by Anne Sebba
The great ignorance in sexual matters in early twentieth-century middle- and working-class Britain is key to understanding the story of Wallis, why she was attacked so fiercely at the time, and why she has since become such a talisman for gay and lesbian minorities even though she herself was not lesbian. For many, her struggle is emblematic of a wider struggle for greater sexual freedom against the establishment’s narrow interpretation of what was acceptable. In the 1930s, some who wanted information about sex resorted to pornography. A variety of erotic literature could be purchased then but only through expensive underground channels, so in practice it was available only to satisfy well-off men, probably those whose wives were shy, ignorant or both. The Rickatson-Hatt divorce, awarded in 1939 on grounds of genuine non-consummation after ten years of traumatic marriage, illustrates only too clearly and in painful detail the overpowering middle-class taboos involved in seeking help, medical or otherwise, to discuss sex. When Rickatson-Hatt died it was discovered that he had amassed a fine collection of erotic literature. But, although he had gone on to marry a second time and father a son, it did not help him in his marriage to an American wife, Frances, who evidently struggled to establish normal marital relations with her reserved husband. Neither of them felt able to talk, even in private, to their friends, Wallis and Ernest Simpson.
Of course there were books, by Marie Stopes and others, containing sexual information for the lay public as well as medical textbooks which, while describing the sex organs, omitted to detail what was done with them. But there was almost nothing for the general reader nor anything that looked at the psychology of sexual behaviour. One trainee gynaecologist who tried to remedy this state of affairs by writing a simple and straightforward guide had to do so under a pseudonym for fear that the medical hierarchy would prevent him getting a post in obstetrics and gynaecology. When he eventually found a publisher – the Wales Publishing Company – they insisted that any illustrations in the book were bound Kk wtuaand sealed separately in a packet at the back of the book as these were, according to the preface, ‘of interest only to the serious reader’. Even so the book, first published in 1939, was banned in some areas and burned publicly in Blackpool. The Technique of Sex by Anthony Havil (pseudonym of Dr Elliot Philipp) cost fourpence a copy, stayed in print for a remarkable fifty years and sold half a million copies in hardback alone, clearly satisfying a national demand.
But, since no one can know for certain what activities go on behind a closed door except those who are inside, all speculation about what exactly Wallis and her Prince did or did not do together must remain just that – speculation. Of the facts that are known, many of those who saw the Prince naked commented on his lack of bodily hair, implicitly questioning his virility. But, drawing the conclusion that Wallis, with her obvious dominating personality, was therefore able to satisfy both his repressed homosexuality and his yearning for a mother figure is, again, speculation, however likely it may seem. Much could be observed by watching them together in public and examples abound of Wallis bossing the Prince or humiliating him contemptuously, depending on the occasion or one’s point of view. The young Alfred Shaughnessy, stepson of a courtier at the heart of the crisis, Sir Piers ‘Joey’ Legh, was so struck by her manly behaviour that he had to ask his mother ‘who the bossy American woman was’: she had ‘got up at lunch and seized the carving knife from the Prince as he struggled with the roast chicken on the sideboard and told him to sit down saying in a grating voice: “I’ll take care of that, Sir”’. When the weekend guests had departed from the Fort and only Wallis remained, the staff would notice how she would ‘taunt and berate him until he was reduced to tears’. Lady Diana Cooper, one of the keenest observers of the Prince’s demeaning devotion, noticed that once ‘Wallis tore her nail and said “oh” and forgot about it, but he needs must disappear and arrive back in two minutes, panting, with two little emery-boards for her to file the offending nail’. The more Wallis was beset by fears of her future the more, it seemed, she found new ways to humiliate the Prince more brazenly. Philip Ziegler believes that Wallis provoked in him both ‘slavish devotion’ and ‘profound sexual excitement. That such excitement may have had some kind of sadomasochistic trimmings is possible, even likely.’
Yet sexual magnetism was clearly not all that Wallis offered the Prince, even if it was at the root of their relationship. Edward may not have realized how deeply he needed someone like Wallis, nor she him, until they became entangled. If Wallis had grown up with an unexplained and unnamed Disorder of Sexual Development she would always have known there was something unusual about her that she could not talk about, something that was humiliating, and she may have discovered that she was more comfortable when projecting this on to someone else. Wallis could be remarkably self-aware on occasions and in letters as well as her memoirs often talks of the ‘two sides’ of her own personality in flat, straightforward terms such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. At the same time she now said of her husband, Ernest, that he is ‘much too good for “the likes of me”’.
Psychologists may have an explanation for this behaviour: the ideal partner for her personality would be one who allowed her to appear as the perfect one, the other (him) as the inadequate one and the one who carried the flaw. This allowed for an aspect of herself, instead of being owned by her, to be projected on to someone else. This type of personality needs someone else to engage with closely so that the other person can be the receptacle of those part Kof r: the s of oneself that are despised. In this way an aspect of one is transferred to the other which makes both partners feel good and as a result each person develops a vital sense of closeness with the other.
To the outsider this phenomenon is observed by watching the transference process which is effected, however unconsciously, by giving the other person tasks and then criticizing them for the way they do them, thus making them feel at first inadequate but then eager to do better another time. Wallis excelled at this and the Prince responded by returning for more.
Outsiders were indeed aware that the Prince was in the grip of an abnormal obsession but were at a loss to explain it. He insisted it was love and in some ways it was. Walter Monckton, a barrister friend of Edward’s since Oxford days who acted as his trusted legal adviser in the months to follow, commented:
It is a great mistake to assume that he was merely in love with her in the ordinary physical sense of the term. There was an intellectual companionship and there is no doubt that his lonely nature found in her a spiritual companionship … He felt that he and Mrs Simpson were made for one another and there was no other honest way of meeting the situation than marrying her.
Winston Churchill MP, whose warnings in the 1930s of the need for Britain to rearm in the face of the Nazi threat made him suspect as a warmonger, was even more understanding and retained a roseate romantic view of the relationship longer than most. Churchill felt deeply that abdication should be avoided in the hope that the crisis would resolve itself. He believed that ‘the Prince found in her qualities as necessary to his happiness as the air he breathed. Those who … watched him closely noticed that many little tricks and fidgetings of nervousness fell away from him. He was a completed being instead of a sick and harassed soul.’ Churchill wrote shortly after the abdication that:
the King’s love for Mrs Simpson was branded with the stigma of a guilty love … no companionship could have appeared more natural, more free from impropriety or grossness …
The character and record of the lady upon whom the affection of Edward VIII became so fatally fixed is relevant only upon a lower plane to the constitutional and moral issues which have been raised. No one has been more victimised by gossip and scandal but gossip and scandal in themselves would not have been decisive. The only fact of which the Church could take notice was that she had divorced one husband and was in the process of divorcing another.
Lord Dawson of Penn, asked by the King for a medical opinion on his son’s infatuation, believed that the Prince’s age
had something to do with his obsession. ‘A first absorbing love coming after 40 is so apt to take possession. To have abandoned it would have spoilt life and work and therefore worth. To preserve it in marriage was impossible, ’ the doctor wrote. By the late autumn of 1935, the old King was, after years of poor health, seriously ill, suffering from bronchitis and a weak heart aggravated by heavy smoking. Worried about his eldest son he now predicted to his Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, ‘After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.’
The new year of 1936 started with exceptionally cold and snowy weather and on 16 January the Prince was out shoot Kwasm">ing in Windsor Great Park when he received a restrained message from his mother suggesting he might ‘propose’ himself for the weekend at Sandringham. He flew up immediately with his own pilot – flying was part of the Prince’s glamour – and, as soon as he arrived, was shocked to find his father had only hours to live. He immediately wrote to Wallis, terrified that the new situation might change her feelings, imploring her to keep faith. ‘You are all and everything I have in life and WE must hold each other so tight.’ On 20 January at five minutes to midnight King George V died, his end hastened by an overdose of morphine and cocaine injected by the royal physician, Lord Dawson, to ensure that the death announcement was in time for the quality newspapers. The Queen’s first act was to take her eldest son’s hand and kiss it, offering fealty to the new King. He was embarrassed by such subservience and broke down, weeping hysterically and noisily with dread at what the future might hold as much as for the passing of his father. Wallis was at a charity gala in a London cinema with some friends, the Lawson Johnstons, when she heard the bulletin. ‘I am so very sorry,’ she told the new King, adding later, ‘God bless you and above all make you strong where you have been weak.’ Ernest, the next day, wrote ‘as a devoted, loyal subject’ offering ‘the warmest sentiments that friendship can engender … in the ordeal through which you have passed’.
‘I miss him dreadfully,’ the Duchess of York wrote to Dawson. ‘Unlike his own children I was never afraid of him, and in all the 12 years of having me as daughter-in-law he never spoke one unkind or abrupt word to me, and was always ready to listen and give advice on one’s own silly little affairs.’ Two days later the will was read to the family and the former Prince was shocked to discover that his father had left him a life interest in Balmoral and Sandringham, but no cash, because it was expected that he had considerable reserves from his Duchy of Cornwall estates – which, as it transpired later, he did, although he failed to admit it then. Alan Lascelles described how, with a face like thunder, he strode out of the room and immediately telephoned Mrs Simpson to tell her the bad news.
The next few days were a shock to many as the new King, believing he was on a mission to modernize the monarchy, constantly breached protocol. The first important ceremony was his own proclamation by Garter King of Arms at St James’s Palace. Not only did Edward VIII arrange for Mrs Simpson to view the proceedings from a highly visible front window; he then, at the last minute, decided he wanted to stand next to her there and watch his accession being proclaimed. Chips Channon, like many of those in the know, was enthralled.
Afterwards I saw a large black car (the King’s) drive away, with the blinds pulled half down. The crowd bowed, thinking that it contained the Duchess of Kent, but I saw Mrs Simpson …
We are all riveted by the position of Mrs S. No man has ever been so in love as the present King but can she be another Mrs Fitzherbert?6 If he drops her she will fall – fall – into the nothingness from whence she came.
A desire to gainsay this nothingness prompted Wallis to ask her aunt to have ‘one of those family tree things’ made up of the Warfields and the Montagues, reminding Bessie that in England Montague with an e meant the Jewish family – ‘the swell spell it without an e!!’ She did not specify why she wanted this genealogy but said she hoped her Khe the Jewown family histories ‘would stand up against these 1066 families here’. Meanwhile the Duchess of York spent the day of the proclamation travelling to Sandringham to be with the widowed Queen.
There were trivial aspects to the modernizing, too, all of which aroused comment. For example, Wallis liked the King to call a taxi for her at St James’s Palace. Lady Carlisle, who saw him doing this, commented: ‘anything more undignified than the King going past sentries to call a taxi is difficult to imagine’. And the same ‘democratic’ approach was introduced at the Fort where Wallis, acting as hostess, would say ‘We don’t dress for dinner.’ This caused the women much embarrassment as often they had not brought the appropriate clothes. For example Lady Diana Cooper, arriving late for dinner, began gushing apologies whereupon Mrs Simpson said: ‘Oh cut it out. David and I don’t mind.’
Others were more deeply offended by her easy, proprietorial attitude. Lascelles told his wife, Joan, how the Wigrams had been invited to see a film show at Windsor:
When it was over Mrs S said to Lady W (who has lived at Windsor for 20 years and knows everything in the castle as well as she knows her own drawing room) ‘wouldn’t you like me to show you the pictures in the long corridor’ and when they left ‘Goodbye, we were so glad you and Lord W were able to come.’ That shows an incredible lack of elementary tact. Don’t leave this about!
Lascelles concluded that this indicated that Wallis ‘cannot really be a very clever woman’.
‘Clever’ was not the issue as far as hostesses such as Emerald Cunard, who had never been on good terms with the old regime, were concerned. Almost immediately the invitations turned from a trickle to a flood. In 1935 Lady Cunard had enjoyed what she believed to be a position of pre-eminence among those chasing after the Prince and his paramour. Partly hoping the Prince would become a patron of the opera so important to her lover, Sir Thomas Beecham, she had pursued Wallis from the first. Wallis responded, believing that some musical culture would be of benefit to the future monarch. But Edward always loathed opera and took every opportunity to escape into the corridor and smoke. Emerald genuinely liked her fellow American, describing ‘little Mrs Simpson’ as ‘a woman of character who reads Balzac’ – a questionable boast.
When the Prince and Mrs Simpson expressed a desire to see a play called Storm over Patsy, a light romantic comedy based on a German play by Bruno Frank which had just opened at the Theatre Royal Haymarket and which they, solipsistically, believed had echoes of their own story, it was Emerald who arranged for them to see an abridged version privately at her house to save them the embarrassment of going publicly.7 She rashly told friends she hoped to be appointed mistress of the robes and preside over a court where poets, musicians and artists held sway, a remark which may have reached Queen Mary who always singled Lady Cunard out – not entirely justifiably – as having played a mischievous role by encouraging Wallis to believe she was accepted in society. ‘I fear she has done David a great deal of harm as there is no doubt she was great friends with Mrs S and gave parties for her … several people have mentioned to me what harm she has done.’
Other hostesses, notably Lady Colefax and Lady A Kax .stor, vied with each other to entertain the woman they assumed would be queen, but older money invited her as well, including the Marlboroughs, Sackville Wests, Buccleuchs and Sutherlands. Noël Coward, exhausted by the chase, refused one of Emerald’s invitations, telling her acidly: ‘I am sick to death of having quiet suppers with the King and Mrs Simpson.’
From the first, the new Court caused deep consternation among the old guard. ‘I think he will make a great King of a new era,’ Wallis told her aunt, ‘and I believe the country thinks the same.’ The old regime, she believed, ‘was a little behind the times … the late King was not sociable nor the Queen and I’m sure this one will entertain more at the Palace.’ What the old guard objected to was not so much the new King’s awkwardness or obstinacy – a monarch was entitled to that and after all George V had often not been easy. What they minded was the obstinacy devoid of any sense of duty or service. Men like Lascelles had
been aware of the chasm since 1928, constantly hoping that Edward would mature. In fact the reverse now seemed to be the case. On 12 February there was tea with Lord and Lady Brownlow, where Chips Channon recorded ‘Mrs Simpson [as being] very charming and gay and vivacious. She said she had not worn black stockings since she gave up the Can Can,’ a remark some felt out of order so soon after the King’s death, but which Channon considered was typical of her ‘breezy humour, quick and American but not profound’. While some courtiers were optimistic that Wallis would have a positive effect on the King, encouraging him to take his job more seriously, and were therefore prepared to overlook her brashness, others quickly despaired. Philip Ziegler believes that by 1936 it was too late for anyone to effect any change, that by then Edward ‘was corroded by idleness. He may have had a better brain than his brother, and a capacity to communicate and charisma … but the charisma was wasted by the time he had met Wallis and the charm had become a dangerous attribute.’
