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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Anna Pasternak 2019

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Family trees by Martin Brown

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Source ISBN: 9780008297305

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008297329

Version: 2020-01-15

Dedication

To Wallis,

Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Windsor

Epigraph

I who had sought no place in history would now be assured of one – an appalling one, carved out by blind prejudice

The Duchess of Windsor

The fault lay not in my stars but in my genes

HRH The Duke of Windsor

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Family Trees

Prologue: The Heart Has Its Reasons

1. The Prince’s Girl

2. Ich Dien

3. One and Only

4. God Bless WE

5. Down with the American Harlot

6. Oceans of Agony

7. The Last Hour

8. The Fury

9. Untitled

10. The Twilight Zone

11. A Shadow King

12. Son Altesse Royale

13. My David

Epilogue: The Cedar Walk

Postscript

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements and Note on Sources

Notes

Picture Section

Index

By the Same Author

About the Author

About the Publisher

Family Trees

Prologue
The Heart Has Its Reasons

Once upon a time there was a charming, handsome prince. Whenever he visited even the farthest reaches of his kingdom, his people flocked to see him. He was adored the world over. Everyone expected him to marry a pretty, well-bred English virgin who would one day become Queen of England and its vast empire. But, when the prince was thirty-seven years old – having previously shown no sign of wanting to get married – he fell in love with an odd-looking, twice-divorced American. No one thought that the affair would last, so everyone close to him kept quiet about it. When the prince’s father, the king, died five years later, the prince inherited the Crown. Courtiers assumed that the new king would find a suitable young bride. To their horror he said that he could not continue to be king without the American woman he loved by his side and that he intended to marry her. Everyone in the royal palaces, the prime minister, the government, the Church, were shocked. They accused the wicked witch-divorcee of being a sorceress who had cast a spell over their poor, gentle prince in order to become queen. The king’s ministers told him that if he married this terrible woman, he would have to surrender the Crown.

But instead of renouncing his love, the king sacrificed his whole realm – an empire of over five hundred million people – to be with her. He only ruled for 326 days, making his reign one of the shortest in his country’s history. His devoted subjects were heartbroken. They blamed the ugly witch for taking their beloved sovereign away from them. His family banished him from the land, leaving him free to marry the woman he loved. Denied royal status, the couple spent the rest of their lives in exile, roaming the world aimlessly, sad that they could not return to the king’s homeland and to the little castle that he adored. The world, meanwhile, imagined that this was the Greatest Love Story Ever Told and that husband and wife went on to live Happily Ever After.

***

The story of the abdication of King Edward VIII and his marriage to Wallis Simpson has been told so many times that it has taken on the character of a fairy tale. Like fairy tales, much of what we are repeatedly told is in fact make-believe. The most scandalous love affair of the twentieth century may have softened into a romantic legend with time, but dark myths still endure. The dashing young prince, whose charisma and glamour ensured him the status of a movie star, gave up ‘the greatest throne in history’, as Churchill called it, to marry his one true love, an American divorcee. Surely, there can be no greater act of sacrifice than to give up such power, privilege and adoration for love? And for a woman whose appeal was such a mystery to most.

Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Windsor was considered the world’s most eligible bachelor. Society hostess Elsa Maxwell first met the Prince of Wales in the early 1920s ‘at Mrs Cuckoo Belleville’s house in Manchester Square. He was a gay, golden-haired, blue-eyed, debonair Prince Charming, the most famous celebrity in the world, who seemed a Raphael angel grown up. He projected an aura of glamour that was as unmistakeable as it was authentic.’ To the fashion editor Diana Vreeland ‘he was the Golden Prince. You must understand that to be a woman of my generation in London – any woman – was to be in love with the Prince of Wales.’

Men were equally beguiled. Even the senior Palace courtier, Alan Lascelles, known in royal circles as ‘Tommy’ and later a fierce critic of the former king, gushed in 1921 that the heir to the throne was ‘the most attractive man I ever met’. Piers ‘Joey’ Legh, an equerry who remained in the prince’s service for twenty years, accompanying him into exile, said of Edward a decade after the abdication: his ‘charm was so great that he would thrill with emotion if the duke entered the room just now’.

When news of Wallis Simpson’s affair with Edward broke from under a media blackout in 1936, what seemed unfathomable was why, when the Prince of Wales could have had any beauty he desired, he was smitten with an unconventional, severe-looking American, two years his junior with two living husbands. So much gossip and innuendo has been levelled at Wallis that it has become near impossible to discern the real woman or to hear her authentic voice amid the cacophony of condemnation. As her friend Herman Rogers said of her in 1936, ‘much of what is being said concerns a woman who does not exist and never did exist’. Lady Monckton, a close friend of the Windsors, later concurred: ‘People were always being nasty about Wallis. You must remember how jealous people felt when the Prince of Wales fell in love with her.’

Ever since, we have been overfed a diet of fantastical slander: that Wallis was really a man; that she had a perverse psycho-sexual hold over the prince; that she used manipulation and feminine wiles to lure him into abdicating; that she was a ruthless, cold, ambitious bitch, who schemed from the outset to be Queen of England. The well-worn view is that she alone was responsible for almost bringing down the British monarchy, triggering a constitutional crisis caused by her determination to marry the heir apparent. We have experienced her so fully as Machiavellian through others’ projections and prejudice, through misogynistic memoirs, biographies and unflattering portrayals, that she has become a caricature of villainous womanhood. Devoid of warmth, emotional complexity and a beating heart, she remains the brittle victim of salacious chatter and brutal character assassination many decades after her pitiful death.

Instead of simply belittling Wallis and defaming her reputation, we might try to understand this modern, intelligent, remarkable woman and the impossible situation she was placed in. She was, in fact, very warm, funny, irresistibly charming, loyal and dignified to the end. Adored by her many friends, she was written off by a cunning, powerful British establishment who sought to destroy and diminish her; men like Tommy Lascelles – who famously dismissed Wallis as ‘shop-soiled’ with ‘a voice like a rusty saw’ – the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin, and Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

However, far from being the villain of the abdication, Wallis was the victim. Instead of pushing for Edward to leave the throne, she had tried to prevent it. What most of her detractors fail to acknowledge is that she never wanted to marry Edward. Naturally she was initially flattered by his attention; as an American woman, living in London surrounded by society hostesses and social climbers, she felt giddy to be included in His Royal Highness’s elegant and rarefied circle. What woman would not have been beguiled by the prince’s ‘unmistakable aura of power and authority?’ According to Wallis: ‘His slightest wish seemed always to be translated instantly into the most impressive kind of reality. Trains were held; yachts materialised; the best suites in the finest hotels were flung open; aeroplanes stood waiting.’ Wallis made no secret of her open-mouthed delight, but she also believed Edward’s interest in her was transitory. She never expected his infatuation to last. In 1935 she wrote to her beloved aunt, Bessie Merryman, in Wallis’s hometown of Baltimore: ‘What a bump I’ll get when a young beauty appears and plucks the Prince from me. Anyway, I am prepared.’

The real tragedy for Wallis is that she could never have been prepared for what was to come, for the speed with which events spun so quickly out of her control. Though worldly, she would find herself painfully out of her depth. Unable to juggle her settled, second marriage to Ernest Simpson with the overwhelming and incessant demands of a besotted prince – whom she and Ernest nicknamed ‘Peter Pan’ – Wallis became the perfect pawn. She did not bargain for Edward’s self-absorbed, possessive and stubborn love for her and his absolute refusal to give her up. Although she valiantly tried to break off the relationship prior to the abdication, it would become impossible for Wallis to ever leave his side.

Probably the biggest lie in this fable is that Wallis lured Edward from his destiny. Her detractors claim that if she had never divorced Ernest Simpson, the abdication would not have occurred. Yet the truth is that she had had no intention of divorcing Ernest. It was Edward, then king, who forced her into this untenable position. In the name of his needy love, Wallis paid the ultimate price: entrapment by a childish narcissist who threw the largest tantrum in history when he could not have the two things he wanted most in the world: Wallis and the throne.

When I began my research, keen to strip away decades of grotesque caricature in an attempt to find the real Wallis, I feared that doors might close. The opposite happened; people were keen to talk with me and I found that those close to the story did not hold Wallis in contempt. Many powerful, key players who had led the charge against Mrs Simpson were now dead. The late queen mother, then Elizabeth, Duchess of York, for one, was furious that Edward’s abdication might force her highly strung and physically weak husband, Bertie, onto the throne and dehumanised Wallis as ‘that woman’ and ‘the lowest of the low’. The spite meted out to Wallis by certain members of the royal family was staggering. Those of Wallis’s friends who are still alive seem to finally feel freer to speak about the injustice they witnessed. Sitting in elegant drawing rooms in London, Paris, Gstaad and Marbella, interviewing those who knew Wallis, I heard the same sentiments echoed; that she was witty and diverting company; that the duke was self-absorbed and less engaging. That Wallis, possessed of perfect manners, behaved with laudable inner strength and dignity, despite the terrible slurs and insults hurled at her. ‘The world adored him,’ Hugo Vickers said of the Duke of Windsor, ‘yet the people who knew him and worked for him, had reservations about him. The world hated her but the people who knew her and worked for her, absolutely adored her.’

None of those with whom I spoke recognised the wicked Wallis of the history books. Repeatedly, I heard of her kindliness, sense of fun and depth of friendship, which contradicted the public image of a hard-nosed, shallow woman. The closer I got to Wallis’s true character, the greater my incredulity and mounting fury that the world has judged her unfairly and unkindly. She certainly was no saint, but she was far from the sinister manipulator depicted in many accounts. Her friends noted in their diaries and memoirs their warmth and respect for Wallis, yet these tender recollections never seemed to gain sufficient attention. ‘She was so affectionate, a loving sort of friend – very rare you know,’ wrote Diana Vreeland. ‘Women are rarely that sort of friend to each other.’ Wallis was similarly loyal to male friends, too. The Conservative MP Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon said: ‘She has always shown me friendship, understanding and even affection, and I have known her to do a hundred kindnesses and never a mean act.’

Wallis was viciously derided at the time of Edward’s abdication and then kept at a distance, denied the opportunity to change public mistrust and misgivings about her. When the scandal broke in the press, she was, understandably, devastated. ‘The enormity of the hatred I had aroused and the distorted image of me that seemed to be forming in minds everywhere went far beyond anything I had anticipated even in my most depressed moments,’ she later wrote. ‘I became obsessed by the notion that, in a manner impossible for me to comprehend, a calculated and organized effort to discredit me had been set afoot.’

She was right. So sensational were the press reports and fevered gossip in 1936 – Mrs Simpson was ‘gold digger’, ‘a whore’, ‘a sorceress’, ‘a Nazi spy’ – that many of the British and European aristocracy, meeting her for the first time, were taken aback. The woman they encountered was nothing like her vulgar fictional persona. ‘I was absolutely flabbergasted when I first met the duchess,’ recalled Count Rudolf Graf von Schönburg. ‘She was the complete opposite of everything we had heard about her.’

Count Rudi became a close friend of the Windsors, after meeting them in the early sixties in Marbella, where he ran a fashionable club. ‘The story of the abdication was so shocking,’ he recalled, ‘but the duchess was so much more ladylike than anything we had been led to believe. It was all “this loud, twice-divorced, American” … yet here was this charming, dignified woman, always well-dressed but never overdoing it. Maybe sometimes she laughed too loudly but that was it. I liked her very much and we spent many days and evenings with the couple, so had the opportunity to be treated like close friends and almost family. I have always considered that her position in history is factually incorrect and very unfair.’

The Duke of Fragnito had similar preconceptions when he met the duchess in Palm Beach in the early 1960s. ‘I didn’t want to like her because of everything I had heard about her,’ he admitted. ‘But I was taken aback by her grace and impeccable manners. To my great surprise she behaved like a real royal. She was just as captivating as the duke. They both had this ability to produce an electric charm which I have never forgotten.’

Vogue editor Diana Vreeland noted of Wallis: ‘There was something about her that made you look twice.’ The duchess’s private secretary, Johanna Schutz, accompanied Wallis to New York by boat shortly after the duke died. The duchess did not put her name on the passenger list and usually ate in her room. Occasionally, she would enter the dining room to keep Miss Schutz company. ‘Some people recognised her, others didn’t, but they knew she was special,’ said Hugo Vickers. ‘She was somebody. She had a hypnotic effect.’

‘I can’t say that she was sexy but she was sassy,’ remembered Nicky Haslam. ‘She walked into the room and it took off. The only other person I knew who had that quality was Frank Sinatra.’ Haslam, an interior designer who met Wallis in New York in 1962, said: ‘Wallis had innate American style. But to be an American was against her then, almost more than the divorce.’ Wallis described the archaic snobbery she encountered when living in London: ‘The British seemed to cherish a sentiment of settled disapproval towards things American.’

I was sitting with Nicholas Haslam in a Chelsea restaurant, when he produced an envelope, saying that he had something special to show me. It was a handwritten letter from Wallis to her friend, Elsie de Wolfe. Elsie, who became Lady Mendl in 1926 on her marriage to Sir Charles Mendl, a press attaché to the British embassy in Paris, was an eccentric who practised yoga and underwent plastic surgeries, years before both became de rigueur. Credited with inventing the profession of interior decorating, she was famed for her elaborate parties, and in particular the Circus Ball at the Villa Trianon, in Versailles in 1939. Attended by over 700 guests, including the duke and duchess, the ball was held in a green and white dance pavilion, and featured a fabulously jewelled elephant. Circumstances would force Wallis to adopt Elsie’s favourite motto, embroidered on taffeta cushions strewn throughout the Villa Trianon: ‘Never Complain, Never Explain’.

Turning the letter over in my hand, I admired Wallis’s chic stationery, the thick envelope lined with forest green tissue paper and the simple address on crisp cream paper, ‘La Croë, Cap D’Antibes’, the duke and duchess’s villa in the south of France. The letter, written in 1948, and dated Friday 24 September, reveals Wallis’s loose, looping handwriting in black ink: open and hurried in style and pace, there are endearing crossings out and insertions as her thoughts race across the page with barely any punctuation. She asks Elsie if she and Edward can come to stay with her at the Villa Trianon on their way back to Paris, and shares details of her day-to-day life: ‘I swam this A.M and tonight I go to Cap d’ail to play Oklahoma [a card game] with Winston Churchill who is stopping with Max Beaverbrook – we are great rivals and play every other night …’

The letter is full of warmth and love. Wallis reveals herself to be a genuine, open friend. She tells Elsie how difficult it is packing up and leaving La Croë, which she and the duke had leased for the previous decade. Her loneliness and tension is tangible; she details her desire to be alone, relaxing with Elsie, whom she misses: ‘I long to see your elephant again and sit in the tent with the blackamoors, look at you and the things you have created,’ Wallis wrote. ‘I do wish I could come sooner to do all this. My great and deep affection, as always, Wallis.’

When I contemplated the duke and duchess’s empty, peripatetic life after abdication and exile, I felt a profound sadness. What was their purpose from that point on? To live a life together to prove that it had not all been for nought? To be happy? To appear to be happy? There must have been an element of continuous silent strain for them both, a seam of guilt they dared not plunder. ‘I have a theory that when men let women down, they feel awful,’ Hugo Vickers told me. ‘The duke turned Wallis into the most hated woman in the world, then he couldn’t get her what he promised her: the HRH title, or his family to accept her. So he must have spent his whole life feeling guilty. I saw him once at Princess Marina’s* funeral and I have never seen a man with sadder eyes.’

Over three decades into their post-abdication existence, just a few years before the duke’s death, the Windsors were interviewed on live television, on the BBC, by the broadcaster, Kenneth Harris. The programme was watched by 12 million viewers. Wallis comes across effortlessly, she is witty and warm. The duke, with his hangdog eyes, appears less comfortable in his own skin, constantly looking down at his hands, studying his nails, fidgeting. The interviewer asks the couple if they have any regrets. The duchess, elegant in cream silk with a pale blue scarf, laughs nervously: ‘About certain things. I wish it could have been different. Naturally, we’ve had some hard times. Who hasn’t? But we’ve been very happy.’ The duke awkwardly grabs her hand in confirmation.

The main aim of this book is to look beneath this convenient illusion and give Wallis a voice: to peel back the layers of prejudice and examine the wider motives for the enduring propaganda against her. For Edward the relationship started as a thrilling coup de foudre; for Wallis, it would soon feel like a Faustian pact. Did a genuine love emerge between them as they surmounted the abdication together; or was the monumental sacrifice on both their parts a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions? Wallis, quietly stoical, rarely sought pity or openly complained about her suffering. She was always incredibly dignified, generously concluding in her memoirs: ‘Any woman who has been loved as I have been loved, and who, too, has loved, has experienced life in its fullness.’

* Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent (1906–68), was born Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark. She was married to Prince George, Duke of Kent, Edward’s favourite brother.

1

The Prince’s Girl

As the train hurtled north from St Pancras to Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, Wallis Simpson stood in the aisle of a compartment, practising her curtsy. No mean feat, given the lurch and sway of the carriage. She was being instructed that the trick was to put her left leg well back behind her right one. Wallis’s balance was further challenged due to a streaming cold; her head was bunged up, while a voice rasped in her ears as she tried to master an elegant swoop down, then up. This comical scene was being watched by her husband, Ernest Simpson – always gently encouraging – and their friend Benjamin Thaw Jr, who was delivering the etiquette tutorial. Benjamin, known as Benny, first secretary at the United States embassy, was married to Consuelo Morgan, whose glamorous American half-sisters were Thelma, Viscountess Furness, and Gloria Vanderbilt.

Benny and Connie Thaw had become close friends of the Simpsons in London. Wallis and Ernest mixed in society circles thanks to the introductions of his sister, Maud Kerr-Smiley. Maud had married Peter Kerr-Smiley in 1905. He became a prominent Member of Parliament and it was the Kerr-Smileys who facilitated the Simpsons’ entrée into the upper echelons of the aristocracy. It was through Consuelo that Wallis first met Thelma Furness. Consuelo had told her sister that Wallis was fun, promising Thelma that she would like her. In the autumn of 1930, she took Wallis to her sister’s Grosvenor Square house for cocktails. ‘Consuelo was right,’ said Thelma. ‘Wallis Simpson was “fun”, and I did like her.’ ‘She was not beautiful; in fact, she was not even pretty,’ she recalled of thirty-four-year-old Wallis – who was accustomed to an ever-present scrutiny of her looks – ‘but she had a distinct charm and a sharp sense of humour. Her dark hair was parted in the middle. Her eyes, alert and eloquent, were her best feature.’ Wallis was blessed with riveting sapphire blue eyes.

That November, 1930, Wallis received a tantalising invitation. Connie Thaw asked her if she and Ernest would act as chaperones to Thelma and the Prince of Wales at a weekend house party in Leicestershire. Connie had to leave for the Continent at the last minute, due to a family illness, and wondered if Wallis and Ernest would accompany Ambassador Thaw to Burrough Court, Viscount Furness’s country house, instead. The Simpsons had heard the rumours that Thelma Furness was ‘the Prince’s Girl’, having stolen the maîtresse-en-titre role from his previous lover, Mrs Freda Dudley Ward. The prince’s pet name for Thelma was ‘Toodles’ and she was said to be madly in love with him. It was an open secret in society circles that Thelma was unhappily married to Marmaduke, the 1st Viscount Furness. Known as the ‘fiery Furness’, he had red hair and a temper.

Wallis’s first reaction to the invitation was ‘a mixture of pleasure and horror’. ‘Like everybody else, I was dying to meet the Prince of Wales,’ she said, ‘but my knowledge of royalty, except for what I had read, had until then been limited to glimpses at a distance of King George V in his State Coach on his way to Parliament.’ Though unsure of royal etiquette, she was at least confident of looking the part, having been on a shopping spree in Molyneux, Paris, a few months earlier. Her attractive blue-grey tweed dress, with a matching fur-edged cape, ‘would meet the most exacting requirements of both a horsy and princely setting’.

It was past five o’clock on Saturday afternoon when Thaw and the Simpsons arrived at Melton Mowbray, in the heart of fox-hunting country. A thick fog choked the county. Burrough Court was a spacious, comfortable hunting lodge full of traditional mahogany furniture and lively chintz. Thelma’s stepdaughter, Averill, greeted the guests, informing them that the rest of the party had been delayed out hunting on the road, due to the fog. Taken into the drawing room, where tea had been laid out on a round table in front of the fire, Wallis could feel her skin burning. Suspecting she had a slight temperature, she hankered to go to bed. Instead, they were forced to wait a further two hours until the royal party arrived.

After what seemed an age, voices were heard in the hallway and Thelma appeared with two princes: Edward, Prince of Wales, and his younger (favourite) brother, Prince George. To her surprise, Wallis’s curtsy to each prince came off well, to the Simpsons’ shared amusement. Thelma led everyone back to the table in front of the fire and they had tea all over again.

Like many who meet celebrities in the flesh for the first time, Wallis was taken aback; she was surprised by how small the Prince of Wales was. She was five foot five and Edward less than two inches taller. Prince George was ‘considerably taller’, she noted, ‘with neatly brushed brown hair, aquiline features, and dark-blue eyes. He gave an impression of gaiety and joie de vivre.’ Facially, Edward was immediately recognisable. ‘I remember thinking, as I studied the Prince of Wales, how much like his pictures he really was,’ she recollected. ‘The slightly wind-rumpled golden hair, the turned-up nose, and a strange, wistful, almost sad look about the eyes when his expression was in repose.’

At eight o’clock, Prince George’s friends arrived and took him to another house party. Finally, the Simpsons could retire upstairs to change. Wallis had a much longed-for hot bath and took two aspirin, while Ernest – from America but naturalised British – remarked on the charm of the two royal brothers and how they instantly put everyone at their ease. ‘I have come to the conclusion,’ he added, ‘that you Americans lost something that is very good and quite irreplaceable when you decided to dispense with the British Monarchy.’

The dinner party that night for thirty guests was late even by European standards, past ten o’clock. Ernest and Wallis knew no one and were at a conversational loss as they had no knowledge of, or curiosity about, hunting. A fact not lost on the prince. ‘Mrs Simpson did not ride and obviously had no interest in horses, hounds, or hunting in general,’ Edward later wrote. ‘She was also plainly in misery from a bad cold in the head.’ Discovering that she was American, the prince kicked off conversation by observing that she must miss central heating, of which there was a lamentable lack in British country houses and an abundance in American homes. Wallis’s response astonished him: ‘On the contrary. I like the cold houses of Great Britain,’ she replied. According to the prince ‘a mocking look came into her eyes’, and she replied: ‘I am sorry, Sir, but you have disappointed me.’

‘In what way?’ said Edward.

‘Every American woman who comes to your country is always asked the same question. I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.’

***

Wallis, born Bessie Wallis Warfield on 19 June 1896, took pride in coming from old Southern stock. ‘Wallis’s family was very old by American standards,’ said her friend, Diana, Lady Mosley, approvingly. Wallis’s mother, Alice, gave birth to her in a holiday cottage at Blue Ridge Summit in Pennsylvania, where she had gone with her consumptive husband, named Teackle, to escape the heat of his native Baltimore. Alice and Teackle, both twenty-six years old, were fleeing their disapproving parents. Wallis wrote that her mother and father had married in June 1895: ‘without taking their parents into their confidence, they slipped away’. Records show that they actually married on 19 November, seven months before her birth, in a quiet ceremony with no family present. Wallis was conceived out of wedlock, a fact she tried to blur in later accounts of her life. She recalled how she once asked her mother for the date and time of her birth ‘and she answered impatiently that she had been far too busy at the time to consult the calendar let alone the clock’. Wallis learned early the benefits of discretion.

Her mother was a Montague from Virginia. They were famous for their good looks and sharp tongues. When Wallis was growing up, if she made one of her familiar wisecracks, friends would exclaim: ‘Oh, the Montagueity of it!’ Perhaps it was a Montagueism that caused Wallis as a young child to drop the first name Bessie and say that she wished to be known simply as ‘Wallis’. She was ‘very quick and funny’, remembers Nicky Haslam. ‘She could be cutting too. She put people’s backs up amid the British aristocracy in the sense of being too bright and witty.’ On meeting Wallis, Chips Channon declared: ‘Mrs Simpson is a woman of great wit’, she has ‘sense, balance and her reserve and discretion are famous’. ‘Her talent was for people,’ said Diana Mosley. ‘Witty herself, she had the capacity to draw the best out of others, making even the dull feel quite pleased with themselves.’

From a young age, realising that she was not conventionally attractive, and could not rely on the flimsy currency of her looks, Wallis developed an inner resilience and astute insight. ‘My endowments were definitely on the scanty side,’ she later recalled. ‘Nobody ever called me beautiful or even pretty. I was thin in an era when a certain plumpness was a girl’s ideal. My jaw was clearly too big and too pointed to be classic. My hair was straight where the laws of compensation might at least have produced curls.’

Wallis’s father died from tuberculosis when Wallis was five months old, leaving her mother penniless. The Warfields supported Alice and their granddaughter, affording Wallis a happy childhood. An only child, she plainly adored her mother, who summoned up ‘reserves of will and fortitude’ to surmount her single-mother status. Wallis admired her mother for never ‘showing a trace of self-pity or despair’ – characteristics that she inherited and would employ throughout her own life with similar aplomb. Alice urged Wallis never to be afraid of loneliness. ‘Loneliness has its purposes,’ she counselled her daughter. ‘It teaches us to think.’

Wallis and her mother were so close that Wallis described their relationship as ‘more like sisters’, in terms of their ‘comradeship’. Alice Warfield was both loving and strict. If Wallis swore, she would be marched to the bathroom to have her tongue scrubbed with a nailbrush. When Wallis was apprehensive about learning to swim, her mother simply carried her to the deep end of a swimming pool and dropped her in. ‘Then and there I learned to swim, and the thought occurs that I’ve been striking out that way ever since,’ Wallis wrote years after Edward VIII’s abdication.

When Alice first met Ernest Simpson, she warned her future son-in-law: ‘You must remember that Wallis is an only child. Like explosives, she needs to be handled with care. There are times when I have been too afraid of having put too much of myself into her – too much of the heart, that is, and not enough of the head.’ Alice sent Wallis to a fashionable day school in Baltimore, where Wallis was a diligent student. ‘No one has ever accused me of being intellectual. Though in my school days I was capable of good marks,’ she said. As a young girl, Wallis was already tiring of her unsettled life and ‘desperately wanted to stay put’. This desire to find a stable home would become a constant theme in her life, heightened when forced into exile with the Duke of Windsor. For a few years Wallis and her mother lived with her Warfield grandmother, then with her Aunt Bessie, until Alice, craving a place of her own, took a small apartment when her daughter was seven. Wallis loved her grandmother’s Baltimore house: ‘a red brick affair, trimmed with white with the typical Baltimore hall-mark, white marble steps leading down to the side-walk’. Here her grandmother lived with her last unmarried son, S. Davies Warfield – ‘Uncle Sol’ to Wallis. ‘For a long and impressionable period he was the nearest thing to a father in my uncertain world,’ Wallis recalled. ‘But an odd kind of father – reserved, unbending, silent. I was always a little afraid of Uncle Sol.’

A successful banker, Sol paid the school fees until Wallis’s mother married again. Alice’s new husband was John Freeman Rasin, who was prominent in politics and fairly wealthy. While offering financial security, he took Alice to live part time in Atlanta, which was a wrench for Wallis. She was sent to boarding school – Oldfields – in 1912 where the school motto, pasted on the door of every dormitory, was ‘Gentleness and Courtesy are expected of the Girls at all Times’. Wallis’s best friend at Oldfields was Mary Kirk, who was later to play an astonishing part in her life.

In 1913, Wallis and her mother suffered another shock. Freeman Rasin died of Bright’s disease, a failure of the kidneys. Wallis was heartbroken to see her mother so distressed. ‘It was the first time I had ever seen her dispirited.’ Wallis would never forget her mother whispering to her: ‘I had not thought it possible to be so hurt so much so soon.’ Alice had been with her second husband for less than five years.

Wallis left Oldfields in 1914, signing her name in the school book with the bold and rebellious ‘ALL IS LOVE’, and made her debut as part of the jeunesse dorée at the Bachelors’ Cotillion, a ball in Baltimore, on 24 December. (To be presented at the ball was ‘a life-and-death matter for Baltimore girls in those days’, maintained Wallis.) The Great War had begun in Europe in August, and the US daily newspapers were ‘black with headlines of frightful battles’. Baltimore’s sentiments were firmly on the side of the Allies and the thirty-four debutantes attending the ball were instructed to sign a public pledge to observe, for the duration of the war, ‘an absence of rivalry in elegance in respective social functions’. This was, according to Wallis, an attempt to set an example of how young American women should conduct themselves at a time when other friendly nations were in extremity.

Unable to afford to buy her ball gown from Fuechsl’s, Baltimore’s most fashionable shop, like most other debutantes, Wallis designed her own dress. White satin with a white chiffon tunic and bordered with seed pearls, it was made by ‘a local Negro seamstress called Ellen’. Wallis’s mother permitted her for the first time a brush of rouge on her cheeks, even though rouge ‘was considered a little fast’. Wallis’s love of couture would become legendary; as the Duchess of Windsor, she became an icon of style and an arbiter of meticulous taste. She regularly featured in the best dressed lists of the world. Her sharp eye for fashionable detail burgeoned early. According to Aunt Bessie, Wallis created a ‘foot-stamping scene’ at one of the first parties she ever attended as a little girl, when she wanted to substitute a blue sash her mother wanted her to wear, with a red one. ‘I remember exactly what you said,’ Aunt Bessie later told Wallis. ‘You told your mother you wanted a red sash so the boys would notice you.’ Wallis told a fashion journalist in 1966: ‘Whatever look I evolved came from working with a little dressmaker around the corner years and years ago, who used to make all my clothes. I began with my own personal ideas about style and I’ve never felt correct in anything but the severe look I developed then.’

As the Duchess of Windsor, she created an eternal signature style, which became her personal armour. Her dedication to appearance defined her as a Southern woman, hailing from an era when a woman dressed to please her man. ‘She was chic but never casual,’ said the French aristocrat and designer Jacqueline de Ribes, who similarly topped the best dressed lists. ‘Other American society women, like Babe Paley, could be chic in blue jeans. The duchess was a different generation.’ Elsa Maxwell observed: ‘The Duchess has impeccable taste and she spends more money on her wardrobe than any woman I’ve ever known. Her clothes are beautiful and chic, but though she invests them with elegance, she wears them with such rigidity, such neatness, that she destroys the impression of ease and casualness. She is too meticulous.’ Diana Vreeland, later of Harper’s Bazaar and editor of Vogue, described Wallis’s style as ‘soignée, not degageé’ – polished but not relaxed.

Wallis learned to distil every outfit to its essence, later asking Parisian couturiers, including Hubert de Givenchy and Christian Dior’s Marc Bohan, to dispense with pockets. Yet in her choice of nightwear she was the essence of soft, traditionally feminine sensuality. Diana Vreeland, who had an exclusive lingerie boutique off Berkeley Square in London in the mid-1930s, recalled that when Wallis shopped, ‘she knew exactly what she wanted’. One day, in autumn 1936, just before the king’s abdication, Wallis ordered three exquisite nightgowns to be made in three weeks. ‘First, there was one in white satin copied from Vionnet, all on the bias, that you just pulled down over your head,’ said Vreeland. ‘Then there was one I’d bought the original of in Paris from a marvellous Russian woman. The whole neck of this nightgown was made of petals, which was too extraordinary, because they were put in on the bias, and when you moved they rippled. Then the third nightgown was a wonderful pale blue crêpe de Chine.’

Years after the abdication, Elsa Maxwell asked Wallis why she devoted so much time and attention to her clothes. Was it not a frivolous pursuit when she had so many other responsibilities and her extravagance merely invited criticism? Wallis replied candidly: ‘My husband gave up everything for me. I’m not a beautiful woman. I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is to try and dress better than anyone else. If everyone looks at me when I enter a room, my husband can feel proud of me. That’s my chief responsibility.’

‘Wallis was a much more artistic creature than people thought,’ said Nicky Haslam. ‘She liked beautiful things and had a keen eye.’ Haslam, who worked on American Vogue in the 1960s, was introduced to Wallis in New York by the magazine’s social editor, Margaret Case. ‘We were seated at a booth at the back of the Colony restaurant in New York, on the best banquette, and in walked the duchess,’ he recalled. ‘Every single head turned to look at her and cutlery literally dropped. She was wearing an impossibly wide pink angora Chanel tweed with a black grosgrain bow at her nape. At the end of a wonderful lunch, she took a discreet peek at her watch, which was tied to her bag on a delicate chain. It was Fulco Verdura* who told her that it was common for women to wear a watch.’

Having the sartorial edge hugely increased Wallis’s confidence. Of her first meeting with the Prince of Wales at Melton Mowbray, she said her clothes would give her ‘the added assurance that came from the knowledge that in the dress was a little white satin label bearing the word Molyneux’.

***

It was her sister-in-law, Maud, who suggested that Wallis should be presented at court on 10 June 1931. Ernest Simpson’s rank as a captain with the Coldstream Guards gave him the requisite social status, but Wallis was reluctant to go. Once again, as for her debutante ball in her youth, she did not have the funds to buy the splendid clothes the occasion demanded. However, Wallis’s friends persuaded her that she would be foolish to turn down the generous offer of her girlfriend, Mildred Andersen, to present her. ‘Determined to get through the ceremony in the most economical manner,’ she wore the dress that Connie Thaw herself had worn to be presented, while Thelma Furness lent her the train, feathers and fan. She treated herself to a large aquamarine cross and white kid three-quarter-length gloves, writing to her Aunt Bessie that her aquamarine jewellery looked ‘really lovely on the white dress’.

Of the magnificent pageantry of the event, what impressed Wallis ‘to the point of awe’ was the grandeur that invested King George V and Queen Mary, sitting side by side in full regalia on identical gilt thrones on their red dais. Standing behind the two thrones were the Prince of Wales and his great-uncle, the Duke of Connaught. Ernest Simpson, in his uniform of the Coldstream Guards, looked on proudly as Wallis and Mildred performed deep curtsies to the sovereign, then to the queen. The Prince of Wales later recalled of Wallis: ‘When her turn came to curtsey, first to my father and then to my mother, I was struck by the grace of her carriage and the natural dignity of her movements.’ After the ceremony, Wallis was standing with Ernest in the adjoining state apartment, in the front row, watching as the king and queen walked slowly by, followed by other members of the royal family. As the Prince of Wales passed her, Wallis overheard him say to his uncle: ‘Uncle Arthur, something ought to be done about the lights. They make all the women look ghastly.’

That evening, at a party hosted by Thelma Furness, Wallis met the Prince of Wales again. Over a glass of champagne, he complimented Wallis on her gown. ‘“But, Sir,” she responded with a straight face, “I understood that you thought we all looked ghastly.”’ The prince ‘was startled’, Wallis noted with some satisfaction. ‘Then he smiled. “I had no idea my voice carried so far”.’

The prince was captivated. No British woman would have dreamed of speaking to him in such a direct and provocative way. ‘In character, Wallis was, and still remains, complex and elusive,’ he wrote of that encounter. ‘From the first I looked upon her as the most independent woman I had ever met.’

***

Prince Edward was born on 23 June 1894 at White Lodge, Richmond Park, the home of his parents, the Duke and Duchess of York. An extraordinary prophecy was made about the great-grandson and godson of Queen Victoria, the queen then aged seventy-five and in the fifty-seventh year of her reign. The socialist pioneer Keir Hardie rose in the House of Commons to shatter the polite rejoicing about the royal birth. Instead, he hollered: ‘This boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation … in due course … he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and the end of it all will be that the country will be called upon to pay the bill.’ As a predictor of Edward’s royal destiny, the Scot proved uncannily prescient.

Baptised by the Archbishop of Canterbury from a golden bowl of holy water from the River Jordan, in the presence of Queen Victoria, ‘David’, as his family always called him, would experience a strict, unhappy and largely loveless childhood. His mother showed little maternal warmth to her six children. While her husband, who in 1910 became King George V, was even more severe. A dogged disciplinarian, with rigid rules on dress and protocol, he ensured that any errant childish behaviour was bullied and beaten out of his offspring. ‘My father was the most terrible father, most terrible father you can imagine,’ Edward’s brother, Prince Henry, later said. ‘He believed in God, in the invincibility of the Royal Navy, and the essential rightness of whatever was British,’ said Edward. Handwritten on his father’s desk were the words that Edward was made to memorise as a young boy: ‘I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.’ These were the lines of an early nineteenth-century American Quaker, Stephen Grellet.

As a sense of duty and responsibility cleaved through every aspect of his royal bearing, the Duke of York made Edward fully aware of the influence of his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Her children and grandchildren ruled the courts of Europe. Her eldest daughter, Victoria, was the Dowager Empress of Germany; Kaiser Wilhelm II was the queen’s grandson, and the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, was her grandson by marriage. The empire over which Queen Victoria ruled was the most powerful in the world; it embraced a quarter of the earth’s surface and nearly a quarter of its population. On her death in 1901, this empire passed to her eldest son Edward VII and then to George. An empire Edward VIII would inherit, albeit briefly.

As Edward later wrote of his childhood: ‘For better or worse, royalty is excluded from the more settled forms of domesticity … The mere circumstances of my father’s position interposed an impalpable barrier that inhibited the closer continuing intimacy of conventional family life.’ Despite having five siblings, and being particularly close to Bertie and later, George, his younger brother by eight years, Edward recalled that: ‘We were lonely in a curious way.’ Denied association with other children their own age and home-educated by uninspiring tutors, behind the turreted facades of the royal households, there was emotional sterility. ‘Christmas at Sandringham,’ Edward reflected, ‘was Dickens in a Cartier setting.’ The writer James Pope-Hennessy described Sandringham as ‘a hideous house with a horrible atmosphere in parts, and in others no atmosphere at all. It was like a visit to a morgue.’ The Hon. Margaret Wyndham, who served as Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Mary from 1938, recalled: ‘At Sandringham if the king were present they put on Garter ribbons, tiaras and diamonds for every family dinner even without guests.’ Freda Dudley Ward later said of the prince’s childhood: ‘If his life was a bit of a mess, his parents were to blame. They made him what he was. The duke hated his father. The king was horrible to him. His mother was horrible to him, too … The duke loved his mother but his mother wouldn’t let him love her. She always took the king’s side against him.’

In 1907, twelve-year-old Edward was dispatched, in tears, to the Royal Naval College at Osborne on the Isle of Wight with the bizarre assurance from his father that: ‘I am your best friend.’ Edward quickly settled in as a cadet. His letters home were full of boyish excitement: he wrote to his parents of meeting the explorers Sir Ernest Shackleton and Captain Robert Falcon Scott and he performed in a pantomime. Instead of inheriting his father’s unassailable sense of duty, a duty that was ‘drilled into’ him, Edward, burdened by his regal inheritance, longed to break free. Even as a young boy he said that he ‘never had the sense that the days belonged to me alone’. Edward progressed to officer training at Dartmouth Royal Naval College, where he struggled academically – he came bottom of his year – but proudly reported to his parents that he was ‘top in German’. Perhaps the only thing he excelled in as a boy was German, learning first from his German nursemaid and then Professor Eugene Oswald, an elderly master who had previously taught his father the language. ‘I liked German and studied diligently,’ he said, ‘and profited from the hours I spent with the professor.’

The death of King Edward VII on 6 May 1910, after a reign of nine years, interrupted Edward’s summer term at Dartmouth for three weeks. Now heir apparent, he was called home to Windsor for his sixteenth birthday. His father informed him that he was going to make him Prince of Wales (the king’s eldest son does not automatically become Prince of Wales; he is anointed by the monarch when deemed appropriate). Edward returned to Dartmouth with a new title, the Duke of Cornwall, and considerable wealth from the Duchy of Cornwall estate. For the first time he had an independent income. ‘I do not recall that this new wealth gave rise to any particular satisfaction at the time,’ he said.

In his last term at Dartmouth, both Edward and Bertie (who had followed his brother’s trajectory from Osborne to Dartmouth, where Edward had ‘assumed an older brother’s responsibility for him’) caught a severe case of mumps, followed by measles. Two-thirds of cadets were hospitalised in this epidemic. It is believed that Edward then developed orchitis, a complication of mumps that left him sterile. The knowledge that Edward would not be able to produce an heir may have been significant later, in the establishment’s push to have brother Bertie (George VI) as king.

The coronation of George V in June 1911 thwarted Edward’s ‘first serious ambition’. He was forced to forgo the goal of his officer-cadet life and miss a training cruise in North American waters. After completing his naval training, Edward underwent a ‘finishing’ programme in preparation for his future full-time role as Prince of Wales. Assumed to be studying for Oxford, while his parents travelled to India for the coronation durbar, Edward instead opted to play cards with his grandmother, Queen Alexandra, and helped her with jigsaw puzzles. Nevertheless, Edward went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in October 1912. Befitting the future king, he had a special suite of rooms installed for him, including his own bath in the first private undergraduate bathroom.

Missing the camaraderie of his Royal Navy friends, he was ‘acutely lonely’ and ‘under the added disadvantage of being something of a celebrity’. He soon realised that the skills he had acquired in the navy, which included an ability to ‘box a compass, read naval signals, run a picket boat, and make cocoa for the officer of the watch’, held little sway with learned Oxford dons. The Prince was tutored by the most eminent scholars, including Magdalen’s esteemed president, Sir Herbert Warren, but Oxford did nothing academically for him. Personally, he seemed uncertain of himself; encouraging familiarity from fellow undergraduates, then swiftly acting with regal hauteur. He found himself happiest on the playing fields, discovering at Oxford a love of sport; he played football, cricket and squash. He beagled with the New College, Magdalen and Trinity packs, took riding lessons – progressing to become a fearless horseman. He punted, gambled, smoked, drank to excess and even smashed glasses and furniture as part of the high jinks of the Bullingdon Club – a club which, the New York Times explained to its readers, represented ‘the acme of exclusiveness at Oxford; it is the club of the sons of nobility, the sons of great wealth; its membership represents the “young bloods” of the university’.

Like Wallis, Edward displayed a strong early interest in fashion, developing his own flamboyant style. Rather than starchy formal garb, he preferred an eccentric mix of sports coats, loud ‘Prince of Wales checks’ (named after his grandfather, but popularised by Edward), bright tartans, baggy golfing plus fours and boyish Fair Isle sweaters. This was to become a source of conflict with his sartorial stickler of a father. When Edward entered the breakfast room at Buckingham Palace one morning, proudly sporting a suit with the new style of trouser turn-ups, the king bellowed: ‘Is it raining in here?’

‘Edward was completely different to any of the rest of the family,’ recalled John Julius Norwich, who, as a young man, knew both Edward and Wallis. ‘George V was very stiff and regal yet here was his son, a boy in a peaked cap, smoking and winking.’ The young prince ‘was dandyish and out to shock’, said David Maude-Roxby-Montalto di Fragnito. ‘He wanted to break tradition. He wore his signet ring in the continental way, just to be different. The British wear it facing inwards, to use on seals, whereas the Europeans wear it facing out. It was very arriviste of the prince to wear his continental style as no British gentleman would ever have done this.’

During his Easter and summer vacations in 1913, Edward went to visit his German relatives. ‘The purpose of these trips was to improve my German and to teach me something about these vigorous people whose blood flows so strongly in my veins. For I was related in one way or another to most of the many Royal houses that reigned in Germany in those days,’ Edward wrote. Later in life, ‘the duke loved to sit with my wife and speak perfect German (with a slight English accent) for hours with her’, recalled Count Rudolf von Schönburg, husband of Princess Marie Louise of Prussia, who was related to Edward through Queen Victoria. ‘Nothing made him happier than speaking at length about his German relations, to whom he was very close. He was very pro-German and would have liked to avoid a war between the two countries.’

‘Later in his life, the prince lived in France for over fifteen years, yet he never spoke a word of French,’ said John Julius Norwich. ‘He would start a conversation with a Frenchman in German. As you can imagine, his fluent German did not go down well in 1946 in France. To him, there was English and there was “foreign” and his “foreign” was German. The prince really was incredibly stupid.’

Edward left Oxford before taking his finals and seemingly without the slightest intellectual curiosity, claiming: ‘I have always preferred outdoor exercise to reading.’ He was now fully confirmed as the playboy bachelor prince. Painfully thin, he subjected himself to punishing physical regimes throughout his twenties and thirties. He liked to sweat a lot – he wore five layers to exercise – then party into the early hours, existing on minimal sleep and even less food. According to Lord Claud Hamilton, the Prince of Wales’s equerry from 1919–22, Edward took after his mother who, ‘frightened of becoming fat, ate almost nothing at all’. Her ladies-in-waiting regularly went hungry as meals consisted of tiny slivers of roast chicken, no potatoes, a morsel of vegetables, followed by a wafer.

Edward loathed Buckingham Palace so much, with its ‘curious musty odour’, that he refused to take meals there and only ate an orange for lunch. This became his daily routine. ‘His amazing energy makes him indulge frantically in exercise or stay up all night,’ observed Chips Channon. Boyish and hyper-energetic, Edward never had to shave and preferred nightclubs to formal society. Like a more sophisticated Bertie Wooster, he even took up the banjulele. His favourite question to courtiers was the decidedly un-royal, rebellious teenage riposte: ‘Can I get away with it?’

‘The late king and queen are not without blame,’ Chips Channon wrote at the time of Edward’s abdication in 1936. ‘For the twenty-six years of their reign, they practically saw no one except their old courtiers, and they made no social background whatever for any of their children. Naturally, their children had to find outlets and fun elsewhere, and the two most high-spirited, the late king (Edward) and the fascinating Duke of Kent (George) drank deeply from life.’ Edward partied his way through the last London season before the outbreak of the Great War with gusto. With his angelic looks, electric charm and personality dedicated to pleasure not pomp, he infuriated his parents with his dilettante behaviour.

Yet when Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, Edward was desperate to unveil his courage and serve his country. Commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, he was vexed to find himself denied a combat role. It was a bitter blow – ‘the worst in my life’ he said later. Sent to France in 1914, he was kept well behind enemy lines at general headquarters, reduced to conducting basic royal duties such as visits and meeting and greeting dignitaries. Complaining he was the one unemployed man in northern France, he did eventually manage to get into the battle zone where he observed the horrors of trench warfare. The fighting on the Somme, he wrote in a letter home, was ‘the nearest approach to hell imaginable’. In 1915, a shell killed his personal chauffeur.

‘Manifestly I was being kept, so to speak, on ice, against the day that death would claim my father,’ Edward wrote, expressing his mounting frustration. ‘I found it hard to accept this unique dispensation. My generation had a rendezvous with history, and my whole being insisted that I share the common destiny, whatever it might be.’ When he was promoted to captain and awarded the Military Cross, Edward’s feelings of unworthiness and self-loathing spiralled. He wrote to his father on 22 September 1915: ‘I feel so ashamed to wear medals which I only have because of my position, when there are so many thousands of gallant officers who lead a terrible existence in the trenches who have not been decorated.’

By the end of the war, which saw the collapse of the Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman dynasties, the Prince of Wales seemed ordained to protect the House of Windsor. It was during the Great War that King George decided that, due to anti-German sentiment in Britain (according to the popular press, even dachshunds were being pelted in the streets of London), the royal family must change their Germanic-sounding surname. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became Windsor.

From the war years onwards, throughout his twenties and early thirties, Edward did his duty, dazzling the world as the fairy-tale prince. He visited forty-five countries in six years, travelling 150,000 miles. On a trip to Canada, his right hand became so badly bruised and swollen from too many enthusiastic greetings (which he described as pump-handling), that he was forced to proffer his left hand for fear of permanent impairment. Adored and feted like a film star, Edward began to behave like one too. His mood swings became all too familiar amongst his equerries and advisors, as he oscillated between buoyed-up exhilaration and lacerating self-pity. He became irritated with official rigmarole and seemed unable to focus on diplomatic matters. On Christmas Day 1919, before embarking on a five-month trip to the Antipodes, he wrote to his private secretary, Godfrey Thomas: ‘Christ how I loathe my job now and all the press “puffed” empty “success”. I feel I’m through with it and long to die. For God’s sake don’t breathe a word of this to a soul. No one else must know how I feel about my life and everything … You probably think from this that I ought to be in the madhouse already … I do feel such a bloody little shit.’

Another cause of friction with his parents was Edward’s obsession with nightclubs and partying in the burgeoning Jazz Age. King George wrote to Queen Mary of his horror, having heard reports that Edward danced ‘every night & most of the night too’, fearing that ‘people who don’t know him will begin to think that he is either mad or the biggest rake in Europe’.

Edward found some solace in his romantic life, yet here too, he was irreverent. Instead of seeking a suitable single, eligible bride with whom to settle down, he quickly established a penchant for married women. The patience of his advisors was wearing thin. Tommy Lascelles wrote: ‘For the ten years before he met Mrs Simpson, the Prince of Wales was continuously in the throes of one shattering and absorbing love affair after another (not to mention a number of street-corner affairs).’ It was Lascelles’s contention that the prince never grew up; that he remained morally arrested. Stanley Baldwin agreed: ‘He is an abnormal being, half child, half genius … It is almost as though two or three cells in his brain had remained entirely undeveloped while the rest of him is a mature man.’

Perhaps this partly explains the prince’s preference for married women, and his desire that they play a bossy, maternal role. His first serious relationship was with the British-born socialite, Mrs Freda Dudley Ward, who was half American and had two teenage daughters, Penelope (Pempe) and Angela (Angie), on whom Edward doted. Between March 1918, when the prince first met Mrs Dudley Ward sheltering in the doorway of a house in Belgrave Square during an air raid, and January 1921, the prince wrote her 263 letters. In total, during their relationship, which lasted over a decade (surviving his affair with Thelma Furness but not his infatuation with Wallis), the prince penned over two thousand letters to Freda Dudley Ward, many addressing her as ‘my very own darling beloved little mummie’. ‘It is quite pathetic to see the prince and Freda,’ Winston Churchill observed, after travelling with them on a train. ‘His love is so obvious and undisguisable.’

‘Freda, whom I knew, was like Wallis in that physically, she was fairly boyish. As far as their relationship went, the prince was a masochist who liked harsh treatment,’ said Nicky Haslam. ‘Freda was lovely,’ recalled John Julius Norwich. ‘She was the prince’s mistress … and everybody liked her.’ Chips Channon described her in his diaries as ‘tiny, squeaky, wise and chic’. ‘Mrs Dudley Ward was the best friend he ever had, only he didn’t realise it,’ said his brother, Prince Henry. Later in life, Mrs Dudley Ward was asked if her first husband, William Dudley Ward, minded about her affair with the Prince of Wales. ‘Oh, no,’ she replied. ‘My husband knew all about my relationship with the prince. But he didn’t mind. If it’s the Prince of Wales – no husbands ever mind.’

A hint of Edward’s desire to be dominated in his relationships lies in a letter he wrote to Freda on 26 March 1918. ‘You know you ought to be really foul to me sometimes sweetie & curse & be cruel. It would do me the world of goods and bring me to my right senses!! I think I’m the kind of man who needs a certain amount of cruelty without which he gets abominably spoilt & soft!! I feel that’s what’s the matter with me.’

***

Wallis Warfield was twenty years old when, in November 1916, she married her first husband, Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. She had first met the US Navy pilot the previous April during a trip to Florida, when he was stationed at the Pensacola Air Station. The day after she arrived at Pensacola Wallis wrote to her mother: ‘I have just met the world’s most fascinating aviator.’ Ever since she left Oldfields, Wallis, like her contemporaries, aspired to marriage as the sine qua non of achievement. When ‘Win’, dark-haired with brooding looks, proposed eight weeks after their meeting, Wallis was excited to be one of the first debutantes of her coming-out year to get engaged. As much as Wallis thought that she loved Win, a man she barely knew, she later admitted: ‘There also lay in the back of my mind a realisation that my marriage would relieve my mother of the burden of my support.’

Despite her mother’s fears that a navy life, with no permanent home, constant postings, little money, as well as long and lonely waits for her husband to return from sea, would be too regulated for someone as spirited as her daughter, Alice eventually gave the union her blessing. If only she had not. Wallis discovered on her short, grim honeymoon with Win at a hotel in West Virginia that he was an alcoholic. Wallis – who had only ever had a small glass of champagne at Christmas, as her puritanical family extolled the evils of alcohol – had never tasted hard liquor. West Virginia was a dry state, which further incensed Win, who pulled a bottle of gin from his suitcase. Once inebriated he would become aggressive, cruel and violent.

Her new life as a navy wife, first in San Diego, and then when Win took a desk job in Washington DC, became unbearable. Win’s insecurity, frustration at his dwindling career and jealous rages were sadistically vented on his young bride. But when Wallis decided to leave and seek a divorce, her mother was aghast. No Montague had ever been divorced. It was unthinkable. Even her stalwart Aunt Bessie said that it was out of the question. Her Uncle Sol was apoplectic. ‘I won’t let you bring disgrace upon us,’ he shouted.

Wallis persevered with the marriage. Her mother cautioned her that ‘being a successful wife is an exercise in understanding’. Wallis retorted bitterly: ‘A point comes when one is at the end of one’s endurance. I’m at that point now.’ She moved in with her mother, who was also living in Washington. As Uncle Sol refused her any financial help towards a divorce, her prospects looked bleak. Wallis was suitably thrilled when, in 1924, her cousin Corinne Mustin invited her to go on her first trip to Europe, to Paris. Win continued to write to Wallis and told her that he had been stationed in the Far East. He begged her to join him in China. Perhaps because Wallis could not afford a divorce and was uncertain of her financial and domestic future, she decided to give the marriage yet another go. Win met her in Hong Kong and soon enough, the familiar patterns recommenced. He became jealous, moody, quarrelsome and offensive. When he began drinking before breakfast, Wallis finally had had enough. She drew their eight-year marriage to a close, seeking a divorce at the United States Court for China in Shanghai.

‘Wallis was now twenty-eight and her character was formed,’ according to Diana Mosley. ‘She was independent but not tough, rather easily hurt with a rare capacity for making friends wherever she went. She was intelligent and quick, amusing, good company; an addition to any party with her high-spirited gaiety.’

Wallis embarked on a year’s sojourn in Peking, staying with her good friends Katherine and Herman Rogers. She later described her Eastern sojourn as her ‘Lotus Year’. As a divorced woman travelling in the Far East on her own, she displayed a spirited independence ahead of her time. According to a friend of Duff Cooper’s in Paris, a French woman who knew Wallis as Mrs Spencer in Peking, Wallis was ‘always good-natured’. Unfortunately, when news of Wallis’s relationship with the Prince of Wales broke in 1936, her year in China was used against her. It was said that she had visited the ‘singing houses’ of Shanghai and Peking. Unsavoury gossip tut-tutted, suggesting that she had acquired ‘sophisticated sexual techniques’ which she then used to entrap and manipulate the Prince of Wales and she became the butt of cheap jokes: ‘Other girls picked up pennies but Wallis was so proficient that she picked up a sovereign.’

Wallis nursed a secret that hit at the very heart of her femininity. She was infertile and had never menstruated. As a young girl it is unlikely that Wallis would have known that anything was wrong. Perhaps the absence of periods would have been her first sign at puberty that all was not as expected. It has been speculated that Wallis may have had a ‘disorder of sexual development’ or DSD, a modern term encompassing a wide range of rare genetic conditions. Others have claimed Wallis may have had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome – that is, she was born genetically male, with the XY chromosome. If this had been the case, the male sexual organs would have been internal and barely noticeable and she would have had an extremely shallow vagina. Yet this is unlikely as Wallis lacked other physical traits associated with the syndrome. We also know that she would go on to have a hysterectomy in middle age.

Whatever the cause of Wallis’s infertility it was a source of profound sadness for her. Over three marriages she bore no children, but not out of choice. Though she and Edward seemed to adore children, their lack of parenthood united them as outsiders to a familial club. Instead, they lavished love on their dogs which became their child replacements. Wallis later wrote that she mourned never being part of the ‘miracle of creation’ and that her ‘one continuing regret’ was never having ‘known the joy of having children’. The secret inner pain of childlessness must have made the gossip and slurs against her so much harder to bear.

One of the reasons that Wallis kept herself skeletally thin was that she worried that if she put on any weight she would ‘bulk up in a masculine way’. Diana Mosley said that Wallis ‘loved and appreciated good food, but ate so little that she remained triumphantly thin at a time when slenderness was all important in fashion’. Elsa Maxwell agreed that Wallis ate very little at the dinner table. When she challenged Wallis about this, she always replied defensively: ‘I’m an ice-box raider.’ Clearly any snacking was confined to minuscule amounts. Wallis and Edward were similar in this respect; they both favoured starvation diets and punishing regimes, each obsessed with retaining an almost pre-pubescent slenderness.

Wallis expressed a traditional femininity through her clothes: her sartorial perfectionism – a love of Cartier and couture – served to create an exaggeratedly feminine outline that was more elegant than sexual. Always immaculately groomed, there was a delicacy about her appearance – from her skirts and dresses cinched-in at the waist with tiny belts, to neat little pairs of heels. Adorned as he was with exquisite statement jewels, there was nothing androgynous about Wallis’s style. She certainly was no ‘sex siren’ or ‘harlot’, as many made her out to be. Although Wallis often liked to be the centre of attention socially, in other ways she came across as old-fashioned and reserved; indeed, her upbringing in Baltimore had been ladylike to the point of prudish. Astonishingly she told Herman Rogers, who eventually gave her away at her wedding to Edward in 1937, that she ‘had never had sexual intercourse with either of her two husbands’. Nor had she ‘ever allowed anyone else to touch her below’ what she described as ‘her personal Mason–Dixon line’.†

Both Wallis and Edward shared insecurities about their sexual identities. Confiding this in one another may have helped forge a strong secret bond between them. Cynthia Jebb, Lady Gladwyn, whose husband was ambassador to France 1954–60, knew the Windsors in Paris and confided to Hugo Vickers that ‘the prince had sexual problems. He was unable to perform’ – she ‘called it a hairpin reaction. She said that the duchess coped with it. I commented: “She was meant to have learned special ways in China.” “There was nothing Chinese about it,” said Lady Gladwyn. “It was what they call oral sex.”’ Although she could be openly flirtatious in a social setting, Wallis was, as Nicky Haslam observed of her, sassy rather than sexy: her gaiety was more playful teasing than predatory or seriously seductive. ‘Wallis wasn’t obsessed by sex,’ says Haslam. ‘If anything, she was rigidly undressable in that she was prudish. Everybody made such a thing of her going to brothels in China but everyone did that in those days. It was the fashionable thing to do. To have a good look.’

‘It was just the sort of thing that the press would say, that she was a twice-divorced American adventuress out for what she could get,’ said John Julius Norwich. ‘Everything was a bid to discredit her but she was the furthest thing from kinky. You never got the feeling that she was particularly sexually motivated. She was a perfectly normal American woman but not in the least bit depraved. And there was nothing more normal than Ernest Simpson and he fell in love with her.’

Winston Churchill summed up the controversial couple’s mutual attraction: ‘the association was psychical rather than sexual, and certainly not sensual except incidentally’. Churchill always believed that Wallis was good for Edward; he defended the couple to the last. ‘Although branded with the stigma of a guilty love, no companionship could have appeared more natural, more free from impropriety or grossness,’ he said.

***

Wallis met Ernest Simpson through Mary Kirk, who had now become Madame Raffray, on her marriage to the Frenchman, Jacques Raffray. Raffray, a veteran of the Great War, had originally come to America to train US troops to fight in France. Wallis, then living in Washington, enjoyed staying with the Raffrays at their New York apartment. She spent Christmas of 1926 with them awaiting her divorce from Win. Ernest, who was also in the process of getting divorced, from his American wife Dorothea, with whom he had a daughter, Audrey, was frequently asked for dinner or to make up a fourth for bridge. A friendship developed and when both were granted divorces, Ernest asked Wallis to marry him.

A graduate of Harvard, Ernest had been born in New York of an American mother and a British father. After brief service as a captain in the British Army, he began work in the family shipping business, Simpson, Spence & Young. Tall, with blue eyes and a neat moustache, he was a fastidious dresser. In the early 1920s he was much in demand on the London scene and a regular dance partner of Barbara Cartland. (She later described him as a ‘handsome young bachelor, who was to figure dramatically in the history of England seventeen years later’.) The letter Wallis wrote to her mother on 15 July 1928 regarding Ernest’s marriage proposal is revealing: ‘I’ve decided that the best and wisest thing for me to do is to marry Ernest. I am very fond of him and he is kind which will be a contrast … I can’t go wandering the rest of my life and I really feel so tired of fighting the world alone and with no money. Also 32 doesn’t seem so young when you see all the youthful faces one has to compete against. So I shall settle down to a fairly comfortable old age.’ After her peripatetic childhood, and abusive marriage to Win, Ernest represented financial and emotional stability, comfort and respectability. Wallis worried briefly that his wholesome ponderousness was the polar opposite to her Southern emotionalism. She was fun, spontaneous and extravagant. He was methodical and cautious. Later, he was dismissed amid the upper-class circles into which the Simpsons were propelled as ‘crashingly middle class’ and a bore.

Ernest was transferred to run the British offices of his shipping firm, and in May 1928, Wallis followed him to London. They married on 21 July at Chelsea Register Office. Wallis wore a yellow dress and blue coat that she had bought in Paris the previous summer. Although they considered the clinical nature of the register office ceremony ‘a cold little job’, she found their honeymoon ‘a blissful experience’. Driving through France, Wallis discovered that her husband was cultured, considerate and spoke French fluently. Ernest may not have been the most exciting or diverting company but he was a thoroughly decent gentleman. His great-nephew, Alex Kerr-Smiley, remembers: ‘Ernest was just a nice person. He was an extremely nice uncle. He was almost like our fairy godfather.’

After the harrowing uncertainties of the previous decade, Wallis, aged thirty-two, could finally relax. Looking forward to a new life in London, she ‘felt a security that I had never really experienced since early childhood’. Her domestic equilibrium was to prove short-lived. Three years later, the dull conformity of her marriage was shattered by the arrival in their steady realm of the dazzling Prince of Wales.

* Fulco di Verdura was an influential Italian jeweller who designed for the duchess. His career took off when he was introduced to Coco Chanel by Cole Porter.

† The Mason–Dixon line was the American Civil War partition between the slave states of the South and free states of the North.

2

Ich Dien

After their honeymoon, Wallis and Ernest moved into a small hotel in London while they searched for a suitable home. Ernest’s sister, Maud, helped them to find a furnished house in Upper Berkeley Street, which they rented for a year. Wallis, a natural and dedicated homemaker, was keen to secure an unfurnished property on which she could put her decorative stamp.

Initially, Mrs Simpson was lonely in London, knowing no other Americans. Unaccustomed and resistant to the formality of English mores, she felt like ‘a stranger in a strange land’. Her sense of isolation heightened in October 1929 when she learned that her mother was seriously ill. Alice had been diagnosed with a blood clot in her brain. As Ernest could not leave his business, Wallis crossed the Atlantic alone. She spent three weeks with her ailing mother, who died shortly after Wallis returned to London. The ‘sadness’ that Wallis carried inside was ‘a long time lifting’. She grieved bitterly for her adored mother, whom she felt was the only person who truly understood her.

Soon a welcome distraction presented itself. That winter, Wallis found a first-floor flat that both she and Ernest liked in a mansion block on George Street, near Marble Arch. She set about decorating the flat at Bryanston Court with her inimitable flair. She was influenced by two design legends: Syrie Maugham, wife of novelist Somerset Maugham, and her good friend Elsie de Wolfe. Professional rivalry simmered between these two eccentrics as to who was the greater visionary. Both were ‘ultra chic’, creating light avant-garde rooms – the antithesis of heavy, dark Victoriana. Wallis enlisted Syrie Maugham’s talents at Bryanston Court, while de Wolfe helped shape her later homes in France. Maugham, who pioneered white furniture and white walls against which were showcased Provençal antiques, stripped and painted everything with her secret craquelure technique. From Maugham’s workshops Wallis commissioned a dozen dining-room chairs with tall backs, upholstered in white leather and studded with nails. This was considered daringly modern. An Italian dining table, Adam sideboard and console received the Maugham treatment; they were painted blue-green and white. According to Wallis, ‘when the table was laid for the first time and the candles lighted, the effect was soft and charming’. Wallis always chose a mirror-topped table, the centre decorated with glass fruits and a silver candelabra at each end. The table service was pink china; one of her most prized possessions was the dinner service inherited from her grandmother. Unconventionally, she served her consommé piping hot in small cups of black Chinese lacquer, with tiny lids. To Wallis, design and presentation was nothing less than a moral issue. She adopted both Elsie de Wolfe’s streamlined aesthetic and her credo: ‘What surer guarantee can there be of a person’s character, natural and cultivated, inherent and inherited, than taste?’

Ernest, proud of his wife’s exceptional talents as a hostess, was pleased with both the style of their home and Wallis’s eye for detail. She was always moving furniture into new positions, changing things around in her efforts to perfect a room’s look. This continued throughout her life, to her last home, the regal villa she shared with the Duke of Windsor in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

In her early days in London, Wallis, far from being able to exhibit largesse in her entertaining, had to budget cautiously. Most of her correspondence to her Aunt Bessie at this time focuses on the trials of trying to find the right cook and of financial concerns. Ernest was meticulous in his housekeeping. One evening a week, he demanded that Wallis show him her weekly expenditures. He would run his finger down the list, scrutinising each purchase. Wallis ran the house and bought her clothes on a weekly stipend from Ernest. Accustomed to working to a fiscal limit, she discovered that life in Britain was cheap by American standards. If she found herself under budget, she would splurge at Fortnum & Mason on a jar of caviar, brandied peaches or, as a special treat, an avocado.

Wallis shared Elsie de Wolfe’s obsession with serving guests food that was the same size, driving her butcher and fishmonger to distraction sourcing six or eight identical trout or grouse; even vegetables were laid out on the plate with military precision. Like her mother, Wallis prided herself on serving only the most delicious food. The Prince of Wales said of his first visit to her ‘small but charming flat in Bryanston Square’, that ‘everything in it was in exquisite taste and the food, in my judgement, unrivalled in London’. Wallis ‘is the best housekeeper I know’, declared Elsa Maxwell. ‘She is as skilful as a Japanese professional in arranging flowers. She has perfect taste in food as well as furniture and in those little details of forethought and care that mark an imaginative hostess. For instance, last time I lunched with her I noticed that she had found the most enchanting little round porcelain pots with covers to contain the butter and at the bottom, there was ice to keep it firm.’ According to Lady Pamela Hicks: ‘She was the most marvellous hostess. Her houses were perfection. At giving parties and serving food, she was the best.’ When she was the Duchess of Windsor and could afford it, Wallis would spray floral centre pieces with Diorissimo perfume.

Wallis’s reputation as a skilled hostess spread around the Simpsons’ London set. Naturally, she and Ernest were suitably excited when, having bumped into the Prince of Wales a few times at Thelma Furness’s, he accepted their invitation to Bryanston Court in January 1932. Wallis decided to serve a typical American dinner: black bean soup, grilled lobster, fried chicken Maryland and a cold raspberry soufflé. As a concession to her English guests, she followed it with a savoury of marrow bones. Typical of Wallis’s dignity, she was ‘bursting to tell the fishmonger and green grocer’ whom she was hosting but ‘had acquired too much British restraint’.

Ten sat down to dinner that January evening, with the prince at the head of the table and Ernest at the foot. Wallis wrote to her Aunt Bessie afterwards, on Sunday 24 January, thanking her for sending butter pat moulds with the Prince of Wales’s feathers on them. ‘Darling – the candles arrived and are grand. I enclose cheque. I can’t accept everything from you. We (meaning Cain* and self) loved the butter pats, especially the one with HRH’s feathers on it. It was a shame it didn’t arrive for use the night he dined here which by the way passed off pleasantly the party breaking up at 4 a.m., so I think he enjoyed himself.’

The prince paid Wallis the compliment of asking her for the recipe of her raspberry soufflé. The following week, he repaid her hospitality with a prized invitation for the Simpsons to stay as his guests for the weekend at Fort Belvedere, his country residence in Surrey. In 1930 the king had given Edward a grace-and-favour property on Crown lands, bordering Windsor Great Park. This ‘castellated conglomeration’ had been built in the eighteenth century by William, Duke of Cumberland, third son of George II. Eighty years later, the architect, Sir Jeffry Wyatville, added a high tower which gave the impression of an ancient castle in a forest. From the moment he saw it, Edward adored this ‘pseudo-Gothic hodge-podge’, despite its wild, untended garden and excess of gloomy yew trees. Fort Belvedere became his first proper home; his only other residence, York House, was more like an office. Edward poured all his energies into doing up ‘The Fort’, as it became known.

‘It was a child’s idea of a fort,’ said Lady Diana Cooper. ‘The house is an enchanting folly and only needs fifty red soldiers stood between the battlements to make it into a Walt Disney coloured symphony toy.’ Of her host, she said: ‘The comfort could not be greater, nor the desire on his part for guests to be happy, free and unembarrassed. Surely a new atmosphere for Courts?’

Edward renovated the inside, modernising with gusto – creating spaces entirely different from the musty royal houses of his childhood which had made him feel so unwell he could not eat. Each bedroom had its own bathroom – unheard of then in British country houses – and he added showers, a steam bath in the basement, built-in cupboards and central heating. Outside, he felled the yew trees to let in light and air. A muddy lily pond below the battlements was transformed into a swimming pool and acres of dank laurel were cleared for rare rhododendrons. Winding paths cut through fir and birch trees adding to the attractive woodland setting. He also improved and developed the Cedar Walk, a sweeping avenue lined by ancient cedar trees stretching from below the terrace to the edge of his property, which became one of his favourite places to walk. Later he added a private aerodrome in the grounds (he was patron of the London Flying Club in 1935) and would ferry friends in and out of Belvedere in his de Havilland Dragon Rapide biplane, which he had painted in the colours of the Brigade of Guards.

‘The prince was himself’ at the Fort, Thelma, Lady Furness, wrote in her memoirs. ‘He was free from any obligation to maintain the formalities of his official position. He pottered in the garden, pruned his trees, blew on his bagpipes. We entertained a great deal, but our guests were always the people we liked to have around – there were no dignitaries, no representatives of State and Empire.’ Of the Fort, Edward said: ‘I came to love it as I loved no other material thing – perhaps because it was so much my own creation.’ Guests were pressed into arduous physical labour; hacking out undergrowth and pruning trees. Edward also discovered a love of Windsor Castle, six miles away, of which he had said as a boy ‘the ancient walls seemed to exude disapproval’. Now his reverence grew for the immense grey pile which Samuel Pepys once described as ‘the most romantic castle that is in the world’. Edward would take weekend guests to browse the library and show off the Rubens and Van Dycks in the state apartments on Sunday afternoons.

The Fort became the prince’s sanctuary, a place where he could dispense with private secretaries and equerries. He considerately refused to keep staff up late at night, despite the early hours that he often enjoyed and if he returned home at dawn, let himself into the property with his own latch key. Unthinkably modern for a future monarch.

Wallis and Ernest set out for the Fort late on the Saturday afternoon, timing their pace to arrive, as invited, at six. It was dark when the car crunched up the gravel driveway. Before they could come to a stop, the prince had opened the door and was supervising the unloading of the luggage, a habit he enjoyed. Unlike the grandeur of Knole, the Kent home of the Sackvilles to which the Simpsons had previously been invited as weekend guests, the Fort struck them as remarkably relaxed. The prince led them into the octagonal hall, which had a black and white marble floor and eight bright yellow leather chairs in the eight corners. The drawing room, also octagonal, was more traditional; pine panelling, yellow velvet curtains, Canalettos and Chippendale furniture. The prince insisted on showing his guests to their room on the second floor. Diana Cooper wrote of her bedroom when staying there: ‘The stationery is disappointingly humble – not so the conditions. I am in a pink bedroom, pink-sheeted, pink Venetian-blinded, pink soaped, white-telephoned and pink-and-white maided.’ She did not comment on the gaudy Prince of Wales’s feathers engraved into every bed’s headboard.

When Wallis and Ernest arrived downstairs for cocktails, they were surprised to see the prince sitting on a sofa, his head bent over a large flat screen. His right hand plied a needle from which trailed a long coloured thread. At his feet were his two cairn terriers, Cora and Jaggs. Catching Wallis’s look of incredulity at the sight of the Prince of Wales doing needlepoint, he laughed, rising to greet her. ‘This is my secret vice,’ he explained, ‘the only one, in any case, I am at any pains to conceal.’

He explained to Wallis that he had learned to crochet from his mother as a young boy. At half past six each evening at Sandringham, Edward and his siblings were called in from the school room and sent to their mother’s boudoir where they would sit at her knee, while she crocheted or embroidered. Queen Mary taught them gros point, which Edward kept up, and perfected while recovering from a riding accident. He returned to this hobby during his time on the Western front in France. On long car journeys he crocheted to kill time. He later said that he was ‘understandably discreet about my hobby at first. It would hardly have done for the story to get around that a major general in the British Army had been seen bowling along the roads behind the Maginot Line crocheting.’

While the women all wore simple evening dresses, Edward sported a kilt in Balmoral tartan and produced a small cigarette case from his silver sporran. After cocktails, the small party went through to the dining room – the wood-panelled room seating only ten – where they ate oysters from the Duchy of Cornwall oyster beds, followed by roast beef and salad, pudding and a savoury. After coffee in the drawing room, Edward taught Wallis to play a card game called Red Dog, while others attempted a complicated jigsaw puzzle that was laid out on a long table in front of the main window. Dancing followed in the hallway. Suddenly, the prince tired. Before going to bed, he announced the rules of the Fort: ‘There are none. Stay up as late as you want. Get up when you want. For me this is a place of rest and change, I go to bed early and get up early so that I can work in the garden.’

The following morning, when the maid bought Wallis breakfast to her room, she was informed that His Royal Highness had finished his an hour before and was in the garden. When the Simpsons entered the drawing room, they saw the prince on the terrace outside in baggy plus fours, a thick sweater, hair tousled, hacking at the wild undergrowth with a machete-like billhook, dogs at his heels. Ernest Simpson, not a natural athlete, was ill-equipped to respond to the prince’s insistence that all guests help him wage war against the dreaded laurel bushes. ‘It’s not exactly a command,’ a fellow guest informed Ernest, ‘but I’ve never known anybody to refuse.’ Crossing the lawn, brandishing murderous-looking weapons, the house party resembled more a band of revolutionaries ready to do battle than an elite group of guests staying with the Prince of Wales at his country retreat. After two wearying hours in the winter chill the guests returned for a fortifying hot and cold buffet lunch laid out in the dining room. That afternoon, the prince took Wallis and Ernest around his home, even showing them his bedroom, on the ground floor, off the hall. It was spacious and charming with red chintz curtains framing spectacular views of his beloved garden.

Later that afternoon, the prince went for a tour outside with his gardener. When he returned, he disappeared to the basement. Thelma explained to a perplexed Wallis that at the same time every day he liked to take a steam bath, and was as proud of having installed this as he was of his central heating. He later appeared wearing a bright yellow polo neck, his face flushed red, yet ‘radiating utter contentment’.

As an original thank-you note, Wallis and Ernest composed the prince a jaunty poem on their return to Bryanston Court. As etiquette demanded, it was signed by Wallis only.

Sir –

Bear with me and do not curse

This poor attempt at thanks in verse.

Our weekend at ‘Fort Belvedere’

Has left us both with memories dear

Of what in every sense must be

Princely hospitality.

Too soon the hours stole away,

And we, who would have had them stay,

Regretful o’er that fleeting slyness,

Do warmly thank Your Royal Highness.

But with your time I make too free –

I have the honour, Sir, to be

(Ere too long my poetic pencil limps on)

Your obedient Servant,

Wallis Simpson.

After their fairy-tale weekend, Wallis and Ernest returned to the real world. They did not see the prince for much of the rest of that year, 1932 – a year Wallis pronounced ‘dismal’. Ever preoccupied with worsening money worries, she wrote to her Aunt Bessie that Ernest’s shipping business was struggling as the world lay in the trough of the Depression.

Britain had also been suffering from the severe economic downturn. Hardest hit were the industrial and mining areas of the north of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, where unemployment reached 70 per cent. Over the previous few years the Prince of Wales had made extensive tours of Tyneside, the Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales. He visited hundreds of working men’s clubs and schemes for the unemployed, seeking out the areas of rawest poverty. Although he was sometimes met with sullen apathy, which perturbed him, the prince persevered, inviting himself into slums, eager that the people would not think the monarchy had forsaken them in their misfortune. In 1929 in Winlanton, Durham, he visited the house of Mr Frank McKay, a seventy-four-year-old miner, whose wife had just died. The prince offered his sympathies to the family and ‘expressed a wish to go upstairs to the room where Mrs McKay lay dead’. As he left, the miners cheered him on the way back to his car. George Haynes, General Secretary of the National Council, remembered the Prince of Wales’s ‘way of approach; his transparent interest and concern, and the immense regard people had for him. He had a charisma in those days which was unique.’ However, the prince was quickly marked down by the establishment as a ‘dangerous subversive’.

The prince would return from his public duties painfully aware that ‘there was always something lacking’. In spring 1932, King George V had what was for him, an uncharacteristically intimate conversation with his son. He told Edward that while he was still worshipped by the public, he could not expect to survive the erosion of his reputation caused by the increasingly damaging revelations surrounding his private life. The king cited Edward’s liaison with Lady Furness and asked his son if he had ever thought of marrying ‘a suitable well-born English girl?’ Strangely, the prince replied that he had never supposed it would be possible.

‘What he meant by this was that he liked these married women and he loved Americans,’ explained Hugo Vickers. ‘The prince loved golfing pros and tycoons. According to his Private Secretary he became like a little boy in their presence. He thought that English girls were boring and thought that zinging cocktail girls were what he liked. There was never any question in his mind that he would marry an eligible British girl.’

There were suggestions that Princess Ingrid of Sweden might make a suitable bride, but it was never seriously contemplated at York House or Buckingham Palace. Earl Mountbatten of Burma prepared a list of seventeen European princesses who were ‘theoretically possible’, ranging from the fifteen-year-old Thyra of Mecklenburg-Schwerin to twenty-two-year-old Princess Ingrid, but these were made with little conviction. No one who knew the Prince of Wales now believed that he would ever marry. The despairing king said to Stanley Baldwin: ‘After I am dead the boy will ruin himself within twelve months.’ He apparently later confided to the courtier, Ulick Alexander: ‘My eldest son will never succeed me. He will abdicate.’

This was a view shared by the king’s third son, Prince Henry, who became the Duke of Gloucester. ‘My brother and I never got on, I’m afraid,’ Gloucester later said of his relationship with Edward. ‘We had a hell of a row in 1927. I’d said to someone I didn’t think he’d ever be king and it was repeated. He said to me: “Did you say that or didn’t you?” So I said: “Well I’ve either got to tell you a lie or tell you the truth and I’m going to tell you the truth. I did say it and I still think it.”’

The prince’s equerry, John Aird, who succeeded Tommy Lascelles in this position, believed that the king and his family were misinformed about his son’s activities. He wrote in his diary: ‘I have been told that HRH’s behaviour is killing the king. If so I am very sorry, but feel that it is not probable and quite unnecessary.’ Lascelles had described the prince as ‘“an archangel ruined” – though ruined by what, God only knows’. John Aird, however, did not share this view. At fault, he felt, were the courtiers at York House eagerly relaying to the king ‘all the nasty gossip, which is very wrong of them and does no good’. Queen Mary’s official biographer, James Pope-Hennessy, who was given access to the entire royal family for the writing of his book, concluded sagely: ‘It is courtiers who make royalty frightened and frightening.’

However, those close to the Prince of Wales, the unholy trinity of the monarchy, Church and political establishment, had serious misgivings about Edward’s suitability as king. His views were regarded as not conservative enough and he did not seem to take to his official duties with the appropriate solemnity. His high-profile visits to areas of mass unemployment, highlighting the suffering of the labouring classes, raised political hackles during the Depression, while his chief activities – socialising, needlepoint, sewing and gardening – did not match well with contemporary ideas of kingship. There were also concerns about his ability to have children and provide an heir. Several who worked closely with him began to bandy about the word ‘mad’. His nervous tics, odd speech and constant fiddling with his cuffs did not help solidify his reputation yet while he could be extremely self-centred, often appearing detached from reality, he was certainly not insane. George V remained infuriated by his eldest son’s ways, especially his style of dress. The prince insisted on wearing a bowler hat on official visits to industrial plants, eschewing his father’s preference for a top hat. Yet this was a considered move not to further alienate himself from the workers, rather than as a snub to court etiquette. The king and his court dismissed any such attempt of Edward’s to modernise the style and approachability of the monarchy as anarchic.

The prince’s lack of conformity extended widely to his social circle. Edward’s friendship with the Hon. Diana Guinness (nee Mitford) and her lover, the MP and, from 1932, leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald, raised questions of political impartiality and judgement. George V knew that the monarchy’s survival depended on maintaining its constitutional neutrality, whereas Edward appeared to be enthusiastically pro-German, at a time when his parents were going to great lengths to rebrand the royal family as British. Like many members of the British aristocracy in the early 1930s, the prince seemed to view fascism as the latest in political chic. However, Edward was considered too ideologically vacuous to have any genuine interest in a political creed, and his two political mentors, Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, were both Liberals.

That Edward did not conform to court life, preferring a vigorous and flamboyant social life over the grey strictures of monarchial duty, was tantamount to treachery in the eyes of his advisors. In 1927, Tommy Lascelles said to Stanley Baldwin of the prince: ‘You know, sometimes when I am waiting to get the result of some point-to-point in which he is riding, I can’t help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him and the country, would be for him to break his neck.’ ‘God forgive me,’ Baldwin said. ‘I have often thought the same thing.’

Edward carried on with his private life, ignoring opprobrium, preferring to spend his time with the wealthy and self-made, as opposed to old school aristocrats. He enjoyed the company of rich Americans, such as Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon and Emerald, Lady Cunard. Emerald, widow of shipping heir Sir Bache Cunard, was an influential hostess and patron of the arts. Stanley Walker, editor of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote: ‘International society is not always difficult to crash. To be the guest of the Prince of Wales at his country house, Fort Belvedere, is regarded as a high honour. Many of the members of what is known in New York as the “international set” are accepted in London, and shuttle back and forth between England and America.’

During the summer of 1932, Wallis, who suffered from a physically nervous disposition – she felt her stresses in her stomach – had to return from a much anticipated trip to France and Austria with Ernest, due to a stomach ulcer. She later wrote: ‘I suppose that the ulcer came from nerves, as I always kept the day-to-day tensions of living bottled up inside me.’ Beneath her confident, sharp-shooting facade, Wallis nursed a frailty she was at literal pains to conceal. That autumn, Wallis and Ernest were twice invited to the Fort; once for tea and once for the weekend. By December, Wallis was in bed again as her stomach problems had flared up, in spite of careful attention to her diet. Her doctor advised her to drink only whisky or water for six months.

From early 1933, the Simpsons received more frequent invitations to the Fort. Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie from Belvedere on Sunday 29 January. ‘It is cold for England now and since arriving here we have been skating out on the water with the Duke and Duchess of York.† Isn’t it a scream! Also you can imagine me out on the ice but due to having roller skated I have not been too bad. The Prince presented T[helma] and self with skates etc.’

Wallis’s bond with Thelma was strengthening. She wrote to Mary Kirk: ‘A friend of mine, Thelma Furness, is the Prince of Wales’s girl and I chaperone her when she goes out to Fort Belvedere to stay with him.’ Wallis described her surprise when Thelma arrived to drive her to the Fort, with long struts strapped to the side of the car. Thelma ‘just laughed and said that I would find out later’. It was after dinner that she found out. ‘The three of us came into the sitting room for coffee. On either side of the fireplace, where a grand fire was blazing, stood a comfortable chair and beside each chair stood something that looked like an artist’s easel. When I went closer and looked I found that each of these held a canvas on which was an unfinished piece of embroidery. When we had finished our coffee Thelma and the prince settled themselves down to work and I, sitting between them, was asked to read from a book Thelma handed me.’

Thelma encouraged the prince’s love of petit point. His first solo effort was a paperweight which he made for Queen Mary. It depicted the royal crown above her initials, ‘M. R.’, in gold. The prince had it mounted on a silver base and when finished, it was beautiful. He then progressed to sewing a backgammon table cover for Thelma.

The prince had a thoughtful, generous side. Every Christmas he bought all the staff at York House and the Fort a Christmas present. This meant buying and wrapping many hundreds of gifts. An eccentricity of his was to involve all his weekend guests during the run-up to Christmas in sessions of after-dinner wrapping. ‘All the guests became an informal task force,’ recalled Thelma. ‘Scissors, paper, ribbon, string were issued to each and the production line started rolling. The prince got down on the floor with his paper and ribbon and manfully struggled through three or four parcels. The results were hardly reassuring; the corners sagged ominously and the ribbons were apparently tied with some sort of knot he had learned to use in securing hawsers during his naval days.’ Thelma tactfully suggested that he would be of the greatest help if he cut the paper for them and this became the prince’s special task. ‘I can still see the group sprawled on the floor: Prince George flourishing rolls of ribbon, Wallis Simpson keeping up an animated chatter from one corner, while Ernest stolidly ground out package after package with astonishing skill and artistry.’

Wallis sailed for New York that March, 1933, thanks to a generous cheque for $500 from Aunt Bessie. When Wallis received it the previous December, she had written immediately to her aunt from Knole, where she and Ernest were weekending. ‘Dearest Aunt Bessie, I am staggered by the size of the cheque and have sensation of being a millionairess. You know you should not have sent it and I shall be killed by generosity! I have sworn I shall not pay a bill with it or buy anything for the flat as I have done with your other presents. This I shall invest in myself.’

On this visit to America, Wallis was keen to tour, visiting old friends and family. Ernest was due to join her, as his business interests took him to New York, while Wallis would also see friends in Baltimore. The Mauretania had barely left the Isle of Wight in its wake when a messenger came dashing up with a radiogram. It was a bon voyage message from the prince, signed ‘Edward P’, wishing Wallis a safe crossing and speedy return. Word spread on the ship that Mrs Simpson had received a personal message from the Prince of Wales. ‘The attention was flattering,’ Wallis recalled. ‘I enjoyed every minute of it.’

Wallis’s time in Washington coincided with the famous first ‘hundred days’ of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, when he presented a series of initiatives to Congress to counter the effects of the Great Depression, including the abandonment of the Gold Standard. Wallis’s mind was on other matters, however, and she made no reference in her letters to American politics. She returned to Europe in May aboard the RMS Olympic (Ernest met her at Cherbourg), and on the seventeenth wrote to Bessie, thanking her for her generosity. ‘Darling – What can I ever say to make you know how much I appreciate your giving me this marvellous trip and then a dress and coat besides? Maybe you realise that I am enough like my mother to be completely inadequate at expressing my feelings when I feel the most. I’m afraid I then generally joke the most. I love you better than anyone in the world and will always be on hand when you need me.’

On her return from America, Wallis’s relationship with the Prince of Wales entered a new phase, despite Wallis writing to her aunt that ‘Thelma is still the Princess of Wales’. She and Ernest were accepted into the inner circle of the prince’s friends, mixing with his brothers, Prince George and the Duke of York. The Simpsons were regulars at the Fort, they accompanied Edward to nightclubs in London – he was an habitué of the Embassy Club on Bond Street – and the prince dined often at Bryanston Court. Ernest, a staunch monarchist and social climber, was proud of Wallis and the way she had been accepted into this rarefied crowd. He believed in deferential reverence to the Prince of Wales, initially basking in reflected glory at his wife’s burgeoning closeness to the future monarch, as William Dudley Ward had once done. ‘Ernest was initially delighted with Wallis’s royal foray,’ recalled Ernest’s nephew, Alex Kerr-Smiley. ‘He benefited from the royal connection. The Prince of Wales had some tweed especially woven. It was made into an overcoat for him. My great uncle admired it and the Prince of Wales said: “My dear chap, there is some tweed left over. You may have it.” Ernest had an identical overcoat made up and there is a rude family story saying that he actually swapped his wife for an overcoat.’

Initially, though, Ernest refuted rumours that he was a cuckold. Ernest had applied for admission to a Masonic Lodge, presided over by Sir Maurice Jenks, a former Lord Mayor of London. His candidature was supported by the Prince of Wales. When Ernest was refused entry, Edward naturally demanded an explanation. The heir apparent was boldly told that it was against the Masonic law for the husband of his mistress to be admitted. The prince gave his word that this was not the situation and Ernest’s candidature was accepted. With Ernest’s entrée to the Masonic Lodge came introductions to a rich and influential coterie of friends.

‘The game of royal mistress, or the royal favourite, had its own set of rules and Ernest played his part,’ said John Julius Norwich. ‘Both Wallis and Ernest benefited from the arrangement.’ Of her association with the Prince of Wales – ‘a figure of popular legend and the quintessence of youthful charm’ – Wallis was ‘glad to be even a minor satellite in the company revolving around him’. Yet she, like her husband, misunderstood the prince’s growing admiration for her. ‘If the prince was in any way drawn to me I was unaware of his interest,’ she said. ‘Thelma was always there, and often Prince George, whom I found on closer acquaintance to be altogether as attractive as his brother. He played the piano very well, knew all the latest jazz, and loved to bang away at the keys while the rest of us danced after dinner in the octagonal hall.’

Prince George was closest to Edward of all his siblings and had worried the heir to the throne considerably. After he left the navy, George took up residence in York House. Artistic and impressionable, he succumbed easily to temptation. In 1928, he fell into the embrace of an attractive married American socialite called Kiki Preston, who introduced him to drugs. Known as ‘the girl with the silver syringe’, she was addicted to heroin, cocaine and morphine. In the summer of 1929, Edward tried to intervene and even drew closer to his parents, the three of them united in their concern for George. Eventually, Edward persuaded Mrs Preston to move abroad and more or less incarcerated George in the country. He took full responsibility for helping his brother beat his addictions, telling Freda Dudley Ward how exhausting it was to be ‘doctor, gaoler and detective combined’. Aiding Prince George come off drugs illustrated Edward’s capacity for kindness and commendable behaviour. Even King George was impressed. He wrote to his son: ‘Looking after him all those months must have been a great strain on you, and I think it was wonderful all you did for him.’

Sadly, Edward could not hold his father’s praise for long. Eschewing stuffy court life, he began to drop in on the Simpsons at Bryanston Court for tea or cocktails, enamoured with the ‘gay, lively and informed company’ Wallis liked to keep. Young British and American businessmen, foreign diplomats and Wallis’s girlfriends would gather. The prince found the conversation ‘witty and crackling with new ideas’. Edward later wrote: ‘Wallis had an intuitive understanding of the forces and ideas working in society. She was extraordinarily well informed about politics and current affairs. Her conversation was deft and amusing. But most of all I admired her forthrightness. If she disagreed with some point under discussion, she never failed to advance her own views with vigour and spirit. That side of her enchanted me.’

Where Wallis was not honest with the prince was concerning the financial strain that she and Ernest were under, constantly trying to keep up with the prince’s set. Entertaining lavishly was beyond their means. Although Ernest’s father, ‘Pa Simpson’, helped financially, from time to time he would withdraw his allowance, creating huge pressure on the couple. Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie that ‘Pa S – the most selfish old pig’ – had stopped their allowance. They could only afford to host one dinner party a month.

On 19 June, the Prince of Wales threw a surprise dinner party for Wallis’s thirty-seventh birthday at Quaglino’s, a restaurant off Jermyn Street. Edward gave Wallis an orchid plant as a gift. As it was the prince’s thirty-ninth birthday four days later, she gave him a present that she had put much thought and effort into. She had borrowed a royal spoon from Osborne, the butler at the Fort, and had the prince’s cipher copied and engraved onto a silver matchbox holder. The first letter the prince preserved from Wallis was the note she wrote accompanying the birthday present:

Sir – Many happy returns of the day.

This small ‘presy’ is to conceal Bryant and May’s (match) books on your dining table at the Fort. I am also enclosing your own spoon which I borrowed from Osborne for the marking.

Your obedient servant, Wallis

***

That summer, news of the Prince of Wales’s interest in Wallis reached his mother, Queen Mary. Elizabeth, Duchess of York wrote to her mother-in-law about the matter on 1 August 1933:

My darling Mama, when I was at Cowes with you, Papa‡ one day mentioned to me that he had heard that a certain person§ had been at the Fort when Bertie & I had been there, & he said that he had a good mind to speak to David¶ about it. I never had the chance to reopen the subject, but I do hope that he won’t do this, as I am sure that David would never forgive us into being drawn into something like that. I do hope that you do not mind my mentioning this Mama, but relations are already a little difficult when naughty ladies are brought in, and up to now we have not met the ‘lady’ at all, & I would like to remain outside the whole affair.

With again all my grateful and loving thanks darling Mama for all your kindness and sympathy which I appreciate more than I can ever say,

Ever your loving daughter in law

Elizabeth

Although the Duchess of York had not met Wallis at Fort Belvedere, she had in fact been skating with the duke and the prince’s party, which included Wallis and Thelma, five months earlier. Queen Mary replied on 20 August, reassuring her daughter-in-law:

Darling Elizabeth,

I am so sorry, I quite forgot to answer yr letter to me at Cowes. Of course Papa never said a word to D about Belvedere so all is well for I agree with you that it wld never do to start a quarrel, but I confess I hope it will not occur again for you ought not to meet D’s lady in his own house, that is too much of a bad thing!!!’

The Yorks had never been frequent visitors to the Fort. The duchess, ever conscious of her position, was not comfortable with its air of informality. A photograph taken by Thelma Furness during her reign as chatelaine shows a group of eight guests; seven are sitting around the pool relaxing in swimming costumes, while the Duchess of York sits alone, resplendent in a dress, hat and pearls.

Wallis and Edward went on separate summer sojourns in August. The prince holidayed in Biarritz, while Wallis and Ernest extended a business trip of Ernest’s in Norway, staying with their friends, the Thaws, who were stationed in Oslo. That autumn, they were again regulars at the Fort while Wallis stoically nursed her private strain: more frantic concerns about money. She and Ernest faced the prospect of having to sell Bryanston Court. Dinner parties were reduced to eight guests, every six weeks, and she was restricted to having one girls’ lunch a month of no more than four women. She continued to lunch at the Ritz or Claridge’s with Thelma, à deux, and in November was excited to be invited to a dinner that Thelma gave where she met Noël Coward. (Coward later said of the Prince of Wales: he ‘had all the charm in the world with nothing to back it up’.)

The prince had started giving Wallis gifts: a photograph of himself in a leather frame, a table for her drawing room – that she chose – for Christmas. Wallis declared Christmas ‘lovely and gay’ and that New Year’s Eve, she and Ernest partied with the playboy prince until five in the morning.

On 25 January, Thelma left for a three-month trip to America to visit her family. In November, Wallis had written to Aunt Bessie: ‘I am going to miss Thelma terribly when she goes to NY after Christmas.’ The day before she sailed, Thelma and Wallis met for cocktails. ‘We rattled along in our fashion,’ Wallis remembered, ‘as we said goodbye, she said, laughingly: “I’m afraid the prince is going to be lonely. Wallis, won’t you look after him?” I promised that I would.’

Thelma’s recollection of events is subtly different. In her memoirs, she wrote: ‘Three or four days before I was set to sail, I had lunch with Wallis at the Ritz. I told her of my plans, and in my exuberance I offered myself for all the usual yeoman’s services. Was there anything I could do for her in America? Were there any messages I could deliver? Did she want me to bring anything back for her? She thanked me and said suddenly: “Oh, Thelma, the little man is going to be so lonely.” “Well, dear,” I answered, “you look after him for me while I’m away.”’

On Monday 12 February, Wallis’s letter to Bessie illustrated the extent to which Wallis heeded her friend, and in the process became indispensable to the demands of the prince. ‘Darling – I have been very slow with letters these past 2 weeks. We have inherited the “young man” from Thelma. He misses her so that he is always calling us up and the result is one late night after the other – and by late I mean 4 a.m. Ernest has cried off a few but I have had to go on. I am sure the gossip will now be that I am the latest.’ Six days later, she wrote: ‘Am also behind on my letters to you on account of the prince who is here most of the time or telephoning 2 and 3 times a day being completely at a loose end. However Thelma will be back very shortly.’

The prince’s interest in Wallis intensified during a dinner that he hosted at the Dorchester Hotel for some American friends on 30 January. Earlier that day he had been in Yorkshire, visiting social welfare projects, villages and working men’s clubs. He was astonished that evening, while the other guests were away from the table dancing, when Wallis sat with him, enquired about his day and actually appeared interested in what his role entailed. Instead of the usual: ‘Oh, Sir, how boring for you! Aren’t you terribly tired?’ response that he was accustomed to, Wallis, who had read about the Council of Social Service in the newspapers, was genuinely keen to know more about it.

Wallis recalled this to be a turning point in their relationship: ‘He began to talk about his work, the things he hoped to do, and the creative role he thought the Monarchy could play in this new age, and also dropped a hint of the frustration he was experiencing,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘I was fascinated. It was as if a door had opened on the inner fastness of his character. What I now saw in his keenness for his job, in his ambition to make a success of it, was not dissimilar to the attitude of many American businessmen I had known. I can not claim that I instantly understood him but I sensed in him something that few around him could have been aware of – a deep loneliness, an overtone of spiritual isolation.’

Edward was captivated. As the dancing guests returned to the table, he said to Wallis: ‘You’re the only woman who’s ever been interested in my job.’ He later wrote: ‘She began to mean more to me in a way that she did not perhaps understand. For a long time she remained unaffected by my interest.’

Yet the point had come when Wallis could no longer remain oblivious to the prince’s attentions. He took to turning up at Bryanston Court for pot-luck suppers which he, Wallis and Ernest would enjoy à trois. According to Wallis, Ernest then ‘developed the art of tactfully excusing himself and retiring to his room with his papers’. The work demands were genuine, thankfully Ernest’s shipping business was picking up.

The Prince of Wales would sometimes pop in and stay for a quick drink, at other times he would appear twice a week and stay all evening. On 18 February, Wallis reassured her aunt in her regular correspondence: ‘P.S. It’s all gossip about the prince. I’m not in the habit of taking my friends’ beaux. We are around together a lot and of course people are going to say it. I think I do amuse him. I’m the comedy relief and we like to dance together – but I always have Ernest hanging around my neck so all is safe.’

A few days later, Wallis wrote once more to her aunt: ‘I am feeling very well but am quite thin not in the face but in the figure. Naturally worry over finances is not fat-making. I weigh 8 stone undressed but eat and drink as usual.’ Juggling the attentions of Ernest, as well as the prince, who was proving to be a most determined suitor, similarly took its toll on Wallis’s nervous disposition. Admirably, she did not ‘junk old friends’ when the prince came into her life, making efforts to keep up her acquaintances in her spare evenings. She told Bessie: ‘I’m a bit worn – never a restful moment as it requires great tact to manage both.’ She and Ernest had even been asked by the prince to invite their own friends to the Fort for weekends. A tremendous honour. She asked Bessie to send her a pale-blue summer dress for $20, explaining: ‘The royalty stuff very demanding on clothes.’

Wallis was now playing the coveted hostess role. Unwittingly, Thelma provided the prince the perfect excuse to transfer affection when she returned from America on 22 March. In New York and on the crossing home, she had enjoyed the attentions of Prince Aly Khan, the son of the Aga Khan. Only twenty-three, he had a reputation as a polished seducer. According to Elsa Maxwell, Aly Khan was ‘un homme fatal’. Word of their association reached Edward.

‘The prince arrived at my house in Regent’s Park that night,’ Thelma recalled. ‘He seemed a little distrait, as if something were bothering him. Suddenly he said: “I hear Aly Khan has been very attentive to you.” I thought he was joking. “Are you jealous, darling?” I asked. But the prince did not answer me.’ When Thelma asked Wallis why the prince was distant to her at the Fort the following weekend, Wallis replied somewhat disingenuously: ‘Darling, you know the little man loves you very much. The little man was just lost without you.’

‘Empty as these sentences were, they were a kind of emotional bulwark,’ recalled Thelma. Reassured, she invited Wallis and Ernest to the Fort for Easter weekend. However, ‘that weekend was negatively memorable’, said Thelma. ‘I do not remember who was there, other than the Simpsons, there were about eight of us in all. I had a bad cold when we arrived … Most of Saturday passed without incident. At dinner, however, I noticed that the prince and Wallis seemed to have little private jokes. Once he picked up a piece of salad with his fingers; Wallis playfully slapped his hand.’ Thelma caught Wallis’s eye and shook her head at her. ‘She knew as well as everybody else that the prince could be very friendly, but no matter how friendly, he never permitted familiarity. His image of himself, shy, genial and democratic, was always framed by the royal three feathers … Wallis looked straight at me. And then and there I knew. That one cold, defiant glance had told the entire story.’

Thelma left the Fort, and the prince’s life, the following morning. Wallis confirmed that her reign was over in a letter to her aunt on 15 April 1934, sent tellingly from the Fort; she writes: ‘Thelma is still in Paris. I’m afraid her rule is over and I’m trying to keep an even keel with my relations with him by avoiding seeing him alone as he is very attentive at the moment. And of course I’m flattered.’

Wallis took to her new role as chatelaine of Fort Belvedere with verve. A footman brought in by Thelma Furness was quickly dismissed, the cook soon followed. Osborne, the butler, was more threatened by Wallis’s presence than those of her predecessors, Lady Furness or Mrs Dudley Ward. When Wallis presented the prince with a small tray on a folding stand, which she thought would simplify the serving of tea, Osborne was reluctant to use it. When the prince insisted that he bring it in for the afternoon tea, the butler snapped the tray into position with a vicious jerk and announced contemptuously: ‘Your Royal Highness, this thing won’t last twenty-four hours.’

Wallis’s status was further sealed when the prince arrived at Bryanston Court with a cairn terrier pup under his arm. He presented the dog to Wallis, announcing that it was called Slipper and was now hers. In her letters, Wallis tried to reassure Aunt Bessie that Ernest was fully aware of what was happening and, in fact, colluded with the new order. ‘Ernest is flattered with it all and lets me dine once or twice a week with him alone,’ she wrote, adding: ‘If Ernest raises any objections to the situation I shall give the prince up at once.’

Even at the height of the prince’s affair with Thelma Furness, Freda Dudley Ward was in the background as the maternal figure the prince could always rely on. On 25 April, when Wallis wrote to Bessie that the royal affair with Thelma was ‘very much on the wane’, she continued: ‘I shall doubtless be blamed as for the moment he is rather attentive though sees equally as much of Mrs Dudley Ward his old flame.’

This is the only mention Wallis ever makes of Freda in her correspondence, yet ever since the prince’s affair with Freda cooled in 1924, and Thelma came on the scene, he had continued to visit the Dudley Ward family. That month, her elder daughter, Penelope, suffered complications after an operation for appendicitis. Freda, who spent anxious days beside her daughter’s bedside, was too distraught to realise that all was suspiciously quiet from royal quarters. As soon as her daughter recovered, she rang York House to speak to the prince. The telephone operator, whom she had known for years, made a strange choking sound when he discovered Mrs Dudley Ward was on the line. ‘He didn’t seem able to speak. I suddenly realised to my horror that he was crying,’ said Freda. ‘“Everybody seems to have gone mad around here,” he said. The prince had given orders that none of my phone calls be put through. I never heard from him again.’

In that one act of cowardice, the prince coldly dispensed with Mrs Freda Dudley Ward. From that moment on, Wallis was to be his ‘one and only’.

* Cain was Wallis’s maid.

† The Prince of Wales’s brother, Albert (Bertie) and his wife, Elizabeth.

‡ King George VI, her father-in-law.

§ Wallis Simpson.

¶ Only Edward’s family ever referred to him as David.

3

One and Only

By the spring of 1934, Wallis and Ernest’s life was almost ‘completely caught up and submerged in the prince’s private world’. The Simpsons received the ultimate invitation of society’s summer season: to join the prince’s party for Ascot week. The royal procession from Windsor Castle to the racecourse was a brilliant piece of pageantry – the king, queen, their family in open landaus, with bewigged postilions astride the grey horses. ‘That year, as I watched from the Royal Enclosure,’ Wallis recalled, ‘I felt an odd surge of pride and admiration when I saw that fleeting, boyish smile directed at us from under his grey topper.’

When the prince invited Wallis and Ernest as his guests on his summer holiday to Biarritz, Wallis initially declined. Ernest was due to go to America on business and she had invited Aunt Bessie to stay with her in his absence. Not to be deterred, the prince reassured Wallis that he would welcome Bessie. Her seventy-year-old aunt, would, of course, make the perfect chaperone.

It was a small party that set off for France on 1 August. The prince, his assistant private secretary, Hugh Lloyd-Thomas, his equerries, ‘G’ Trotter and John Aird, and his old friends, Lieutenant-Commander Buist and his wife Gladys, and Wallis and Aunt Bessie. Edward had rented a sprawling villa called Meretmont, overlooking the ocean. The holiday did not get off to a promising start. There were two days of continuous rain, then their regal host suffered from a surfeit of langoustines and was sick at his table in the Café de Paris. Fortunately, they soon settled into a happier routine. ‘As at the Fort, life was simple – swimming and sunbathing, golf, sometimes a little bridge,’ said Wallis. Once a week, Edward and Wallis would leave the rest of the party and dine alone at local bistros. This was their first opportunity to be together as a couple. John Aird wrote in his diary of the prince at this time: ‘Behaviour in public excellent, in private awful and most embarrassing for others. The prince has lost all confidence in himself and follows W around like a dog.’

The prince soon tired of Biarritz. When Mrs Kenelm Guinness, known as ‘Posy’, joined the party, she invited them to extend their holiday. Her cousin, Lord Moyne, an heir of the Guinness brewing family and Conservative politician, was sailing his yacht, Rosaura, nearby. Edward jumped at the chance to spend more time with Wallis. Bessie, who had planned a motoring trip in Italy, refused to be diverted and left Wallis with the royal party. John Aird, who was responsible for organising the logistics of joining the cruise, later wrote of Wallis: ‘I feel that she is not basically a bad sort of tough girl out to get what she can, but unless she is much cleverer than I think, she does not know how to work it so as to cash in best.’

The yacht was a converted channel steamer. Lord Moyne, a distinguished-looking Irishman, made a point of boasting to his guests that he was an accomplished seaman and the Rosaura could override any Atlantic gale. In spite of a furious storm in the Bay of Biscay as the royal party went aboard, Lord Moyne ordered the vessel to get underway, announcing: ‘I have yet to see the storm that could keep me in port.’ Wallis, a seasoned seafarer who rarely got seasick, took to her cabin, clinging to the bed as her trunk was flung back and forth across her berth. As the storm mounted in violence, each of the rest of the party retreated to their cabins, with the exception of John Aird. Wallis, convinced that their host would have to accept defeat, asked a steward who checked in on her later that night, how soon they would be in port. He replied: ‘I’ve never seen his Lordship in finer fettle. He has just ordered caviar and grouse and a bottle of champagne for Mr Aird and himself.’

The last straw was when Lord Moyne’s pet, a terrifying monkey who had the run of the vessel, suddenly leapt on Wallis’s bed, having jumped through a skylight. Wallis let out such a scream that Lord Moyne himself was startled from the bridge. A steward was sent to coax the spirited animal from Wallis’s berth. Fortunately, the prince, reeling with seasickness himself, struggled to the bridge and, summoning his finest diplomacy, ordered the yacht to the nearby Spanish port of Coruna.

John Aird felt that Wallis’s fear of physical danger had an enfeebling effect on the prince. Always before, he had been physically intrepid, even recklessly so. He enjoyed flying in aircraft and was always the one who wanted to push ahead in bad conditions. Of the storm they faced in the Rosaura, Aird later wrote bitterly: ‘He was really frightened, and in my opinion is a coward at heart.’

Once the storm had blown over, the party enjoyed a relaxed, delightful cruise down the Spanish and Portuguese coasts. Often finding themselves alone on deck in the evenings, Wallis recognised that here she and Edward ‘crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love’. Eleven days after leaving Biarritz, they reached Cannes. After dinner with Wallis’s friends, Herman and Katherine Rogers, at their hillside villa, Edward placed a tiny velvet pouch from Cartier in Wallis’s hand. It contained a diamond and emerald charm for a bracelet – the first of what would become his legendary acquisition of exquisite jewellery for his beloved.

The prince’s advisors were aware of the beneficial influence Wallis could have on him. On holiday, Edward liked to sport the simplest of clothes; an antidote to the constant, starchy dressing up that his position required. But Wallis could see that it was inappropriate for the Prince of Wales to go ashore practically deshabille in shorts, shirt and sandals. It took all her powers of persuasion to entice him into linen trousers and a jacket.

It was their visibility on the Côte d’Azur that inspired the first mention in the press of the new romance. That September, Time magazine referred to the fun that ‘Edward of Wales [was] having at Cannes last week with beautiful Mrs Wallace Simpson’. Still the courtiers were not alert to any real danger. At the end of the holiday, John Aird concluded of Wallis: ‘She does not seem to have any illusions about the situation and definitely does not want to do anything that will lose her husband.’

The wiser, more perceptive Aunt Bessie queried her niece’s motives that September. Over dinner, she asked Wallis: ‘Isn’t the prince rather taken with you?’ adding: ‘These old eyes aren’t so old that they can’t see what’s in his every glance.’ Bessie cautioned Wallis that if she continued enjoying this kind of life – which Wallis herself described as ‘Wallis in Wonderland’ – it would leave her niece unsettled and dissatisfied with the life she had known before. Wallis batted away her concerns. ‘It’s all great fun,’ she told her. ‘You don’t have to worry about me – I know what I am doing.’ Aunt Bessie’s conclusion was wisely prescient: ‘I can see no happy outcome to such a situation.’

Similarly concerned were the king and queen. Up until then, they had publicly ignored Wallis’s existence. That September, after his prolonged summer holiday, Edward joined his parents at Balmoral. He had composed a tune for the bagpipes, dedicated to Wallis, called ‘Majorca’. He practised it relentlessly, marching up and down the castle terrace in the rain until the exasperated king threw open the window and yelled at him to stop.

In November, tensions escalated over Wallis in the royal household. The prince had included Mrs Simpson’s name on a list of guests that he wanted to invite to an evening celebration at Buckingham Palace for his brother George, the Duke of Kent’s, wedding to Princess Marina of Greece. When the king saw it he scratched it out. The Duke of Kent later reinstated her on the list.

Wallis resumed her letters to Aunt Bessie, writing from the Fort on 5 November about circulating rumours: ‘Don’t listen to such ridiculous gossip. E[rnest] and myself are far from being divorced and have had a long talk about [the] P[rince of] W[ales] and myself and also one with the latter and everything will go on just the same as before, namely the three of us being the best of friends. I shall try and be clever enough to keep them both.’

In the run-up to the royal wedding at Westminster Abbey on 29 November, the Simpsons spent many happy times at the Fort with the two princes. George was living there in preparation for his marriage, while Princess Marina was in Paris with her parents, selecting her trousseau. Wallis, Ernest and the princes ‘had great fun together’. Wallis declared Princess Marina ‘a most beautiful woman’ whom Prince George was ‘genuinely in love with’. It amused Wallis to see Prince George jokingly checking the tally at the end of the day of how much the wedding gifts that arrived from all over the world were worth. ‘Royalty can be just as interested in the cost of things as the rest of us,’ she sagely observed. She and Ernest gave the royal couple two lamps from Fortnum & Mason, costing ten guineas each. These, she told Prince George, unabashed, were reduced in the sale and were not exchangeable.

For the state reception hosted by the king and queen at Buckingham Palace, Wallis wore a dress designed by Eva Lutyens, daughter-in-law of the famous architect. In a simple column of violet lamé with a vivid green sash, Wallis made a bold impression. Princess Marina, the bride-to-be, was in an unpretentious white evening dress, while Queen Mary was her usual regal staid self in silver brocade with ice-blue paillettes. Wallis, who had borrowed a tiara from Cartier, was understandably thrilled when Prince Paul, Regent of Yugoslavia, the brother-in-law of the bride, told her: ‘Mrs Simpson, there is no question about it – you are wearing the most striking gown in the room.’

However, the evening would hold far more import than being memorable for Wallis’s stylish gown. It would turn out to be the only occasion when she would (briefly) meet Edward’s parents. The prince approached Queen Mary with the words: ‘I want to introduce a great friend of mine.’ Wallis later wrote in her memoirs: ‘After Prince Paul had left us, David led me over to where they [the king and queen] were standing and introduced me. It was the briefest of encounters – a few words of perfunctory greeting, and exchange of meaningless pleasantries, and we moved away.’ Afterwards, Wallis described to her Aunt Bessie the ‘excitement of the prince bringing the Queen up to Ernest and self in front of all the cold jealous English eyes’. Many times that evening, Ernest was left standing alone while the heir to the throne took Wallis off to meet his friends and relations. Prince Christopher of Greece wrote of Edward: ‘He laid a hand on my arm in an impulsive way: “Christo, come with me. I want you to meet Mrs Simpson …” “Mrs Simpson, who is she?” I asked. “An American,” then he smiled. “She’s wonderful,” he added. The two words told me everything. It was as though he had said: “She is the only woman in the world.”’

John Aird recorded in his memoirs that the prince introduced Wallis to his mother ‘and would have done to HM [His Majesty] if he had not been cut off’. After the party, the king was outraged that Wallis had slipped back onto the guest list, shouting: ‘That woman in my house!’ He continued to rant that at least Mrs Dudley Ward had come from a better class, while his son had ‘not a single friend who is a gentleman’. He was referring to Edward’s involvement with the international set. King George gave orders to the Lord Chamberlain that Mrs Simpson was not to be invited to any of the Silver Jubilee functions the following year, nor ever again to the royal enclosure at Ascot.

During the glamorous reception, the prince also took Wallis over to be greeted by the Duke and Duchess of York. Against Wallis’s flat, angular frame and violet column dress, Elizabeth was softer, filling out her pale pink gown. Yet her femininity belied a steely reserve. Wallis curtsied to Edward’s sister-in-law, later describing ‘the almost startling blueness’ of the Duchess of York’s eyes as she felt her cold, appraising stare. Their blue eyes and affection for the Prince of Wales was all the two women would ever have in common. The Yorks, while studiously polite in public, failed to show any warmth towards Wallis. Elizabeth’s close friend, the Dowager Lady Hardinge of Penshurst, who was present at the interaction between the two brothers and their amours, later wrote: ‘I am afraid Mrs Simpson went down rather badly with the duchess from the word go. It may have been the rather ostentatious dress, or the fact that she allowed the Prince of Wales to push her forward in what seemed an inappropriate manner. The Duchess of York was never discourteous in my experience, but those of us who knew her very well could always tell when she did not care for something or someone, and it was very apparent to me that she did not care for Mrs Simpson at all.’

If Elizabeth, born Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, once harboured romantic feelings for Edward, as was rumoured, it would partly explain her enmity towards Wallis. Elizabeth had initially been reluctant to accept his brother, Bertie’s, wedding proposal. ‘Prince Albert pursued Elizabeth for three years and she twice turned down marriage proposals, which protocol demanded were made to her through intermediaries,’ said her equerry, Major Colin Burgess. ‘On the third time, in 1923, when Prince Albert ignored protocol and asked her directly, she accepted.’ The twenty-three-year-old daughter of the Earl of Strathmore was considered a suitable royal match. ‘I believe that it is not impossible that Elizabeth would have liked to marry the Prince of Wales,’ said Hugo Vickers, who knew her. ‘Once the Duke of York took an interest in her, her mother, Lady Strathmore, saw the possibility of a royal union. She thought: “Why not the older brother?” Edward wasn’t interested in any eligible English girl.’

Wallis, ever resourceful, did not dwell on the chill of Elizabeth’s disapproval at Prince George’s wedding celebrations. Instead, she was aware, after the nuptials – where ‘the prince had provided Ernest and me with very good places on a side aisle, from which we had an uninterrupted view of the altar’ – that Edward nursed a sense of sadness and keen loss now that his favourite brother was married. His friendship with his younger brother was, apart from his relationship with Wallis, the most important of his adult life. Wallis, sensitive to the strain of Edward’s loneliness, worked hard to divert him with some humorous irrelevancy or by engaging in a more serious topic that interested him. ‘It was curious to see a man of such dynamic qualities, a man so active and so often filled with the true joy of life, suddenly disappear before my very eyes into uncertainty,’ she wrote. She felt that he was ‘reaching out for something that was as yet unknown to him, something which could anchor his personal life’.

***

Edward described his life before his marriage to Wallis as ‘a disconnected pattern – duty without decision, service without responsibility, pomp without power’. After George’s betrothal, this disconnect seemed to weigh on him more heavily. The heir to the throne continued to struggle with the responsibility of his official duties, while railing against the Palace old guard. He was at heart a moderniser who felt that many of the institutional practices were out of date. He wanted to be seen as ‘Edward the innovator’, a monarch who would let ‘fresh air’ into the ‘venerable institution of kingship’. In 1969, Edward told an interviewer: ‘Before I became King, I was in conflict with the Government of the Day.’ The prince’s visits in 1935 to depressed areas of the country angered the prime minister. Edward later recalled: ‘When Stanley Baldwin got to hear of these trips he called me to the House of Commons. He said: “Why are you going up there? Have you not got other important things to do?” So I said, “No, Mr Baldwin, I think it’s very important to see how these people live. Some of them have been out of work for ten years.”’ Edward felt it was his duty to alert the government that little had been done to alleviate the plight of the unemployed. ‘To some extent I collided with the Establishment,’ he concluded, ‘but not violently. I’m not being conceited but it might have helped revive their thinking.’

As the prince shared the frustrations of his position with Wallis, she realised that she had become a part of his quest, perhaps inextricably so. Each day he drew her ever more intimately into his life. Their dinners alone became more regular and he began telephoning Wallis frequently throughout the day. Flattering, but with his ardour and intense neediness, it was also pressurising and exhausting. On 3 December 1934, Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie from the Fort that she had been buying all the prince’s Christmas presents for his staff and had to wrap 250 gifts. After her usual domestic update – she had no housemaid – Wallis added, almost casually: ‘I have 2 more bracelets and a small diamond that sticks into my hair. Smart. Ernest says that the insurance is getting steep! A big kiss and all love –.’

Ernest was right to be worried about their insurance premium. That Christmas, Edward gave Wallis £50,000 worth of jewels (including two large square emeralds) followed by £60,000 worth a week later at New Year. The prince should have been more judicious. When the king was alerted by his courtiers that his son and heir had spent £110,000 (£7 million today) on jewels he feared blackmail. Unbeknownst to Edward, the king asked Stanley Baldwin for police help to ascertain the woman’s identity and motives. George V set in motion a controversial surveillance operation that would continue throughout the following year. Sir Vernon Kell, the founder and first director of MI5, initially refused Baldwin’s request to spy on the Prince of Wales because he felt that it would be crossing a constitutional line and could not be justified in terms of national security. Eventually, Sir Vernon grudgingly agreed to put Baldwin’s request to the board at MI5, who overruled the director and gave their assent.

The covert surveillance operation was authorised by the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, and undertaken by Superintendent Albert Canning of Scotland Yard. Canning began by confirming Mrs Simpson as the recipient of the jewels. ‘She is reputed to be very attractive,’ wrote Canning in one report, ‘and spends lavishly on clothes and entertainment.’ Visitors to Bryanston Court were monitored by the inspector and his team. Detectives also recorded that Mrs Simpson and the prince called each other ‘darling’ while visiting an antiques shop in South Kensington. In the report the shopkeeper remarked that the lady seemed to have the gentleman ‘completely under her thumb’. The information collected by Special Branch was often lurid, almost laughably inaccurate and very boys’ own. It was asserted that Ernest Simpson was ‘Jewish’ and a ‘bounder type’ who was waiting for ‘high honours’ to be conferred on him. Wallis, who two years later referred to becoming the ‘convenient tool’ in the hands of the politicians who created ‘an organised campaign’ to remove Edward from the throne, had no idea at this stage that she was being spied on.

One trumped-up charge against Wallis that later came to light was that, whilst seeing the prince, she was having ‘intimate relations’ with a Ford car salesman by the name of Guy Marcus Trundle. Trundle, known to his family as a fantasist who liked to boast of his ‘conquests’, made these claims about Wallis to anyone who would listen. However, her close friends categorically deny that she would have even contemplated an affair with such a figure. ‘There is absolutely no way that she had an affair with Guy Trundle,’ said Nicky Haslam. ‘I know this to be true,’ John Julius Norwich agreed: ‘She was much too intelligent to have had an affair with a second-hand car dealer when the eyes of the world were upon her. This was merely another bid by the powers that be to discredit her.’

Wallis’s correspondence to her aunt brims with the strain of juggling two men, her husband and the Prince of Wales; it seems completely out of character that she would jeopardise her situation with a third, let alone a man from such an unlikely background. Far from craving further entanglements, she cherished space for herself. When the prince went to Sandringham with his family for Christmas, she considered it ‘a lovely rest for us and especially me’.

The following year, 1935, was thrilling for Wallis. Diana, Lady Mosley summarised her situation: ‘Although the great public knew nothing of the Prince of Wales’s friendship with Mrs Simpson, a fairly wide circle in London knew of it, and those who did thought at first it was just Lady Furness all over again and Wallis the prince’s latest American friend. Society being what it is, Wallis began not just to have a good time but the time of her life. She was courted and flattered.’

Wallis was feted by the Londonderrys (the 7th Marquess was a Cabinet minister and his wife, Edith, Lady Londonderry, held sought-after political receptions); Mrs Evelyn Fitzgerald, sister-in-law of the press baron, Lord Beaverbrook; the Guinnesses; the Cholmondeleys (the 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley would become Lord Chamberlain at the court of Edward VIII); Mrs Laura Corrigan (a society hostess from Colorado); Daphne, Countess of Weymouth; Lady Sibyl Colefax; and Emerald, Lady Cunard.

‘Though nothing about Mrs Simpson appears in the English papers,’ the society photographer Cecil Beaton noted in his diary that autumn, ‘her name seems never to be off people’s lips. For those who enjoy gossip she is a particular treat. The sound of her name implies secrecy, royalty, and being in the know. As a topic she has become a mania, so much so that her name is banned in many houses to allow breathing space for other topics …’

There was something touchingly childlike about Wallis’s excitement at her recognised status in society as Edward’s ‘One and Only’. Instead of always feeling an outsider, as she had done since childhood, she began to embrace the (faux) warmth of acceptance. Lady Cunard, the society figurehead always adorned with ropes of pearls who championed Wallis, memorably said: ‘Little Mrs Simpson knows her Balzac,’ suggesting that Wallis was better read and better bred than people imagined. Emerald Cunard’s lunch parties were legendary due to her ‘throwaway shockers’; invitations to her Grosvenor Square home were coveted. Wallis, who became a regular around her lapis lazuli-topped circular table, was sufficiently savvy to recognise that the fawning society figures were there solely because of the prince. Her glittering position would extinguish the minute Edward lost interest in her. This she accepted and awaited.

Ernest, too, knew that all the attention had nothing to do with him. According to Diana Mosley: ‘He absented himself more and more, and in fact behaved with dignity. Mrs Simpson saw only the prince. If she had seen others, everyone would have known, even if there was nothing in the newspapers.’

In late January 1935, Chips Channon recorded his first meeting with Wallis. ‘Lunched with Emerald to meet Mrs Simpson … She is a nice, quiet, well-bred mouse of a woman with large startled eyes and a huge mole. I think that she is surprised and rather conscience-stricken by her present position and the limelight which consequently falls upon her.’ Those in the know were abuzz with chatter as to what exactly the prince saw in Wallis Simpson. As she herself said later: ‘I could find no good reason why this most glamorous of men should be so seriously attracted to me. I was certainly no beauty, and he had the pick of the beautiful women of the world.’ It was her American independence of spirit, she concluded, along with her breezy sense of fun, that he was drawn to.

Although Wallis valiantly told herself and her aunt that Ernest was completely compliant with her situation, the truth was that Ernest, for all his reverence of royalty, was finding his wife’s ever-growing attachment to another man increasingly hard to tolerate. For all her protestations to Aunt Bessie that her relationship with Ernest was solid, the marriage was starting to disintegrate. ‘Until now, I had taken for granted that Ernest’s interest in the prince was keeping pace with mine,’ she later wrote, ‘but about this time I began to sense a change in his attitude. His work seemed to make more and more demands on his time in the evening. Often he would not return in time for dinner, or when the prince suggested dropping in at Sartori’s or the Dorchester for an hour or so of amusement, Ernest would ask to be excused on the plea that he had an early appointment or that papers from the office needed his attention. He also seemed less and less interested in what I had to say about the prince’s latest news and interest.’

It was the prince’s invitation to a two-week skiing holiday in Austria in February 1935 which highlighted the growing frictions between the Simpsons. Wallis relished the chance to get away; when the prince invited them to join him in Kitzbühel, Wallis ‘naturally accepted for both of us’. When she told Ernest, it precipitated their first ever door slamming row. Ernest, who had business in New York and was no fan of winter sports, wanted Wallis to accompany him on his business trip. Wallis made her choice; the prince over Ernest, and this, unsurprisingly, created the first irreparable fissure in their marriage.

The prince’s staff began to feel alarmed when Edward set off for another holiday with Wallis in the party, yet again without her husband. Accompanying them were Bruce Ogilvy (the prince’s equerry), his wife Primrose and his sister-in-law Olive. Wallis, who did not take to skiing, discovered a fear of the sport, preferring the less demanding après-ski. She looked forward to the afternoon rendezvous of the whole party in the village inn, sipping hot chocolate before the fire. The prince’s entourage stayed in the Grand Hotel and every evening ate at a mountain restaurant where a band played folk music, the prince heartily singing along to the local songs. Edward, loath to return to London, announced after two weeks that he felt like waltzing, ‘and Vienna’s the place for that’. So off the royal party swept, to the Bristol Hotel in Vienna, crossing the Alps by train. His aides were understandably frantic when, after delightful evenings devoted to Strauss, the prince asserted that ‘while these Viennese waltzes are wonderfully tender, there is nothing to match the fire of gypsy violins’. The next morning, on yet another royal whim, they were on their way to Budapest. Edward’s insatiable need to indulge every fleeting impulse was more akin to that of a jaded jetsetter, rather than the heir to the throne, with duties and responsibilities to consider.

It was in a dingy local tavern in Budapest, on the Pest side of the river, where they had been guaranteed to hear the best gypsy music in Hungary, that Wallis had a piercing moment of realisation about the impossibility of her situation. As the violins swelled with melancholy tunes, amid the flickering candles and rough-hewn wooden tables, she ‘had the feeling of being torn apart, of being caught up in the inescapable sadness and sorrow of human suffering; and the look in David’s eyes told me that he was in the grip of the same flow of feeling’. She later wrote that she was ‘scarcely in a condition to differentiate these two worlds between which I giddily swung, hoping to have the best of both, but not quite sure whether I could maintain my footing in either’.

On Wallis’s return to London, it became clear that her sense of foreboding was justified. Her marital footing could no longer be guaranteed. Ernest, now cold and distant, had ‘undergone a change’. He showed no interest in her trip and was uncommunicative about his own visit to New York. For the first time their evenings together were strained, punctuated by arctic silences. Still Wallis did not act on the warning bells, so enraptured was she to be swept up in the prince’s orbit. ‘My concern was no more than a tiny cloud in the growing radiance that the prince’s favour cast over my life,’ she wrote with insouciance. ‘I became aware of a rising curiosity concerning me, of new doors opening, and a heightened interest even in my casual remarks. I was stimulated; I was excited; I felt as if I were borne upon a rising wave that seemed to be carrying me ever more rapidly and even higher.’

It was the Kitzbühel skiing holiday that convinced royal aides that the prince had gone too far. Sir Clive Wigram, George V’s private secretary, visited Edward at Fort Belvedere and told him how concerned the king was about his personal life. In a memo afterwards, he wrote: ‘The prince said that he was astonished that anyone could take offence about his personal friends. Mrs Simpson was a charming, cultivated woman.’ John Aird, meanwhile, could see that putting any pressure on the prince had negligible effect. If anything, he felt that after Sir Clive’s visit ‘the devotion of HRH if possible greater’. Godfrey Thomas, the prince’s equerry, said that he believed the prince knew ‘in his inmost heart’ he was behaving badly. Thomas reassured the courtiers that patience was key. ‘I am sure his eyes will be opened to the folly he is making of himself, and when he does come for help and sympathy, I am sure you will respond as I know I shall.’

The rumour mill amongst the staff at the two royal households, York House and Buckingham Palace, was rife with tales of the prince’s nocturnal habits. It was said that two bedrooms at the Fort had been turned into one for the couple’s benefit, presumably to avoid the risk that, when the house was full, the dressing room adjoining Wallis’s bedroom might be occupied and thus access to her impeded. It is a curious detail that Edward always maintained that he never slept with Wallis before his marriage, and sued for libel an author who referred to her as his mistress. Astonishingly, the subject arose between Edward and his father, when Edward challenged the king over his ban on Wallis’s appearance at court. He wanted Wallis to be invited to the court ball to celebrate the Silver Jubilee in May 1935. The king said that he could not invite his son’s mistress to such an occasion. When the prince swore that she was not his ‘mistress’, the king accepted his son’s word and said that Mrs Simpson could come. ‘I think that this is all for the best,’ wrote John Aird in his diary, ‘but it is rather a shock to think of the Prince of Wales lying on his oath, which a lot of people who know think he has.’

Sir Clive Wigram wrote that ‘the staff were horrified at the audacity of the statements of HRH. Apart from actually seeing HRH and Mrs S in bed together, they had positive proof that HRH lived with her.’ Tommy Lascelles said that he would find it as easy to believe in the innocence of their relationship as ‘a herd of unicorns grazing in Hyde Park and a shoal of mermaids swimming in the Serpentine’.

Despite the unravelling of their marriage, the Simpsons put on a brave front. That April, Ernest wrote warmly to his mother, keen to impress her with his royal connections and wanting to reassure her that all was well in his marriage:

My dearest one and only Mother,

The Prince took two other married couples and ourselves to the Grand National Steeple chase near Liverpool. We had a special car on the train and we were met by a fleet of motors. We lunched in state with Lord Sefton, the owner of the course and had a splendid view from his private stand. It was great fun.

Much, much love, in which Wallis joins, and a big hug,

Affectionately, Ernest.

At Easter, Ernest joined Wallis motoring around Cornwall with the prince, and their friends, the Hunters, to see the camellias and rhododendrons in bloom. According to Wallis, whatever Ernest was ‘thinking or feeling, he loyally played his part’. Whilst staying on the Duchy estate, Edward began penning Wallis intimate billets-doux, which he had delivered to her room. But a shadow was now cast over the trio. Where the arrangement had previously been chummily inclusive, Ernest was now excluded. Wallis and Edward were sufficiently emotionally entwined to have developed their own private language, which spelt out the intensity of their relationship. They referred to themselves as ‘WE’, representing their joint first names and symbolising their union. They also devised the adjective eanum, which to them meant tiny, ‘poor’, ‘affecting’ and ‘pathetic’. Edward wrote to Wallis from St Austell Bay Hotel, his note accompanying an Easter gift of a bracelet:

My [twice underlined] Eanum – My [thrice underlined] Wallis

This is not the kind of Easter WE want but it will be alright next year. The Easter Bunny has brought this from Us All [twice underlined] & Slipper says he likes it too but it has to be fitted and christened later. I love you more & more & more each & every minute & miss you so [thrice underlined] terribly here. You do too dont you my sweetheart.

God bless WE. Always your[s] [twice underlined].

Edward’s obsession for Wallis was causing him to act with increasingly rash indiscretion. Wallis would have received the letter, and the accompanying piece of jewellery, while sharing a room with Ernest. She, meanwhile, was no longer under any illusions that this was a romantic relationship that the prince seemed wholly committed to. The mounting tension between the trio finally erupted in a terrible row between Wallis and Ernest on their return from Cornwall. This provoked Wallis to write her first stern letter to the prince. It reveals how she by now fully assumed the role of disapproving mother, reprimanding a thoughtless naughty boy.

Tuesday a.m.

David dear –

I was and still am most terribly upset. You see my dear one can’t go through life stepping on other people … You think only of what you want and take it without the slightest thought of others. One can arrive at the same result in a kinder way. I had a long quiet talk with E last night and I felt very eanum at the end. Everything he said was so true. The evening was difficult as you did stay too late. Doesn’t your love for me reach the heights of wanting to make things a little easier for me. The lovely things you say to me aren’t of much value unless they are backed up by equal actions.

I was upset and also very disappointed in a boy – because David what are all those words if what they say isn’t enough for a little sacrifice on our part to do what is the right thing for all concerned. So far you have always come first in my actions if there had to be a choice (like Sat). It isn’t fair and cannot always be that way.

Sometimes I think you haven’t grown up where love is concerned and perhaps it’s only a boyish passion for surely it lacks the thought of me that a man’s love is capable of … Your behaviour last night made me realise how very alone I shall be some day – and because I love you I don’t seem to have the strength to protect myself from your youthfulness.

God bless WE and be kind to me in the years to come for I have lost something noble for a boy who may always remain a Peter Pan.

Those close to the couple could see the inherent insecurity in Wallis’s position. As Chips Channon wrote on 14 May, the day of the Silver Jubilee Ball: ‘She is madly anxious to storm society while she is still his favourite so that when he leaves her, as he leaves everybody in time, she will be secure.’ Chips continued to comment on the gossip fizzing about Wallis’s appearance later at the ball. ‘There is tremendous excitement about Mrs Simpson. It is a war of the knife between past and present. Officially I am on-side – but secretly delighted for she always was an appalling, selfish, silly influence. Mrs S has enormously improved the prince. In fact, I find her duel over the Prince of Wales between Mrs Simpson, supported by Diana Cooper, and strangely, enough, Emerald, and the _* camp, is most diverting. In fact, the romance surpasses all else in interest.’

Of the state ball, Wallis recalled that after the king and queen had made their entrance, the dancing began. ‘As David and I danced past, I thought I felt the king’s eyes rest searchingly on me. Something in his look made me feel all this graciousness and pageantry were but the glittering tip of an iceberg that extended down into unseen depths I could never plumb, depths filled with an icy menace for such as me.’ A chill ran through Wallis and in spite of being seen dancing the foxtrot with the Prince of Wales, ‘in that moment I knew that between David’s world and mine lay an abyss that I could never cross, one he could never bridge for me’.

Wallis kept up her jovial, reassuring front in her correspondence with Aunt Bessie. After the ball, she wrote of her evening, describing the diamond clips she received as a jubilee present. ‘The Prince danced with me after the opening one with the Queen so you see I am not neglected on the right things.’ She continued to regale her aunt with examples of her popularity, explaining that she was besieged by invitations. Wise to the situation she explained: ‘They think that in asking me they’ll get him.’ Before adding, tellingly: ‘It will be lovely when something happens to break it up.’

However, Edward had no intention of letting Wallis go. He later wrote: ‘A prince’s heart, like his politics, must remain within the constitutional pale. But my heart refused to be so confined; and presently and imperceptibly the hope formed that one day I might be able to share my life with her, just how I did not know.’ The prince and Mrs Simpson continued to storm society; while Special Branch continued to spy on Wallis; and the royal family made every effort to avoid her. The battle lines that Chips Channon referred to were drawn between the old guard traditionalists (chiefly King George V, Queen Mary, the Duke and Duchess of York and Princess Marina) and the pro-Wallis camp (which included the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Kent, Lady Cunard, Lady Colefax, Chips Channon, the Duff Coopers, Cecil Beaton and Winston Churchill).

Later that May, on Empire Day, Chips Channon wrote in his diary: ‘We had cocktails at Mrs Simpson’s little flat in Bryanston Court. The Prince was charm itself. He is boisterous, wrinkled and gay. His voice is more American than ever. (It doesn’t matter, since all the Royal Family except the Duke of Kent have German voices.) He wore a short black coat and soft collar, checked socks and a tie … He shook and passed the cocktails very much the jeune homme de la maison.’

A few nights later, Chips joined the prince and ‘the ménage Simpson’ in Emerald Cunard’s box at the opera. He noted the positive influence and mesmeric hold Wallis had over the heir to the throne. It was she who chided Edward to leave, reminding him not to be late in joining the queen for a ball. As he left, she removed a cigar from his breast pocket, admonishing: ‘It doesn’t look very pretty.’ The party noted that the prince left but was back within half an hour.

Wallis’s reign at the Fort was similarly in its zenith. That summer Lady Diana Cooper and her husband, Duff, were weekend guests. ‘We arrived after midnight (perhaps as chaperones),’ recalled Lady Diana:

Jabber and beer and bed was the order. I did not leave the ‘cabin’s seclusion’ until 1 o’clock, having been told that no one else did. HRH was dressed in plus-twenties with vivid azure socks. Wallis, admirably correct and chic. Me bang wrong! Everything is a few hours later than other places (perhaps it is American time). A splendid tea arrived at 6.30 with Anthony Eden and Esmond Harmsworth [son and heir of Lord Rothermere]. Dinner was at 10. Emerald arrived at 8.30 for cocktails, which she doesn’t drink although the prince prepares the portions with his own poor hands and does all the glass-filling. The Prince changed into a Donald tartan dress-kilt with an immense white leather purse in front, and played the pipes round the table after dinner, having first fetched his bonnet. We ‘reeled’ to bed at 2 a.m.

While the British press had yet to write anything about the royal romance, keeping the public completely in the dark about the affair, American publications were less reverential and inhibited. That June, Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie who was ‘upset by Hearst [Newspapers’] reporters lies’. She tried to put her aunt’s mind at rest. ‘You know I am not going to get a divorce. Ernest and I are perfectly happy and understand each other so please put it all out of your head and tell people they can’t believe the press.’

It was not just the whispers in the press that were mounting. Superintendent Canning’s report, delivered to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Philip Game on 3 July, not only alleged that Wallis was having an affair with Guy Trundle; it also speculated about a controversial liaison between Wallis and Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s ambassador to Britain. The relentlessly charming von Ribbentrop, a former wine salesman, had for the last two years been peddling the Third Reich to the British aristocracy. He cultivated Lady Cunard as a route to the Prince of Wales. In June, Wallis and the prince had met von Ribbentrop at a large gathering at Emerald’s. Winston Churchill, also in attendance, listened as the German droned on about the achievements of the Führer. When he left, Churchill turned to his hostess and said: ‘Emerald, I hope we never have to hear that broken gramophone record again.’

Chips Channon noted in his diary: ‘much gossip about the Prince of Wales’s alleged Nazi leanings; he is alleged to have been influenced by Emerald (who is rather eprise with Herr Ribbentrop) through Mrs Simpson. He has just made an extraordinary speech to the British Legion advocating friendship with Germany; it is only a gesture, but a gesture that may be taken seriously in Germany and elsewhere. If only the Chancelleries of Europe knew that his speech was the result of Emerald Cunard’s intrigues, themselves inspired by Herr Ribbentrop’s dimple!’

In July, Edward took part in a naval review in the Channel. His separation from Wallis inspired him to write to her at one o’clock in the morning on board his ship:

A boy is holding a girl so very tight in his arms tonight … A girl knows that not anybody or anything can separate WE – not even the stars – and that WE belong to each other for ever. WE love [twice underlined] each other more than life so God bless WE. Your [twice underlined] David.

For his August holiday that year, the prince rented the Marquess of Cholmondeley’s summer residence, Villa Le Roc, in Cannes. As Edward was not allowed to receive gifts from his subjects, he paid George Rocksavage a token £5 for the fortnight’s stay. Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie of the villa, with its pretty terraced gardens bursting with zinnias and plumbago: ‘We got here on Monday to find a lovely villa on the water – our own rocks and all the privacy in the world but very hot.’ The Duke of Westminster’s yacht, Cutty Sark, was at their disposal. Again, Wallis accompanied the prince without Ernest. Ernest absented himself because his mother was visiting him in London, then he was due on business in America. Wallis gushed to her aunt: ‘My party consists of Lord and Lady Brownlow, Buists, Mrs Fitzgerald and Lord Sefton. Très chic. E is quite content for me to go as he can do nothing for me in the way of a holiday.’ She ends her missive asking her aunt to go and see her husband when he is in the States. Ernest, she reveals, ‘is still the man of my dreams’.

John Aird, who was in attendance on the trip, was alarmed when, on arrival at the villa, the prince rushed in and gave the best bedroom to his equerry, apportioning himself ‘a rotten little room next to W’. An hour later the decision was reversed. ‘At whose suggestion I do not know,’ recorded Aird. Most likely Wallis’s, given that only she could steer the prince towards more dignified behaviour. Indeed, the couple’s correspondence during the trip bears witness to Wallis’s eye for detail. She writes to him from her room in the morning, suggesting that as they have a lunch for ten later that day, including with Sir Robert Vansittart, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, it would be more comfortable if the butler could organise ‘chairs without arms’. As well as seating plans, menu plans – ‘I didn’t see a green vegetable on the menu’ – she explains: ‘I like everyone to think you do things well.’

Wallis always needed to be in control. ‘She liked to know exactly what was going on,’ said Hugo Vickers. ‘Later in their life together, if someone dropped a plate in their house in the French countryside and the Duchess was in Paris, she would know as if by radar. She said to her butler: “If something breaks, please tell me. I won’t mind but please always let me know.” She was incredibly straightforward like that and her staff adored her for it.’ Indeed, a kitchen maid who later worked for Wallis attests to this: ‘All the maids spoke well of Mrs Simpson.’

Oblivious to the dramatic extent of it, Wallis, with her maternal chiding, vigilant housekeeping, lack of sycophancy, genuine intelligent interest in Edward’s official duties and air of assured competency, had become indispensable to the prince. She was his oxygen. Without her, Winston Churchill observed, he was haggard and dejected. By the end of the long summer holiday, having stretched their European sojourn through to October, Edward knew that he wanted to marry her. How he would realise this became his principal obsession. ‘It was all quite vague but nonetheless vivid,’ he later wrote. ‘This dream of being able to bring into my life what for so long had been lacking.’ He intended to discuss the matter with his father that autumn. Meanwhile, he wrote to Wallis, pleading with her not to forsake him: ‘Please, please Wallis don’t get scared or loose [sic] faith when you are away from me. I love you more every minute and no difficulties or complications can possibly prevent our ultimate happiness.’

His obsessive desire for Wallis now left no room for Ernest. ‘I do hate and loathe the present situation … and am just going mad at the mere thought (let alone knowing) that you are alone there with Ernest. God bless WE forever my Wallis. You know your David will love you and look after you so long as he has breath in his eanum body.’

* When Chips Channon’s diaries were published in 1967, his views on the royal family were seen as so controversial that certain names were redacted. In this instance it is likely that he is referring to the Duchess of York and then the battle between the king’s camp and the York camp, which would include the attitude of the king and queen.

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