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

by Anne Sebba

  In spite of widespread assumptions that either the Archbishop of Canterbury or Baldwin had written the speech, it came as a shock to both men to see the report in the press the following day. But while Baldwin might have been relieved, the Archbishop was aghast; if any clerics was to give the King advice, it should be him. Yet he was only too aware of how he had failed V>

  Baldwin and Dugdale already had a secret appointment to meet the King set for 9 p.m. on 2 December – the secrecy at the King’s behest – to report back on the morganatic marriage proposal. But, in the wake of the Blunt speech, this had taken on a desperate urgency. While Dugdale paced up and down the garden with detectives, Baldwin informed the King of the answer obtained from the Dominion prime ministers, from the British Cabinet, from the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Attlee, and from the leader of Liberals: they all said a morganatic marriage was impossible and were strongly opposed to it. ‘The King was ill tempered and petulant at this meeting, ’ Nancy Dugdale recorded, ‘and very angry about Bishop Blunt. Mr Baldwin had to calm him and generally treat this wrong headed little man like a doctor treats a case, never putting his back up, never giving in. The King suggested broadcasting, placing himself at the mercy of his people.’ The audience lasted one hour and the King’s attitude to the Dominions was ‘there are only very few people in Canada, Australia and the colonies … meaning that the question of colonial responsibility did not count for a great deal’.

  According to Nancy Dugdale, at the end of the meeting Baldwin said to the King – ‘and it won over his complete confidence – “well, sir, whatever happens I hope you will be happy.”’13 Subsequently the King alluded many times to this phrase saying: ‘Not even my so called friends who are on my side have ever wished me happiness.’

  The two men left the Palace feeling ‘sad at heart for the little man, despising him, loving him, and pitying him all at the same time and hating the woman who goaded him on to fight until the struggle became one between the Prime Minister and Mrs Simpson through the person of the King’. Dugdale, quoting Flaubert, believed that the King was that day ‘Vaincu enfin par la terrible force de la douleur’.

  The King drove down to the Fort and immediately reported the latest events to Wallis, telling her she must now leave. He had heard that The Times, the newspaper he feared most, was preparing to run a fierce attack on her the next day and, although he had asked Baldwin to stop it, his request had been refused. This was not within the Prime Minister’s power, even had he wished to stop such an article. In any case, the Times editor, Geoffrey Dawson, was a staunch supporter of the government, unlike Beaverbrook or Harmsworth.

  The final evening for Wallis at the Fort was painful. Brownlow asked the King if he intended to abdicate. ‘“Oh no,” he replied. He had just told me the first and last important lie of our friendship.’ Brownlow believed that Wallis ‘had taught him to lie’. In fact there was an element of truth in the King’s reply as he had it in mind to go to Switzerland and then see if he was called back with Mrs Simpson at his side. As they departed the King ‘leant across to her to ge [ tond t one last touch of her hand – there were tears in his eyes and on his cheeks, and his voice was shaking – wherever you reach tonight, no matter what time, telephone me. Bless you, my darling.’

  Others remember the departure more prosaically. Mrs Simpson left by walking through the King’s bedroom on to the lawn without saying goodbye to any of the staff, with whom her relationship had never been easy.

  ‘Well, that’s the end of that,’ said one of the footmen to the butler, Osborne, who had always believed Wallis ‘had got her knife into them’.

  ‘Don’t be too sure,’ Osborne replied.

  ‘We’ll keep our fingers crossed.’

  Since Wallis would not fly, driving to the Herman Rogers villa, Lou Viei, near Cannes, was seized on as the only option. Wallis talked almost incessantly on the journey but it was only as they crossed to Dieppe that Brownlow discovered to his horror that he was also responsible for Wallis’s jewels, which she had brought with her, ‘presents from the King worth at least £100,000 – to carry them savoured a little of the deportee or exile’, he felt. Though they were travelling under the pseudonyms of Mr and Mrs Harris, the King’s Buick was quickly recognized and they were followed for much of the journey, forcing the King’s chauffeur to take sudden side-turnings in towns he did not know in the hope of throwing off their pursuers. They arrived at the Grand Hôtel de la Poste in Rouen at 5.15 a.m., spoke to the King for fifteen minutes and finally got to bed around six o’clock for a few hours’ sleep. After two days on the road, they arrived at Lou Viei – a twelfth-century converted monastery, which Brownlow rather uncharitably described as ‘small and dark … unsuited to winter conditions’ – with Wallis humiliatingly crouched in the back of the car, covered by a blanket. She felt every inch the hunted animal. The journey was an agonizing experience and ‘the feeling of desperation that was my invisible and relentless companion during the entire trip is not difficult to recapture’. Still manipulating the agency wires where he could, Bernard Rickatson-Hatt loyally delayed announcing Mrs Simpson’s destination until she had reached Cannes.

  ‘Tell the country,’ she had scribbled in one final note to the King, referring to the very modern idea they had discussed before she left, that he should broadcast an appeal directly to the country to be allowed to marry and remain king. Television broadcasts were completely new and untried and even Christmas radio broadcasts by the monarch had been used only since 1932. But Wallis, admitting that a radio broadcast was her idea, said she had in mind the ‘extraordinary impact on public opinion of President Roosevelt’s “fireside chats”’. Back at the Fort, without Wallis, the King’s confidence quickly drained. He no longer believed he could have both Wallis and the throne, in spite of Churchill urging that he should not be rushed and that, with time, something could be done short of abdication – an unpopular line which even his wife Clementine disagreed with. Churchill in 1936 was viewed as a man of flawed political judgement, yet his opinions were coloured not just by romance. His own mother was American and had been vilified for her love life. However, by the time he rose to speak in the House of Commons on Monday 7 December the mood had changed and he was shouted down on all sides. Baldwin gave thanks for the power of a weekend.

  The King now abandoned the idea of using a broadcast as an appeal remain as King and marry Wallis. Nonetheless, [Nonem"emboldened by what he perceived as the successful South Wales tour, he still wanted to speak directly to the nation before departing. This was a misreading of the situation, however, as there were many Nonconformists in South Wales who were extremely critical of Edward’s behaviour. Likewise in England, as Mrs Hannah Summerscales asserted when she wrote to the King’s Proctor: ‘Even though the King thinks that working people are with him, I know that they are not. I was born a working woman and I know that working people want the moral cleanliness of their homes and moral cleanliness of the crown and throne …’ But it was also deeply unconstitutional for the King to go above the heads of his government and the notion had a whiff of dictatorship about it at a time when any threat to democracy was a very serious matter. Baldwin pragmatically explained to the King that if he made such a broadcast ‘he would be telling millions of people throughout the world, including a vast number of women, that he wanted to marry a married woman’, and had his Home Secretary, Sir John Simon – not known as Sir John Snake for nothing – swiftly draft a paper to show that constitutionally a king can broadcast only on the advice of his ministers. Aware of the stark choice, the King now prepared himself for abdication.

  Sir Edward Peacock, the King’s Canadian-born principal financial adviser who was very close to him at this time, stated that the wavering in the final days was ‘as I know, upon the insistence over the phone of the lady that he should fight for his rights. She kept up that line until near the end, maintaining that he was the King, and his popularity would carry everything. With him this lasted only a very short time then
he recognized the falsity of the position and put it definitely aside … the lady persisted in her advice until she saw that that tack was hopeless.’

  The long-distance telephone calls between the pair, on a crackly and faint line, which punctuated the next few days were something none of the participants ever forgot. The King was always distraught waiting for Wallis to call but wrung dry after she had. They were in daily contact – not easy in 1936, even for a king – and the lines had to be kept free for at least two hours for her exclusive use. William Bateman, the King’s private telephone operator at the Palace, had been instructed to give priority to all calls and messages from her. But it was difficult to hear clearly, so Wallis shouted, and the King found these conversations emotionally draining as all his negotiating power was evaporating in the face of his one remaining desire: to marry Wallis. He often had Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse, or his solicitor, George Allen, by his side to prompt him while speaking to Wallis and at a critical moment in one conversation he covered the phone with one hand and asked Allen what he should say to summarize the situation to her. Allen wrote, and the King relayed, ‘The only conditions on which I can stay here are if I renounce you for all time.’ She knew he was never going to do that.

  He had hoped to secure the right to a substantial pension, the right to return to the Fort as his home in due course, the right of his future wife to share his royal title and, most urgently, an Act of Parliament making Wallis’s divorce absolute immediately to ensure that they could be married. Monckton, managing astutely to remain the King’s adviser while retaining the trust of the politicians, took up the latter issue urgently on the King’s behalf. He was genuinely alarmed by the cruel possibility awaiting the King if he abdicated and then found that Wallis was not free after all. He suggested the idea of a special Bill to free her immediately at the same time as the abdication, an obvious way of tidying things, pointing out that divorces [thal t by Bill were once the only way of getting a divorce. But, although in those fraught final days Baldwin was prepared to consider this, ultimately he had to remind the King that ‘even his wishes were not above the inexorable fulfilment of the law and he was afraid he could not interfere’. However, it was more complicated than that because any such action might have been misinterpreted as a government ploy to persuade the King to abdicate, which it could not be seen to do. In the event, the King in his all-consuming desire to have Wallis, played into the government’s hands and failed to secure any of these rights before he too left.

  Within hours of her arrival in Cannes, a confused and exhausted Wallis tried to persuade the King to stay on the throne. She issued a statement claiming that she was anxious to avoid damaging His Majesty or the Throne and stating her readiness ‘if such action would solve the problem to withdraw forthwith from a situation that has been rendered both unhappy and untenable’. Hardinge, not surprisingly, insisted that she was not sincere in this and was merely posturing, knowing what the King’s response would be. Nancy Dugdale described the statement as ‘undisguised humbug. After having done her utmost to split the country from Land’s End to John O’Groats she now played the part of the gilded angel who, having failed to accomplish this, only wanted to act for the best.’

  As Zetland pointed out: ‘She did NOT say she was ready to withdraw her petition for divorce.’ But she did send the King a long and rambling letter urging him not to abdicate. ‘Don’t be silenced and leave under a cloud, I beseech you and in abdication no matter in what form unless you can let the public know that the Cabinet has virtually kicked you out … I must have any action of yours understood by the world [or] we would have no happiness and I think the world would turn against me.’

  Reading this, along with her earlier note to Sibyl Colefax, it is clear she was finally trying to extricate herself, painfully aware now how history would view her as the woman who forced a man to give up his throne. Wallis was utterly genuine in her desire to disappear from the King’s life, if only to preserve her own sanity rather than from motives of altruism or to protect the King let alone the institution of monarchy. She, not the King, retained a keen awareness of the world beyond. But she also knew better than anyone, other than Monckton perhaps, how difficult it was going to be to leave him. ‘With the King’s straightness and directness,’ he wrote, ‘there went a remarkable determination and courage and confidence in his own opinions and decisions. Once his mind was made up one felt that he was like the deaf adder that stoppeth his ears … for myself … I thought that if and when the stark choice faced them between their love and his obligations as King Emperor they would in the end make the sacrifice, devastating though it would be.’ Nancy Dugdale was perhaps right in claiming that Wallis’s renunciation statement ‘came many, many weeks if not years too late and was despised by everyone except the vacuous women of society whom she had vamped and who were touched by her magnanimous gesture’, but wrong in failing to recognize how sincerely Wallis wanted to get out of a predicament she now loathed, even without any clear plans as to how she would fend for herself if she had to.

  Theodore Goddard also understood, through awkward conversations on ‘a very bad phone line with much shouting and confusion’, that his client was completely ‘ready to do anything that would ease the situation but that the other end of the wicket was determined’. Since Wallis, not the King, was his client, Goddard faced another [acebutproblem. He had information which made him seriously concerned that, following the Francis Stephenson intervention with the King’s Proctor, the divorce might not be granted after all. This potentially disastrous situation made it imperative for him to meet with his client for her sake, even though the King, a semi-prisoner himself at the Fort, was strongly opposed to his going or to any action which might put pressure on Wallis to withdraw. Nonetheless, Goddard ignored royal opposition and bravely flew, for the first time in his life, in a small government plane to the South of France. It was a terrifying flight as one of engines broke down, forcing him to land at Marseilles, and he eventually arrived at two o’clock on the morning of Tuesday 8 December. Also in the party was a doctor – Goddard had a weak heart. But since Dr Kirkwood was a gynaecologist, rumours immediately spread that Wallis was pregnant. Brownlow was infuriated by this further annoyance and had to issue a statement that Dr Kirkwood was there only as Goddard’s personal physician.

  At nine the next morning Goddard had a long talk with Wallis ‘and asked if she was sure that what she was doing was wise? Two things stand out,’ Goddard stated later. ‘She was definitely prepared to give up the King and he was definitely not prepared to give her up … he intended to abdicate and eventually marry her.’ Nonetheless, after increasingly tense phone calls between Cannes and Fort Belvedere, Wallis signed a further, much stronger statement which, according to Goddard, the King agreed to only in order to protect her from criticism. Goddard returned, by train this time, with a document in which Mrs Simpson unambiguously expressed her readiness to withdraw from her entanglement. But nothing was done with this statement: ‘It was not available until the afternoon of Wednesday the 9th and, as you know,’ the Downing Street adviser Sir Horace Wilson explained to Monckton, ‘you and others had been at the Fort the previous evening on what proved to be the final attempt. During Wednesday morning’s cabinet, decisions were taken which with Tuesday’s proceedings made it clear that nothing would come of the statement nor of Goddard’s efforts. I see that after hearing his account on Wednesday afternoon I noted that I did not think that G’s client had fully taken him into her confidence!’ There also exists in the Bodleian Library in Oxford what Alan Lascelles in depositing it there called ‘a curious little document’, found among Baldwin’s political papers. It was a half-sheet of grey notepaper bearing the heading ‘Lou Viei, Cannes’ but with no date. On it is written in pencil, in what is believed to be Brownlow’s handwriting, ‘With the deepest personal sorrow, Mrs Simpson wishes to announce that she has abandoned any intention of marrying his Majesty.’ It is signed (in ink) ‘Wallis
Simpson’. This statement is unequivocal.

  But it, too, presumably also arrived among Baldwin’s papers via Goddard and never saw the light of day. For, as Goddard relayed to Dugdale, he had found his client ‘in a most terrified state of nerves, complete capitulation and willingness to do anything’. The atmosphere at the Rogers villa was appallingly tense for all. The King had given orders that Wallis should have police protection, but Inspector Evans and his colleague begged to be allowed to return to England, complaining in particular of Brownlow and his high-handed ways. They particularly resented being told to take their hands out of their pockets when speaking to him. Goddard believed Wallis’s desire to disappear from Europe was genuine – she had contemplated going to the Far East – but by 9 December neither plans nor statements were of any use, as Wallis probably feared all along. Although the King now was resolute in his decision to abdicate, with Wallis gone he had no friends with whom to discuss the mat [scuughter. Churchill, out of sympathy and pragmatism, continued to beg him not to rush. He even wrote to Baldwin saying how cruel and wrong it would be to extort a decision from the man in his present state. He had visited the King and believed that he should see a doctor as ‘the personal strain he had been so long under and which was not at its climax had exhausted him to a most painful degree’.

  But none of this washed with the House of Commons and by Tuesday 8 December Baldwin, who paid his last visit to the Fort that day, knew it was all over. There were still many unresolved questions about the King’s future status and finances but nothing could persuade him to remain. American newspapers were already reporting the abdication. Baldwin had found all his conversations with the King difficult, partly because it was: