The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor

by Anna Pasternak

“After he had finished, the others quietly went away and left me alone,” Wallis said. “I lay there a long time before I could control myself enough to walk through the house and go upstairs to my room.”32

  Wallis was not the only stunned listener to shed tears. “ ‘The King is gone, Long Live the King.’ We woke in the reign of Edward VIII and went to bed in that of George VI,” Chips Channon wrote on December 11. “Edward, the beautiful boy King with his gaiety and honesty, his American accent and nervous twitching, his flair and glamour, was part of history. At ten o’clock we turned on the wireless to hear ‘His Royal Highness, Prince Edward’ speak his farewell words in his unmistakably slightly Long Island voice. It was a manly, sincere farewell. . . . I wept, and I murmured a prayer for he who had once been King Edward VIII. Then we played bridge.”33

  Queen Mary recorded the event more matter-of-factly: “David made his private broadcast to the Nation which was good & dignified, he did it at the Castle, we listened to it at Royal Lodge.”34 Edward, who had included the line “during these hard days I have been comforted by my Mother and by my family,” sensed that when he returned to his family after the broadcast, what he “had said had to some extent eased the tension between us.”35 As it was getting late, and fog once again shrouded the gardens and valley, Queen Mary left first. “And then came the dreadful good bye as he was leaving that evening for Austria,” she wrote. “The whole thing was too pathetic for words.”36 Monckton recorded: “Queen Mary, ever magnificent, was mute and immovable and very royal. The brothers were sad and showed their emotion.”37

  After a farewell drink with his siblings and Sir Walter, Edward took his leave around midnight. “My brothers walked me to the door exactly as they would have done if I were leaving for Balmoral, Sandringham or some other familiar place,” he recalled. “On this leave-taking, however, it was I who as the subject of the king bowed to Bertie; and George, watching, shook his head and cried almost fiercely, ‘It isn’t possible! It isn’t happening!”38

  Monckton reported that as Edward bowed over his brother’s hand, he said: “ ‘God bless you, Sir. I hope that you will be happier than your predecessor,’ and disappeared into the night, leaving the Royal Family speechless.”39

  There was tremendous courage in the dignified way that the prince left his family, his heritage and his country. He drove with Monckton for an hour, out across the Hartford Bridge Flats, through Hampshire to Portsmouth, where a ship was being readied for him. There was, perhaps deliberately, no time for reflection as the friends chatted amiably about their time at Oxford, during which they had both been members of the Officers’ Training Corps. At Portsmouth, they found the quayside dark and deserted. Eventually finding the right dock, they were met by the commander in chief, Admiral Sir William Fisher, his staff, and members of the former sovereign’s household: Sir Piers Legh, Ulick Alexander and Godfrey Thomas. After brief farewells, Edward crossed the gangway with Slipper under his arm to meet the captain, Commander C. L. Howe.

  At two in the morning of December 12, 1936, HMS Fury, an F-class destroyer, slid silently and, unusually for Edward, unescorted, out of Portsmouth harbor. Watching the shore of England recede, the former king was overcome with emotion. “If it had been hard to give up the Throne, it had been ever harder to give up Great Britain,” he later wrote. “I knew now that I was irretrievably on my own. The drawbridges were going up behind me. But of one thing I am certain; so far as I was concerned love had triumphed over the exigencies of politics.”40

  From Lambeth Palace, the Reverend Alan Don observed: “A couple of hours later the poor fellow was hurrying through the darkness to Portsmouth where he boarded a ferry for an unknown destination. Will he ever set foot on these shores again? I doubt it, if he ever marries Mrs. S. Feeling has hardened against poor King Edward very noticeably. . . . His was a dual personality, a mixture of much that was good and attractive and charming with much that was rotten and unstable. His infatuation for ‘the woman I love’ (as he called Mrs. S in his broadcast talk) descended to something akin to madness. What will be the end thereof?”41

  Nine hours after his brother’s departure, the new King George VI, pale and haggard, addressed his Accession Council at St. James’s Palace. He announced that the first act of his reign would be to confer upon his brother a dukedom. Although Windsor had been the family name of the reigning royal house of the United Kingdom since 1917, there had never been a Windsor dukedom. Edward now changed his title for the seventh time in his life. That afternoon, the new duke telegraphed King George VI via the Admiralty: “Have had good crossing. Glad to hear this morning’s ceremony went off so well. Hope Elizabeth better. Best love and best of luck to you both. David.”42

  Wallis sent a letter to Kitty de Rothschild, thanking her for offering Edward a safe haven. “Dear Kitty—be kind to him,” she wrote sweetly. “He is honest and good and really worthy of affection. They simply haven’t understood.” She also confided in her friend: “I have fallen back exhausted from the struggle to prevent this great tragedy. One felt so small not to be able to make him stay where he belonged—and then the world to turn against me—because I fought a losing battle.”43

  Wallis alone understood how harsh this period of exile would be for Edward and how impossible the transition from monarch to almost ordinary citizen. For the former king, one of the most painful aspects of his departure had been the refusal of a few of his former servants to accompany him. Fred Smith, who had been with him since 1908, had angrily and disrespectfully exclaimed, “Your name’s mud. M.U.D!,” to which Edward pitifully replied: “Oh, Frederick, please don’t say that. We’ve known each other for so long.”44 Crisp, his valet, refused to come because he did not want to be parted from his wife. Edward was deeply hurt, his loneliness palpable; for four months, and for the first time in his life, he was without the security of his retinue of advisors and retainers. Only Piers Legh and Ulick Alexander accompanied him into exile. But, far more crucial to his sense of self and sanity, he did not have Wallis. Unlike Wallis, Edward did not have the inner resources of intellectual or spiritual stamina to fall back on. At Schloss Enzesfeld, there would only be golf or skiing to entertain him. In his favor, his hosts were welcoming and he could speak German.

  As the official backlash against him gained momentum, Edward proved ill equipped to cope. On Sunday, December 13, the archbishop of Canterbury broadcast a sermon castigating the former king and the king’s friends. “My heart aches for ‘the Duke of Windsor,’ ” Lang wrote directly after the abdication, “remembering his childhood, his boyhood, his days at Oxford, the rich promise of his service as Prince of Wales—all ruined by his disastrous liking for vulgar society, and by his infatuation for this Mrs. Simpson.”45 Lang elected to demonstrate his aching heart via his own BBC radio broadcast, in which he castigated the former king for his “craving for private happiness” and denounced again the “vulgar society” which had led him down this unedifying path. The duke was outraged and so were many of his former subjects; after these attacks, the archbishop received hundreds of abusive letters, many violently so. Perry Brownlow felt justifiably enraged; Chips Channon also: “I myself wrote a dignified snorter to His Grace today. I hope the old gentleman has asphyxia.”46

  Wallis was also the recipient of thousands of angry, abusive and hostile letters. The hate mail also included assassination threats. “It is no exaggeration to say that my world went to pieces every morning on my breakfast tray,” she later said. “Everything that I stood for was condemned. The presumption [was] that I had somehow gained an ascendency over a beloved King.”47 She was shocked by the vocabulary of vilification in the onslaught of correspondence. Even in her darkest hour, with the world seething with “controversy and speculation” about her, with every newspaper screaming hysterical untruths, Wallis was perspicacious. “I became obsessed with the notion that, in a manner impossible for me to comprehend, a calculated and organized effort to discredit and destroy me had been set afoot.”48


  She wrote plainly to Edward: “The world is against me and me alone. Not a paper has said a kind thing for me.” She was especially wounded that Queen Mary had made a “colossal denial of statements in the foreign press saying she had seen me” and felt hurt that her future mother-in-law refused to meet or publicly acknowledge her. Admirably, Wallis realized that the only answer to any peace of mind, henceforth, would be to learn to contain and control her inner world. She schooled herself to survive what would have felled the hardiest of souls: “To be accused of things that one has never done; to be judged and condemned on many sides by people ignorant of the controlling circumstances; to have one’s supposed character day after day laid bare, dissected and flayed by mischievous and merciless hands.”49 She triumphed with “a kind of private arrangement with oneself—an understanding of the heart and mind—that one’s life and purposes are essentially good, and that nothing from the outside must be allowed to impair that understanding.”50

  Wallis wrote a tender, warm and reassuring letter to Edward on December 12, hours after he left England:

  Darling—my heart is so full of love for you and the agony of not being able to see you after all we have been through is pathetic. At the moment we have the whole world against us and our love—so we can’t afford to move about very much and must simply sit and face these dreary months ahead. . . . Your broadcast was very good my angel and it is going to be lovely. . . . Some of the papers—Times, Telegraph, Morning Post—have been disloyal to you and foul to me. I hope you will never forget this sacrifice and your brother will prove to the world that we still have a position and that you will be given some jobs to do. . . . I love you David and am holding so tight, Wallis.51

  In her letter she added that Perry Brownlow’s friendship with them both has been “absolutely marvelous in every way.” His kindness and loyalty moved her to tears. Perry, like Wallis, realized that the duke would be lonely and disoriented in Vienna. Before returning to London, he had offered to travel via Vienna to help Edward settle in at Schloss Enzesfeld. As he was leaving Lou Viei, he turned to Wallis and said: “I shall tell them in London how you tried to stop this tragedy. They may not believe me—they may not want to believe me—but I was witness.”52

  Perry arrived at the Rothschilds’ castle at around six, just as dawn was breaking. A footman took him through “this cold, lonely castle” to the duke’s room. There he saw Edward, “who looked just like a little schoolboy, sound asleep, with sun coming across his blond hair. His bed was surrounded by chairs and on each chair was a picture of his beloved Wallis.”53 It struck Perry that the former monarch had no possessions at all except twenty-six suits and Slipper, his dog. The duke had placed a small yellow pillow of Wallis’s on his bed. Perry, who stayed for two days with the duke, told Diana Vreeland: “It was an obsession. No greater love has ever existed.”54

  Back in London, Lord Brownlow found himself ostracized by society. Two weeks after the abdication, he wrote: “This is my life: today I walk into White’s and every man leaves the bar. I walk down Seymour Street, where Kitty and I have lived all these years, and if I see a friend he crosses to the other side of the street. Nobody—but nobody—speaks to me in London. It’s as if people really believed I was party to the abdication—to a conspiracy.”55

  Throughout their period of enforced separation, the duke and Wallis spoke almost every evening and sometimes several times a day on the telephone. This did not endear Edward to his hosts, as he ran up a phone bill of £800 in three months, which they were expected to pay. Communication via telephone was never easy: it could take up to an hour to put calls through from Cannes to Enzesfeld; and then the calls often dropped without warning. There was the constant risk of eavesdroppers, so freedom of speech was curtailed. The duke would phone Wallis every evening at seven. As the telephone at Lou Viei was in the hall, near the dining room, the butler, having laid the table, would withdraw to leave Wallis in privacy. She would bring in the phone via its long cord and sit at the dining room table, shouting to be heard, unconsciously banging her elbows on the table. Accidentally, she shattered many of the fragile coral handles on some special soup spoons that her hosts had lovingly brought back from China. Eventually, the butler decided that it would be safer to finish the table laying after her evening call to the duke.

  The couple could be more open in their written correspondence, however, which was almost daily for the twenty weeks that they were apart. On December 22, Edward wrote Wallis a long, chatty letter. He detailed their joint interests, and how much Slipper was eating, exercising and missing Wallis (“He sends you millions of dog kisses”). Edward described the Rothschilds’ generosity of spirit: they “are very kind and hospitable and allow me to lead my own life here by never expecting me for lunch or to sit and make conversation after tea.” Parts of the duke’s letters show him to be a man in the grip of manic euphoria—Perry found him “exalté to the point of madness.” One minute Edward would be lamenting “how cruel and inhuman the American newspaper business is,” the next, eulogizing his love for Wallis. “It’s all so lovely Wallis and so dear and sweet and sacred and I’m really happy for the very first time in my life.”56

  The duke was clearly in shock and dazed by events; as ever, his moods oscillated between soaring joy at the thought of his marriage to Wallis, and seismic self-pity. He found the separation “as hard and trying as two people have had to endure.” As time went on, and the biting reality of his new situation took hold—that he was an outcast from his family and his country—he was prone to outbursts of fury and bitterness. “If I ever hear another word of that old bromide ‘The English are a nation of sportsmen’ I’ll yell the place down.”57

  Wallis described her virtual incarceration at Cannes: “So much scandal has been whispered about me even that I am a spy that I am shunned by people so until I have the protection of your name I must remain hidden.”58 Though she did manage to escape to Somerset Maugham’s villa, La Mauresque, in Cap Ferrat, to join his house party for luncheon on Christmas Day.59

  Earlier, on December 17, with endless hours of contemplation to revisit the past, Wallis had written to her estranged husband: “Ernest—none of this mess . . . is of my own making—it is the new Peter Pan plan. I miss you and worry about you—in spite of the fact that due to letters [the hate mail] I shan’t live very long and in fact am a prisoner. Four detectives. I have nothing for you for Christmas because I can’t move on account of threats so sit all day. Oh dear, wasn’t life lovely, sweet and simple. Wallis.”60

  Ernest replied at the end of December: “I did not have the heart to write before. I have felt somewhat stunned and slightly sick over recent events. I am not, however, going into that, but I want you to believe—I do believe—that you did everything in your power to prevent the final catastrophe. My thoughts have been with you throughout your ordeal, and you may rest assured that no one has felt more deeply for you than I have. For a few pence each day I can keep au courant with your doings.”61 He later made a salutary point in another note: “And would your life have ever been the same if you had broken it off? I mean could you possibly have settled down in the old life and forgotten the fairyland through which you had passed? My child, I do not think so.”62

  Wallis wrote furiously to Ernest after she read the first biography about her, published in New York that December and titled Her Name Was Wallis Warfield: The Life Story of Mrs. Ernest Simpson by “Edwina H. Wilson.” Wallis detected the heavy hand of Mary Raffray in the account. The publishers had helpfully included a foreword: “This life story is authenticated by a very close friend of Mrs. Simpson who has known her since childhood, through her school days, her debutante years and her married life in America and in London.” Mary Raffray had included pointless frippery on Wallis such as: “she can complete a jigsaw puzzle in half the time the average person takes,” and “a wise hostess never entertains at the same time her bridge-playing friends and those who shun the game.” Nevertheless the book, which included ins
ights such as “she does not affect dark nail polish, preferring a pale pink shade,” sold out and was reprinted three times in a fortnight.63

  “Have you read Mary’s effort at literature,” a wounded Wallis wrote to Ernest. “. . . It is written by Mary and one other bitch. Charming to make money out of one’s friends beside sleeping with their husband. Everyone in London says the amount of stuff she has sold is the top. . . . I warned you of this ages ago but you wouldn’t believe me. I am very sad.”64

  Worse for Wallis was the dreadful waxwork effigy of her in Madame Tussauds. As in life, Wallis was not grouped with the royal family but with Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc. More offensive was the heavily jawed, fuller-figured, sour-faced depiction of Mrs. Simpson that Tussauds had created. It reflected none of Wallis’s grace, style and dignity. She clearly saw it for the grotesque caricature that it was, asking her lawyers if there was any way it could be removed. “It really is too indecent and awful to be there,”65 she lamented to Monckton.

  However, Wallis generously opined that “of the two of us, it was David who had by far the worse time, although in his reticence, he rigidly held in his grief.”66 Through their telephone calls and letters, she witnessed, with increasing sadness and alarm, the fracture between him and the royal family. “It was a terrible thing to watch,” she said. “David had taken leave of his family in sorrow but in a hopeful spirit, leaving many matters to be composed in what he assumed would be an equally cordial and compassionate atmosphere. Now he said to me: ‘The drawbridges are going up behind me. I have taken you into a void.’ ”67

  It never seemed to have occurred to Edward that abdication would mean permanent exile from Britain and virtual banishment from his family. He later said that he “never intended to renounce my native land or my right to return to it—for all time.”68 Diana Mosley recalled being told by the duke that when he abdicated, “the new king had promised that after an interval he could come back from time to time to Fort Belvedere, the house he loved so much. But this was a gentleman’s agreement, there was nothing written down, no legal arrangement.”69