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

by Anne Sebba

  At the same time the way the law currently operated no longer reflected trends in society and the attractive new ideology promoting individualism and the pursuit of personal happiness. There were women as well as men who wanted wider grounds for divorce, to include desertion and cruelty, and who found the present law unacceptable on grounds of cost, which put it out of their reach. Among the fashionable London elite, divorce was no longer rare as many found ways to accommodate personal happiness. These ideas naturally filtered through to the King, but that did not mean they were available for him to enjoy. The King represented an ideal: he was meant to uphold the law not to condone subversion of it. Making acceptable the craving for personal happiness and individual development and freedom, which so shocked Queen Mary, is ironically perhaps one of the genuinely ‘modern’ achievements of King Edward VIII. As he wrote in his memoir, A King’s Story:

  The taboo of no divorced person being received at court, which rightly or wrongly I regarded as barbarous and hypocritical, meant that an ever increasing number of otherwise worthy and blameless British men and women were forced to stand apart in a permanent state of obloquy and the sovereign and indeed the whole nation were deprived of the full services of many brilliant people. It had long been in my mind that, were I ever to succeed to the throne, I should strive to rectify this form of social tyranny.

  In September 1936, Wallis returned from the cruise via Paris, where she stayed again at what had become her favourite hotel, the Meurice. And there she caught up with her mail – which included a batch of American newspaper cuttings sent, calculatedly perhaps, by Aunt Bessie. The international press had not held back on pictures of the couple holidaying Se henttogether, some of them revealing the often shirtless King, infatuation leaping out of his eyes as he looked at Wallis, she with her hand tellingly on his arm. This was an epiphany. In England she had been shielded from sensational (or indeed any) accounts of her affair, partly through the King cultivating a friendship with two of the major press barons, the Hon. Esmond Harmsworth and the Canadian Lord Beaverbrook, formerly Max Aitken, and also through the actions of Rickatson-Hatt, who, knowing more than almost anyone else on Fleet Street, nonetheless discarded basic journalistic instincts for the sake of honour, telling his staff that ‘Mrs Simpson’s name is not be mentioned in either the inward or outward services without reference [to him]’. The Press Association followed suit. Now, laid low by a cold and reading the lurid details of what was being said about her in her homeland, she made a belated attempt to recapture her earlier life and break with the King. She told him she really had to return to Ernest and the ‘calm, congenial’ life he offered, ‘where it all runs smoothly and no nerve strain. True we are poor and unable to do the attractive amusing things in life which I must confess I do love and enjoy … I am sure you and I would only create disaster together.’ Alone at the Fort, the King immediately telephoned and wrote and made clear he was never going to let her go. If she tried to leave him, according to Lascelles, he threatened to cut his throat. So frayed were his nerves at this time that, according to Helen Hardinge, he even slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow.

  Ernest’s mother also read the foreign press and was upset to see her son cast as the guilty party, allowing himself to be petitioned for divorce. ‘You must rest assured that I have behaved in a correct manner,’ he told her.

  In fact I have been complimented on every side. The malicious gossips do not count, they, for the most part, let their tongues wag to entertain a women’s luncheon party. Frankly I am in no way anxious to see the divorce upset. I don’t see how I could ever live with W again. All the nice things are spoiled and I don’t want to be tied for life to someone I cannot live with.

  From now on there is a painful inexorability to Wallis’s life. She was carried forward, more or less unwillingly, by the King’s alternating threats, blandishments and jewels. She had been consulting lawyers since the summer after Charles Russell, the first firm she asked, declined to represent her for various reasons. John Theodore Goddard agreed. Goddard, the senior of five partners in the firm he had founded and one of the most experienced solicitors of his generation, was, according to Baldwin, ‘a man of blameless reputation but extraordinary ingenuity … a man whom every crook in London employs by reason of his cleverness; everybody who gets into a mess applies immediately to Goddard, who gets them out at once’.

  But, as previously unpublished letters to Ernest reveal, Wallis regretted losing the earlier companionship – and even fun – she had once shared with her husband. ‘I wake up in the night sometimes and I think I must be lying on that strange chaise longue and hear your footsteps coming down the passage of the flat and there you are with the Evening Standard under your arm! I can’t believe that such a thing could have happened to two people who got along so well,’ she wrote to him. Privately, they continued to poke fun at the King, referring to him as the child who never grew up, Peter Pan. Rickatson-Hatt later told Walter Monckton, based on what Ernest had confided to him, that Wallis had always reassured her husband that there was no harm in the liaison since i Saishatt would not last for ever and that in the meantime she could look after herself. Wallis knew that, with less to play for, she behaved better with Ernest than with the King, and the security Ernest offered suddenly appeared as something to be cherished compared with the hate and loathing she increasingly had to face as the King’s lover. But her divorce petition had now been set down for hearing at Ipswich Assizes on 27 October – Ipswich chosen in order to have the case heard quickly and, it was hoped, with less press coverage than a London case would attract. If it went through, and a decree nisi was granted six months later at the end of April, there would be just enough time for the King to have Wallis alongside him at the Coronation, whose date was already set for May 1937. She knew therefore that there was no way out of this difficult and lonely legal process, and it is hardly surprising that in her memoirs, written in 1956, she does not describe how she felt towards Ernest at this time nor how she perceived herself trapped by a situation that terrified her. Not only would this have been offensive to the ex-King, by then her husband, but it would have been admitting perjury and a collusive divorce procedure.

  Churchill was one of the few politicians who, in early 1936, looked at the situation through a long historical lens and, at the beginning of the summer, expressed the view that Mrs Simpson was ‘acceptable’. According to Helen Hardinge, he believed that ‘in the ultimate analysis of the Monarchy, she simply did not count one way or the other … moral and social considerations apart, he considered her presence to be irrelevant to King Edward’s performance as Sovereign’. Broadly speaking, he was in great sympathy with the King’s predicament, believing he should be allowed to follow the dictates of his heart. But at the same time he was pragmatic and opposed to the divorce, considering it ‘most dangerous as it would give any minister of religion opportunity to say from the pulpit that an innocent man had allowed himself to be divorced on account of the King’s intimacies with his wife …’ and advised against taking Wallis to stay at Balmoral on the grounds that it was ‘a highly official place sacred to the memory of Queen Victoria and John Brown’.9 When his views were reported back to Mrs Simpson she was not at all pleased ‘and declared that I had shown myself against her’, Churchill wrote.

  But she went anyway, as the King begged her to do, and on 23 September, together with the loyal Herman and Katherine Rogers, took the train from London to Balmoral. It was a disastrous visit. Even – or perhaps especially – her innovation of triple-decker sandwiches was not well received by the kitchen staff. More seriously the King, to save Wallis from changing trains and waiting at railway platforms, as most visitors to Balmoral had to do, drove himself the sixty or so miles and met them at the railway station in Aberdeen in order to escort them in person to Balmoral. He wore his motoring goggles, believing these would conceal his identity, but of course he was easily recognized – except by one policeman who told him off for leaving his car i
n the wrong part of the station yard. As he had already refused to attend a dedication of the new Aberdeen Royal Infirmary that day on the shaky grounds that he was in mourning and so sent his brother instead – a strange excuse since he too was in mourning – the sight of him with Wallis on a motoring trip caused deep offence. His ‘surprise’ visit duly made the headlines of the Aberdeen Evening Argus. The Duke and Duchess of York, staying at nearby Brickhall, loaned to them by the King, were furious and felt they had been made to look foolish and complicit. They would have found a sympathetic listener on whom to ve Son Thent their fury in their houseguest, Cosmo Gordon Lang, the seventy-one-year-old Archbishop of Canterbury who was no longer in good health. They had invited him to stay to make up for the fact that the new King had not invited him to Balmoral as in previous years and he found it ‘a delightful visit. They were kindness itself … Strange to think of the destiny which may be awaiting the little Elizabeth at present second from the throne.’

  The Yorks nonetheless agreed to attend a dinner at Balmoral three days later, where further friction ensued. They arrived late but when Wallis stepped forward to greet them, smiling and extending her hand in a friendly way, the Duchess walked past Wallis and, according to author Michael Thornton, who has vividly reconstructed this scene based on personal information given in confidence by a descendant of one of those present on the night, said in a loud voice, ‘I came to dine with the King.’ As Churchill had feared, by inviting his mistress to preside in Queen Victoria’s favourite house, sleeping in the bedroom where once she and Queen Mary had slept, the King had ensured not only the royal family but society was painfully divided. Philip Ziegler points out that the King ‘could not forget how rudely his sister-in-law had treated the woman he loved’. Wallis after all had been asked to act as hostess and had offered a friendly greeting. In addition the King viewed the invitation to the Archbishop, an intensely close friend of his parents, as undermining his attempts to create informality and modernity at Balmoral.

  William Shawcross, the Duchess of York’s official biographer, by way of defence quotes Elizabeth’s distraught letter to her mother-in-law written some days later. ‘I feel that the whole difficulty is a certain person,’ the Duchess wrote. ‘I do not feel that I can make advances to her & ask her to our house, as I imagine would be liked, and this fact is bound to make relations a little difficult … the whole situation is complicated and horrible and I feel so unhappy about it sometimes.’

  Not long afterwards, the Duchess of York wrote a kind and gentle letter to ‘Darling David’ thanking him for lending them Brickhall. But from now on her sweetness was derided as cloying. The relationship between the two brothers as well as that between the two women was irreparably damaged. In Aberdeen itself someone daubed a wall with graffiti: ‘Down with the American harlot.’ Six weeks later the Balmoral debacle had become such an issue that a joke went the rounds stating that when Wallis took a taxi and asked for King’s Cross, the driver answered: ‘I’m sorry, lady.’ Chips Channon believed the weekend was a turning point. ‘Aberdeen will never forgive him,’ he reported six weeks later.

  On their return from Scotland the King, somewhat reluctantly as he considered it oppressive and gloomy, finally took up residence at Buckingham Palace. He disliked eating meals there so would escape lunch and manage with just an orange all day; this became a lifelong habit. He rented a house for Wallis in Regent’s Park at 16 Cumberland Terrace, one of the fine Nash terrace houses topped with magnificent ionic statuary on the outer circle of the Park. But it was being redecorated and not yet ready. So, after a brief spell at Claridge’s, in early October she took up residence in Felixstowe, as required in order to establish residency (just as it had been in Warrenton nine years earlier), before her case could be heard at the local court. Her friends George and Kitty Hunter gallantly came to keep her company in the depressingly faded rented house and the King ordered a Scotland Yard detective to guard against intruders. From there she wrote to Ernest, stayi SErntedng with some Kerr-Smiley cousins who had taken pity on him. It was Sunday evening, two days before the case was heard. Wallis was feeling lower than she had for years. ‘I really can’t concentrate on … anything at the moment my dear,’ she told him, the only man she could still turn to.

  I have had so MUCH trouble and complications with everyone. Also I am terrified of the court etc – and the US press has done untold harm in every direction besides printing wicked lies – I feel small and licked by it all. I shall come back Wednesday afternoon but remain in seclusion as last time I went out I was followed everywhere by cameramen, so horrible I can’t think what sort of mess … I am leaving for. I am sorry about the club ghosts, I am sorry about Mary – I am sorry for myself. I am sorry for the King. I hate the U.S. press, I hate stuffy British minds and last but not least I don’t understand myself, which is the cause of all the misery.

  Give me courage

  2.15 Tuesday

  Love Wallis

  I am so lonely.

  Although the British press was still heavily self-censored (with the exception of Cavalcade, a magazine unafraid of publishing pictures of Wallis and the King), American magazines were sold in Britain but with whole pages scissored out. It was easy enough for those with access to international news to read expansive accounts of the affair. The coverage was, Nancy Dugdale confided to her diary, ‘vulgar in the extreme’. The American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst had weeks beforehand sent over one of his top reporters, Adela Rogers St Johns, who worked on the story for months interviewing anyone close to the couple. One enterprising reporter in New York had traced Ernest’s first wife Dorothea, who issued a statement saying: ‘If what the newspapers say of my former husband’s present financial standing is true, Audrey and I wish he could find it possible to provide adequately for her education and maintenance …’ Wallis decided that she now needed to have some society photographs taken, so she arranged to sit for the fashionable photographer Cecil Beaton.

  If Wallis had any lingering doubts about how excited the American and international press was by her story, the arrival of hundreds of clamouring journalists at Ipswich dispelled them. Policemen outside the court smashed two press cameras with their truncheons as Wallis, wearing a simple and carefully chosen navy-blue double-breasted coat, with a matching skirt and navy-blue felt hat with veil, had to be hustled through the throng to enter the courtroom. Once inside she sat, immobile, in the barristers’ well with a lawyer either side of her surrounded by seven policemen and four plainclothes detectives. The judge, described by Time magazine as ‘the jovial, golfing Sir John Anthony Hawke, who was for five years attached to the present King in the capacity of Attorney General to the Prince of Wales’, opened by asking why the case had come to Ipswich. After some hurried whispering and nodding he carried on.

  Wallis was led through her questions by her assured barrister, Norman Birkett KC , and rarely had to say anything other than answer in the affirmative. Asked if, from the autumn of 1934 she had complained about her husband’s indifference and the way he often went away for weekends alone, she answered, ‘Yes, I did.’

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  But the essential piece of evidence – that Ernest Simpson had been served breakfast in bed at the Hotel de Paris with a woman who was not his wife – was not in doubt. Ernest, who did not defend the case and was thus spared taking the witness stand, had hoped that his companion could remain nameless, and indeed the first petition did not name her. But within a day of lodging his statement, having been told that the absence of any name might lead to worse problems as the press ferreted one out, he agreed to name the woman as Mrs Elizabeth Kennedy, known as Buttercup. She was almost certainly Mary Raffray, the name probably deriving from a hat she once wore, and the mild subterfuge is typical of Ernest trying to act the gentleman. He would have hated the idea of taking a paid stranger to bed for this purpose and yet equally he could not possibly allow Mary to be publicly named.10