.’ Aird joined in, giving details o
f how he had seen him emerge early one morning with his upper lip all red!! So that’s that and no mistake.’ Wigram’s view was the one the King believed in the end – that his son had lied to him. The sovereign wrote in his diary on 6 November 1935 following the marriage of his third son Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester to Alice, daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch: ‘Now all the children are married except David.’ A few weeks later he was heard to exclaim: ‘I pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet [the pet name for Princess Elizabeth, the King’s granddaughter] and the throne.’

  The Prince had known it would be impossible to arrange for Wallis officially to see the Jubilee procession on 6 May, the actual anniversary of the King’s accession which, that year, happened to fall on a glorious summer’s day. Instead, he begged a favour of Helen Hardinge, as her apartment in St James’s Palace overlooked the processional route to St Paul’s Cathedral. Could she, he asked, find accommodation for ‘one or two scullery maids’ to watch as the windows of his own residence at York House did not overlook the processional route? Slightly puzzled as to why the Prince could not find space for his humble servants at a Buckingham Palace window, she nonetheless obliged. ‘Some time after we returned home … I learned the identity of the “one or two scullery maids”. They were Mrs Simpson and one of her friends.’ The Hardinges came to believe that the Prince had not deliberately played a trick on them. So consumed was he by his love affair with Wallis, he assumed that everyone else was too and that the identity of the scullery maids would have been obvious. A week later Wallis was, grudgingly, invited to the Jubilee Ball, where she ‘felt the King’s eyes rest searchingly on me. Something in his look made me feel that all this graciousness and pageantry were but the glittering tip of an iceberg … filled with an icy menace for such as me.’

  In spite of referring to the occasion as the ‘Silly Jubilee’, Wallis was happy to receive a pair of beautiful diamond clips as a Jubilee present from the Prince. Yet the real lessons of the Jubilee seem to have passed her by. In her bubble of worry about losing both husband and lover, she had failed to see just how deeply the British monarchy was loved and revered, not just in London but throughout the country and the wider Empire. When on Jubilee Day itself King George and Queen Mary appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, some 100,000 people cheered enthusiastically, a scene repeated every night that week and which she could not fail to have been aware was happening. His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gord Cy, haton Lang, ‘listened with evident satisfaction to the words which fell from royal lips’, wrote his chaplain, Alan Don, in his diary that Jubilee night. No wonder. The Archbishop had written them. Men like Don and Lang were increasingly worried about how they would ever be able to write such speeches for King George’s son to utter with conviction when the time came.

  But there was a deeper meaning of service which the royal family embodied and which could not have been made clearer that week. ‘A leading theme of statements about the monarchy [in 1935] was that although its political power had declined, its public significance had increased,’ notes Baldwin’s official biographer, Philip Williamson. Even renowned left-wingers like George Orwell had to admit they were impressed by ‘the survival, or recrudescence, of an idea almost as old as history, the idea of the King and the common people being in some sort of alliance against the upper classes’. For the Jubilee was a brilliant opportunity to raise many thousands of pounds for a wide variety of charities, not just in England but all over the Empire, to launch Jubilee Appeals, usually with members of the royal family as patrons. Canada raised £250,000 for a Silver Jubilee Cancer Fund within weeks of the charity’s launch. Wallis may have thought the celebrations silly but she must have known about King George V’s Jubilee Trust, which quickly raised £1 million to ‘promote the welfare of the younger generation’, as the appeal was headed by the Prince of Wales. According to the historian Frank Prochaska:

  Few subjects bring out so well the differences between ourselves and our ancestors as the history of Christian charity. In an increasingly mobile and materialist world, in which culture has grown more national, indeed global, we no longer relate to the lost world of nineteenth-century parish life. Today, we can hardly imagine a voluntary society that boasted millions of religious associations providing essential services, in which the public rarely saw a government official apart from the post office clerk. Against the background of the welfare state and the collapse of church membership, the very idea of Christian social reform has a quaint, Victorian air about it.

  Shortly after the celebrations ended in early June, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald resigned on grounds of ill health and was replaced by Stanley Baldwin. At the end of July, Wallis left for Cannes where the Prince had taken a villa. Unfortunately, as she wrote to her aunt, Ernest was not able to join them. All summer Wallis was writing to Bessie about how saintly Ernest was, running the business, looking after his deaf mother, irascible father and jealous sister. He even tried, vainly, to bring over his ten-year-old daughter Audrey to live in London, perhaps to keep him company or perhaps thinking she might benefit from the royal connection his wife had forged. But his former wife refused. Wallis tried to reassure Bessie that no divorce was planned at all and that she, Ernest and the Prince had an understanding. She worried about Ernest endlessly, thought he looked extremely handsome at the Court Ball and described him as ‘still the man of my dreams’. When Ernest made a ten-week business trip to the US that autumn she missed him and wrote to Bessie in early October just before his return: ‘I shall be glad to see that angelic Ernest again.’

  But by then the Prin

  ce had found he could barely stand a day without Wallis. His love letters to her were increasingly intense and, by now, unambiguous about his intention to marry her. At three o’clock one morning at the Fort he declared: ‘I love you more and more every minute and NO difficulties or complic Ces reeations can possibly prevent our ultimate happiness … am just going mad at the mere thought … that you are alone there with Ernest. God bless WE for ever my Wallis. You know your David will love you and look after you so long as he has breath in this eanum body.’

  7

  Wallis Out of Control

  ‘I have of course been under a most awful strain with Ernest and H.M.’

  In the years since 1935 Wallis Simpson has acquired the reputation of a seductress with legendary contractile vaginal talents. She had, according to one study, ‘the ability to make a matchstick feel like a cigar’. Charles Higham, one of her early biographers, went into greater detail, describing an ancient Chinese skill at which she was apparently adept involving ‘relaxation of the male partner through a prolonged and carefully modulated hot oil massage of the nipples, stomach, thighs and after a deliberately, almost cruelly protracted delay, the genitals’. When Thelma Furness was abandoned by the Prince, she made it her business to ensure that everyone in London knew that ‘the little man’ was so called for a reason; he was sexually inadequate and suffered from a common complaint among men at the time – premature ejaculation. Wallis, it was alleged, having spent so much time in Chinese bordellos, had learned special techniques to overcome this and give him the satisfaction he craved. But as the China Dossier, said to detail how she learned techniques variously called the Baltimore grip, Shanghai squeeze or China clinch, has never been found, the intimate pleasures Wallis gave the Prince must remain conjecture. That such breezy rumours landed on so much fertile ground reveals plenty but little that is about Wallis directly. The stories flowered so convincingly because they played on ignorance and fantasy, on the Western vision of the orient as a highly sexualized society coupled with the embarrassed repression and sexual taboos prevalent in most British homes at the time.

  Every biographer of Wallis, as well as courtiers who knew her, in trying to explain the inexplicable – how could a middle-aged, not especially beautiful, rather masculine-looking woman have exerted such a powerful eff
ect on a king that he gave up his throne in order to possess her? – produces a different theory. What most agree on is that Wallis was the bad girl, the wicked temptress, the femme fatale who, in teaching a repressed prince satisfying techniques in bed, nearly destroyed the monarchy. Just as Eve was responsible for man’s original sin, these ideas tap into some deep and ancient fears of women’s carnality. Wigram believed that Wallis was, effectively, a witch, while other scandalmongers, whisperers and tittle-tattlers blabbed that she must have hypnotized the Prince. Servants talked to chauffeurs about rowdy parties, and plenty of the rumours, embellished on the way, reached higher places, including Lambeth Palace, residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Another woman whose sexual allure proved irresistible to an English king, Henry VIII, was similarly accused of bewitching him. Those accusations were based partly on Anne Boleyn’s alleged sixth fingernail and partly, some scholars argue, on the fact that when she miscarried in 1536 the apparently deformed foetus thus ‘prove Fd pd’ that she was a witch, even though serious historians today insist that the foetus bore no abnormalities. After being found guilty of treason on the grounds that she had allegedly committed adultery, she was beheaded for her ‘crime’.

  But the difficulty with theories which insist that Wallis was a sexual predator is that they underplay the fact that Edward was a man of considerable sexual appetite and experience. As Prince of Wales he had sought out women for fornication in almost every corner of the globe and, apparently, had no difficulty in possessing them. But who is to know how satisfying these activities had ever been? Clearly this time something was different. Wallis’s remark to Herman Rogers about her marital chastity was now backed up by the Prince’s insistence that he and Wallis had never slept together before marriage and his threats to sue anyone who dared to write that Wallis had been his mistress. Wallis might well have taught him some adventurous new activity. What is not in doubt is that she was at the very least a woman of the world, unusually experienced for a well-brought-up young lady in the early twentieth century who liked to tell people about her ‘tough, rough past life in China and cooking and doing housework for a loathed husband with the smell of your husband’s bacon getting in your hair etc’. What she would have learned from her years as a naval wife married to Win Spencer as much as from life in China was that pleasure as well as pain can be derived from sex. And she probably knew about a variety of non-vaginal sexual techniques, including oral sex, which would not have been standard education for most English or American girls of the day.