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

by Anne Sebba

  Where are the cWheinking sh friends of yesterday

  That fawned on Him

  And flattered Her

  Where are the friends of yesterday

  Submitting to His every whim

  Offering praise of Her as Myrrh

  To him?

  What do they say, that jolly crew?

  Oh … her they hardly knew,

  They never found her really nice

  (And here the sickened cock crew thrice) …

  The apprehension of the new Court, and antipathy towards anyone thought to have been part of the ex-King’s circle, was made painfully clear to Perry Brownlow when he returned from France at the end of the month and found his services no longer required. He complained at being ‘hurt and humiliated more than I have ever known before … I am afraid that when I came back last week I did not realise the depth of personal feeling against myself in certain circles: perhaps you should have told me more frankly or maybe I should have understood your hint in the “formula of resignation” shown to me,’ he wrote to the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Cromer. ‘My resignation from His Majesty’s household was both obvious and desirable, ’ he agreed, but was it necessary to be demanded ‘in such a premature and unhappy manner’? Lord Cromer tried to reassure Brownlow that the request was not personal as the new King was very grateful for his loyal service in escorting Wallis abroad. But the reality was that he was criticized severely for helping her and remaining friendly to the Duke, who was after all godfather to his young son. Baldwin at least accepted that Brownlow ‘had a difficult row to hoe’, and Wallis, who understood that any intervention from her would only make matters worse, wrote: ‘You know my dear that if there was anything I could do about it I would have done it long ago.’ Spurned by the new Court, Brownlow offered to visit the Duke, brooding at a castle in Austria, Schloss Enzesfeld.

  ‘The strain here [at Enzesfeld] is pretty great, as you can imagine, and the Archbishop’s outburst hasn’t helped,’ wrote Piers Legh, who, firmly out of sympathy with the Duke and Mrs Simpson and not able to speak German, was hoping to be relieved as soon as possible. Brownlow put it more strongly to Alan Don after visiting the Duke in Austria. He thought the Duke was ‘a pathological case. If Mrs Simpson now lets him down anything might happen.’ But, as the Duke saw it, the only people letting him down were those in England, mainly his own family. When Dudley Forwood replaced Legh to become sole equerry he described the Duke as ‘a broken man, a shell, yet he still expected a full service, a monarch’s service’. If Forwood forgot to bow on arriving in the Duke’s bedroom in the morning to announce the day’s business, he would receive a reprimand.

  Schloss Enzesfeld, owned by Baron Eugène de Rothschild, had been chosen in hasty desperation in December as it was clear the Duke could not be in the same country as Wallis. At least it had a golf course, skiing was near by and he could get around by speaking German. His grandfather, King Edward VII, had stayed there on a visit to the Baron’s father. The introduction now came thanks c caerman. Hito the Baroness, Kitty de Rothschild, a thrice-married friend of Wallis. According to a newspaper cutting sent to Archbishop Lang, heavily underscored and with exclamation marks in the margins, Kitty (née Wolf) had left Bavaria as a child and emigrated to America with her parents. An uncle educated her and at twenty she married for the first time a Mr Spotswood, a Philadelphia dentist. She divorced him, went to Paris in 1910 and became a Catholic in order to marry Count Erwin Schönborn-Buchheim, a wealthy diplomat. Later she divorced Schönborn and in 1924 ‘accepted the Jewish faith’ in order to marry Baron Eugène de Rothschild. What really irked courtiers who knew the Duke well was hearing how enthusiastically he read the lesson at a Vienna church on Christmas Day when they recalled how resistant he had always been to going to church when it was required of him. Wallis spent Christmas Day at Somerset Maugham’s Villa Mauresque at Cap Ferrat, with Sybil Colefax attempting to cheer her up.

  Bored and unable to amuse themselves – knitting was only so much fun – both Wallis and the Duke were finding fault with those who were trying their best to entertain them. Boredom at least gave Wallis time to read the first of many books published about her. By December 1936 the New York publishers E. P. Dutton had managed to release a biography of her by one Edwina H. Wilson. This superficial and rather breathless account of Mrs Simpson’s furs, nail varnish, jewellery and accomplishments was hugely successful and went into three printings in a fortnight. ‘She can complete a jigsaw puzzle in half the time the average person takes,’ readers were informed. They were then told not to despair, as ‘those who envy Wallis Simpson her success’ could be given hints to guide them, for example on how to emulate her: ‘A wise hostess never entertains at the same time her bridge-playing friends and those who shun the game.’ Wallis, who read it immediately, was furious to find the amount of inside knowledge it contained and concluded that Mary had had a heavy hand in it.

  ‘Have you read Mary’s effort at literature called “Her Name was Wallis Warfield”? … It is written by Mary and one other bitch,’ she wrote furiously to Ernest. ‘Charming to make money out of one’s friends besides sleeping with their husband. Everyone in London says the amount of stuff she has sold is the top … I warned you of this ages ago but you wouldn’t believe me. I am very sad.’ Even more upsetting was the appalling waxwork effigy of her in Madame Tussaud’s, where she was grouped not with the royals but with Voltaire, Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc. She begged Walter Monckton to do something about it. ‘It really is too indecent and so awful to be there anyway.’ But he was powerless.

  Walter Monckton, ever the emollient diplomat, was trying to keep the peace on all sides and generally advising patience and turning the other cheek, his tact and usefulness evidenced by the fact that he was the first knight of the new reign, dubbed KCVO by George VI on 1 January 1937. Sir Walter, as he now was, had to fly to Austria, which he found extremely frightening in a small plane in horrible weather, to appease the Duke, who was bombarding his brother, the new King, with what he thought was advice as well as demands for future status and income. Numerous stories did the rounds about how Wallis would telephone from France berating and shouting at the Duke, mostly about money but also about position. And she was once, apparently, heard to accuse the Duke over the phone of having an affair with his hostess, Kitty, even though she had written to her friend in advance imploring her to ‘be kind to him. He is honest and good and really worthy of affection. They simply haven’t understood.’ Now she remarked: ‘It is odd, the hostess remain costfriening on. Must be that fatal charm!’ She told him she had heard terrible rumours, but ‘I can only pray to God that in your loneliness you haven’t flirted with her (I suspect that).’ As the atmosphere at Enzesfeld deteriorated dramatically, Kitty left the castle in early February, appalled at the cost of the long phone calls – £800 after three months – which the Rothschilds were expected to pay. The Duke failed to say goodbye to her. Most nights as he sat down for dinner with whomever was staying, he would hold forth to a baffled audience about what a wonderful woman Wallis was.

  She was certainly a jealous and frightened woman, convinced that she was more than ever a target for royalist fanatics. In her memoirs she admits that even in her most depressed moments she had never anticipated the enormity of the hatred she would arouse ‘and the distorted image of me that seemed to be forming in minds everywhere … there can be few expletives applicable to my sex that were missing from my morning tray’, she explained. There had been ‘a spot of bother’ with Lord Brownlow and the two police officers assigned to her in Cannes even before the abdication, and in a memorandum of 10 December 1936 it was stated that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Philip Game, had instructed the unhappy officers to stand by pending further orders. ‘The senior officer then said, what was understood from guarded language to be, that Mrs Simpson intended to “flit” to Germany. [This is underlined in pencil and marked with three vertical lines and a cross.]’ According to the memor
andum, the Prime Minister informed Sir Horace Wilson of this at once and confirmed with the Commissioner ‘That there is no question of the officers moving without further orders’. The two detectives were therefore asked to stay on, more now as informers than to offer protection, ‘though it’s a most unusual measure to be kept as quiet as possible there or questions would be asked in Parliament. The new King suggested today that he should pay.’

  But although Wallis’s phone calls were bugged there is no other evidence that Germany was her intended destination. She simply wanted to escape her predicament and, no doubt recognizing that she would be something of a prize in Germany, was also playing with ideas of where else she might go if the English courts set aside the decree nisi and so obliged her to seek a valid divorce in another jurisdiction. In fact, as the letters to Sibyl Colefax indicate, China – ‘the only other distant country that I knew … seemed the best choice’. She still had friends there who she believed would ‘take her in’. However, as Stephen Cretney points out, she was probably unaware that ‘at that time a married woman’s domicile was dependent on her husband and so long as Mr Simpson remained domiciled in England a divorce obtained by her elsewhere would have been ineffective in English law’. When it was too late to escape anywhere for good, all she could contemplate were shopping trips to Paris couturiers for her wedding gown and trousseau, and for her hair, face and nails. Intense anxiety always led to dieting for Wallis, and Aunt Bessie, who had been to stay, thought she was ‘too thin and should put on six pounds’. Thinner than ever, she at least enjoyed buying eighteen pieces from Elsa Schiaparelli’s summer collection that year and several from Molyneaux, who showed in Cannes. Nonetheless she was writing to the Duke about how much weight she had gained and how heavy she now was. But in early 1937 having a wedding of any kind was still not a certainty for them.

  In February she wrote to Ernest, a letter expressing some of her deepest fears and regrets and for once acknowledging how much flak he too was facing as the authorities examined whether or not he had been paid to keep quiet, a ckeeeight shn accusation he decided to fight vigorously asas contrary to all notions of gentlemanly behaviour. His solicitors argued that such allegations had damaged his standing in the City. He could not avoid being aware of ‘current luncheon table gossip … and widespread rumours that I was paid handsomely (some reports put the figure as high as £200,000!) to allow myself to be divorced. Needless toto say none of my friends believe it and I have scores of people batting for me,’ he reassured his elderly mother in New York. But when he discovered that Mrs Arthur Sutherland, a woman he did not know, had made an offensive comment – ‘she’s the only one I have been able to catch red handed since she made the remark at a luncheon in front of Maud, not knowing that M. was my sister. It is villainous, malicious slander and must be stopped’ – he decided he had to sue her.

  ‘Ernest dear,’ Wallis wrote, sending ‘my dearest love to you’:

  I am really so sorry about all the unjust criticism you have had. I feel your suit will change things. I am sorry you have Patrick H. [Sir Patrick Hastings KC] against you – he’s so clever & v lucky besides – however I have perfect faith in your abilities as a witness.

  I’m in a fog about the US bank account … Life here is one colossal bore. I don’t go places as I think it more dignified to be quiet. One hopes to keep the name from the papers but even doing nothing is no protection against their intentions.

  In a remarkably frank account of her own emotions Wallis admitted to Ernest, ‘It never should have been like it is now.’ She went on:

  … I am so illogical and so groomed by my pride that – when that is touched nothing will stop what I’m capable of doing and this situation shows the truth of that remark because if I had told you I would go to such lengths you wouldn’t have believed it humanly possible, and of course you had every right to have a flirtation. So really you see what a queer girl I am.

  I think Peter Pan should have written you too, but then you see he doesn’t understand …

  Write me sometime please & above all make your life again with care. You are so good and sweet. The IOU’s are in a tin box at Windsor but you can consider them torn up.

  And she was desperate to leave Cannes, as she confided to Ernest: ‘I am going to move from here – nobody knows it – so please don’t tell … I’m going to a house belonging to some friends of the Rogers near Tours, a change from their climate is also needed. You can imagine how much I want to kill Katherine by now … !’

  Although most courtiers agreed that for the King’s Proctor now to disallow the divorce would be unnecessarily cruel, no one could say with certainty, least of all Wallis, that he would not be obliged to do so as the angry letters continued to pour in. Mary and Ernest were worried too. Mary wrote to her sister that ‘E was such an angel – if only that damn King’s Proctor doesn’t upset the divorce. We are staying very quiet on purpose … I have been mentioned many times as having been the corespondent [sic] in the Simpson divorce case which is unpleasant … and no one would have wanted to take a chance on being nice to me if they [the Windsors] hadn’t left the country, which is a great brea c a asant k for me … but I love my life and E and I am happy.’ She told her sister that she dreaded the idea that she might ever again meet Wallis in case she should have to curtsey to her. ‘But as bitterly as I feel towards her for what she did to me, I do not envy her her life with that nervous difficult little man. They say he doesn’t realize at all that he is no longer King.’ And she believed the rampant rumours that Wallis had somehow made off with Queen Alexandra’s emeralds, jewels apparently bequeathed to the Duke by his grandmother but in fact spread among various female members of the royal family. The gossip about Wallis’s jewellery was a hot issue. The former Constance Coolidge, Comtesse de Jumilhac, who stayed with Wallis immediately before her wedding, wrote to a mutual friend:

  About those emeralds … Queen Alexandra never left any emeralds. The only emeralds in the royal family all belong to Queen Mary, who bought them or acquired them from the Tzarina. She still has them. The Duke never had any jewels at all. He even had to buy his own silver when he went to Belvedere. The jewels that Wallis has are all new jewels he has bought for her here in Paris – some at Cartier’s and mostly at Van Cleef and Arpels. She has lovely jewels but no great stones except her emerald engagement ring which I find a little dark. I like her sapphire one better and also the diamond. The ruby is small. She has several sets of jewels but they are all modern. After all she would have told me if they had come from the royal family. I asked her and she said no – none of them, that the Duke had not been left any jewels at all.

  In her determination to quash rumours, Wallis exaggerated. Of course the Duke had some family pieces but whatever Wallis wore was newly set or new stones entirely.

  Some courtiers felt a nagging doubt that Wallis might not actually go through with a wedding. On 5 March Lascelles spotted an announcement in the evening newspaper about the activities of the King’s Proctor and the Simpson divorce which disturbed him. ‘But I tracked Walter Monckton down in the Savoy and he reassured me as to its being only formal routine,’ he told his wife. ‘Just when I finished talking to him HM sent for me to know what it was all about and I was able to reassure him in turn.’

  So, when Sir Thomas Barnes eventually announced the results of his enquiries on 18 March and ruled that in spite of gossip and hearsay he had not been presented with any actual evidence to indicate why the decree absolute should not go ahead, there was huge relief. He was criticized for not having interviewed the one servant who could possibly give more information – Wallis’s maid, Mary Burke. But as he explained in his instructions to counsel: ‘By reason of the fact that she is still in the employ of petitioner it is impossible to interview her … it is not the practice of the King’s Proctor to endeavour to get information from such servants.’

  But had Barnes chosen deliberately not to pursue information which would have shown the ex-King to be involve
d in a collusive divorce? There were those who offered him evidence of the King’s adultery but only if he paid for it. For example, when Wallis and the then Prince had stayed in Budapest in 1935, returning from their skiing holiday, hotel staff as well as detectives on duty observed their behaviour and (according to an unsigned three-page memorandum in the King’s Proctor files at the National Archives) ‘there appears to be no doubt that the evidence which is being sought exists … even a cursory enquiry showed that evidence going to the root of matters does in fact exist. cn fional’

  ‘Whilst there is a possibility of obtaining confidential and oral information from them – none of them would take the risk of making a statement in writing or of giving evidence before a commissioner of court’ for fear of losing their jobs, unless they were offered compensation. Barnes decided not to proceed with seeking their story on the grounds that ‘it would not be proper to pay witnesses to give evidence.’ Not only that, unless they had actually been in the room, what evidence could they give beyond stating that Wallis and the Prince had shared a room?

  In early March Wallis had left for the Château de Candé in the Loire Valley with loyal Mary Burke and twenty-seven pieces of luggage. Thanks to an introduction from Katherine Rogers, with whom she was now fed up, she went to stay with Charles Bedaux, the French-born American industrial millionaire, and his second wife Fern, who had offered their castle as a wedding venue, thrilled by the publicity that such an illustrious guest would bring them. Charles Bedaux was a mysterious self-made entrepreneur who, after a spell in the Foreign Legion, had made his money by inventing a labour management efficiency system for industry. Not surprisingly this earned him the hostility of organized labour, but it held great appeal for the Nazi German leadership and he was under surveillance from the British and French security services, both of which were aware of his German contacts. The only condition insisted upon by M. and Mme Bedaux was that they be given full publicity as hosts for the royal couple. ‘For I am a hard working businessman and in these critical times if the erroneous thought were to penetrate the public that we rented Candé for the purpose intended, it would be sure to have a disastrous effect on my business career.’ Charles and Fern Bedaux, who had bought the castle and surrounding estate ten years previously and had lavishly modernized it, were to prove dubious hosts for the Windsor wedding. When allegations of collaboration were made against Charles in 1941, it was Fern’s old friend Katherine who supplied the Americans with evidence. Facing a trial for treason, he committed suicide.16 But for the moment Wallis was enamoured with Fern’s hostessing skills and her attention to detail as well as with the up-to-date American plumbing and central-heating system. A bathtub that could be filled and emptied in less than a minute and a telephone, which at the time was almost unheard of in a French residence (it was directly connected to the exchange in Tours, and therefore required an operator to be present inin the castle), were luxuries that mattered more than Charles Bedaux’s politics. Fern even had her own gymnasium with all the latest exercise equipment at the castle.