However, the duke had no intention of idling on the French Riviera while his countrymen hurried to the colors. His primary preoccupation was how he might serve. Phone calls to London were guarded, due to eavesdropping by both British and German agents, but the duke told Monckton to relay the message: “I want to offer my services in any capacity that my brother deems appropriate, and I must return to Britain.”47 But when the king agreed to send an aircraft to bring the duke and duchess back from the Riviera, Edward instantly reignited his campaign for Wallis, initially refusing to return home unless the duchess was received at a royal residence. Fruity Metcalfe was aghast at such a stipulation during this fearful, pivotal time. “You have just behaved as two spoiled children,” he accused the Windsors. “You don’t realise that there is at this moment a war going on, that women and children are being bombed and killed while you talk of your PRIDE.”48
The king presented his brother with a choice of two jobs: either he could join the British military mission, attached to the French general headquarters at Vincennes, Paris; or serve as Regional Commissioner of Wales, a civil defense job that would require the couple to take up residence in Britain. “They would both stay in Wales,” George VI told his mother. However, the king insisted that top-secret information must be kept from Edward due to deep-seated suspicions over the Duchess of Windsor’s loyalties.49
Far from ferreting out official secrets, Wallis, who was terrified of flying, was anxiously negotiating a way to travel back to Britain by sea. The Duke of Windsor requested that a Royal Navy destroyer be sent. As Winston Churchill was now first lord of the Admiralty, Edward’s request was sanctioned. Lord Louis Mountbatten and his destroyer, HMS Kelly, was dispatched to collect the Windsors from Cherbourg. Randolph Churchill, resplendent in the uniform of the 4th Hussars (marred only by his upside-down spurs), attended on behalf of his father.50 Wallis, meanwhile, concerned that they might never see France again, frantically wrapped Edward’s most valued possessions in brown butcher paper and packed them in cardboard boxes. The cairn terriers were piled into a car, along with the cardboard boxes, and she, the duke and Fruity Metcalfe drove to northern France.
The royal family awaited their return with uncharitable trepidation. On August 31, Queen Elizabeth had written to her mother-in-law from Buckingham Palace: “If David comes back here (I suppose he must if there is a war), what are we going to do about Mrs. S? Personally I do not wish to receive her at all, tho’ it must depend on circumstances, what do you feel about it Mama? I am afraid that if they do return they will wriggle their way into things—tho’ not come to court functions of course. It is a very difficult position & a great nuisance, with many pitfalls.”51 Baba Metcalfe may not have been Wallis’s most ardent fan, but even she was incensed by the way the Windsors were treated on their return to England. “They were offered no accommodation anywhere so I invited them to stay at South Hartfield,” she wrote. “Not only were no rooms made available to the Windsors during their visit but no car was made available to meet them. Walter asked the Palace but was told that nothing was going to be done from that quarter so they were our guests.”52
Almost three years after Edward had left England in the middle of the night on one destroyer, he returned on another. As they entered Portsmouth harbor, at around 9.30 p.m., Edward turned to Wallis and said pensively: “I don’t know how this will work out. War should bring families together, even a Royal Family. But I don’t know.”53 After giving his wife’s hand a reassuring squeeze, he walked out of the cabin.
Touchingly, Winston Churchill had given orders for the Windsors to be received with due ceremony. A guard of honor of one hundred men—wearing tin hats and gas masks—was drawn up and a strip of red carpet was laid to the gangway of HMS Kelly. “Even in the pitch darkness the little ceremonial was beautifully carried off, as only the British can manage such things,” said Wallis. “David was stirred. He remarked later: ‘Of course, I have seen hundreds of guards of honour, but I don’t think I was ever prouder of inspecting one.’ ”54
“After a lot of handshaking and guard-reviewing, we went down and had dinner in Dickie [Mountbatten]’s cabin,” recalled Baba Metcalfe, who was waiting with Sir Walter Monckton for the Windsors at Portsmouth. Admiral Sir William James, the new commander in chief at Portsmouth, and his wife put the duke and duchess up for the night in Admiralty House. The foursome chatted for a while before retiring to bed. “They were nice to me, almost desperately polite,” Wallis remembered. “However, under the politeness, I became aware that it was I, rather than the former king, who was the object of their covert curiosity. When I was chatting with one, I could feel the sidelong glance of the other, charged with speculation, roving searchingly over me.”55 For the rest of her life, Wallis would face this oblique scrutiny, pregnant with the unasked question: Can this really be the Mrs. Simpson who caused it all? Is this really the woman who took our king from us?
The following morning, Baba Metcalfe collected the Windsors in her car, while her husband drove a van containing their luggage. The duke and duchess took up residence with the Metcalfes at their homes in South Hartfield, East Sussex, and at 16 Wilton Place, London. With Britain now officially at war, the duke’s return attracted little excitement. The novelist and New Yorker columnist Mollie Panter-Downes wrote: “The Duke and Duchess of Windsor came home in a blaze of public apathy. No one seemed particularly glad or sorry, but everyone felt it was natural that yet another anxious family should want to be reunited in such times. The Express, always a fierce Windsor partisan, devoted space to the duke’s reading on the journey, Nazi Germany Can’t Win, and to the duchess’s travelling coat—mustard-and-black tweed.”56
On September 14, the duke met his brother at Buckingham Palace. It had been agreed with Major Hardinge that it would be “easier” if no women were present. The meeting was civil but “unbrotherly,” reported the king. Edward, the king felt, “was in a very good mood, his usual swaggering one, laying down the law about everything.”57 “The Duke has slipped quietly around London,” wrote Panter-Downes. He “has been photographed shaking hands with [Minister of War] Hore-Belisha at the War Office, and has taken tea with his brother at Buckingham Palace, where the sentries have put away their red coats for the duration and now mount guard, minus tourists with Kodaks, in khaki battle dress.”58 The duke had decided that he would like to accept the position in Wales, which would keep him in Britain. He had told the king this at their meeting. Suddenly his brother felt that it would be preferable for Edward to be stationed in France. He did not want to give the duke the chance to “take his wife and flaunt her before the British Army.”59 After just two weeks in Britain, the Windsors were to be sent back across the Channel.
“So far as David’s family or the Court was concerned, I simply did not exist,” Wallis later wrote. “The fact that our love had withstood the tests and trials of three difficult years made no difference. Neither did his desire to share, however humbly, the war time burdens of the Royal Family and the hazards that war would present to us all.”60 Typical of the English upper classes, nothing was ever said. “It was simply a case of our being confronted with a barrier of turned backs, rigid and immovable.”61 Wallis bore the hostility and malice with characteristic equanimity.
Three days before Edward and Wallis’s return to France, on September 29, Queen Elizabeth wrote to her mother-in-law from Buckingham Palace. “I haven’t heard a word about Mrs. Simpson—I trust that she will soon return to France and STAY THERE. I am sure that she hates this dear country, & therefore she should not be here in war time.”62 The queen kept up her delusional menace of the duchess, writing to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia in the weeks that followed:
David’s visit passed off very quietly. He and Mrs. S stayed with Baba and Fruity Metcalfe, & they have returned to France, where let us hope they will remain. I think that he at last realises that there is no niche for him here—the mass of the people do not forgive quickly the sort of thing he did to this country, and th
ey HATE her! D came to see Bertie, and behaved as if nothing had EVER happened—too extraordinary. I had taken the precaution to send her a message before they came, saying I was sorry I could not receive her. I thought it more honest to make things quite clear. So she kept away, & nobody saw her. What a curse black sheep are in a family!63
Before leaving England, the duke and duchess made a sentimental visit to the Fort. “The lawn was overgrown,” Wallis observed. “The garden in which we had spent so many happy hours together had become a mass of weeds; and the house itself, shuttered, damp, and dark, was slowly decaying.” It must have been unbearably painful for the couple. Yet Wallis, ever restrained, simply declared: “It was a sad visit.”64
* * *
Whatever she did, it seemed, Wallis could not win. Nor could Edward. If he successfully carried out his war service, he would be perceived as upstaging his brother. If he failed, he would be chastised for letting down the monarchy. As a member of the British Expeditionary Force’s military mission in Paris, liaising with the French high command, “Major General the Duke of Windsor” made a good impression. Sir Walter Monckton, who accompanied the duke to lunch at General Gamelin’s headquarters at the Château de Vincennes, wrote: “HRH was wonderful. . . . He got everything going well and everyone talking and laughing etc. He really is first class at something like this.”65 However, the duke soon found himself sidelined, and his carefully compiled reports on French defenses were ignored. Many in the upper echelons of power saw his posting as pointless and contrived. The Scottish peer Lord Crawford dismissed Edward as “too irresponsible as a chatterbox to be entrusted with confidential information, which will be passed on to Wally at the dinner table.”66
Wallis, who was staying in a hotel in Versailles, was similarly keen to do her bit for the war effort. She joined a French relief organization, the Colis de Trianon-Versailles, which had been set up by her friend Elsie de Mendl. (Lady Mendl would later be awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur for her relief work with gas-burn cases.67) Wallis spent long days packing comfort kits for the French troops of knitted sweaters, socks, soap, gloves, cigarettes and toiletries. Wearying of hotel life, she moved back into their house in central Paris, on the Boulevard Suchet. She lived there with the dust covers shrouding the furniture, the tall windows blacked out with heavy, dark curtains and the carpets rolled up alongside the walls. She took another job, joining the motor branch—the Section Sanitaire—of the French Red Cross. In her own car, the duchess drove to hospitals behind the Maginot Line delivering plasma, bandages and cigarettes. Wallis later acknowledged: “I was busier and perhaps more useful than I had ever been in my life.”68
The duke and duchess spent the period later dubbed the phony war, from September 1939 to April 1940, mostly apart and often on the move. When an awkward incident broke out concerning Edward and his brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, Wallis wrote: “We had two wars to deal with—the big and still leisurely war—in which everybody was caught up, and the little cold war with the Palace, in which no quarter was given.”69 Both Edward and Henry, also a major general but now outranking the Duke of Windsor in precedence, had been invited to visit the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force near Arras on October 18. Buoyed by the warmth of the reception he received from the soldiers on the ground, Edward made the mistake of instinctively taking salutes intended for the commander in chief, Lord Gort. A few days later, he was informed that he had violated military etiquette and that, from then on, his tours must be confined to the French sector. The Duke of Gloucester also felt upstaged. Edward was accused of pushing himself forward inappropriately, causing Gort’s chief of staff, Henry Pownall, to rail: “If Master W. thinks he can stage a comeback he’s mighty wrong.”70
The Duke of Windsor was understandably outraged. His demand for an interview with the king, whom he accused of unbrotherly hatred, was declined. Churchill tried to smooth things over, counseling Edward to treat petty matters of precedence and protocol as beneath his dignity. Wallis astutely concluded: “David has always had a gift for dealing with the troops—the gift of the common touch and understanding. His admiration and respect for the fighting men in the ranks are deep, and its roots go back to the trenches of the First World War. It seems to me tragic, that this unique gift, humbly proffered, was never really called upon, out of fear, I judged, that it might once more shine brightly, too brightly.”71
The duke’s obsession with his family’s persecution of him was given fresh impetus when he received news in February 1940 that the king had turned Fort Belvedere over to the government. This was seen as the king’s preliminary thrust to reneging on his verbal agreement to reserve it for his brother. Wallis wrote to a friend: “We are both thoroughly disgusted and fed up in every way but are caught like rats in a trap until the war ends.”72
On May 10, 1940, Hitler turned on the Low Countries and France. A week later, as the Panzers rapidly advanced, Edward drove Wallis to Biarritz. He returned to Paris briefly but, unwilling to leave Wallis alone, soon hurried south again, stuffing his car with valuables and abandoning senior staff in his desire to get to Wallis. The duke’s actions drew fierce criticism from his friend and equerry Fruity Metcalfe, who told Lady Metcalfe: “I am very uneasy about him. He talks of doing anything—anything except the right thing. . . . W is like a magnet. It is terrible.”73 After the duke took the cars from Paris, stripping their Parisian home of its assets, Fruity resigned, forced to make his own way back to England without any transport. He wrote to Baba: “After twenty years I am through—utterly I despise him. . . . He deserted his job in 1936; well, he’s deserted his country now. . . . It is the end.”74 Metcalfe believed that the duke should have remained at headquarters in Paris to help oversee the evacuation of the Dunkirk beaches, although the duke had been told to leave by his superior officer.75 It was very difficult for outsiders to understand how desperately it mattered to the duke and duchess to be together in a world that seemed threatening and hostile on many levels; in a disintegrating Europe, the only thing it seemed they could cling to was each other. Even the appalled Fruity observed of their love: “it is very true and deep stuff.”76
Before leaving Paris, the duke had managed to pause to collect his latest jewelry commission from Cartier. Several months earlier, he had visited Jeanne Toussaint, Cartier’s design director, his pockets heavy with valuable stones from a necklace and four bracelets; together they created an impressive brooch: a flamingo with dazzling tail feathers of rubies, sapphires and emeralds. Thoughtfully, it even had a retractable leg, so that Wallis could wear it centrally, without the leg digging into her should she bend down. It was the duke’s birthday gift to Wallis on June 19.77
As France collapsed, the Windsors fled to neutral Spain. On June 23, the duke’s forty-sixth birthday, they arrived in Madrid, where Edward’s old friend Sir Samuel Hoare had just been posted as British ambassador. He told them that Churchill, prime minister since May following Chamberlain’s resignation, was sending flying boats as part of a rescue mission to Lisbon to ensure the duke’s safe return to Britain and that the Duke of Westminster had offered them Eaton Hall in Cheshire.
Yet again the duke, who was unable to think beyond his family’s ill treatment of Wallis, fired off conditions, his hotheadedness persistently damaging any chance of détente with his family. He demanded a meeting with the king at which the duchess would be present, a job with royal backing, and compensation from the civil list if he lost his tax-free status. “When the world is crashing,” Sir Samuel Hoare told him, “this is no time for bargaining.”78 For the past nine months, the duke had been simmering with resentment at repeated humiliations. Edward’s sense of perspective had become wholly distorted and he now lashed out at every perceived slight, causing further irreparable harm. Wallis said of their time in Madrid: “In a material sense, David and I were more or less back where we were in December 1936—certainly homeless, once more adrift in a strange country, our possessions scattered, David witho
ut a post, and our prospects befogged.”79 For the first time in his life, the duke tried to exist without a valet. Although Wallis said that he “adapted himself to this refugee interlude with far more resourcefulness and good humor” than she had anticipated, he was “certainly no Admirable Crichton.” It is said that no man is ever a hero to his valet; “it is almost impossible for a Prince to be a hero to his wife without a valet,” Wallis quipped.80
While Edward continued to harass an embattled Churchill, a bizarre subplot was developing, of which the duke was entirely unaware. The Germans were weaving a web of conspiracy, poring over conversations recorded between the duke and duchess. As Hitler prepared his plans for the invasion of Britain, he became convinced that, should occupation prove necessary, he could somehow use the Duke of Windsor. Hitler and his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, believed that Edward’s rancor towards his family meant that he would agree to be installed as a puppet king of England. According to German diplomats, the duke was seen as “the logical director of England’s destiny after the war.”81
It is almost inconceivable that the duke would ever have consciously betrayed his country. He did not help his reputation by making defeatist-sounding statements about Britain’s military preparedness and prospects against the Third Reich’s war machine. But he undeniably loved Britain. He pined for it. His greatest wish was to return home and be treated as a royal alongside his brothers, with Wallis as consort. “I won’t have them push us into a bottom drawer,” he told the duchess during this time. “It must be the two of us together—man and wife with the same position. Some people will probably say that, with a war on, these trifles should be forgotten. But they are not trifles to me. Whatever I am to be I must be with you; any position I am called to fill I can only fill with you.”82
The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor Page 26
