Introduction
On 8 December 1936, Evelyn Waugh wrote his impressions of the abdication saga in his diary. ‘The Simpson crisis has been a great delight to everyone’, he remarked gleefully. ‘At Maidie’s nursing home they report a pronounced turn for the better in all adult patients. There can seldom have been an event that has caused so much general delight and so little pain.’ Waugh’s witty and flippant observation was accurate in one respect. But though the delight was indeed unsurpassed for some, the pain that counterbalanced it for others was equally so.
The year’s events were unparalleled in English history. There had been monarchs before Edward VIII who had been variously wicked, heroic, incompetent, vain and saintly. There had never been a king who had abdicated his throne so that he could marry. If previous rulers had wished to take a wife and found the status quo against them, they acted with brutal force.
Social change on this level was not an option for Edward, who lacked a brilliant – and pliant – advisor to bring about his desired reforms. Instead, he was pitted against the most powerful figures in British society, many of whom tried to frustrate his wishes. Some acted out of principle; others from personal animosity. It should have been an unequal contest, but Edward was both king and in possession of considerable charisma and charm. Accordingly, the battle of wits and influence that ensued was more balanced than has often been assumed. Victory was far from assured for either side until the conclusion of the crisis, and if the half-compromise, half-defeat that Edward was presented with was a triumph for the forces of establishment conservatism, it was not without significant damage to its proponents along the way.
Nor had they taken full account of the woman who nearly brought down the monarchy: Wallis Simpson. One of the most photographed and discussed women of the age, right up to until her death in 1986, she was nevertheless largely condemned as an ambitious gold-digger. Today, those who consider her a feminist pioneer have made a convincing case for her rehabilitation, arguing that she was a woman in a man’s world who achieved her eventual position through her own auspices and intelligence. Others contend that she was a Machiavellian figure who manipulated an emotionally and intellectually weak figure into a position that benefitted her, rather than his country. I am sympathetic to aspects of both perspectives, and to the nuances of those in between. Yet the relationship between Edward and Wallis, crucial though it is to this narrative, was not the sole basis of the abdication.
* * *
This book originally began as a biography of one of the leading figures in the abdication saga, Walter Monckton. As I researched Monckton and his role during the crisis, I began to see that not only had the abdication been the dominant event of his life, but that of many of the people involved in it. It is unlikely that we would remember the king’s private secretary Alec Hardinge if it had not been for his extraordinary, even treacherous, actions towards his monarch. And it is certain that Jerome Brannigan, aka George McMahon, would have been long forgotten had it not been for his still-mysterious attempt to assassinate Edward in July 1936.
As I continued looking into the memoirs (published and otherwise) of those involved in the crisis and contemporary journalistic accounts, an increasingly complex picture emerged. Why was Edward not able to take the unilateral decision to abdicate as soon as it was clear that he would not be able to take Wallis as his queen? What was the hold that she had over him? What was the relationship like between the king and his inner circle? Who were his allies, and enemies? And these questions led to yet more. Why did Wallis’s husband Ernest sit back and do nothing? What were Wallis’s true feelings about her situation? What was ‘the King’s party’, and did it come close to ousting the government? Why did Stanley Baldwin and Lord Beaverbrook hate one another so much? Did Edward really have Nazi sympathies? And why would an occasional informer for MI5 have tried to murder him?
It has been a privilege to use a mixture of rare archival sources, many of which have only been made public recently and some that are published here for the first time, new interviews with those who knew Edward and Wallis, a comprehensive selection of the diaries, letters and records written by those with first-hand experience of the abdication crisis and my own informed conjecture. It has been a revelatory and rewarding opportunity to explore one of the most dramatic periods in English history. I hope that the book is a fitting distillation of my research, and that its conclusions and discoveries are as surprising to the reader as they were to its author.
Some of these are less equivocal than others. I found myself with little sympathy for Edward VIII, even if, to my surprise, I was reduced to tears one day in Windsor Castle while reading the heartbreakingly sad letters his friends and admirers wrote to him as he prepared to abdicate. While I would not go so far as the Prime Minister and the courtier Tommy Lascelles, who openly pined for his untimely death before he acceded the throne, Edward was one of the least distinguished figures ever to have reigned in Britain, and the country was fortunate to have the considerably more dutiful George VI as its king when WWII broke out a few years later.
Thanks to the superb performances of Alex Jennings and Derek Jacobi as the older Duke of Windsor in the first three series of Peter Morgan’s The Crown, many will feel that they have a good sense of who he became later in life. Actors of their intelligence and versatility can lend the most unappealing of figures dignity, and Edward skilfully reinvented himself as an elder statesman after the abdication, synonymous with sharp tailoring and an even sharper interest in royal protocol, insofar as it reflected his own interests. His less distinguished career as monarch was seldom publicly discussed, unless there was a large cheque involved. Yet it was the events of 1936 that dominated the rest of his life, and his reputation.
While taking care to offer a fair case for the defence, not least by acknowledging his charm, charisma and the undeniable affection and loyalty that he inspired in considerably greater people, I cannot feel admiration for someone who even his friend Monckton regarded as believing in a deity ‘who dealt him trumps all the time and put no inhibitions upon his main desires.’ He lived ultimately for his own desires and pleasure, and expected others to fulfil his wishes without question or delay. As his private secretary Alec Hardinge wrote, ‘One can hardly be surprised that during ten months of unremitting work and heavy responsibilities no word of gratitude or appreciation to anyone in his employment was ever heard to pass his lips.’ Others may find themselves better inclined towards him; his ghost-written memoir, A King’s Story, offers his own, unavoidably partial, account of his involvement in the crisis.
Yet this book is not simply Edward’s tale, or Wallis’s. Instead, it depicts a time in British history when conventional ideas of regal behaviour and duty were cast aside, and where the resulting moral and social vacuum could have led to disaster far beyond the worst nightmares of many of those involved in the crisis. Its eventual resolution was a testament to both traditional strengths of the British character – stoicism, resourcefulness and courage – and to less-trumpeted but equally integral aspects of the national psyche, including dissimulation and betrayal. Such was the price for saving the throne. And, as a far worse international situation dawned, few would have argued in retrospect that it was a price, unprecedented though it was, well worth paying.
Oxford, February 2020
Chapter One
The Royal Concubine
When the courtier Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles was asked whether Edward and Wallis had a platonic relationship before their marriage, he replied scornfully that it was as likely ‘as a herd of unicorns grazing in Hyde Park and a shoal of mermaids swimming in the Serpentine’.1 While Lascelles, who served as Edward’s assistant private secretary while he was Prince of Wales, cannot be regarded as an impartial chronicler of the events leading to the abdication, his thoughts on Wallis Simpson were broadly representative of contemporary court and political opinion about her.
Lascelles starkly described the events of 1936 as ‘the nightmare’, and placed the responsibility firmly with Wallis. He wrote that ‘The philosophers of the Prince Hal school were wishful thinkers … The leopard, so far from having changed his spots, was daily acquiring more sinister ones from the leopardess.’2 Acknowledging that Wallis’s second husband Ernest was ‘nothing worse than a nincompoop’, Lascelles believed that one of the primary reasons for the abdication was finance. George V’s will had left Edward nothing, save the lucrative Duchy of Cornwall, while his brothers inherited three-quarters of a million pounds apiece.
Lascelles noted that ‘Money, and the things that money buys, were the principal desiderata in Mrs Simpson’s philosophy, if not in his, and when they found that they had, so to speak, been left the Crown without the cash, I am convinced that they agreed, in that interminable telephone conversation, to renounce their plans for a joint existence as private individuals, and to see what they could make out of the Kingship, with the subsidiary prospect of the Queenship for her later on.’3
* * *
There has been endless speculation, during and after her lifetime, as to what motivated Wallis. Romantics assert that she and Edward were deeply in love, and that it was mere ill fortune that he happened to become King of England during their liaison. Her well-intentioned and selfless generosity even led her to attempt to leave both her adopted country and her lover in an attempt to stop him from abandoning the crown. This interpretation was – and remains – an especially powerful view of the saga in America, where the magazine Liberty printed two and a half million copies with the headline ‘The Most Envied Woman in the British Empire’. This enduring affection explains the way in which the musician-turned-film-director Madonna was able to represent the story as one of the great historical love affairs in her 2011 film W.E., starring Andrea Riseborough as Wallis and James D’Arcy as Edward.*
Given Edward’s previously utilitarian, rather than romantic, nature, this is not wholly accurate. Lascelles wrote scathingly of a myth in which ‘a lonely bachelor “fell deeply in love” for the first time in his life with the soul-mate for whom he had long been waiting’. With a warning to ‘sentimental biographers’ who might wish to present this version of events as accurate, he dismissed it simply as ‘moonshine’, declaring that Edward ‘was never out of the thrall of one female after another … There was always a grande affaire, and, as I know to my cost, an unbroken series of petites affaires.’4 A typical example of this was Edward’s successful seduction of a Mrs Barnes, wife of a local commissioner in Dodoma, Tanzania, in 1928. What led a disgusted Lascelles to call it ‘incredibly callous behaviour’ was that he had been informed of his father’s grave illness immediately before. Edward dismissed the news as ‘some election-dodge of Baldwin’s’,5 before pursuing his libertine entertainments.
Wallis offered something out of the ordinary. Cynics have long claimed that she was vain, mercenary and wilful, able to manipulate Edward through a mixture of exotic sexual wiles and simple force of character. That she had two husbands still alive, and was married to the second when she became Edward’s consort, was enough on its own to outrage public opinion. She was, by her own frank admission, no great beauty – ‘I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is to try and dress better than anyone else’6 – and had no especial intellectual interest, despite a certain dry wit. Even her best-known saying, ‘You can neither be too rich nor too thin’, has a trite glibness to it. And yet she was the much-photographed woman who captured the heart of a prince, nearly brought down the monarchy and inspired countless articles, biographies and discussions. Who, then, was the real Wallis Simpson?
* * *
Somewhere in the bowels of an anonymous archive is said to lurk a document that, although it hardly ranks with the secrets of the Kennedy assassination or the whereabouts of the passengers of the Mary Celeste, has attained its own curiously mythic status. This is the so-called China dossier, reportedly compiled, on Stanley Baldwin’s instructions, to detail Wallis’s ‘lotus year’ in Shanghai between 1924 and 1925. Although no previous biographer or historian has seen the dossier – and Philip Ziegler has cast doubt on its very existence, although he concedes that ‘There must have been something, but it has been built up in people’s imaginations into something else’7 – the nature of what Wallis did during her time in China has led to rumours of her precise hold over Edward, discussed with varying degrees of authority and salaciousness. While she may indeed have been a sexual adventuress, inducting her lover into hitherto unknown pleasures, this is only part – albeit an extremely revealing part – of her history.
Wallis Warfield was born on 19 June 1896 in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. Her origins were mysterious. It has been suggested both that she was conceived out of wedlock and that she was born intersexual, with both male and female sexual organs. Many of her recent biographers, most notably Michael Bloch and Anne Sebba, have suggested that this explained a great deal about attitudes towards both her appearance and her sexuality, although Ziegler argues that ‘I came across nothing that made me think she was [intersexual] and there is no convincing evidence.’8 Her square-jawed, somewhat androgynous mien often led to speculation about her attributes even during her lifetime, as in the writer James Pope-Hennessy’s 1958 comment that ‘She is one of the very oddest women I have ever seen … I should be tempted to classify her as an American woman par excellence … were it not for the suspicion that she is not a woman at all.’9
Whatever the truth behind Wallis’s femininity, her early life was uneasy. Her mother Alice was widowed when her daughter was only a few months old, and the pair embarked upon a financially uncertain and troubled odyssey, which probably included them being subjected to the unwelcome attentions of ‘Uncle Sol’, Wallis’s uncle Solomon Warfield. Money was lacking throughout her early years, and her intense relationship with Alice led her to understand that if she were to succeed in making her way in the world, it would be through her wits and skills rather than beauty or privilege. She was sent to the best schools that her mother could afford, where she developed her poise and sophistication, as well as a romantic attachment to ideas of beauty and glamour.
After she came out as a debutante in the autumn of 1914, she met and was romanced by the naval pilot Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. The son of a stockbroker, he was handsome and chivalrous, the square-jawed embodiment of her youthful fantasies. The two married on 8 November 1916, but the union was doomed. Wallis, who had been raised to be all but teetotal, asserted that ‘The bottle was seldom far from my husband’s thoughts or his hand.’10 Her dashing husband proved to be a boor, and a bore. His drinking might have been fuelled by frustration at an unconsummated union. Wallis was said, albeit by an unreliable source,* to have commented that, before she knew Edward, ‘She never had sexual intercourse with either of her first two husbands, nor had she ever allowed anyone else to touch her below what she called her personal Mason-Dixon line.’11 It might have irritated Spencer that she was, in her own words, ‘naturally gay and flirtatious’.12 For her part, after enduring his ‘running barrage of subtle innuendoes and veiled insults’, as well as physical violence, she finally separated from him and obtained a divorce in 1927, although not before heading to China in search of a very specific kind of experience.
* * *
Even if the China dossier were never to surface, some of the contents are already public knowledge. Friends of Wallis such as Cynthia Jebb, Lady Gladwyn, described her Oriental skills as nothing more outré than oral sex – ‘nothing Chinese about it’13 – and argued that she was essentially conservative. Duff and Diana Cooper’s son John Julius Norwich described her as ‘[not] particularly sexually motivated … not in the least bit depraved’.14 Others have taken a less wholesome view of her activities. During her time in China, she flitted between Hong Kong, Shanghai and Peking, making the acquaintance of architects, diplomats and the Italian naval attaché Alberto Da Zara, ‘an excellent horseman with a keen and practised eye for charming women [who] fell under her spell’.15 It was later suggested that one of these friendships resulted in ‘an obscure internal ailment’, with which she fell ill while en route home in September 1925, although whether this was the legacy of a botched abortion, the result of a sexually transmitted disease or simple ill health was not clarified by Wallis herself referring to it, coyly, as ‘a very puzzling case’.16
She confessed to visiting the ‘sing-song houses’ of Hong Kong, but suggested that she did this because she was compelled to by Spencer, who ‘ostentatiously [made] a fuss over the girls’.17 At both these and the later ones that she visited in Shanghai – ‘a narrow level of heaven on a thick slice of hell’18 – she was in a milieu that had no obvious berth for a well-brought-up American girl. It was only relatively recently that concubinage had been made illegal in China, and so Wallis encountered a wide variety of former concubines and courtesans who had made the iniquitous decline from being an accepted member of a well-to-do Chinese family to either plying their trade publicly, if they still had their looks, or acting as an instructress for younger women.
The role of the sing-song girls was to attract wealthy male company by being beautiful, immaculately presented, discreet and, in the case of the changsan class, the most discerning and exquisite of paid companions. Unlike the cheaper yao’er, who were only a step or two above streetwalkers, and the shuyu, who found it demeaning to be associated with the commercial transaction of sex, the changsan had the particular skill of enticing high-status men to fall in love with them, but to deny them the release they craved until they had shown themselves worthy of such a gift.
Whether Wallis spent time in these sing-song houses as anything other than a tourist cannot be known. Dozens of scurrilous rumours have arisen from this interlude, vying with one another in both outrageousness and doubtful veracity. All that can be known is that she posed for suggestive photos, which have not survived, wearing only a lifebuoy, and may well have learned specific sexual arts in the brothels, possibly revolving around the tantalising techniques of the changsan. She was said to have ‘the ability to make a matchstick feel like a cigar’,19 and one biographer stated that she learned a specific Chinese technique of a ‘prolonged and carefully modulated hot oil massage of the nipples, stomach, thighs and, after a deliberately, almost cruelly protracted delay, the genitals’.20
Of course, the significance of her ‘lotus year’ might be overstated by the salacious. After all, learning how to pleasure royalty, or the ordinary man, does not require a sojourn in China. Nonetheless, regardless of how depraved or innocent her time in the East was, the experiences she amassed there added to the growing mystery as to who this woman was.
After her divorce, she met the shipping broker Ernest Simpson, who seemed as unadventurous and unchallenging as Spencer had been demanding and vigorous. She summed him up in a letter to her mother: ‘I am very fond of him and he is kind which will be a contrast.’21 She married him in July 1928, a few months after her divorce, and they made their home in London, where Wallis found herself out of place and adrift. She had never known any real happiness in her life to this point, merely different forms of neglect, fleeting comfort and abuse, all of which she absorbed with the same clenched control that she would later exhibit in all of her public appearances. The issue of children with Ernest was not raised. Instead, Wallis amused herself by decorating their flat in Bryanston Court in Marylebone, and eventually came to make herself the centre of a small social circle with a reputation for holding elaborate entertainments. ‘Wallis’ parties have so much pep no one ever wants to leave’,22 one satisfied guest reported. Yet she did not dispense the champagne and brandy – a surprising display of largesse, given her loathing of Spencer’s drinking – out of altruism, or even a desire to befriend the society ladies of London. Her aim was a more specific one.
* * *
In 1931, Prince Edward, known as ‘David’ to his family and intimates, was living in a privileged state of torpor. He was in his late thirties, and everything he had done so far in his life had been largely unsuccessful. His relationship with his parents was cold and distant, as they openly favoured his younger brother George, or ‘Bertie’, the Duke of York. Edward had attended Magdalen College, Oxford (left without a degree), joined the Grenadier Guards (forbidden to join the fighting in World War I on the grounds of his safety) and embarked on a masochistic series of diets and health regimes designed to punish his slim, boyish figure as much as to maintain his health. He was almost certainly suffering from what we now know as anorexia nervosa.
The affairs that Lascelles condemned him for, whether grande or petite, can be seen as a desperate attempt for stimulation and attention. Yet even these were undercut by a desire on his part to be sexually subservient to his mistresses in order to achieve a satisfactory result. As Ziegler says, ‘Sex meant an awful lot to Edward, but a rather specialised form of sex. He craved to be dominated, and Mrs Simpson provided that service.’23 This was a consistent feature in his dealings with women. As far back as 1918, he had written to Freda Dudley Ward (‘a good influence, but not good enough’),24 ‘my very own darling beloved little mummie’, to tell her, ‘You ought to be really foul to me sometimes … I’m the kind of man who needs a certain amount of cruelty without which he gets abominably spoilt and soft.’25
Publicly, though, he maintained a cheery and breezy attitude towards his future subjects as he glided from one well-laid table to another. His current mistress, Thelma Furness, was half-American, and knew of the prince’s fascination with the modernity and glamour that her country appeared to connote. It was therefore her pleasure, on 10 January 1931, to introduce him to her friend Wallis and her husband Ernest at her country house in Melton Mowbray. The conversation was unexceptional, mainly revolving around the differences between their cultures, but it was enough for Wallis, who had spent the previous day obsessing over ‘hair and nails etc.’,26 to write excitedly to her Aunt Bessie to boast, ‘You can imagine what a treat it was to meet the Prince in such an informal way … As I’ve made up my mind to meet him ever since I’ve been here, I feel relieved.’27
Wallis and Edward met again on 15 May, again at Thelma Furness’s, where he remarked how much he had enjoyed their first encounter. A more impressive honour came on 10 June, when she was formally presented at court. Although rather old* to be most people’s idea of a debutante, she charmed Edward enough to be complimented on her appearance. Having overheard him mutter about how the bright lighting did not flatter the assembled women, she responded, ‘But sir, I understood that you thought we all looked ghastly!’28 The prince, unused to such studied displays of American brashness, was enchanted. Their intercourse continued early the following year, when he came for dinner at Bryanston Court and enjoyed Wallis’s cooking, ending with a raspberry soufflé that he appreciated sufficiently to ask for its recipe. Whether Mrs Simpson merely wished to inveigle herself into the grandest social circles or already had other designs, she was rewarded for her tenacity by an invitation to stay at Edward’s much-beloved Surrey residence, Fort Belvedere, along with Ernest.
One of Edward’s few tangible achievements at this time was to have turned a decrepit and slightly odd-looking miniature castle into a grand retreat fit for a prince – if not a king. While the worldly socialite Diana Cooper might have sneered at some of the more flamboyant decorative touches (‘I am in a pink bedroom, pink Venetian-blinded, pink-sheeted, white-telephoned and pink and white-maided’),29 Wallis was entranced, pronouncing it ‘astonishingly warm and attractive’.30 It seemed to be a retreat that would not have disgraced a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, and the prince who strode its corridors in plus fours, whistling and followed by his Cairn terriers Cora and Jaggs, struck her as an isolated and rather sad figure in need of rescuing. John Simon, the Home Secretary, acknowledged this when he noted that ‘It is almost impossible to conceive the loneliness of a monarch who … does not enjoy the blessing of a happy home with wife and children.’31 As Wallis later wrote, with the considerable benefit of experience, ‘I had been one of the first to penetrate the heart of his inner loneliness.’32
The weekend, which consisted of gardening by day and drinking by night, was a success. At one point, Wallis noted that Edward, fresh from a steam bath, was ‘radiating utter contentment’.33 When she and Ernest returned home, they sent a piece of doggerel to thank him. Typical lines included ‘Our weekend at “Fort Belvedere”/Has left us both with memories dear/Of what in every sense must be/Princely hospitality.’34 Anyone with a poetic spirit might have blanched; as it was, Wallis barely saw Edward for the remainder of 1932. It was a miserable year for her. Ernest’s business ventures failed, her health suffered and her position at the highest levels of society seemed precarious. All she could do was to maintain her friendship with Thelma Furness, who, concerned that Edward was tiring of her, took care to present herself as one who consorted with the fun and frivolous: Wallis, in other words.
The plan worked. Wallis was able to reminisce that, from the beginning of 1933, ‘we found ourselves becoming permanent fixtures at the Fort weekends’, and, triumphantly, ‘the association imperceptibly but swiftly passed from an acquaintanceship to a friendship’.35 The ‘we’ was used in its most regal sense; as Ernest trudged between the City, Europe and America, Wallis was at leisure to ‘chaperone’ Thelma Furness on a weekly basis. She had become so indispensable to Edward that, by his birthday on 23 June – four days after hers – she could ‘make whoopee’ at his house until 4.30 in the morning. The first letter she wrote to the prince, a formal note enclosing a present for him, ends with the sign-off ‘your obedient servant’. The questions of obedience, and who was whose servant, would remain tantalisingly ambiguous.
Copyright © 2020 by Alexander Larman
