During the service, “Fruity” Metcalfe used the prayer book that Queen Mary had given Edward when he was ten. Inscribed in the front were the words: “To darling David from his loving mother.” Baba Metcalfe said: “It was hard not to cry. In fact I did.” She was not alone. “HRH had tears running down his face as the service finished.”58 Immediately afterwards, Sir Walter Monckton gave the new Duchess of Windsor an unmistakable bow. “For my part,” he said, “I never had any doubt. I always told the duke that I would treat his wife as his wife should be treated.”59
After the wedding breakfast, the guests were received one by one by the duke and duchess. Right until the moment of their marriage, Wallis had always curtsied to the duke and addressed him as “Sir.” For the first time, the awkward problem arose of who was going to bow or curtsy to the duchess. To honor the duke on his wedding day, his guests bowed and curtsied to his bride, and then to him. This issue of who would acknowledge the duchess “recurred for the rest of their lives,” said Diana Mosley. “It was noticeable that everyone with the slightest pretention to good manners treated her, for the duke’s sake, as he would have wished.”60 Newspapers were later full of reports that Lady Diana Cooper had committed the grave social misdemeanor of curtsying to the duchess, and subsequently the Coopers feared being ostracized from “polite society” and put on a blacklist of “friends of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.” “My mother always curtsied to the duchess, whenever she saw them both,” John Julius Norwich remembered. “People said to her, ‘You can’t.’ But she said, ‘It made him so happy, so we did.’ ”61 Diana Mosley commented: “Only people very anxious and unsure of themselves, hoping, perhaps, to show that they knew what was what, did otherwise.”62
Baba Metcalfe said that although she wanted to warm to Wallis—who thanked her effusively three or four times for coming to the wedding—she was unable to because she found her attitude “so correct and hard.”63 The apparent “dearth of softness” during the wedding ceremony—the absence of a reassuring hand on the duke’s arm, or a teasing glance—Baba Metcalfe interpreted as a lamentable lack of love on the bride-to-be’s part. Wallis was often mistaken for being cold and austere, where in fact her rigidity was a defense against terrible nerves and abiding fear of putting a step wrong. Highly attuned to British snobbery, Wallis would have been mortified to have made a social faux pas or to have embarrassed the duke in any way—especially on his wedding day, when the critical eyes of the world were straining upon them. Having been mauled by the press, vilified by the royal family and ostracized by friends since the abdication, the new Duchess of Windsor found the wedding a tense and bittersweet occasion. Wallis, who was anything but hard, used her implacable dignity as a cover for her vulnerability. It gave her self-respect.
Before the couple left on their honeymoon, which was to be in Austria, Sir Walter Monckton took Wallis aside. He told her that “most people in England disliked her very much because the duke had married her and given up his throne, but that if she kept him happy all his days that would change, but that if he were unhappy nothing would be too bad for her.” The duchess received his warning with good grace, replying: “Walter, don’t you think I have thought of all that? I think I can make him happy.”64
From England, Chips Channon wrote of the wedding day: “the Windsor wedding has taken place in a foreign country amid a blaze of publicity and rather cracked trumpets, and the photographs of him and Wallis show an animated, ecstatic pair. Reaction here, however, is setting in and people are angrily demanding why he should be so snubbed?”65
That afternoon, Chips was surprised to receive a telegram from the duke. “Many thanks for your good wishes. We shall write when we get the present. Edward,” it read. “It must have been sent directly after the Service as it arrived at 4 o’clock and is dated Tours,”66 Chips surmised. When still the following day there was no mention of the wedding in the Court Circular, Channon raged on the duke and duchess’s behalf. “Almost every newspaper last night and again this morning has run a leader of good wishes to the Duke of Windsor. The Times, however, refrained. It is of course an organ of the Archbishop and he is a power behind it. I think it is disgraceful. The treatment of the Duke of Windsor by the present Government has hurt the institution of royalty far more than ever the Duke of Windsor did himself by his abdication.”67
The day was generously referred to by Wallis afterwards as “a supremely happy moment. All I had been through, the hurts I had suffered, were forgotten.”68 For the honeymoon, the duke had arranged a stay at Schloss Wasserleonburg, a secluded castle set in the Carinthian Mountains, lent to them by Count Paul Münster, a cousin of their friend Lord Dudley, a wealthy landowner in the Black Country. Accompanied by their replacement cairns, 186 trunks and 80 additional items of luggage, the honeymoon couple stopped en route for a day in Venice, in between trains, where Mussolini’s fascist government, wise to the propaganda value of the visit, greeted the newlyweds with an impressive array of flowers and gondolas.
Arriving at the castle, the duke, who had been fretful that his bride would not like the choice of honeymoon venue, was relieved when Wallis congratulated him on finding such a magnificent location with wrap-around views of the snowcapped Alps. “David had indeed done well,”69 she wrote. He had selected the Austrian staff himself, hired a chef and a butler from Vienna, and recruited a British secretary, Mrs. Bedford. “The first thing I learned about David as a husband was that he was much more thoughtful and attentive than I had expected,”70 Wallis happily discovered.
At last, the couple found a measure of serenity. They walked, swam, played tennis and sunbathed. To sate his passion for extreme exercise, the duke would climb the Dobratsch, a rocky peak at the back of the castle, signaling to his wife below with a small mirror from the summit, while she lunched quietly on the terrace. “It was an idyllic interlude; for the moment one could almost forget the winter’s pain and separation,” Wallis said.71 She wrote to her cousin Leila Barnett: “Here I am at last with my king sitting on a mountain in Austria—which is really lovely and peaceful—we hope here to gather strength for future battles. . . . Please write me and say you still love me and that we may come to Wakefield one day.”72
However, the marital bliss was short-lived. The duke and duchess engaged in “interminable post-mortems concerning the events leading up to the Abdication,” talking late into the night: “If only I had done this, if only you had done that; if only you had listened to me, if only I had known.” “Endless rehashing” of “what ifs” and “if onlys” became “almost an obsession” between them.73 But Wallis soon realized that it would be futile and unnecessarily painful to dwell on regret. Thus, a few weeks into their marriage, the couple made a pact “never to discuss the Abdication again.” To preserve their relationship, they dropped the subject for good. Later in life, the duke obliquely referred to the delicate subject of the abdication as “1936.”74
A whisper of the loneliness felt by the duchess—adored by her husband yet reviled by the rest of the world—was apparent when she wrote to Ernest during her honeymoon. She confided in her ex-husband once more how much she missed him and their life together. “I think of us so much though I try not to. Wherever you are you can be sure that never a day goes by without some hours’ thought of you & for you and again in my prayers at night.”75 She asked him for news: “I wonder so much how you are? How is the business 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 told Ernest that she had, at last, found peace in the mountains and was trying “to recover from all those terrible months that we all went through before starting out in the future. I have gathered up courage from that.”76 With myriad uncertainties of a future roaming in exile with the duke, it was the steadfast nature of her marriage to Ernest that Wallis now felt the loss of. She loved Edward, yet she missed the comfort and safety of her marriage to Ernest. He, better than most, knew what she was going through as he had shared her i
ntimate knowledge of life with “Peter Pan” at the Fort.
When Sir Walter Monckton visited the duke and duchess in Austria, he was relieved to find them “both really well and happy.” He urged them to find somewhere to settle, at least temporarily. “It is going to be difficult to keep his time occupied, but she is genuinely trying to help,” Sir Walter recorded, “and though it is early days, I was honestly impressed and feel happier about them than I expected.”77
Difficulties continued to ripple through the honeymoon, thanks once again to the royal family. From Austria, the duke and duchess traveled to Venice, then Vienna, Salzburg and Yugoslavia. Edward discovered that the Duke and Duchess of Kent were also holidaying in Yugoslavia. Edward exploded in rage when he was informed that only his brother George was prepared to visit them. When Edward demanded to know if Princess Marina did not want to come, or whether she had been forbidden from doing so, he was told that she did not care to meet Wallis. In the end, neither the Duke nor the Duchess of Kent visited the honeymooners; Wallis was snubbed, and the duke was shunned by his family.
* * *
After a three-month honeymoon, the couple moved to Paris, where they took a small apartment—two bedrooms and a sitting room—on the third floor of the Hôtel Meurice, overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries. This was a base while they looked for a home, which proved to be complex; the duke preferred the country, while Wallis felt more comfortable in the city. The real issue was that neither of them had envisaged living on the Continent in permanent exile. “Probably the first year was the most difficult of all their married life,” said Diana Mosley, who became closer to the couple as she was then living in Paris. The duke did not want to buy a house, as he was still convinced that in time he would be allowed to go home, as part of the “gentleman’s agreement” with his brother. However, “as the months went on it became obvious that this was a promise he was not going to keep.”78 As Wallis was such an exemplary hostess and took pride in creating beautiful settings, not to have a property to make her own was particularly hard for her. At the end of August, she wrote to Ernest: “It is horrid having no home & living like snails yet how difficult to decide where to live with every country quivering.”79
While the duke was in Paris, it began to sink in that he had nothing to do. Still only in his forties, he yearned for some gainful employment. Accustomed to detailed itineraries and imposed structure, idle restlessness gave him time to nurse his many grievances against his family and dwell on injustices. While Wallis filled his life as much as she could, neither had anticipated a life of globe-trotting obscurity. Years later, she confided to the writer Gore Vidal: “I remember like yesterday the morning after we were married and I woke up and there was David standing beside the bed with this innocent smile, saying, ‘and now what do we do?’ My heart sank. Here was someone whose every day had been arranged for him all his life and now I was the one who was going to take the place of the entire British government, trying to think up things for him to do.”80
The duke craved a return to the limelight, costarring with his glittering consort. It was this backdrop, in part, which compelled him to make the worst mistake of his career—a decision which was to have bitter ramifications for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for the rest of their lives.
10
* * *
The Twilight Zone
In October 1937, the duke accepted an invitation, arranged by Charles Bedaux, to visit Hitler’s Germany. The American millionaire had substantial business interests in the country which were threatened by the Third Reich. Bedaux could see that to organize a visit by the Duke of Windsor would earn him considerable credit in Berlin. The Germans could be trusted to exact the maximum propaganda from the duke’s visit, as they sought to build close links with the man whom they believed could one day be of great use to them.
Edward, for his part, felt there was an urgent need for a third party that could stand aloof from the growing conflict between Germany and Britain, and that he was ideally placed to help reconcile the two countries and provide the impetus towards peace. The decision to go was, however, incredibly foolish. Floundering without his court advisors and strategists, the duke did not pause to consider that this was exactly the type of trip to attract widespread negative publicity. Subsequently, the visit would be used by the duke and duchess’s detractors as evidence that they were incipient Nazis. Nominally, this was a private tour to study projects to improve workers’ housing and labor conditions, subjects Edward had always shown a genuine interest in at home during his visits to the Rhondda Valley and the northeast. Less altruistic, however, was the duke’s wish to return to center stage, where he could be seen as a powerful force, his new wife by his side. Dudley Forwood believed that the duke’s strongest desire was to have Wallis experience a state visit. “He wanted to prove to her that he had lost nothing by abdicating,” according to Sir Dudley. “And the only way such a state visit was possible was to make the arrangements with Hitler.” There was also an element of pique in the duke’s woefully ill-judged decision to accept the führer’s invitation: “When the Foreign Office and George VI asked him not to go he felt that they’d been bloody to me, why the hell should I do what they want? They denied my wife her right.”1
On their tours of housing projects, youth camps and hospitals in cities such as Stuttgart, Dresden and Munich, local authorities were instructed to refer to Wallis as “Her Royal Highness,” affording the duchess the status of a royal on tour that she had been denied in Britain. At the historic meeting with the führer at the Berghof, his mountaintop retreat outside Salzburg, the Duke of Windsor watched proudly as, amid pomp and pageantry, Hitler leaned over to kiss the duchess’s hand. This startling image and the photograph of the duke smiling shyly as he shook hands with Hitler would linger decades after the event. Edward later stated: “In spite of Hitler’s phenomenal sway over the German masses, their Führer struck me as a somewhat ridiculous figure, with his theatrical posturings and bombastic pretensions.”2
When the duke praised in glowing terms the workers’ housing and the marvel of full employment, his words were retrospectively ascribed to praising the entire Nazi regime, creating an enduring picture of a man who condoned Hitler’s atrocities and gave comfort to Britain’s enemies. When the duke was photographed waving to the crowds, it looked like he was giving the Nazi salute. However, at the time of the duke’s visit, most members of the government would have agreed with the duke that the two countries shared many aspirations, that war with Germany was not inevitable, and that Soviet communism posed the greatest danger, not least from the threat of infection with social revolution.3
As well as Sir Dudley, the duke and duchess’s party included Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph. Apparently, earlier that year, Randolph Churchill had tried, unsuccessfully, to secure his own invitation to the Berghof via Unity Mitford. He was delighted to be able to accompany the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and to brief his father afterwards about the controversial visit.
The duke’s inspection of Nazi industrial and architectural showpieces was given fulsome coverage by Goebbels’s propaganda machine, which made much of Edward’s pro-German sentiments and anti-communist views. Nonetheless, when the newsreels were shown to British audiences at home, the Duke of Windsor was greeted with cheers. Yet Fleet Street played down the whole visit. At court, everyone was incandescent, asserting that the duke had behaved abominably, breaking his promise not to embarrass his brother and “dropping bombshell after bombshell.” His friends and advisors were written off as “semi-Nazis.”4
Wallis, despite her critics claiming she was also a Nazi, seemed indifferent to any political dimension of their visit. She wrote to Ernest only about the domestic details: “This is a most interesting trip, though very strenuous, starting at 8 am each morning and ending at 5. Tomorrow, to vary the tour a bit, we take the train at 7.15 am. Peter Pan is determined to help working conditions. He really likes those people much better than any of us—and I’m sure th
ey are much nicer.”5 Never before had she “been thrown in with such a strange, ill-assorted company of men,” she wrote afterwards. “They both repelled and fascinated. One thing was for sure: they were a humorless lot.”6 Once, while being driven down a street in Berlin, Wallis had remarked to a Nazi official on the “charming” German custom of setting flower boxes in the windows. “That depends upon the point of view” was the solemn response. “We had those things dropped on our heads by the Communists when we entered Berlin, and I still carry a scar from that time.”7
As ever, Wallis came across as gracious and polite to everyone she met. After a dinner with Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, his wife, Ilse, described the duchess as “a lovely, charming, warm and clever woman with a heart of gold and an affection for her husband she made not the slightest attempt to conceal.”8 Dudley Forwood wrote of Wallis: “During my tours of duty with them both, she showed every kindness and understanding; indeed often, when His Royal Highness was being somewhat difficult, she would overcome his stubbornness.”9
* * *
On their return to Paris, the Windsors met the American ambassador to France, William Bullitt. He reported to President Roosevelt that the duke was “obviously intensely in love with his wife.”10 Of Wallis, he noted that she “behaved like a person whose insides have been taken out and replaced by an idea of what a King’s wife should be like. She has lost that spontaneous wit and twinkle which used to make her very attractive; instead she is ‘gracious.’ I had the feeling that if one had her alone for a few minutes she would probably say: ‘isn’t this a hell of a mess but don’t you think that I am doing it well?’ ”11
The arch anti-appeaser, Winston Churchill, congratulated the duke on his visit to Germany, which he thought had gone surprisingly well. “I was rather afraid beforehand that your tour in Germany would offend the great numbers of anti-Nazis in this country, many of whom are your friends and admirers,” Winston told him, having been briefed by Randolph. “But I must admit that it does not seem to have had that effect, and I am so glad that it all passed off with so much distinction and success.”12 But the duke finally heeded Lord Beaverbrook’s advice to step away from the public arena for a while, after he was mocked and scorned in the press for his German trip. A cartoon in the New York Times depicted him leaning on a trunk with labels saying “St. James’s Palace, Honeymoon Castle, Château de Candé, Paris Hotels,” with a billboard behind him blazing “Duke of Windsor to study Housing.”13 A similar trip organized by Charles Bedaux to America, which Wallis was looking forward to because a visit to the White House was on the cards, was sensibly canceled. By then Bedaux was recognized as a Fascist sympathizer and was no longer welcome in his adopted homeland. Not only did he have to cancel the Windsors’ tour but officials of the American Bedaux company demanded he sever his connection to the firm he had founded.14
The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor Page 24
