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

by Anne Sebba

  the apparent deference to his every wish, the adulation of the populace, the universal desire even of the most exalted of his subjects to be accorded marks of his esteem – all this had persuaded me to take literally the maxim that ‘the King can do no wrong’. Nothing that I had seen had made me appreciate how vulnerable the King really was, how little his wishes really counted for against those of his ministers and parliament.

  And the British constitution is, after all, famously unwritten.

  By December 1936, when she realized that the King was going to forfeit the throne in order to possess her – the only British monarch to have voluntarily renounced the throne since the Anglo-Saxon period14 – she knew that the cost for her was the total destruction of her reputation. Hardly comparable sacrifices, some might think. But Wallis, who owned little, did make that comparison and made sure the ex-King did too. She remained convinced that she had been used by the politicians. As she wrote to one of her closest London friends two weeks after the abdication: ‘The pitiful tragedy of it all is that England still remains in the hands of the men that caused the tragedy – using a woman as their means.’ She was not alone in such views. Lloyd [vie thGeorge, away in Jamaica throughout the crisis writing his memoirs, was furious at the way Baldwin and his allies had ‘got rid of a king who was making himself obnoxious by calling attention to conditions which it was to their interest to cover up. Baldwin has succeeded by methods which time and again take in the gullible British public. He has taken the high line in order to achieve the lowest of aims.’ Lloyd George did not hold ‘the woman Simpson’ personally in high regard, considering that she ‘is not worth the price the poor infatuated King was prepared to pay’. Nor was he without bitter personal prejudice against the Conservative leader. But he had a natural sympathy with a man whose love life was unorthodox, believing ‘all the same if he wished to marry her it could have been arranged, quietly, after the coronation … if the King wants to marry his American friend – Why not? I cannot help thinking the Govt. would not have dealt so brusquely with him had it not been for his popular sympathies. The Tories never really cared for the little man.’

  If there is a sense in which, as Wallis persuaded herself, the abdication crisis appears as a government plot to be rid of a difficult king, it is sharpened by the speed with which events unfurled after 27 October, at a time when communications were normally difficult and slow. As early as 1927, Lascelles had remarked in desperation to Baldwin: ‘You know, sometimes when I am waiting to get the result of some point-to-point in which he is riding, I can’t help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him, and to the country, would be for him to break his neck.’ ‘God forgive me,’ said Baldwin, ‘I have often thought the same.’

  However, at the beginning of 1936 Baldwin and his ministers, and experienced courtiers such as Hardinge, Wigram and Lascelles, who all knew each other and understood each other well, were neither plotting nor acting in unison. They all wanted to retain the King, but on their own terms. And they wanted to do this not for themselves but as a matter of duty to the public interest. By November that year, however, they saw that the problem was not simply that the new King might be difficult or interfering; that could be managed. What made Edward VIII worryingly unsafe was his total lack of a sense of public duty, without which a workable relationship seemed impossible. These men and their wives all had a high moral agenda. Wallis Simpson clashed irredeemably with that and in doing so played a valuable role in focusing them on what sort of monarchy Britons wanted and needed to face the looming European crisis.

  One other reason should not be overlooked in explaining why the drama played out so swiftly. Edward VIII was at the top of a hereditary system, yet what greater failure could be imagined than the failure to provide an heir? If he believed he was sterile, or if he knew that Wallis was infertile, abdicating could be seen as a welcome release for him. Giving up was something he had contemplated before, as his father recognized when he said to Ulick Alexander: ‘My eldest son will never succeed me. He will abdicate.’

  Having failed to detach herself from the King and realizing that she was doomed to a life of exile as despised consort to an ex-king, Wallis now fought for every penny she could, an overwhelming recurrence of her childhood insecurity. As well as being overheard, her telephone was being tapped (by the Metropolitan Police), which she appears not to have known, and her conversation with the Duke at midnight on 14 – 15 December – two days after he had undergone the massive emotion of abdication – was recorded.

  Mrs S: If they d [ S: lion’t get you this thing [presumably money] I will return to England and fight it out to the bitter end. The coronation will be a flop compared with the story that I shall tell the British press. I shall publish it in every paper in the world so that the whole world shall know my story. Your mother is even persecuting me now. Look in all the Sunday papers, you will see what she has done. On the front page of every paper is a black bordered notice stating that she has never seen or spoken to me during the past 12 months. I know it is true but she need not persecute me. She could have helped you so much, you the only son that matters. Did you get a good picking from Ulick? After all I am a British subject and entitled to protection from Scotland Yard. You must change one of these men not the new one he is an honest type of fellow but the other one is not loyal and is anxious to get back …

  Concentrate on the legal side now. That is the side that counts. We must have that fixed up because of April. Harmsworth has been so helpful and promises to do all he can. He has a villa in Cannes and was here during the few vital days.

  ‘I told him I didn’t want to be Queen,’ Ralph Martin, one of her earliest biographers, quotes her as telling him in an interview. ‘All that formality and responsibility … I told him it was too heavy a load for me to carry. I told him the British people were absolutely right about not wanting a divorced woman for a Queen.’ The version may have been polished with the years but the truth was, as she understood, ‘that if he abdicated every woman in the world would hate me and everybody in Great Britain would feel he had deserted them … we had terrible arguments about it. But he was a mule. He didn’t want to be King without me … if I left him he would follow me wherever I went.’

  Had the crisis not arisen in December, with Christmas looming, Wallis might, perhaps, have won more time and been able to escape her fate. But Baldwin always maintained that it would be impossible for politicians to go away for Christmas without a settlement. Far from wanting to be queen, she had a vaguely sketched plan to escape, but it was too late. Blinded by fear, she was also aware of the King’s fragile state of mind and health, aggravated by lack of sleep and fitful or non-existent meals. In addition to the concern shown by Churchill, Piers Legh was so worried about him that he insisted that the Surgeon Commander for the royal yacht should travel with them on the Fury in case he needed medical attention while at sea.

  From pity, Francis Stephenson, the clerk, withdrew his intervention with the King’s Proctor after hearing the broadcast. Monckton went back to Fort Belvedere, now abandoned, to clear up and in the room used by Wallis found a biography of George IV’s mistress, Mrs Fitzherbert.

  But, as 1936 drew to a close, Wallis was still writing to Ernest and, even more extraordinary, Ernest was writing to the King. ‘My heart is too full for utterance tonight,’ he insisted on the eve of the King’s abdication. ‘What the ordeal of the past weeks has meant to you I well know, and I want you to know that my deepest and most loyal feelings have been with you throughout!’

  From Lou Viei Wallis wrote five days after the abdication:

  Ernest – none of this mess … is of my own making – it is the new Peter Pan plan. I miss you and worry about you – in spite of the fact that due to the letters [the hate mail] I shan’t live very long [ve s the new and in fact am a prisoner. Four detectives. Oh dear, wasn’t life lovely, sweet and simple.

  Wallis

  Isn’t everything awful including the pen?


  Finally she apologized to her second husband: ‘I have nothing for you for Christmas because I can’t move on account of threats so sit all day.’ It was in Wallis’s interest to tell the world that she had not wanted a divorce until Ernest’s adultery with her best friend forced her hand, a story that was both true and untrue. What was true is that she had not wanted to divorce Ernest. And Ernest, although grateful for Mary’s loving support and comfort, never really fell out of love with Wallis.

  ‘I know that somewhere in your heart there is a small flame burning for me. Guard it carefully, my darling, and don’t let it go out,’ he wrote to her in October after leaving Bryanston Court for the last time, ‘if only in memory of the sacred lovely things that have been.’

  If the King acted greedily, was it fair to blame Wallis? ‘Money was an obsession,’ wrote Alastair Forbes of the Duke, an obsession that grew worse with the years, ‘and he was obsessively mean about it. To the last this was a “royal” who counted his royalties.’ When Sir John Wheeler-Bennett wrote his official life of George V he told the author and diplomat Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart that a key concern was that ‘he would have to put in writing how greedy for money the Duke of Windsor had been and what demands he made on King George VI, who had generously responded at considerable sacrifice to himself’.

  If the King lied, was it fair to blame Wallis for teaching him? How truthful had he ever been in his relationships with previous women? Yet the establishment and most of the royal family did blame her; whatever failings the King had, he was one of theirs and, just as at Ipswich, essentially beyond reproach. It was she and she alone who was responsible for the near-disastrous opprobrium heaped on the British throne in the last months. The true feelings of the royal family – and especially those of the new Queen Elizabeth ab

  out the woman shortly to become her sister-in-law – is revealed in a letter sent from Windsor Castle to the Dominions Secretary, Lord Lloyd, in 1940 and only recently released with the agreement of the Royal Archives and after the Queen Mother’s death in March 2002.

  The views expressed in this sternly worded memorandum sent from the Queen via Alec Hardinge, who was ‘sure you shared H.M.’s sentiments as most of us do’, include the assertion that a woman such as Wallis with ‘three husbands alive’ could never ‘lead or set an example’ and therefore represented an inevitable lowering of standards since ‘the people in our lands are used to looking up to their King’s representatives’. Wallis, according to this letter, is ‘looked down upon as the lowest of the low’. This attitude bedevilled all future relationships between the British Court and the departed uncrowned King.

  10

  Wallis in Exile

  ‘Mummy dear, isn’t it nice to have a Royal Family again’

  ^e tdiv>

  In a controversial broadcast the day after the abdication Archbishop Lang denounced the sovereign for giving in to ‘a craving for private happiness’:

  From God he had received a high and sacred trust. Yet by his own will he has abdicated – he has surrendered the trust.

  Even more strange and sad it is that he should have sought his happiness in a manner inconsistent with the Christian principles of marriage and within a social circle whose standards and ways of life are alien to all the best instincts and traditions of his people.

  Let those who belong to this circle know that today they stand rebuked by the judgement of the nation which had loved King Edward.

  Although Baldwin insisted that the broadcast was ‘the voice of Christian England’, and the BBC’s Sir John Reith wrote, ‘Few more momentous or impressive messages have ever been delivered … we are honoured to have been the medium,’ the speech was generally considered a disaster, appearing as ‘clerical vindictiveness towards a beaten and pathetic figure’. Lambeth Palace was deluged with more vituperative letters than the staff had ever known. Gerald Bullett, the popular novelist, wrote a widely circulated poem:

  My Lord Archbishop, what a scold you are

  And when your man is down how bold you are

  In Christian charity how scant you are

  Oh Auld Lang Swine how full of Cantuar

  A strong letter to the New Statesman from the drama critic Ivor Brown helped explain why such a lack of compassion was causing nervousness on all sides:

  The departure into exile of Mrs Simpson and the Duke of Windsor is a smashing clerical victory and the cock-a-hoop tone of the bishops last Sunday, led by the primate, seems to me thoroughly sinister. You may say that Parliament won – so did the prudes and the Pharisees; a dangerous victory … no doubt according to their principles the Churchmen had to fight the proposed marriage … we may be sure that clericalism will now fight harder than ever to hold all its forts of intolerance and obscurantism.

  Lang had truly believed for months that the ex-King had ‘a pathological obsession which completely unbalanced his mind’. He and his Chaplain Alex Sergeant seriously considered that Edward was ‘definitely abnormal psychologically if not mentally or physically. Drink or drugs may have contributed to the result which is that he became a sort of slave to this woman and cannot do without her. It is not a case of normal love.’ Because of Edward’s ‘disastrous liking for vulgar society and infatuation for this Mrs Simpson’, the Archbishop had been dreading the Coronation ‘as a sort of nightmare’. He was now confident in the new King and Queen’s regard for traditional morality and ‘sure that to the solemn words of the Coronation there would be a sincere response’, and his broadcast left no one, least of all Wallis, in any doubt of that.

  The Archbishop’s personal csast of allsense of relief that he could now proceed with a meaningful Coronation was surpassed by an even greater sense of relief within the royal family at how smooth the transition to the new King and Queen had been and how readily the nation took to the new family with their photogenic young daughters. The country rejoiced that such an unpleasant episode was now behind it, a delight expressed clearly by a seven-year-old Welsh girl: ‘Mummy dear, isn’t it nice to have a Royal Family again.’

  But such relief did not signal a general relaxation in attitudes to the exiled former King, sympathy for whom was considered highly dangerous politically in case he proved more popular than the socially awkward, less glamorous George VI. It was generally agreed that should the Duke return to London his presence would be an embarrassment both to the government and to the royal family. But he was well within his rights to return had he wished. As the Attorney General had told the House of Commons on 11 December 1936, a king who voluntarily abdicated was not compelled to leave the country. The new Queen was concerned about further stress for her husband, who had not been brought up to be the centre of attention and whose stammer was a serious problem when it came to public speaking; she was concerned too for their young daughters, whom she wanted shielded from comment and scrutiny. But others worried about more sinister elements who might look to exploit the situation. On the eve of the abdication the British Union of Fascists had made an abortive attempt to rally popular support for King Edward VIII, their leader Sir Oswald Mosley always claiming that he was in direct communication with the King hoping to be asked to form a government. However unlikely this scenario, since Mosley was not then in the House of Commons, the Fascists, while outwardly proclaiming loyalty to King George VI, made no real secret of their support for the Duke of Windsor and for any move for him to return to this country and if possible the throne. Since the Fascists looked forward to any visit with enthusiasm and were certain to arrange some sort of welcome, the Metropolitan Police feared a situation which might serve Communist purposes, as the Communists would be watching and, if there was support for their opponents, would immediately attack both Fascists and the Duke.15

  Virginia Woolf understood the volatility of human emotions, noting in her diary the views of her grocer’s young female assistant, ‘We can’t have a woman Simpson for Queen … She’s no more royal than you or me,’ before commenting,

  But today we have developed a
strong sense of human sympathy: we are saying Hang it all – the age of Victoria is over. Let him marry whom he likes. Harold [Nicolson] is glum as an undertaker and so are the other nobs. They say Royalty is in Peril. The Empire is Divided … never has there been such a crisis … The different interests are queueing up behind Baldwin or Churchill. Mosley is taking advantage of the crisis for his own ends …

  In this febrile time of swift realignments, the writer Osbert Sitwell cleverly captured the mood in his cruel satirical poem ‘Rat Week’, which was not printed at the time for fear of being found libellous. Was the ex-King ‘quite sane’, he asked or merely weak and obstinate and vain? Was Lady Colefax ‘in her iron cage of curls’ one of the rats to desert the sinking ship? Copies were circulating privately and Attlee typed up on his own typewriter all eight verses.