Traitor King
‘It is a rare writer who has not tackled at least one book on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor,’ asserts Craig Brown. ‘Books have been written proving conclusively that they were a good thing and that they were a bad thing; that she loved him but he didn’t love her; that he loved her but she didn’t love him; that they loved one another and that they both hated one another.’1
Thirty-five years after her death and almost fifty years after his, the books – both fiction and non-fiction – documentaries, musicals, and films continue to appear and to adopt very different points of view towards the couple. Some still argue that this was one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century, others that Wallis felt trapped in a marriage that she had never wanted. No book before has started after the Abdication in 1936 and looked fully at what happened to the Windsors in their exile.
The accepted account is that they were rejected by the Royal Family because the former king had put private desire above public duty, that they could not be seen to support a man who had turned his back on his birthright, and there is some truth in that. The Monarch was head of the Church of England and he simply could not hold that role and marry a twice-divorced woman – but might the royal rejection also be because it was believed that the couple had behaved in a treacherous manner?
The conventional line is that the Duke, like the rest of his family and many politicians, financiers and aristocrats before September 1939, was determined that the carnage of the First World War must be avoided at all costs and that some form of accommodation with Hitler was possible, to allow him to focus on the real threat to the British Empire – communism.
It argues that in the summer of 1940, the couple became unwitting pawns in a Nazi plan to persuade the Duke to take on the role of a British Pétain. The German and Spanish officials involved then exaggerated what was happening to suit their own agendas and please their superiors. The Windsors were naïve and foolish and at worst, used German approaches to leverage their own interests.
Though the Windsors continued in their exile in the Bahamas to believe that Britain’s best interests lay in a negotiated peace, the entry of America into the war in December 1941 put an end to their idealistic notions and they then served the Crown with loyalty. It is best summed up by the Duke’s authorised biographer, Philip Ziegler:
the Duke felt the war could and should have been avoided, that he was defeatist about the prospects of victory in 1940 and 1941, that he preached the virtues of a negotiated peace. He had been indiscreet and extravagant enough in what he said to give the Germans some grounds for believing that he might be ready to play an active part in securing such a peace and returning to the throne after it had been negotiated. That is bad enough. What they do not show, and cannot show since no evidence exists, is that the Duke would ever have contemplated accepting such an invitation if it had been issued.2
The argument of this book is that there is plenty of evidence, as demonstrated in the previous pages, that the Windsors were not foolish and naïve, but actively engaged with the German intrigues.
The Germans had long realised that King Edward VIII was a potential ally and both he and Wallis were targeted before, during and after his reign. One of the key figures in the German plan was the Austrian princess, Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who was sent to London, where she took an apartment in Bryanston Court next to Wallis. According to a British Intelligence report, her role was to select from amongst the British Establishment ‘possible future friends of Hitler and Nazi Germany’. Notes for an unpublished memoir show the list was headed by the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson.3 This Stephanie von Hohenlohe did working through social hostesses such as Emerald Cunard.
Countless sources speak of Wallis’s closeness to the German embassy and, in particular, Joachim von Ribbentrop, including Philip Ziegler, who was writing with exclusive access to papers in the Royal Archives. ‘The Foreign Office is anxious less the (Foreign Office) cypher be compromised,’ wrote Sir Robert Vansittart to Stanley Baldwin, ‘as Ms S is said to be in the pocket of the German Ambassador.’4
The Danish Ambassador told Ralph Wigram in the Foreign Office that Mrs Simpson:
tried to mix herself up in politics. She endeavoured in every way to single out the German Embassy and to have everything German preferred at Court . . . Under the influence of these surroundings the King, at times, made statements which tended to show that his sympathies were coloured by Nazism and Fascism.5
Kenneth Rose, staying with the former MI5 officer Victor Rothschild in the 1980s, noted in his diary: ‘Some talk of MI5. They had reason to think that Edward VIII when Prince of Wales was in too-close touch with Ribbentrop.’6
Another Nazi informer was Wallis’s dressmaker Anna Wolkoff, imprisoned in 1940 as part of a spy ring centred around the American diplomat Tyler Kent. MI5 had first become aware of Wolkoff in 1935, ‘when one of their agents reported that Wolkoff was using her position with Mrs Wallis Simpson (the future Duchess of Windsor) to provide the Nazis with confidential information derived from the Prince of Wales (the future Duke of Windsor). Lord Vansittart informed the (then) Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, but no action appears to have been taken.’7
After the Abdication, the Germans kept up the pressure and the Windsors were happy to play along, culminating in the October 1937 tour of Germany and the friendships with a series of Nazi sympathisers. It is perfectly clear that in the summer of 1940 the Duke, who reported none of his communications with the various Spanish emissaries to the British authorities, knew that he was dealing with the Germans and not the Spanish – how else would his maid have been able to travel to Paris – and that his various attempts at delaying departure to the Bahamas had more to do with the international situation than his domestic affairs.
There is then the killer telegram of 15 August 1940, with him agreeing to stay in touch with the Germans using a special code should the situation change. This is backed up by plenty of evidence, including the diaries of the MI5 officer Guy Liddell and Alan Lascelles’ correspondence.
A report from a British intelligence agent in Lisbon during the war related that the Germans had recently approached Charles Bedaux to determine if Windsor would be prepared to be King in the event of a German victory. The report contained a transcript of a supposed conversation between Mrs Bedaux and Wallis, in which the former referred to such a discussion between Bedaux and the Duke in 1937 and that the question then discussed was:
very prominent in the minds of certain powers today. We have been asked seriously of the possibility, and we, continuing to believe that both of you are still of the same opinion, have given absolute assurance that it is not only possible but can be counted on. Are we right?8
Though vague, Sir Alexander Cadogan’s response is revealing. ‘The paragraph is certainly capable of the blackest interpretations. But it would be difficult to get a conviction on it.’9
David Eccles, who had been told to keep an eye on the Duke during July 1940, later admitted that the Germans ‘were trying to get him to agree and he would sort of play the hand for a peace conference in which the Germans would see that he got the throne.’10
Matters had become so serious that MI5 had even opened a file on the couple, an unprecedented occurrence for a member of the Royal Family.11
Everyone from Churchill and the Royal Household to the Intelligence Services believed the Duke to be a traitor rather than a fool, hence the desperate attempts to cover up, delay and minimise the publication of the captured German communications.
And, of course, not all of the captured documents were made public. John Wheeler-Bennett realised that the integrity of the German Documents series depended on releasing the Windsor material, but revealingly he wrote: ‘we duly included the bulk of its contents in the Series D, Vol. X (author’s italics).’12 Michael Bloch in Operation Willi points out that twenty-eight telegrams relating to the Windsors were not published.13
Donald Cameron Watt, later Professor of International History at University of London, was the first British historian to see the Windsor section when some 400 tons of documents arrived at Whaddesdon Hall. ‘Everything was there which we thought should have been there, with one exception. There was no record of the meeting at Berchtesgaden.’14 The question one has to ask is, why not?
Kenneth Rose wrote in his diary in 1979, after meeting Anthony Eden’s widow and Churchill’s niece, ‘Clarissa Avon tells me that she has always hated the Windsors, and thought it “wicked” of Winston to destroy the evidence about the Duke’s apparent readiness to become a German stooge in 1940.’15
Indeed, Churchill, who had done so much to support the King during the Abdication Crisis, refused in September 1958 to go on a cruise on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, Christina, because the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had been invited and ‘since 1940 he had never felt the same about the Duke and thought that it would be wrong for him to associate with him too closely.’16
The Duke may have claimed in 1966:
I acknowledge now that, along with too many other well-meaning people, I let my admiration for the good side of German character dim what was being done to it by the bad. I thought that . . . the immediate task . . . of my generation . . . was to prevent another conflict between Germany and the West that could bring down our civilisation . . . I thought that the rest of us could be fence-sitters while the Nazis and the reds slogged it out.17
But there is plenty of evidence that his views about the Nazis did not change after the war and that his choice of close friends, such as Robert Young and Oswald Mosley, was unfortunate.
‘My parents were horrified by their dinner table talk, where they made it perfectly clear that the world would have been a better place if Jews were exterminated,’ recalled Cleveland Amory’s stepdaughter, Dr Gaea Leinhardt.’18 On one occasion the Duke took a lady guest’s hands in his and ‘closing her fingers together, enclosed her hands over them. The Duke continued, “You just don’t understand. The Jews had Germany in their tentacles. All Hitler tried to do was free the tentacles.” With that, he released the lady’s hands.’19
Patrick Kinross was shocked when the Duke claimed: ‘I have never thought . . . Hitler was such a bad chap.’20 Roy Strong writes in his diaries of playing canasta with the Duke – ‘You have to be really dim to play that’ – how the Duke ‘eulogised Hitler. It confirmed all one had feared.’21
There can be little doubt that if the Duke of Windsor had not renounced the throne that he would have tried to use his influence to seek peace with Hitler in 1940. Without the support of the King, after Dunkirk, even Churchill might have been unable to resist the pressure from Lord Halifax and others to negotiate with the Germans. If so, the history of the world would have been very different.
Other ‘what if’ questions remain. What if the Prince of Wales had never met Mrs Simpson at that weekend house party in January 1931? How much did she encourage his pro-German and antisemitic beliefs? Without her by his side, would he have had the courage or the strength to pursue such a traitorous course?
The Abdication remains one of the most traumatic episodes in royal history and the tension between public obligations and private desires continues to be a significant trope in the story of the Royal Family. The country was lucky that in the crisis which Edward VIII generated, George VI and his daughter Elizabeth rose to the challenge.
Edward’s refusal to discharge his duties as King as he would wish to do was ironically the making of the modern British royal family. If Edward’s renunciation of the throne threatened to destroy the monarchy, his brother and niece saved it.
1 Craig Brown, The Times, 19 September 1990.
2 Ziegler, p. 552.
3 Box 3, Princess Stephanie zu Hohenlohe papers, Hoover Institute.
4 Ziegler, Edward VIII, p. 274.
5 Count Ahlefeldt Laurvig to Ralph Wigram, 16 October 1937, RA KEVIII, Ab. Box 4, quoted Ziegler, p. 269.
6 6 November 1982, Richard Thorpe (ed.), Who Loses, Who Wins: The Journals of Kenneth Rose, Vol. 1 1979–2014 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019), p. 66.
7 Searchlight, October 1989, p. 9.
8 Notes by Thomas and Hardinge, RA KEVIII Ab. Box 3, quoted Ziegler, p. 459.
9 Ibid, p. 459.
10 Lord Eccles interview, p. 14, BREN 2/2/5, Churchill College Archives.
11 It was destroyed in 1946. Interview Phil Tomacelli, 26 May 2020.
12 John Wheeler-Bennett, Friends, Enemies and Sovereigns (Macmillan, 1976), pp. 81–2.
13 Michael Bloch, Operation Willi: The Plot to Kidnap the Duke of Windsor, July 1940 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), p. 2.
14 Donald Cameron Watt interview, John Costello, Mask of Treachery, p. 457.
15 8 May 1979, Thorpe (ed.), Who Loses, Who Wins, p. 2.
16 Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset (Cassell, 1995), p. 242.
17 New York Daily News, 13 December 1966.
18 Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 319.
19 Amory, Best Cat Ever, p. 141.
20 Ibid, p. 141, and Lord Kinross, ‘Love Conquers All’, Books and Bookmen, Vol. 20, p. 50.
21 15 February 1984, Strong, pp. 358–9.