The Duke of York looked on, nervous and highly embarrassed. The king, noticing this, broke off his conversation with a group of guests and came forward to greet his brother and sister-in-law. The Duchess of York took precedence at dinner, sitting on the king’s right, with the Duchess of Sutherland on his left. Wallis sat at the head of the table, but it was Elizabeth who led the ladies from dinner, without even glancing in Mrs. Simpson’s direction.
Whatever Wallis did and however she behaved, she was in an impossible situation; the Duchess of York’s disdain for her severely influenced her detractors, and this antipathy lasts to this day. Although Mary, Duchess of Buccleuch, a guest at the house party, wrote that she “saw no signs of Mrs. Simpson acting as official hostess” during her stay at Balmoral, amongst Scottish grandees, the die was cast. Word among the estate was that Wallis had offended long-serving staff by introducing the triple-decker sandwich to the menu, and another innovation: after-dinner films. The club sandwiches proved incredibly popular with guests, who made repeat orders, but less so with the already busy staff. It was also suggested that old and loyal retainers had been dismissed by the king on Wallis’s advice. The Balmoral trip attracted nothing but bad press for Edward and Wallis.
Yet after he left the castle, George, Duke of Kent, who had enjoyed his brother’s hospitality, wrote: “I could never believe that any place could change so much and have such a different atmosphere. It was all so comfortable and everyone seemed so happy—it really was fun.”43 Cecil Beaton recalled being shown a cine film taken by Herman Rogers of the Balmoral house party which captured the lighthearted gaiety Prince George referred to. “Here, against the Highland setting, more candid shots of the turreted castle, which caught the king demonstrating to his guests an Austrian game by shooting some kind of arrow through the air. Lord Louis Mountbatten tried after him, then the Duke of Kent. They fared badly making everyone laugh. As they sat on the terrace waiting for lunch, the ladies looked untidy and relaxed. . . . Every few feet of film, the king appeared with Wallis. She looked very different from the others, neat and towny in smart clothes and a black felt hat.”44
By October, Wallis and the king were back in London. Both were relocating. Wallis stayed at Claridge’s while she waited for the lease to become free on her new London home, a four-storey furnished property at 16 Cumberland Terrace, Regent’s Park. Cecil Beaton was commissioned by the king to photograph Wallis in his studio. Beaton, who had dismissed Wallis as “brawny and raw-boned” in 1930, now found her “bright and witty, improved in looks and chic.” He “liked her immensely,” he said. She came to his studio “rather shyly” and had scarcely arrived when the telephone rang for her. “It seems that incessant callers make demands upon her all the time,” he wrote. “ ‘Will you lunch?” “May I come in for a cocktail?” To accept all this lionizing required careful arranging, which she manages well. She has learned how to keep people at a distance: ‘Wait till I get home and look at my book.’ ‘My secretary will give you a ring in the morning.’ Her voice seemed quieter.”45
Beneath her popularity, valiant facade and rigid impeccability, the mounting emotional strain was taking its toll. “Whatever fantastic changes have taken place in Mrs. Simpson’s life,” Beaton noted, “she has obviously suffered. There is a sad look to her eyes. The camera was not blind to this.”46
Now that his mother had completed her move to Marlborough House, Edward, meanwhile, was very unhappily installing himself in Buckingham Palace, a place he had loathed since childhood. As he did not want to occupy his father’s rooms on the second floor, he moved into the Belgian Suite on the ground floor. This five-room apartment with tall French windows opening onto the gardens was named after Queen Victoria’s uncle Leopold I and was usually kept for visiting monarchs. The king made no changes to the rooms, bar adding a shower to the bathtub and replacing the ornate four-poster with a single bed. With some prescience, he said that he “had a feeling that I might not be there very long.”47 He installed an extra switchboard to handle his private calls, no doubt with Wallis in mind, and a private line to the Fort.
The king planned to throw himself into his work “with energy”; his schedule was packed until Christmas. Yet rifts in the royal household were creating an anxious, unsettled atmosphere. The Duke of York, increasingly shut off from his brother, confided to his wife that he felt neglected and ignored. The duchess put the couple’s distress into a letter to Queen Mary on October 11. She wrote from Birkhall, telling her mother-in-law about the lovely late summer weather, before turning to her main theme: “David does not seem to possess the faculty of making others feel wanted. It is very sad, and I feel that the whole difficulty is a certain person. I do not feel that I can make advances to her & ask her to our house, as I imagine would be liked, & this fact is bound to make relations a little difficult. . . . The whole situation is complicated and horrible and I feel so unhappy about it sometimes, so you must forgive me darling Mama for letting myself go so indiscreetly.”48
A few weeks later, Elizabeth wrote to the king, betraying no trace of her “indiscretions” to her mother-in-law. In luminous terms, she thanked her brother-in-law for lending her and Bertie Birkhall for the summer. “Darling David . . . It was ANGELIC and kind of you to let us have it. I do thank you from all my heart—you are always so sweet and thoughtful for us, and I wish that I could thank you as I would wish.” She signed off: “Your loving sister in law Elizabeth.”49
On October 1, Wallis moved temporarily to Suffolk. Her friends George and Kitty Hunter offered to stay with her while she waited for her divorce case to come to court. They drove to Felixstowe in Wallis’s Buick. Disheartened by the small, uninspiring cottage that awaited them, which would barely fit three people, let alone a cook and a maid too, Wallis felt low and melancholic. Seaside resorts can be bleak out of season; Felixstowe was particularly dreary, stormy and wet. Yet due to the silence of the British press, Mrs. Simpson and the Hunters passed unrecognized as they strolled into the town to collect their post and the newspapers, when the weather held. During blustery beach walks, Wallis agonized over her plight. Generally feeling depressed and anxious about the unflattering depictions in the foreign press, she tried again to make Edward see sense.
On October 14 she wrote to him on Claridge’s writing paper, though from Beech House, Felixstowe:
My dear—
This is really more than you or I bargained for—this being haunted by the press. Do you feel you still want me to go ahead as I feel it will hurt your popularity in the country. Last night I heard so much from the Hunters that made me shiver—and I am very upset and ill today from talking until 4.
She detailed what she had heard: that the king was hissed at in the cinema; that a man in white tie refused to get up in the theater when they played ‘God Save the King.’ Wallis continued:
Really David darling if I hurt you to this extent isn’t it best for me to steal quietly away. . . . I’m sorry to bother you my darling—but I feel like an animal in a trap and these two buzzards working me up over the way you are losing your popularity—through me.50
Wallis tried to disguise the extent of her despair in letters to Aunt Bessie, asking her to come to visit her in London in November. “Darling—I can never put a foot in the US on account of all the publicity. I am sorry you are in the dark but it is best for you to be that way. I love you and everything will eventually be alright—just now I am having a bad time.”51
Edward knew that the British press’s silence over the private lives of the royal family would not hold indefinitely. “Something was bound to give before long,” he later wrote. “And, believing in the direct approach, I decided to enlist the aid and understanding of two powerful newspaper friends, Lord Beaverbrook and the Honorable Esmond Harmsworth.”52 Max Beaverbrook controlled the Evening Standard and the Daily Express—which had the largest circulation in Britain—while Harmsworth, the son of Lord Rothermere, controlled the rival Daily Mail and Evening News. At the king’s reques
t, Beaverbrook was asked to a meeting at Buckingham Palace. “Name your time,” the king had said, an unusual indication of how urgently the press baron’s presence was required. Beaverbrook, who was suffering from acute toothache, delayed the king by two days. When they finally met, Edward asked Beaverbrook to protect Wallis from “sensational publicity” in his own country.53
“The king asked me to help in suppressing all advance news of the Simpson divorce, and in limiting publicity after the event,” Beaverbrook later wrote. “He stated his case calmly and with great cogency and force. The reasons he gave for his wish were that Mrs. Simpson was ill, unhappy and distressed by the thought of notoriety. Notoriety would attach to her only because she had been his guest on the Nahlin and at Balmoral. As the publicity would be due to association with himself, he felt it his duty to protect her.”54
Beaverbrook secured a “gentleman’s agreement with other press owners who censored themselves, agreeing to make no mention of Mrs. Simpson’s friendship with the king.” This conspiracy of silence was even assisted by newsagents who literally cut out revelations from foreign journals. The New York Times was stunned by this “voluntary surrender of the freedom of the press.”55 At this stage, Lord Beaverbrook was unaware that the king had marriage in mind. But he said that, if he had known, he “would still have done what I did. But the fact remains that I did not know, although I was having conversations with the king almost every day.”56
Following his satisfactory meeting, the king went to Sandringham on Friday night to prepare for a partridge-shooting party he was hosting the following week. This was to be the only time he would act as host at Sandringham. On his arrival, as the Royal Standard was hoisted on Sandringham Church, the flagpole snapped. A carpenter was instructed to work through the night to mend it, to prevent the press from labeling it a portent of doom similar to the Maltese cross falling from the imperial crown.
On Saturday, October 17, Edward wrote to Wallis, who had returned to London for the weekend: “This eanum note to welcome a girl back and to say that a boy loves her more and more and that he will be hurrying back to her very soon now. Oh my sweetheart what a nightmare these days—that are thank God ending now—have been. God bless WE my Wallis Your David.”57
As news of Wallis’s impending divorce circulated around the inner circles of the court and Whitehall, there was a renewed sense of alarm. Stanley Baldwin, who initially resisted pressure to confront the king, could delay no longer. A message was sent to Edward at Sandringham saying that the prime minister needed to see him as a matter of urgency. It was decided that Baldwin’s sudden appearance at Sandringham would create too much speculation amidst the shooting party, so Edward agreed to meet him at Fort Belvedere. He drove there on Monday evening, in preparation for the meeting set for ten o’clock the next morning.
“Friendly, casual and discursive, he might have been a neighbour who had called to discuss a dispute over a boundary fence,” Edward later said of Baldwin. After Baldwin complimented the king on the beauty of the Fort’s grounds, they retired to the fireside in the octagonal drawing room. Tired from the drive in an unpleasant little car, which the king noted “didn’t seem half big enough for him,”58 the prime minister, while outwardly composed, was agitated and in pain from his arthritis. The king was taken aback when, at eleven in the morning, Baldwin asked, almost apologetically, if he could have a whisky and soda. The king refused to join him on the grounds that he never drank before 7 p.m. But both produced their pipes and tobacco pouches and began to smoke.
Baldwin started by speaking of his high regard for the king, as a man, and his belief that he had the qualities to make an admirable monarch. “You have all the advantages a man can have. You are young. You have before you the example of your father. You are fond of your house and you like children. You have only one disadvantage. You are not married and you ought to be.”59 Baldwin then told Edward that the ministerial correspondence on his relationship with Mrs. Simpson was growing larger every day. A tide of public outrage could no longer be stemmed. He produced a file which contained samples of damaging material: “The American papers are full of it and . . . the effect of such comment in the American press would be to sap the position of the throne unless it is stopped.”60 He pointed out that while the British public would tolerate a considerable amount in a private life, when it spilled over into public life, they resented it. Citing Mrs. Simpson’s appearance in the Court Circular at Balmoral as inflammatory, he urged the king to conduct his affair more discreetly.
“The lady is my friend and I do not wish to let her in by the back door,” responded Edward, at his most dignified.
Then, suggested Baldwin, could he not put off the divorce?
“Mr. Baldwin, I have no right to interfere with the affairs of an individual. It would be wrong were I to attempt to influence Mrs. Simpson just because she happens to be a friend of the king’s,” came the disingenuous reply.
Could Mrs. Simpson perhaps leave the country for six months? Baldwin continued.
The king remained silent.
Baldwin failed to summon the courage to ask Edward if it was his intention to marry Wallis if she became free. Instead, he left mumbling that he was glad that the “ice had been broken.” He reported to colleagues that he found the king “stiff and in the toils.”61 However, he relayed to Mrs. Baldwin that the king had told him that Mrs. Simpson was “the only woman in the world and I cannot live without her.”62
According to Lord Beaverbrook, despite what he actually said to the king, Stanley Baldwin “did not want King Edward.” The prime minister had already clashed with Edward, when, as Prince of Wales, he had visited the unemployed in Wales and Northumberland without the government’s approval. “Baldwin did not believe in the capabilities of His Majesty for the art of kingship,” said Beaverbrook, “and resented his independence of politicians and his addiction to declaring himself on political issues, without consultation with his constitutional advisors.”63
Beaverbrook, who, like Churchill, came to deplore Baldwin, believing that he played a sinister and deceiving hand in Edward’s abdication, said: “He was a thoroughly lazy man, but was capable of immense energy when his own position was threatened. Whenever he was in danger he became a cool, determined, relentless and far-sighted adversary. He showed all the wisdom of the serpent. In the crisis of the king he was to do more. He was to show the serpent’s venom as well.”64 The king, who, according to Beaverbrook, “found Baldwin something of a bore,” had similar misgivings about his prime minister’s loyalties. He later wrote: “My talk with the prime minister perturbed me.” Of his relationship with Wallis, he now fully realized that “a friendship that had so far remained within the sheltered realm of my private solicitude was manifestly about to become an affair of state.”65
Edward decided to talk to Sir Walter Monckton, a barrister and old friend from his Oxford University days. Appointed attorney general to the Prince of Wales in 1932 and legal advisor to the Duchy of Cornwall, Monckton was the first person Edward had knighted as king. Invited to lunch at the Fort a few days later, Monckton and the king strolled after coffee along the Cedar Walk. Edward stopped and faced him. “Listen, Walter. One doesn’t know how things are going to turn out. I am beginning to wonder whether I really am the kind of king they want. Am I not a bit too independent? As you know, my make up is very different from that of my father. I believe they would prefer someone more like him. Well, there is my brother Bertie.” According to the king, Monckton did not wholly agree, yet “conceded the logic of my argument.”66
Although Wallis’s imminent divorce seemed certain to increase the risk of public scandal, still few people, even those close to the king, believed that he would actually marry Mrs. Simpson. Wallis herself did not entertain this possibility. When, in one of her meetings with Theodore Goddard, he tentatively raised the question of marriage, she blazed back: “What do you take me for? Do you think I would allow such a thing? I would never think of it. . . . Some da
y I shall just fade out.”67
The American press were in full cry to the opposite. The day before Wallis’s divorce petition was heard, the New York Daily Mirror ran a blaring headline that took up three-quarters of its front page: “KING TO MARRY ‘WALLY.’ WEDDING NEXT JUNE.”68
The night before her court appearance, Wallis could not sleep. She packed her suitcases from her unhappy stay in Felixstowe, ready to leave the following morning for London, then paced the bedroom floor, agitated as to whether she was doing the right thing. The burden upon her was intense. Yet as dawn broke, a measure of calmness settled over her. It was too late to turn back.
6
* * *
Oceans of Agony
At 2:17 p.m. on Tuesday, October 27, the case of Simpson W. v. Simpson E.A. came before Sir John Hawke at Ipswich Assizes. The court was surrounded by police, preventing the throng of press on the pavement from taking photographs, smashing two cameras in the process. Wallis arrived with Goddard and was given a seat in the witness box (although it was normal custom for a woman to stand while testifying). She was struck by how quiet the courtroom was and that there were only two women present in an otherwise empty gallery. “It’s the judge’s wife and a friend,” whispered Goddard.
The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor Page 14
