The Woman Before Wallis: Prince Edward, the Parisian Courtesan, and the Perfect Murder

by Andrew Rose

  Poules de luxe do not, as a rule, give their services free. The Prince was an exceptional catch. ‘The Prince of Wales never pays’ was the motto although favours, in the form of jewellery or expensive scent, were expected and received. The Prince could be delightfully responsive to the wishes of his women friends. ‘I was able to slip out early to get your Chypre from Coty which I’m sending by the same K[ing’s] M[essenger] as this letter…’ he wrote to a later mistress, ‘tho. I must apologise for the “flacon” looking like a soda water darling tho. its [sic] the only one they had’.174

  Despite this broadening of sexual experience, the Prince remained pathetically immature for someone of his age, army service and social background. ‘He is almost a child in appearance and character,’ commented Esher at this time, ‘and utterly without guidance.’175 To be fair to the Prince, his advisers sometimes gave out mixed messages. Joey Legh had robustly enjoyed the attractions of wartime Paris. In May of that year, the Prince recorded that ‘Joey got 5 days leave there … & they were some days from all his accounts…!!’176 Legh, who had accompanied the Prince and Marguerite on outings to the theatre or to the cinema, seems initially to have made no objection to the liaison (indeed, it would have been difficult to have done so, since he had been jointly responsible for introducing the Prince to ‘Paulette’ in Amiens the previous November). Towards the end of the year, however, Legh became concerned about the possible risks of the affair and advised the Prince to break off the relationship.

  An ideal opportunity to bring the affair to an end arose in November 1917, when XIVth Army HQ was dispatched to Italy, but the Prince, still in thrall to Marguerite, was in no mood to listen to advice, again showing the mulishness which would become characteristic of his later life. He was irritated by having to leave France, particularly as he had been due some three weeks’ leave. The Prince managed to spend only three days in London, but even this short break was marred by ‘a stupid old uncle of mine’177 who ‘must needs die the day before I got back’, plunging the royal family into mourning. Luckily, he was able to get twenty-four hours in Paris, where he spent one ‘undisturbed night’ with Marguerite, which ‘made up for a little of the leave I missed…’178

  The sudden deployment of the XIVth Army corps to Italy arose from the need for Allied reinforcements after the collapse of the Italian army at Caporetto. The Prince had a low opinion of the Italian armed forces, frequently making disparaging references in correspondence (‘It is by no means certain that these bloody “Ice Creamers” are going to fight’). Italian women fared even worse, losing heavily in comparison to his Paris love: ‘These Italian women are the uggliest [sic] collection of bitches I’ve ever seen,’ he wrote frankly to Boyd-Rochfort, adding ‘I’ve hardly seen a fuckable one yet.’ Bemoaning his ‘ghastly existence’ in Mantua, ‘tied to the generals & isolated from the ladies’, the Prince consoled himself by remembering that, ‘Paris is always on the direct route home…’179

  In January 1918, still chafing at his unwanted Italian assignment, the Prince put in for forty-eight hours’ local leave, hoping to get to Bologna, but his thoughts soon turned to France: ‘… thank goodness PARIS is the direct route to England…’180.

  The Prince was allowed a relatively long period of leave in England between mid-February and the latter part of March 1918 and so could enjoy a brief rendezvous with Marguerite on the way home. There, risking the disapproval of his father, the Prince had ‘taken to going to all the dances’, causing ‘wild excitement’ among Society girls. ‘So far,’ noted Lady Cynthia Asquith in her diary, ‘he dances mostly with Rosemary [Leveson-Gower] and … motors with her in the daytime.’181 Lady Rosemary, daughter of the Duke of Sutherland, held a temporary attraction for the Prince, who thought her ‘such a darling’, even briefly considering her to be the only girl he could ever marry.182 Queen Mary, however, had reasons for disapproving of the association. ‘Pray don’t think of her,’ she wrote to the Prince firmly, ‘there is a taint in the blood of her mother’s family.’183

  The Prince’s involvement with Rosemary Leveson-Gower ended, for once, without rancour. In any event, whatever the shortcomings of her blood line, Rosemary was a single girl. From Marguerite onwards, the Prince showed a decided tendency to pursue married women and, in late February 1918, an air-raid introduced him to the Englishwoman who would become his London mistress and long-term confidante.

  The Prince had gone to a party, hosted by Mrs Kerr-Smiley, at 31 Belgrave Square. At that stage in the war, London was suffering a series of night-time air-raids by German Zeppelin-Staaken aircraft, sometimes called ‘giant bombers’. Air-raid warnings were not, as in the Second World War, given by sirens. In a more primitive system, maroons were fired and cyclists would roam the streets ringing handbells, each with a large placard tied in front bearing the words ‘TAKE COVER’.

  On the night of 16–17 February, the Royal Hospital Chelsea, not far from Belgrave Square, had been hit, causing a number of fatalities. A few nights later, presumably dressed for an evening out, Mrs Dudley Ward, the estranged wife of a Liberal MP, and her companion, one ‘Buster’ Dominguez (said to be ‘some kind of Latin American diplomat’184), were walking in Belgrave Square when the alarm was sounded. Seeing an open door, they sought temporary refuge in the hallway of Mrs Kerr-Smiley’s town house and, when discovered there, were invited to take shelter in the cellar.185 After the air-raid wardens had been heard shouting ‘ALL CLEAR’ in the street outside, festivities resumed. The Prince, immediately attracted to the new arrival, danced with Mrs Ward until the end of the party in the small hours. Nobody seems to know what happened to ‘Buster’.

  Before the year was out, a new and growing obsession with Winifred (or, gratingly, to modern ears, ‘Freda’) Dudley Ward would cause the Prince to abandon his Paris bébé, Marguerite, with alarming and wholly unforeseen consequences for the supremely self-centred heir to the throne …

  ‘Fredie’, as he would call her, was almost exactly the same age as the Prince. She not born ‘in the purple’ and came from a middle-class background. Her father, Sir Charles Birkin, was ‘in trade’, a manufacturer of Nottingham lace, and, as often happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dowry available from a manufacturer’s daughter had overcome the snobbery of an increasingly impoverished landed class. In 1913, Fredie married William Dudley Ward, a cousin of the Earl of Dudley and an MP who was nineteen years her senior.

  Like Marguerite, Fredie was ‘petite, elegant and pretty’ and enjoyed the attentions of a number of men – her ‘barrage’ as she called them.186 Lady Cynthia Mosley, Marquess Curzon’s daughter, later waspishly claimed that when Fredie Dudley Ward went to her first coming-out party, ‘nobody knew her. She was terribly dressed.’ Ali Mackintosh, one of the barrage then ‘in charge of something at Barkers’,187 took Fredie in hand and was responsible for teaching her the art of couture.188

  Duff Cooper, a good judge of character, thought Fredie ‘very nice’, also ‘charming and [with] such a good sense of humour’.189 Outside her narrow social circle, many of whose members were little more than vacuous pleasure-seekers, she would have been thought immoral, rather ‘loose’, a ‘woman of easy virtue’. Despite having two young children to care for, she took a succession of lovers, including the Prince, Michael Herbert (a cousin of the Earl of Pembroke), Major Reginald Seymour, and, in the later 1920s, the American socialite Rodman Wanamaker II. Michael Herbert, about the same age as the Prince, was a longstanding rival for Fredie’s affections. She seems to have relished playing the Prince off against Michael Herbert, a process that lasted well into the 1920s.

  Fredie had a strong personality (another trait shared with her Paris rival and with Wallis Simpson), although she ‘contrived to appear feminine and frail’.190 She was discreet and, true to the rules of contemporary upper-class (and upper-middle-class) etiquette, was the safe recipient of myriad confidences imparted by the neurotic Prince. Although Fredie kept several hundred of his letters, writte
n between 1918 and 1930, she never made use of the material for her own advantage and, to the end of her long life, was reluctant to discuss the relationship. The Prince, on the other hand, seems to have destroyed her letters to him.

  An English listener described Marguerite’s voice as ‘rather shrill’.191 Fredie, according to Duff Cooper, spoke in a ‘rather high childish voice’,192 also thought to be ‘oddly attractive’.193 Perhaps the Prince had a taste for women with unusual voices. The BBC television interview of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, recorded in 1970, suggests that Wallis also spoke in a distinctive manner, slightly harsh and rasping, consistent with her own forceful character.

  On his way back to Italy at the end of March 1918 and staying, as usual, at the Hotel Meurice, he was able to spend three nights in Paris, where ‘the Lord Claud & I will probably have lots of adventures…!!!!’194 Having Marguerite as his royal ‘keep’ in Paris would always be an edgy enterprise for the wayward Prince. On one occasion, he left a platinum cigarette case, given to him by his father for his 18th birthday, in the back of a Paris taxi. Despite an extensive search and the offer of a reward, the cherished item was never recovered.

  A far more serious and unwanted adventure took place at the end of March 1918, when the city, now within artillery range, was subjected to indiscriminate shelling by a huge German gun, positioned some 125km north of Paris. During Good Friday liturgy, over eighty people (mostly women and children) were killed when a shell exploded on the roof of the Church of St Gervase et Protais, near the Hotel de Ville. The Prince, all too familiar with the noise of shellfire, heard the strike, noting that ‘there was no mistaking the sound!!!!’195

  The final attempt by Germany to break through the allied lines was at St Quentin in April 1918. With ‘our backs against the wall’, the words of Field Marshal Haig, the tide of war gradually turned against the Central Powers. The loss of Russia as an ally after the Bolshevik coup d’état of October 1917 had been offset by the arrival of increasing numbers of American troops and the near-starvation imposed on Germany by an efficient seaborne blockade.

  The Prince was not able to return to Paris from his Italian posting until August 1918. He wrote frequently to Fredie and from early April began to use romantic phraseology in French which almost certainly derived from the style used in his letters to Marguerite (‘Milles et milles baisers, Bébée’).196 A letter to Fredie, written on 10 June 1918, however, suggests that the Prince was still corresponding with the other woman in his life. He told Fredie that he was ‘rather frightened’ about Paris in the light of a recent German advance. ‘I hear that the morale of the Parisians is good!!’ he noted, with the significant addition, ‘Anyhow of “les Parisiennes”!!!!’197 Although there are hints of sexual adventures in his letters to Fredie, the evidence suggests that the Prince took care not to let Fredie know about his mistress (his ‘keep’) in Paris.

  In any event, it seems that the Prince was not completely faithful to either his English love or his French love. One awkward incident, undoubtedly arising from some sexual adventure(s) by the Prince and involving women of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (known by the unhappily worded initials ‘VAD’), occurred during a short stay in Rome during May 1918. ‘The Lord Claud’ Hamilton, angered by the Prince’s behaviour, threatened to resign. ‘I have had a straight talk and said it must stop or I shall go,’ he wrote crisply to Marion Coke, the ‘little bitch’ now no longer the object of the Prince’s callow romantic affections.198

  The Prince’s long summer exile in Italy, punctuated by tedious official functions (or ‘stunts’, his own word), eventually came to an end. Saturday 17 August 1918 saw an open Rolls-Royce ‘tourer’ stationed outside the Hotel Meurice, awaiting the arrival of its princely owner. That morning, the Prince called on Lord Derby, the British Ambassador, but declined his invitation to lunch, evidently having other plans for the afternoon.199 The pattern of earlier meetings suggests a daytime liaison with Marguerite, his dame à cinq heures.

  Later on, accompanied by ‘The Lord Claud’, the Prince attended a ‘small dinner’ in his honour at the Embassy. The guest list was suitably grand, including the Duchess de Tremouille, the Duke and Duchess de Gramont and their daughter (‘23 and quite lovely’), and Madame de Polignac. Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel (Coco Chanel’s lover) was there with his wife, the former Diana Wyndham, together with Portia Stanley, not yet the object of the Prince’s vilification.

  The Prince, with a low boredom threshold, often found these occasions tedious, but – perhaps mindful of an enjoyable afternoon – was in excellent form that evening. Derby recorded that he had never seen anyone enjoy himself more. The Prince was ‘most cheery’ and seems to have joined in when ‘some of them afterwards danced to the gramophone’.

  The Prince spent one more night in Paris before returning to London, accompanied by ‘The Lord Claud’ and Joey Legh. Derby accurately foresaw ‘lugubrious circumstances’ awaiting the Prince at Windsor Castle. There was a national food shortage and the Ambassador considered that the young, pleasure-loving Prince ‘at all appreciates the rationing and teetotal diet…’ in the home of his parents.200

  The Prince returned to Paris two weeks later, but it is clear that circumstances had changed in the meantime. During his days in England, the relationship with Fredie had deepened considerably.

  Marguerite claimed that the coming of Peace had brought an end to the relationship with the Prince and her chronology was only a week or so out. Around August 1918, she had an operation, supposedly an appendicectomy, though evidence was later produced to show that it had been a procedure to remove her ovaries.201 Whether because the Prince, smitten by Fredie Dudley Ward, was now tiring of her company (and that of her intellectual circle) or because Marguerite was temporarily out of circulation, or because the war was coming to an end, the relationship was cooling. The Prince’s earlier zest and enthusiasm for Parisian life was clearly beginning to wane. ‘Paris falls very flat just now & I’m not enjoying it at all,’ he declared to Fredie, writing from the Hotel Meurice on 4 September.202 It was perhaps at this time that he stopped seeing Marguerite, who would likely have known, from her many contacts, if the Prince had passed through town without seeing her.

  After a further spell of duty in Italy, the Prince spent a short leave in England, where he saw Fredie and admitted having lied about the episode involving the VADs in Rome during May, hinting about other affairs. More worldly-wise than the Prince, Fredie claimed not to be bothered about his ‘medicine’ when he was away from her, as, in her words, ‘les petits amusements ne comptes pas’ (‘little diversions don’t count’).203

  Spending the latter part of October at the HQ of the Canadian Corps in northern France, the Prince continued to bombard Fredie with gossipy letters, none of which refers to his entanglements in Paris. It seems that, by late October 1918, the Prince had finally decided to break off his relationship with his ‘Paris woman’. The Prince should have been aware that Marguerite was a woman of fiery spirit and no respecter of persons. Not for the only time in his life, he chose the path of denial, hoping that Marguerite would quietly accept being dropped after an affair that had lasted the better part of eighteen months. Her ability to look after herself was not to be underestimated. She would make a great deal of trouble for the King-Emperor’s eldest son.

  Around 1.30 a.m. on 1 November 1918, he began a long letter to Fredie, who was in low spirits recovering from a bout of ‘Spanish flu’. The Prince, just back from a party at the Canadian 1st Division HQ, was feeling bullish, having ‘so so enjoyed & loved reading your 2 divine long letters. Gud!! what a happy man I am to-night (or rather this morning).’ The Rome incident now ancient history, the Prince confidently reported that ‘6 Canadian VADs were brought up by car from Boulogne & 3 of them were “divine women” … tho’ of course it was a case of “single girls are much too tame” not that your E tried (or wanted to) find out if this was so!!’ The party was also enriched by ‘½ dozen nursing sisters from a Can[adian] C.C.s
… as ugly as sin … I longed to have my own little girl there to dance with…’ At this point, feeling sleepy and having to go forward in a few hours to see the Canadian attack on the German lines at Valenciennes, the Prince broke off his letter.

  Unscathed by shellfire, he returned to HQ the next evening and, to his horror, found a bombshell awaiting him. A letter, ‘a regular stinker’, from Marguerite reminded the inconstant Prince that she still had his love letters, with all those foolish, indiscreet comments about the conduct of the war, insulting abuse about his father, letters very probably scabrous into the bargain. Although this letter seems to have been lost, there is evidence that it contained some very damaging personal allegations.204 And Marguerite, in bitter mood, had money in mind.

  ‘Oh! Those bloody letters, and what a fool I was not to take your advice over a year ago!!’, he wrote despairingly to Joey Legh. ‘How I curse myself now, tho’ if only I can square this case it will be the last one, as she’s the only pol I’ve really written to … I’m afraid she’s the £100,000 or nothing type, tho’ I must say I’m disappointed and didn’t think she’d turn nasty: of course the whole trouble is my letters and she’s not burnt one!!’205

  Eager to catch that night’s King’s Messenger, the Prince hastily finished his letter to Fredie. The last two scrawled pages reveal an unpleasant side to the Prince’s character, moral cowardice in continuing a grubby little deceit upon a woman he claimed to love deeply. For nine months he had kept Fredie completely in the dark about his lengthy affair with Marguerite, despite all the breastbeating about the Rome affair and his promises to be truthful in future. Now, at last, Fredie might have to be told about the French mistress, but although he had just written a letter of alarming candour to Joey Legh, he was not ready to tell Fredie about his predicament, certainly not in a letter, however frank he had promised to be about his sexual foraging.