by Anne Sebba
There was another month to wait before the news that a decree absolute would be granted, but the day that the announcement was made – 3 May – the Duke immediately left Austria, where he felt he had been imprisoned, to be with Wallis, similarly fractious even in her luxurious confinement at the château. It was no coincidence that the announcement was made a week before the Coronation, the date of which – 12 May – had been chosen months previously when it was assumed that it was Edward VIII who would be crowned (with Wallis by his side, Edward himself had once hoped). The new King and Queen agreed to do what King Edward had refused – to attend a great Empire Service in St Paul’s after the Coronation.
Ernest and Mary watched the Coronation from a first-floor balcony at 49 Pall Mall, ‘one of the best places in London to see the show’, which had been quietly arranged for them by well-connected friends. Mary was e cs. w Kinthralled by the pageantry and sent her family detailed accounts of the uniforms, carriages and costumes:
But finally came the gold coach drawn by the eight white horses called the Windsor Greys … and the King and Queen looking so young and pale and grave, unsmiling and not bowing … looking as if they were taking on their responsibilities with the greatest seriousness.
Ernest said to me, once we were listening to the service in the Abbey, when the Queen was crowned: ‘I couldn’t have taken it if it had been Wallis’ [a rare insight into the man’s otherwise stoic performance]. But that is of course not for publication. We all had a terribly good time. Marvellous food sent up from Fortnums.
That same day, making no reference to activities in London, Wallis was writing to Ernest from the Château de Candé: ‘I have taken back the name of Warfield as I really felt I had done the name of Simpson enough harm. Now the target can be Warfield as I don’t expect the world will let up on its cruelty to me for some time … It’s impossible to have anyone here & also impossible to move – literally surrounded by press and photographers etc … The publicity has practically killed me.’
And when the Duke eventually sent out a paltry handful of wedding invitations he announced his bride imaginatively as Mrs Warfield, which she never was. Those who received one felt as if they had been sent a poisoned chalice, whether the bride was Mrs Simpson or Mrs Warfield. Godfrey Thomas, declining the invitation, wrote of how terribly sorry he was that, ‘largely owing to this damned press, things have developed in this way’, while John Aird, who had written to accept, hurriedly recalled his letter when he realized the consequences, admitting in his diary: ‘Feel a slight shit at leaving HRH to be married with only the Metcalfes [Edward ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, the Duke’s close friend and former equerry, and his wife Lady Alexandra ‘Baba’ Metcalfe] and Walter Monckton at the ceremony.’ As Philip Ziegler observes: ‘No one emerges with great credit from this episode except for Hugh Lloyd Thomas, who made it clear he would attend the ceremony whether given permission or not, and the Duke, who met these humiliating rebuffs with stoical dignity.’
The Duke had filled much of his time in Austria trying to organize his financial affairs, his wedding and a royal title for Wallis. He insisted that the desire for a religious service was mutual. But what Wallis wanted was not so much the religion per se as an occasion that would be spoken of as a rival coronation, a notion she revealed in letters to the Duke. It was he, rather than Wallis, who was adamant that, after all he had given up, he was not prepared to make do with some hole-in-the-wall ceremony solely at a French registry office. While various friends and members of his circle had been deputed to sound out the likely response from the new King, Walter Monckton went directly to Lambeth Palace to see Alan Don to find out the best arrangements that could be made. He told the Archbishop’s chaplain that the Duke was very obstinate and determined to satisfy his bride with the dignified ceremony he thought she deserved, conducted by a royal chaplain. But Don pointed out that all four Houses of Convocation had lately passed resolutions deprecating the use of the marriage service where groom or bride had a former partner still living. At one stage it had seemed possible that Canon Leonard Andrews, a rector in the diocese of Truro, and therefore having an official connection with the Duchy of Cornwall, might be willing to go to France and officia ce arurte. However, as Wigram reportedly told Monckton when the latter tried in early April to organize some sort of religious service, he would ‘hound Andrews out of the College of Chaplains for suggesting such a thing’. Not surprisingly, the rector withdrew.
Monckton also pressed for another of the Duke’s wishes to be met: that some of the royal family might be present at the wedding. Wigram responded by telling him, as he reported to Archbishop Lang:
that if any of the King’s family were present with the approval of HM this would be a firm nail in the coffin of monarchy. I have told the King that he can shelter himself behind Baldwin and the Dominion Prime Ministers and I am sure they would never advise HM to allow any of his family to be present at such a mock ceremony. Fortunately Alec [Hardinge] and I are hand in glove and he says he wants me to continue to deal with this. Excuse this outburst but my religious feelings are really hurt by such monstrous suggestions.
The new King, by retaining the services of both Hardinge and Lascelles, could not have been surprised to be given the sort of advice he was. But the Duke felt that his brother’s weakness was being exploited by men who were his old enemies and were still kicking him because they disapproved of Wallis. This was a close-knit group of friends many of whom had been to Harrow and, as Monckton pointed out, Baldwin and Churchill were Old Harrovians too. Edward wrote to his brother begging him to help give him and Wallis a ‘dignified background’ for their marriage. ‘Of course a great deal of the bunk is levelled at Wallis and I can’t take it because you must always think of Wallis and myself as one from henceforth … and anything said or aimed against her hits me a thousand times harder.’ Nonetheless King George VI steeled himself to what he perceived his duty, insisting that this was not simply a private family matter and writing to tell his elder brother that none of the family could come out to his wedding: this was something ‘I loathe having to do … but you will appreciate the fact that I cannot do anything else’.
As the Duke searched in vain for a royal chaplain, one man now bravely offered himself for the job: the eccentric vicar of St Paul’s, Darlington, the Reverend R. Anderson Jardine. Jardine had been apprenticed to an architect when, aged nineteen, he had experienced a sudden conversion and became a street preacher. After he had taken charge of a chapel in a Yorkshire mining village, his father apparently disinherited him and attempts were made on his life. But he persevered in his chosen calling and, in 1923, was ordained into the Church of England and four years later appointed to the living of St Paul’s with a parish of 13,000 souls. But he was a controversial preacher and sometimes described himself now as a faith healer. Jardine explained that when he read in a newspaper that the ex-King could have no religious blessing on his marriage he was so shocked that he could not even finish his breakfast. He went immediately to the bottom of his garden and prayed in an old army tent he kept there. He said he heard a voice telling him he must go to France and offer his services. He wrote to Herman Rogers and learned that the Duke was overjoyed at the prospect of being married by an English clergyman according to the Book of Common Prayer, even if it would not be the full church wedding he might at one time have wished for.
Jardine had already crossed paths with his bishop, Dr Herbert Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, and one of the most notable intellectuals of his day. Henson, by deliberately remaining silent when Lang uttered c Laf D his post-abdication broadside, had earned the respect of the new King and Queen, who did not wish to be seen as part of an establishment attack on their own family. Whatever they thought privately about Lang’s comments, they recognized that the speech had not been well received in the nation at large, and Henson was invited to stay at Windsor Castle. Henson himself, although far from being an admirer of the Duke of Windsor, was equally no bigot and in fact was a
supporter of A. P. Herbert’s divorce Bill. Nonetheless, he declared that ‘if any clergyman of his diocese were to marry the Duke he, Henson, as Bishop, would inhibit the man at the doors of his Parish Church’ – a threat that in the end he failed to enact.
Henson explained to a small group of influential politicians ‘in the quietest and most friendly manner in the world … that in the eyes of the church the Reno divorce of Mrs Simpson (for incompatibility of temper) is not recognised as a divorce by the Church of England [for which adultery was still the only grounds for divorce] and that a marriage with the Duke of Windsor will therefore be doubly bigamous’. Churchill, one of those present, was deeply perturbed ‘and said plaintively “but why were we not told this before?” ’ Aside from the fact that her divorce was granted in Warrenton, Virginia, not Reno, Nevada, and was on the grounds of Win Spencer’s (alleged) desertion, the conversation illustrates further the depth of misunderstanding about Wallis. In secular American society her divorce from Spencer was legally valid and she had every reason to believe that it entitled her to marry Ernest Simpson. But the Church was another matter and the King’s Proctor had been sent a cutting from the Washington Herald dated 7 December 1936 which asserted that, in the eyes of the US Protestant Episcopal Church, Wallis was still the wife of Commander Spencer. ‘We neither recognize her divorce from him nor her subsequent marriage and divorce from Ernest Simpson … Regardless of what the English authorities may hold in this diocese she must remain Mrs Spencer until divorced from Commander Spencer under the canons of the church or separated from him by death.’
The violent reaction in the British establishment was provoked by Wallis herself, not merely because she was either American or a double divorcée but because she was also brash. The constant rebuffs made her even less guarded. She wrote to the Duke: ‘I blame it all on the wife [Queen Elizabeth] – who hates us both.’ But she had little sympathy for the brother either. ‘Well who cares, let him be pushed off the throne.’ She did not trouble, at the various dinner parties to which she was invited, to hide her views, views which made their way to London where it was noted that she never referred to her future sister-in-law as the new Queen but always as the Duchess of York or by a variety of unflattering nicknames to do with her dress sense or figure. The fact that it had long been recognized, even at the Palace in George V’s day, that Americans had different rules for divorce and sometimes ‘the ladies being American seems to be sufficient justification for exceptional treatment’ was conveniently ignored where Wallis was concerned. She knew of other twice-divorced women – an old friend, Dottie Sands, was one – who were married in church. ‘So what?’ was her reaction. In a letter addressing the former King as ‘Dearest Lightning Brain’ because he never seemed to appreciate what the Palace was doing to him she asked: ‘Why you have been singled out to be crucified I can’t see.’
Nonetheless Henson, however much he may have wanted to take a tough line with Jardine, could actually do little. He issued a statement saying: ‘The Rev R. A. Jardine has no authority to officiate outside his parish a c hiess nd diocese. If the Duke’s marriage were to take place within the diocese of Durham, the Bishop would inhibit him but the Bishop has no jurisdiction [elsewhere] …’ So Jardine made his way to Tours. Also on the road to Candé was the photographer Cecil Beaton, the Duke’s lawyers, George Allen and Walter Monckton, and the society florist Constance Spry, a woman who, partly because of her own irregular romantic entanglements and a failed marriage, was a long-standing and sympathetic ally of the Duke and Duchess in their plight and was determined to do all she could to make the day special. Spry had been one of the first to know of the Prince’s relationship with Mrs Simpson as they were two of her best customers, and she had firmly insisted to her staff that they must be ‘absolutely silent and loyal’.
Immediately after the abdication, Spry’s close association with the former King meant that she missed out on the prestigious – and lucrative – Coronation work. Nonetheless, when she received an invitation at very short notice from Wallis to do the floral display for her wedding at the Château de Candé on 3 June she did not hesitate, even though she knew that this would result in further years of lost commissions from the royal family. She went with her assistant Val Pirie to the Paris flower markets and ordered dozens of Madonna lilies and peonies and then went to Val’s family home near Tours and picked enough to cram the car with wild flowers, roses and more peonies. Cecil Beaton described the two women as ‘laden Ganymedes’ who decorated the whole castle with ‘magnificent mountains’ of flowers. ‘The flowers were out of all proportion to the scale of the house and the small numbers of people who would see them,’ he recalled. For although the whole place was under siege from a motley crew of well-wishers, reporters, dogs and delivery vans, there were embarrassingly few friends.
Brownlow, believing until a few weeks before the wedding that the Duke might ask him to be his best man, had been helping to advise Wallis with press arrangements for the wedding, suggesting that the journalist Frederick Lonsdale would be the man to come out to the château with him because he is ‘as you know a gentleman’ who could be relied upon to write the account ‘in good style and good taste’. But then he started to receive letters, including one from the Lincolnshire MP Harry Crookshank and one from the Bishop of Lincoln, suggesting that if he or Lady Brownlow attended the wedding ‘the Lincolnshire side of your life would become very difficult’. Brownlow was lord lieutenant of the county, a post undertaken by his family for eight generations and one which he valued highly. At the end of the month the Brownlows received their invitation to the wedding as well as a suggestion that they should come out early. Before accepting, Brownlow decided that it would be courteous to obtain the King’s consent. But two days later, having learned that the invitation had been refused by courtiers on his behalf, he told Hardinge that he was no longer asking His Majesty for a ruling and had decided to decline the invitation. He always insisted his decision had nothing to do with fears of losing the lord lieutenancy.
Spry did not let the small number of guests dictate how she would decorate the castle and her magnificent floral displays took two days of preparations. She could not help noticing that the ex-King spent hours on his knees pathetically reading old and damp copies of The Times, which she had spread out underneath her arrangements.
The wedding day itself dawned warm and sunny. At noon everything stopped while Charles and Fern Bedaux and Herman and Katherine Rogers went out for lunch, braving the waiting crowd at the gat cwd on everes. Among the hundreds of jostling international journalists, two, Randolph Churchill and Charles Murphy of Reuters, were invited in after the ceremony. The small bridal party remained in the castle to eat, with Wallis trying to inject some jollity into the occasion by recounting the story of her maid, who thought that all the palaver was enough to put anyone off getting married. ‘I couldn’t let the poor girl be put off matrimony for life. I felt it my bounden duty to say: “Oh it’s not always as bad as this, but it just happens to be if you’re marrying the ex-King of England.” ’ An embarrassed silence met this remark – the irony of a woman embarking on her third marriage explaining why hope continued to triumph over experience presumably was not lost on the assembled diners.
Jardine, ‘a comic little man with a red bun face, protruding teeth and a broad grin’, according to Beaton, arrived on the morning of 3 June and was immediately introduced to the bridegroom. As they shook hands the ex-King said: ‘Thank God you’ve come thank God you’ve come. Pardon my language, Jardine, but you are the only one who had the guts to do this for me.’ There followed a small crisis over the makeshift altar – an oak chest (‘bogus renaissance’, according to Cecil Beaton) with carved fat female figures, dragged from the hall into the music room. Wallis shrieked that ‘the row of extra women’ must be covered up and suggested a tea cloth they had bought as a souvenir in Budapest. There was a further crisis as Jardine refused to have a crucifix on the chest, but no one could immediately pro
duce a plain cross. Then someone remembered the nearby Protestant chapel which obligingly offered theirs. After that was found there appeared to be no more hurdles and the service could get under way.
Wallis’s tight pale-blue crepe dress and small matching jacket with a halo-style hat by Reboux has become a defining image of the twentieth century. The colour was chosen by Mainbocher to match her eyes in a shade henceforth called ‘Wallis blue’, while the style was designed to make her look impossibly thin. At her neck she wore an Art Deco clip of sapphires over a fan of baguette diamonds made for her earlier that year by Van Cleef and Arpels. Such clips became part of Wallis’s personal style, copied by others. But in fact Beaton had taken some photographs the day before, mostly outside, as the green walls and pink upholstery did little to set off the pale-blue dress. The most vivid account of the day itself came from Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, daughter of Lord Curzon and wife of the Duke’s best man, Fruity Metcalfe, who stepped in belatedly to perform that task when the royal brothers could not attend as supporters. In her unpublished diaries Baba Metcalfe admitted frankly that she was dreading the day and would have ‘given a fortune for the train not to stop’. She arrived the night before the wedding and on greeting Wallis noted that she ‘had forgotten how unattractive is her voice and manner of speaking’. The Duke, she thought, looked well and in high spirits, but he ‘sees through Wallis’s eyes, hears through her ears and speaks through her mouth’. Although sad that his staff were unable to come, he ‘took badly Perry Brownlow backing out. Wallis not being HRH was the worst blow.’
