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

by Anne Sebba

  For weeks both Wallis and the Duke had feared this final rebuff, the likelihood of which was being openly discussed in England. Mary Raffray, still awaiting her own divorce, was following her old schoolfriend’s difficulties closely. ‘Much as I loathe Wallis, I can’t help feeling half pleased half sorry for the slap in the face she’s had not being Royal Highness and to me much worse, none of their friends or sycophants going to the wedding. The Brownlows felt it bad for home work and so did mo candba Metcst people and I think she was too proud to ask her American friends.’

  But the Duke had not been told formally that Wallis was to be refused the status of HRH until Walter Monckton arrived with a letter from the King. In it he tried to explain that, far from taking anything away, the Duke – not being in the line of succession – was not automatically HRH, and he (the King) had actually given him a title by issuing Letters Patent even though the honour was specifically limited to him alone. This formula was contrived by Sir John Simon after an appeal from Wigram, as ‘HM hopes you will find some way to avoid this title being conferred’. King George had admitted to Baldwin that he and his family ‘all feel that it would be a great mistake to acknowledge Mrs Simpson as a suitable person to become Royal’.

  ‘This is a nice wedding present,’ the Duke said when he read the letter. Baba Metcalfe saw the bitterness in both of them. ‘He had an outburst to Fruity while dressing for dinner,’ she recorded. ‘He is through with the family. He will be loyal to the crown but not to the man, his brother. He blames him for weakness in everything.’ It was in this mood that a wedding present from the Kents, a Fabergé box, was returned with anguish and disappointment. The Duke felt betrayed by his entire family and had no interest in accepting objects such as this when the one thing he craved, recognition of his wife, was not forthcoming.

  The Duke’s initial reaction had been to give up his own HRH, but Monckton, who insisted he had always been in favour of granting the honour to the Duchess, together with Wallis, dissuaded him from doing that on the grounds that it would achieve nothing except arouse further satisfaction in London. Eventually they agreed that they would fight the decision, and thereafter the Duke referred to Wallis as Her Royal Highness; household staff were told to address her thus and to curtsey. This confusion created awkwardness for everyone, and the orders were occasionally ignored.

  ‘Wallis has lots to say about the behaviour of friends and family and realises there is no insult they have not heaped on her,’ observed Baba. The Metcalfes alone among their friends were always stalwart allies. Wallis kept repeating to Baba her effusive thanks for being there. And there were some who, while critical of the Duke, nonetheless opposed such implied punishment. As Sir Maurice Gwyer, First Parliamentary Counsel and the ultimate authority on constitutional matters, told Wigram: ‘I should have thought myself that an attempt to deprive the Duke’s wife of the title of HRH would have the most disastrous results.’

  Although most lawyers pointed out then and subsequently that the announcement of Letters Patent was based on fallacious premises and a royal title for the Duchess should have followed automatically from marriage – had it not, then Wallis would after all be marrying the Duke morganatically, which had been ruled out as an impossibility months before – the Duke obviously guessed that there would be strong opposition from his family and therefore had written to his brother in mid-April asking him to announce the Duchess’s HRH formally. The request resulted in a flurry of activity, with some courtiers so convinced that the marriage would not last that they feared there would eventually be a number of ex-wives parading as HRH. One can only speculate about what might have happened had the Duke not persisted in asking. However, without such a title they would never live in England and in this way they were effectively kept as exiles.

  Baba Metcalfe wrote that, although the wedding was a nev cingexier-to-be-forgotten occasion, ‘perhaps more than the actual ceremony was the rehearsal in the small green drawing room with the organist trying out the music next door. Fruity walks in with HRH and stands on the right of the altar. Wallis on Herman’s arm comes in under the tutelage of Jardine … they go over the service, Walter, Allen and I watched with such a mixture of feelings. The tune played for “O Perfect Love” was not the proper one so I sang it to the organist and he wrote it down … seven English people present at the wedding of the man who, six months ago, was king of England.’ The total wedding party comprised Metcalfe and his wife, Charles and Fern Bedaux, Herman and Katherine Rogers, Walter Monckton, Aunt Bessie Merryman, Lady Selby (her husband, Walford Selby, had been advised not to go), Dudley Forwood and George Allen. Just before the ceremony began, a bouquet of red, white and blue flowers tied with a tricolour ribbon, the gift of the French Prime Minister Léon Blum, was delivered, further underlining that there was no official British presence.

  Once home, Jardine was offered large sums for the inside story of the wedding. Although he declined and had committed no illegality in giving a religious blessing to a couple who had minutes earlier in the same room been legally married by a French mayor, he found himself ostracized in his parish and repudiated by his Church; within a month he had left England to live in America. Walter Monckton, who would spend many more hours trying to sort out the financial arrangements between the brothers, had a great sense of foreboding that day. He had constantly advised the Duke to be cautious and not inflame matters, but, as he wrote later, he had always been in favour of granting Wallis a title because he foresaw the bitterness that would fester as a result. Once again the Dominions, especially Australia and Canada, were blamed for being immutably opposed to an honour, or rather a style, for someone who had nearly destroyed the Empire. And Wallis well knew how she was loathed in the Empire. Among the piles of hate mail she received, ‘the most abusive, oddly enough, came from Canadians, from English people residing in the United States and from Americans of British birth or connections’, she noted in her memoirs.

  It was a scene of enormous loneliness, hardly the alternative coronation Wallis might have wished for, and both the rivalry and the sense of abandonment were to be played out for another four decades. A telegram from Elizabeth and Bertie insisting ‘We are thinking of you

  with great affection on this your wedding day and send you every wish for future happiness much love’ rang eerily hollow.

  ‘It was hard not to cry. In fact I did,’ wrote Baba; ‘afterwards we shook hands in the salon. I knew I should have kissed her but I just couldn’t. In fact I was bad all day: my effort to be charming and to like her broke down. I don’t remember wishing her happiness or good luck as though she loved him. One would warm towards her but her attitude is so correct and hard. The effect is of an older woman unmoved by the infatuated love of a younger man.’

  ‘I explained to her after the wedding’, wrote Walter Monckton, ‘that she was disliked because she had been the cause of the Duke giving up the throne but that if she made him happy that would change. If she made him unhappy nothing would be too bad for her. She took it very simply and kindly just saying: “Walter, don’t you think I have thought of all that? I think I can make him happy.” ’

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  Wallis at War

  ‘And with all her charity, she had not a word to say for “That Woman” ’

  Having failed to make Wallis his queen or even win her a royal title, having failed to give her a dignified wedding blessed by a royal chaplain, having failed to convince the world, let alone his own family, what a uniquely wonderful woman Wallis was and how worthy of all those things, having instead forced her to hide under car seats and to be abused, threatened or insulted, the Duke of Windsor’s natural tendency towards self-abasement and flagellation was now redoubled. A feeling that he had somehow let Wallis down, although Wallis herself had been clear-eyed about the royal family’s disinclination to welcome her, set the ground rules for their marriage. He had believed right to the last that his brothers would attend his wedding. When they did not, th
is most bitter blow on top of all the others made him feel that he could never do enough to make up to Wallis for all, as he perceived it, that she had been forced to endure, and because he felt so blessed by having her as his wife. In the short term this meant fighting for money he believed due to him, especially ‘considering the position I shall have to maintain and what I have given up’. When she was ill or in pain from neuralgia he rushed her to the best doctors and dentists, while praying that the pain would disappear ‘as I can’t bear to see her suffering’. And she, in turn, determined to give the Duke whatever she could to make up for what he had abandoned, especially where a display of material possessions was concerned.

  Dudley Forwood recalled one evening when the Duchess appeared ‘beautifully dressed as always but blazing with rings, earrings, brooches, bracelets and necklaces and almost stooping under their weight. I said “Ma’am I wonder if you aren’t wearing a few too many jewels?” She said “You forget that I am the Duchess of Windsor. I shall never let the Duke down.” ’

  The honeymoon was spent largely at Schloss Wasserleonburg, a secluded castle in the Carinthian mountains belonging to a cousin of their friend Lord Dudley. En route they stopped in Venice, where Mussolini’s Fascist government had arranged an impressive array of gondolas and flowers to meet the newlyweds. And then, at last, they were left in peace.

  In her memoirs Wallis wrote disingenuously that she ‘recognised with incredulity’ a note awaiting her on the morning tray sent by Ernest about ten days after the abdication. But she had no reason to be surprised since she had been writing to him from the moment when she first felt so alone facing the crowd of reporters in Ipswich. More surprising than Ernest writing to her – ‘you may rest assured that no one has felt more deeply for you than I have’ – is that she continued to write to her second husband even while on her honeymoon with her third. She told him: ‘I think of us so much, though I try not to.’ She craved news about him: ‘I wonder so often how you are? How the business is getting on etc. I thought I’d write a few lines to say I’d love to hear from you if you feel like telling me a bit.’ She admitted she was at least peaceful in the mountains and trying ‘to recover from these terrible months that we all went through before starting out in the future. I have gathered up courage for that,’ she wrote from Schloss Wasse kSche arleonburg.

  But it was peace thanks to material comforts rather than peace from passionate love that she had found and she knew that Ernest understood that. ‘The dual side of my nature will out and you filled my one side so utterly. If we could only have done these things. Anyway I shall always be struggling with myself to the grave and whereas other people will become happy I shall never be able to answer either of my sides satisfactorily. If only one of me was stronger than the other,’ she wrote with remarkably Freudian insight into her own personality. ‘I am so glad you won your suit. I knew you would,’ she concluded. In fact the case against Mrs Sutherland had been settled out of court and Ernest contented himself with costs.

  From Wasserleonburg, as she told Ernest, she and the Duke were travelling around Europe to Budapest and Vienna, ‘as well as to Czechoslovia [sic] (wrong I’m sure) for more shooting … Then a city for a dentist’. In the years to come, Wallis was often in need of dental treatment. They returned to Venice for an occasional day and even managed a visit to Salzburg, a surprising outing given the Duke’s dislike of opera. By the end of September they had done enough travelling and finished up in Paris, staying mostly at the Hôtel Meurice, while they looked for a house, the Duke all the while wondering how soon he could return to England. They did not find anything suitable until February 1938, when they rented a house at Versailles, but later that year they moved again to a more solid and substantial mansion on the Boulevard Suchet, which offered possibilities for entertaining on a regal scale. Mary Kirk, who became Ernest Simpson’s third wife in November 1937, heard about the house from a mutual friend and wrote in her diary: ‘it was deeply interesting what he told me about being there … going over the house from top to bottom there was not ONE single book in it’.

  Wallis was unsettled. Although they had visitors there was an awkwardness of which she was only too aware:

  As for all one’s ‘friends’, I think they find it very difficult to know anybody but the new regime though I must say they all put in unexpected appearances in Paris. But then even a title of peculiar origin and a slight idea that the Duke may be heard from in the future is enough to bring that type of English to one’s side … It is horrid having no home & living like snails yet how difficult to decide where to live with every country quivering.

  ‘I don’t agree it was fate,’ she insisted to Ernest, but ‘a woman’s ambition which has left a wound that will never heal and a woman’s pride were the causes. I curse the latter because it made me lose control. The former was Mary’s way to be satisfied, the latter pushed me over the cliff. Anyway I shall write about it again. It is very painful and it is too late. Wherever you are you can be sure that never a day goes by without some hours thought of you & for you & again in my eanum prayers at night. With love, Wallis.’ Her use of the word ‘eanum’ in a letter to her ex-husband reveals a surprising assumption of his familiarity with what had been part of the lovers’ private language.

  From now on there is an appalling sense of aimlessness to the Duke and Duchess’s lives compounded by abandonment by their friends. Above all they were cut off from sources of good advice, which left them alarmingly vulnerable. Walter Monckton and Winston Churchill both retained a strong sense of obligation towards a former monarch, the latter from a more romantic standpoint bu kstadiv>t at some cost to his own reputation, the former constantly counselling patience while hoping to counteract what he called ‘influences working the other way’, that is Wallis. Another source of advice was Bernard Rickatson-Hatt, Ernest’s old friend, still editor in chief at Reuters, who played something of a double game in the post-abdication years, offering the Duke occasional advice on public relations and Ernest and Mary occasional press seats for events as well as titbits about the lives of the royal exiles. The Duke asked Rickatson-Hatt, whenever there was negative publicity about Wallis, to contradict the statements or give ‘the lie to false rumours … What is vitally important to us … is that any renewal of newspaper interest in us should be met with good publicity.’ So, for example, when they were invited for dinner by the British Ambassador in Paris, Rickatson-Hatt was asked to ensure that the occasion was given what would now be called a favourable spin. The Duke was grateful and told Rickatson-Hatt, who sent on some clippings, how pleased he was ‘that your friends co-operated so willingly … Wallis and I have been greatly amused over the Buck House attitude: not the King’s of course, but that of the same old Palace enemies.’

  But where once he had been surrounded by counsellors, now there were none. In this abyss it is easy to see how alluring was the advice of his host at Tours, Charles Bedaux. Bedaux had substantial business interests in Germany and was keen to use the Duke to further these. The idea of the Duke and Duchess making a trip to Nazi Germany had been in his mind from the first and he broached it with the Duke even before the wedding. The Duke needed little persuasion that such a visit would be a good way to cement ties between the two royal families, broken after the First World War, and thus promote peace. The trip genuinely appealed to his belief that, if he could study the housing and working conditions of the German labour force, there might come a time when such knowledge would be useful, and an announcement in August that the Duke wished to make a study of working conditions in various countries was read with alarm in London to mean that he was doing so with a view to returning to England at a later date as a champion of the working classes.

  In fact there was another, more pressing reason why the idea so appealed. A visit to Germany afforded a real opportunity for Wallis to sample a state visit, a chance for her to experience something of what it was like to be the wife of someone who commanded the respect of a major power; most Ge
rmans had a high regard for the Duke, with his often stated love of Germany. At Oxford his German tutor had been the influential Professor Hermann Fiedler, a man who in May 1937 wrote to The Times that he was ‘appalled’ that Oxford had refused to send an official representative to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Göttingen University, by then purged of Jews. Yet even Mensdorff, the Austro-Hungarian diplomat, was surprised at the strength of his pro-German feelings. Recording a talk he had had with the Prince in 1933, he declared that, having been summoned to see him at 5 p.m. the previous day, ‘I am still under his charm.’ He went on: