At Marlborough House, the king found the Duke and Duchess of York dining with Queen Mary. As simply as he could, Edward explained the reasons for his apparent aloofness: “I have no desire to bring you and the family into all this. This is something I must handle alone.” If Queen Mary had hoped to learn that her son had changed his mind, Edward said, he was “sorry to disappoint her.”75 The Duke of York later recorded: “David said to Queen Mary that he could not live alone as King & must marry Mrs. Simpson.”76 The Countess of Shaftesbury, Queen Mary’s Lady of the Bedchamber, later wrote of her mistress: “Though fond of her children she was not maternal, but she was passionately devoted to Prince David, and the way he behaved hurt her more than anything else in her life.”77
The king did not return to the Fort until 2 a.m., accompanied by Sir Walter Monckton, who was so concerned about the king that he offered him two mild sleeping pills. In the end, it was the shattered Sir Walter who took the tablets, while the king fell asleep unaided.
Across the Channel in the early hours of December 4, Wallis and Perry had just arrived in Rouen at the Hôtel de la Poste, having booked for their small entourage under the names “Mr. and Mrs. Harris.” “We found rooms in a hotel, just like ordinary tourists on the road,” Perry later recalled. “ ‘Perry,’ Wallis said to me through the door, after we’d been in our separate rooms for what seemed like an eternity, ‘will you please leave the door open between your room and mine? I’m so frightened. I’m so nervous.’ ”78 Soon after, Wallis called out to Lord Brownlow again, asking if he could sleep in the bed next to hers. She said that she felt too upset to be alone. He went into her room, still fully dressed, and pulled the blankets up over himself. Suddenly, Wallis started to cry: “Sounds came out of her that were absolutely without top, bottom . . . they were primeval. There was nothing I could do but lie down beside her, hold her hand, and make her feel that she was not alone.”79
Later that morning, Wallis tried to call the king from the reception of the hotel. “By this time the whole of Rouen knew who Wallis was,” said Perry. “They were standing in the hall, in the street, in the square—hundreds of them.”80 Perry, Inspector Evans, the maid and the driver tried to shield Wallis so she had a little privacy as she attempted to speak to the king.
The last leg of their journey, to Cannes, took them through endless towns and villages. Reporters lay in wait for them at every turn. Wherever they stopped, Wallis tried to speak to Edward. But the telephone lines were hopelessly bad in the 1930s, and the king could only half hear of what Wallis was trying to say to him through deafening crackling. She was forced to shout, which alarmed Perry, who feared reporters would hear. At the other end of the line at the Fort, Sir Walter Monckton, who was now living there, said that the king had to shout as well, so the entire household staff heard the attempts at conversation. The intermittent clicks on the lines, meanwhile, were the sound of Thomas Robertson at work; he was a twenty-seven-year-old MI5 intelligence officer who, standing in the undergrowth of Green Park, had tapped the telephone junction box that served Buckingham Palace. Shivering in the cold, the government spy listened in to all the king’s private phone calls. He was one of the first people to learn that the king intended to abdicate.81
“Is everybody listening?” Wallis would say when the twenty clicks heralded a newcomer on the line. Nevertheless, she persevered. “Never leave your country! You can not give in! You were born to this, it is your heritage, it is demanded of you by your country,” she implored Edward. “The king took absolutely no heed,” said Perry Brownlow.82
At lunchtime, Wallis’s party stopped in Évreux, a charming town in Normandy. At the Hôtel du Grand Cerf, Wallis tried to call Edward from a booth near the bar. Before she left the Fort, she and Edward had decided on some simple code words for communication: Max Beaverbrook was “Tornado,” Stanley Baldwin was “Crutch,” Winston Churchill was “W.S.C.,” his initials, and the king was “Mr. James,” after St. James’s Palace.
Whilst Perry put the call through to “Mr. James,” Wallis wrote down a few notes on a piece of paper: “On no account is Mr James to step down. You must get advice. You must bring in your old friends. See Duff Cooper. Talk to Lord Derby. Talk to the Aga Khan. Do nothing rash.”83 Over the abominable phone line, Wallis went over her list of points, “hoping by sheer repetition” to make herself heard and understood. “At the end I was screaming and so, too, were Perry and Inspector Evans outside the booth in an anxious attempt to drown out what I was saying.”84 In the end, with a sense of utter hopelessness, Wallis hung up.
In her distress, she realized when they were back on the road that she had left her scribbled note in the phone booth. Terrified that the press would get hold of it, the party debated turning back but decided against it. At some stage, the hotelier found it and discreetly pocketed it. In an extraordinary quirk of fate, years later, when Sir Harold Nicolson happened to be staying at the same hotel, the hotelier showed the scrap of paper to him. Harold, who knew Wallis through Sibyl Colefax, took the note and eventually returned it safely to Wallis.
The three-day journey to Cannes proved both traumatic and ill conceived. “The whole journey was mismanaged,” claimed Diana Mosley, “particularly in the way Lord Brownlow dealt with the newspapermen.” Lady Diana felt that “Wallis had nothing to hide” and should have spoken to the press, simply saying that she was going to stay with friends. Or Perry Brownlow should have issued a statement on her behalf. It was the biggest story of the decade and nothing was going to stop the newspapermen. Throwing a rug over Wallis in the back of the car, creeping out at three in the morning, through hotel kitchens and even escaping a restaurant in Vienne through a lavatory window into an alley to a waiting car were unedifying and humiliating for Wallis. “There was no need for them to behave like fugitives from a chain gang,” concluded Diana Mosley.85
* * *
Back in England, during the weekend of December 5–6, rumors gripped the nation that Winston Churchill was going to form a “King’s Party” in an attempt to bring down Baldwin’s government. The king was now under immense strain: chain-smoking, drinking whisky, losing the thread of conversations and cradling his head in his hands. Baldwin, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Alec Hardinge and others believed that the king was mentally ill. Tommy Lascelles overheard Clive Wigram saying, “He’s mad—he’s mad. We shall have to lock him up.”86
The writer and society hostess Edith Olivier noted in her diary on December 9 that Patricia, Viscountess Hambleden, had said that the king was as “mad as George III.” The viscountess had heard the bizarre assurance on good authority from the Duchess of York, to whom she was close,II that in previous years the king had been given injections “to make him able to have children and it is these which have sent him mad.”87 The courtiers were frantic that the king was so seemingly unstable; with his judgment impaired, he would be a loose cannon. Helen Hardinge, wife of Alec Hardinge, claimed that the king now slept with a loaded gun under his pillow, while Edward had been overheard on the phone telling Wallis that he would slit his own throat if she ever left him. The king was under great mental pressure, said Piers Legh, a senior member of the royal household. “His outbursts on being asked some obvious questions plainly indicated an unbalanced and thoroughly abnormal frame of mind.”88
Winston Churchill, who dined with the king at Fort Belvedere on Friday, December 4, the day after Wallis left, was more benevolent. He found that the strain Edward had been under had “exhausted him to a most painful degree,” and that he was “down to the last extremity of endurance.”89 Churchill pressed the king to play for time, but Edward was emphatic that to do so would be dishonorable when his resolve never to give Wallis up was unchanged. “It was certainly this very strict point of honour which lost him the Crown,” Churchill later said.90 Churchill felt that the king was ill and urged him to see his doctor. He told Stanley Baldwin that “it would be a most cruel and wrong thing to extort a decision from him in his present state.”91
E
dward was cheered and moved by Churchill’s unwavering support. During this period, Winston and his wife, Clementine, “fought like Kat and Pug”92 over the issue of the king’s abdication. Clementine felt that her husband’s views were rooted in the divine right of kings and the supremacy of love. She feared that this was a near-career-ending misjudgment of the mood of the political classes, who believed the king should put duty first.93
The king remained at the Fort with Monckton and George Allen, both calm, utterly loyal retainers. Edward was also greatly touched by the loyalty of switchboard operator William Bateman. The private line to the Fort “was loaded with top secret calls to Downing Street, and later on with confidential conversations with Wallis at Cannes,” but Bateman, who determined that there would be no leak on his watch, refused to relinquish control of the switchboard while he slept. Loyal Bateman, blithely unaware of MI5’s surveillance, moved a cot bed into the room containing the Buckingham Palace switchboard and for ten days never left his post, only allowing himself catnaps between calls, such was his dedication to Edward.94
Although, for a moment, Edward saw the idea of a King’s Party as a “rocket hung brilliantly in the sky,” he did nothing to encourage or support the idea. In truth, the king had reached the stage where he wanted to go swiftly, with dignity, without further conflict and without fuss. A disappointed Beaverbrook concluded to Churchill: “Our cock won’t fight.”95 Of his decision, the king later said that after sleepless nights spent pacing his bedroom, he decided that it would be best for the country if he did not challenge the prime minister any longer. “By making a stand for myself, I should have left the scars of a civil war,” he wrote. “A civil war is the worst of wars. Its passions soar highest; its hatreds last longest. The price of my marriage under such circumstances would have been the infliction of a grievous wound on the social unity of my native land and the Empire. Could Wallis and I have hoped to find happiness under that condition? This was the question I answered in my soul that night. The answer was no. And so in faith and calmness, not unmixed with sorrow, I resolved to end the constitutional crisis forthwith. I decided to abdicate.”96
Ernest Simpson, by now almost forgotten in the saga, sent a message to Clive Wigram to say how distressed he was by the course of events. He was prepared “to come forward and say that the divorce was entirely a collusion between HM, himself and Mrs. S . . . he felt that he could squash the divorce by turning the king’s evidence.” If Ernest admitted that he had not committed adultery, as he had testified, the divorce would not be legal. Ernest hoped that if the king thought he could not marry Wallis, he might not abdicate. Wigram, horrified that this action might further prolong the crisis, made no use of Ernest’s generous offer.97
* * *
In the South of France, the home of Katherine and Herman Rogers was being besieged by hundreds of reporters and photographers. Lou Viei, originally a twelfth-century monastery, was situated on a stony ledge below the crest of a hill. The reporters tapped the Rogerses’ telephones, tried to bribe the household staff and followed anyone who left the house; while the photographers, equipped with long-range lenses, stationed themselves on high ground, even perching in the trees. Wallis, a prisoner again, said that “in seeking to escape one trap I had run blindly into another.”98
Immediately on her arrival, on Sunday, December 6, Wallis wrote Edward a fifteen-page letter that she hoped he would receive by airmail that evening. Muddled and barely coherent, it is evidence of her exhaustion and desperation that he heed her pleas. “Darling,” she wrote, “I am so anxious for you not to abdicate and I think the fact that you do is going to put me in the wrong light to the entire world because they will say that I could have prevented it.” She urged him to appeal to the nation but, above all, to take his time and not make any rash decisions. Echoing the advice of Churchill and Duff Cooper, she suggested that they should be separated until autumn the following year, after the coronation: “Think my sweetheart isn’t it better in the long run not to be hasty or selfish but back up your people and make an 8 month sacrifice for them.” Over and again she entreated him not to be silenced by Baldwin or to leave under a cloud. “I must have any action of yours understood by the world but hidden by B. we would have no happiness and I think the world would turn against me.”99
Wallis reiterated her pleas in phone calls to the king, but to no avail. Their conversations were strained by the dire lines and the misunderstandings between them, as they adhered to their amateur conversational code. “Despite David’s reassurances, it was becoming tragically clear that the balance was tipping towards abdication,” Wallis recalled. “Perry was in despair.”100 Lord Brownlow urged Wallis to renounce the king, convinced that only an unequivocal statement from her would stave off abdication. Perry and Herman Rogers helped Wallis write a statement to be issued to the press:
Mrs. Simpson throughout the last weeks has invariably wished to avoid any action or proposal which would hurt or damage His Majesty or the Throne.
Today her attitude is unchanged, and she is willing, if such action would solve the problem, to withdraw from a situation that has been rendered both unhappy and untenable.101
On Monday afternoon, December 7, Wallis read Edward the statement over the phone. The connection, as always, was noisy and uncertain. Afterwards, there was such a long silence that Wallis thought that the king had hung up. Hurt and angry, the king’s response was “Go ahead, if you wish, it won’t make any difference.” Indicative of the king’s staggering self-absorption, he later said: “It never occurred to me that she was actually asking to be released from the claims of love. Yet that is what she meant. And others read into her statement the same meaning.”102
Perry gave the statement to the press at seven that evening. Wallis said that “a terrible weight lifted from my mind. That night, for the first time since leaving the Fort five days before, I slept soundly.”103
Sadly, Wallis’s peace of mind was short-lived. The following morning she discovered that her divorce lawyer, Theodore Goddard, was on the way to the South of France in the prime minister’s official airplane. “I don’t know what his purpose is,” warned the king. “All I know is that Baldwin is behind it. Don’t be influenced by anything Goddard says.”104
All day, Wallis waited in “confusion and anxiety” for Goddard. He did not appear. Just as the party were about to go to bed, at two thirty in the morning, Inspector Evans brought Perry a note signed by four British reporters. Its bombshell contents shocked Wallis to her core: “Mr. Goddard, the well-known lawyer who acts for Mrs. Simpson, has arrived at Marseilles by special plane. He brought with him Dr. Kirkwood, the well-known gynaecologist, and his anaesthetist.”105
“Gynecologist? Anesthetist? Had the prime minister and my solicitor taken leave of their senses? Somebody had obviously gone mad,”106 a terrified Wallis exclaimed.
Lord Brownlow exploded with rage: this was a complete affront to Wallis’s dignity and the last straw. When Goddard rang on Wednesday morning to arrange his appointment, Perry “let him have it.” It turned out that the press, ever ravenous for scandal, had alleged that Goddard’s personal physician was a gynecologist. Goddard, it turned out, had a weak heart. The “anesthetist” was one of his law clerks.
A chastened Goddard arrived at the villa, having been instructed to walk alone in front of the press ranks, without carrying a briefcase or anything that could resemble a physician’s bag. As he sat in the drawing room, he made clear the reason for his visit. He urged Wallis to withdraw her divorce action. Her decree absolute was not due for another few months. Although a rescission would be complex and take time to effect, it would prevent the king’s marriage and, hopefully, the abdication.
“Mr. Goddard,” Wallis replied, “any question of inconvenience is now irrelevant. I will do anything in my power to keep the king on the Throne.”107 Goddard prepared a statement that he took back to Britain, and telephoned to Stanley Baldwin:
I have today discussed the whole posit
ion with Mrs. Simpson—her own—the position of the king, the country, the Empire. Mrs. Simpson tells me she was and still is perfectly willing to instruct me to withdraw her petition for divorce and indeed willing to do anything to prevent the king from abdicating. I am satisfied beyond doubt this is Mrs. Simpson’s genuine and honest desire. I read this note over to Mrs. Simpson who in every way confirmed it.108
The statement was signed by Theodore Goddard and countersigned by Lord Brownlow.
That afternoon, Perry spoke frankly yet kindly to Wallis. “The hour is very late,” he cautioned solemnly, “and the mills of the gods are grinding fast. You must now begin to think of the position you will find yourself in if the king does abdicate.”109
“I who had sought no place in history would now be assured of one—an appalling one, carved out by blind prejudice,”110 Wallis predicted.
Perry offered to go with her anywhere in the world if she were prepared to leave.
“At the end of my tether, my mind exhausted, my every fiber crying for an end of the intolerable strain, I told Perry that I was ready to leave that afternoon if he could make the arrangements.”111 They planned to travel by train to Genoa and then sail on abroad from there.
“Then came the dreadful ordeal of breaking the news to David, of burying my love for ever.”112 When Wallis was able to speak to Edward later, on a better line, she told him that she had agreed to instigate proceedings to withdraw her divorce petition. She outlined her plan to go away. After an emotive silence, the king told Wallis that George Allen would speak to her. He passed the phone to Mr. Allen, who told the stunned Wallis that it was too late. The king had made the decision to abdicate immediately and was in the process of doing so.
Edward’s voice came back on the line. “The only conditions on which I can stay here are if I renounce you for all time. And this, of course, I will not do,” he said firmly. “The Cabinet has met twice today, and I have given them my final word. I will be gone from England within forty-eight hours.”113
The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor Page 19
