When the Duke and Duchess of Windsor arrived in the United States in late 1946, they remained unsure of the warmth of their welcome. Although they had generally been well received during his fleeting visits while he was governor general of the Bahamas and in their post-war sojourn in the country, there was still a lingering enmity towards them both, partly because of their notorious visit to Germany and their meeting with Hitler in 1937, and partly due to the events before and during the abdication crisis.
One correspondent, a G. W. Johnson of New Jersey, had written to the New York Times in 1936 to complain that ‘the doings of the King, as reported in the American press, have in the course of a few months transformed Great Britain, as envisaged by the average American, from a sober and dignified realm into a dizzy Balkan musical comedy attuned to the rhythm of Jazz’, and decried the now duke as ‘a hopeless case [and] an irresponsible jazz-mad cocktail shaker’, to say nothing of ‘a pitiful and bemused lover who is completely enslaved by Mrs Simpson’s charms’.1
The duke and duchess were, at least, able to live in rather greater comfort in the United States than Mr G. W. Johnson did. They took as their main residence an apartment in Waldorf Towers in New York, which was decorated in suitably regal – if garish – style. Their novelist friend Cecil Roberts* visited them at their new home, and observed that it contained everything from full-length portraits of George III and George IV – the latter being the ruler the duke had often explicitly compared himself to – to two liveried footmen, and even napkins embossed with the royal arms. If Edward had wished to portray himself as a king-in-exile, he could not have done so more ostentatiously.* As suited his status, he even called on President Truman, of whom he patronisingly wrote to Queen Mary that ‘although no great statesman, the President has a good reputation as a politician for honesty and integrity’.2
Yet Edward was unwilling to maintain a low profile, and decided that he would like to return to his former demesne of the Bahamas in early 1947. A despairing telegram from his successor there, Sir William Murphy, to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Arthur Creech Jones, on 30 December 1946, said that ‘[his] impending visit is being widely discussed here’. While allowing that ‘their visiting Nassau would undoubtedly boost American tourist business’, Murphy stated that such an embassy would be ‘embarrassing to me personally’,3 and so asked for the Cabinet’s opinion as to how desirable the visit was. Bevin replied tactfully. ‘Of course there is a distinction between actually settling down in a colony and merely paying it a visit … it seems fully clear that if a Governor feels that he is going to be embarrassed by the visit of an ex-Governor we ought to do all we can to prevent this, and this seems to me to be the case here.’
There was, as ever with Edward, a central problem: polite hints simply did not work. Bevin lamented this, saying, ‘unfortunately nothing less than a formal message from the PM would be likely to influence the Duke’.4 As usual, his quixotic actions had to be combated; Bevin asked Attlee to urge Edward not to go to the Bahamas, and to ensure that that would be the end of the matter. Yet much bureaucratic hand-wringing ensued. Murphy observed that any official objection would lead to an unpleasant amount of publicity, no doubt whipped up by the duke himself, and also that there was no formal rule that former governors of a colony were not allowed to visit, in a quasi-official capacity as honoured guests, once their term had ended.
The situation was defrayed by the suggestion that Bede Clifford, who had been governor of the Bahamas from 1932 to 1934, should visit at roughly the same time, thereby defusing any suggestion that the duke would be setting a precedent; both would be hosted by the antiques dealer and big-game hunter Arthur Vernay. Any implication that the acquisition of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor – even temporarily – would represent another trophy for Vernay went studiously unmentioned.
Therefore, Creech Jones’s response to Murphy on 17 January was appropriately diplomatic. ‘I think it best that you should offer usual courtesies to HRH as to any other distinguished visitor, and I hope that this will not prove too embarrassing to you.’5 The duke and duchess visited in February, as proposed, and the visit proved to be thankfully uneventful. Yet with the duke denied the quasi-ambassadorial post that he had wished for – and reminded, during his return to the Bahamas, how irrelevant he now was on the international stage – his thoughts turned to comfort rather than prestige.
Wallis wrote to their solicitor, A. G. Allen, in February to say that ‘with the Duke’s dislike of cold weather we could spend winters in America from November to April if we had a house … if only we could have [Fort Belvedere] for the autumn and spring … so we could make our home between England and here … Do you see any chance of getting the Fort for this arrangement?’ There was a plaintive quality to much of the letter. ‘We would not be there long enough to upset the powers that be, and we in our old age could have 2 nice houses where we want them.’ She concluded, emotively, ‘It is a waste of time being homeless on the face of the earth and most disturbing.’6
The duke needed to make money, and quickly, in order to finance the existence that he and Wallis wished to maintain. Therefore, his attention turned to writing a memoir. During his stay in America, he met the energetic American publisher Henry Luce. Luce had founded a series of magazines including Time, Life and Sports Illustrated, and was described as ‘the most influential private citizen in the America of his day’. By the mid forties, he was not only phenomenally wealthy, but he made public interventions into international policy that a lesser man might have shied away from; his 1941 editorial in Life magazine, ‘The American Century’, offered a clear-sighted view of his country’s potential foreign policy, not least a belief that entering World War II was both morally justified and likely to confirm America’s status as the greatest superpower in the world.
He was proved correct in this, and so, by the beginning of 1947, he was casting around for other opportunities that would simultaneously propagate his reputation and sell magazines. It was inevitable that he would cross paths at some Manhattan cocktail party or other with the duke, who was disconsolately serving as the evening’s entertainment by offering his fellow guests titbits of his time as monarch. Luce proposed a deal. Write a series of articles for Life magazine about his childhood and early life, stretching up to 1914, and he would be exceptionally well paid.
Luce was aware that by limiting the scope of the features to events that took place long before the duke’s short-lived reign and subsequent abdication, the potential for controversy would be checked. The duke, meanwhile, viewed the articles as both a means of making him and Wallis the cash he so desperately craved, and a stepping-stone to something greater. He had noticed the lucrative deal that Winston Churchill had secured to write what would become his six-volume history of World War II, and remarked to the former royal courtier Godfrey Thomas that ‘as Mr Churchill was doing the same thing through his very group, [I] didn’t see why [I] shouldn’t, especially as [I am] constantly being asked by less reputable publishers in the States to write something for them’.7 He was rather more reserved when he told Queen Mary the news, breezily commenting that he had inherited her ‘prodigious memory’ and justifying the potential betrayal of his family’s secrets by saying, ‘I am sure that an accurate story of our family life by one of its more prominent members can serve a useful purpose and make a good impression in America and wherever it is read.’ He ended by saying, as if his considerable dignity had been implicitly insulted, ‘Otherwise I would not have accepted the offer.’8
Edward may have airily compared himself to Churchill, but there was a key difference between the two men. The former prime minister was a talented writer with an ear for a killer phrase; the former monarch was an adequate, if verbose, correspondent given to self-pity and unjustified self-regard. Therefore, Luce knew that in order for the articles to be of the literary standard that Life expected, the duke would need the services of a ghostwriter. Under normal circumstances, he might have chosen a British author. Instead, given Edward’s new-found Americanophilia, Luce suggested one of his editors: Charles J. V. Murphy, a former Chinese correspondent for Fortune and an expert on global intelligence matters.
The two had first encountered one another in 1945, when the duke, who had recently completed his stint in the Bahamas, had sounded out Murphy about their working together on some unspecified literary endeavour. Murphy, who was preparing to head off to China, was not especially interested in attaching himself to a man he considered washed up, as well as tainted by his rumoured Nazi associations. However, a combination of pressure from his editors at Life magazine, who saw the sales potential of the series of articles, and the duke’s continued entreaties eventually persuaded him. He had previously written about Winston Churchill for his magazines, and now turned his attention to another internationally famous Englishman, albeit a less beloved one. It was agreed that Murphy would visit the duke at his home in La Croë in the summer of 1947, and that they would begin work then; the deal was signed in February that year. It would prove to be an epochal collaboration.
The duke and duchess’s presence in Britain, at least, was now uncontroversial. After their sojourn in the United States ended in the spring, they returned to England once again, renting a house in Sunningdale, and spent a pleasant, if uneventful, few months there. Wallis later wrote to her Aunt Bessie that ‘We saw all the old gang and had week-end guests etc. The Great Family were the same – the Duke made the usual visits – no job from any direction of course and I really feel we have been away from England for so long that it would be difficult to take up the customs and ideas again. So again the question of where to live … is really spoiling our days and nights.’9
One member of this ‘old gang’ was Harold Nicolson, who saw them on 29 May at the socialite, and Edward’s former mistress, Sybil Colefax’s home. He wrote frankly in his diary of his impressions of the duke, who he initially thought of as ‘a young man’, until Edward called out, ‘[Don’t you] recognise an old friend?’ ‘He is thin but more healthy looking than when I last saw him. He has lost that fried-egg look around the eyes. He is very affable and chatty. I notice that he has stopped calling his wife “Her Royal Highness” … I notice also that people do not bow as they used to and treat him as less of a royalty than they did when he had recently been King. He takes all this quite for granted. I have an impression that he is happier.’10 Nicolson also talked to the ‘improved’ duchess, who spoke wistfully about her ambitions for her husband, both in metaphorical terms – ‘he likes gardening, but it is no fun gardening in other people’s gardens’ – and practical ones. ‘He was born to be a salesman’, she said, ‘[and] he would be an admirable representative of Rolls Royce. But an ex-King cannot start selling motorcars.’11
Permission for the duke and duchess to resume residence at Fort Belvedere was predictably refused. There was no formal rapprochement with the royal family, and the duke was conspicuously not invited to his mother’s eightieth birthday celebrations on 27 May; he had to content himself instead with a formal visit to Marlborough House to present his good wishes. If either of them had hoped for more official recognition, it was not forthcoming. Therefore, once their British sojourn came to an end, they returned to their holiday home of La Croë and awaited the arrival of Murphy, to begin work on the Life magazine articles.
What neither of them had considered was the possibility that the duke was about to be drawn into a major international scandal that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
The so-called Marburg Files had been discovered in Marburg Castle in Germany in May 1945, shortly after the end of the war. The information contained within them – that the duke had been involved with Nazi agents during his stay in Europe in the summer of 1940, and that his loyalties to his home country were at best ambiguous – was potentially devastating. Attlee and Bevin, newly arrived in office, realised that the files were vastly damaging.* Although the release of the papers was agreed in Cabinet on 9 August 1945, Bevin soon had second thoughts.
He wrote to Attlee on 13 August to ask that the most sensitive details be omitted, namely those relating to the Duke of Windsor’s time in Spain and Portugal in June and July 1940. He said of these that ‘they describe the efforts of the German government to retain him in Spain, with a view to a compromise peace, and contain second and third hand reports and speculations about the Duke’s attitude derived from agents in contact with him’. Suggesting that the documents had no bearing on war crimes or the general history of the war – a dubious statement – Bevin stated that ‘they would [nonetheless] possess the highest publicity value on account of the personalities involved and the type of intrigues described’. With commendable understatement, he suggested that ‘a disclosure would in my opinion do grave harm to the national interest’.12
Lascelles described the revelations as ‘at the very least, highly damaging’ to the duke and duchess’s reputations, and the king was said to be ‘much distressed’13 when he learnt of his brother’s activities.* It was agreed that the documents must be suppressed, and it was generally hoped that their contents would never come to light.
Unfortunately, something as incendiary as the suggestion of the former monarch’s treachery was hard to keep out of the public gaze. Although General Eisenhower concurred with the British wish to keep a lid on the files, a microfilm copy of them had already been sent from Marburg to the US State Department, and their existence became sufficiently common knowledge for Newsweek magazine to run a suggestive story hinting at their contents on 4 November 1946. As a much later memo by the then deputy prime minister Anthony Eden to Churchill tartly stated, ‘the position became more difficult as the Anglo-United States project, agreed in June 1946, for the joint publication of a series of volumes of documents selected from the German Foreign Ministry archives developed’.
It did not help that the agreement contained a so-called ‘escape clause’, by which, in Eden’s words, ‘either Government could publish separately any documents upon which agreement between them could not be reached’.14 It became clear that the publication of the Marburg papers was inevitable, and on 30 June 1947, Bevin wrote to Attlee to warn him of such an event, and to discuss what could be done to mitigate the damage. Bevin alluded to a conversation that had taken place between them on 28 February, saying, ‘you took the view that it would be dangerous to forewarn the Duke since that would probably lead him to put out precautionary stories by way of defending himself and these in turn might provoke a leakage’. Anticipating that the Americans would wish to push for the full publication of the documents on 3 July, on the grounds that ‘they feel that the withdrawal of the file at the instance of one of the Governments in the work of editing constitutes a dangerous precedent’, Bevin was uncertain as to whether to acquiesce in their publication or ask the British representative,† John Wheeler Bennett, to ‘adopt stone-walling tactics and seek to postpone the issue’.
Bevin now saw the inevitability of what he called ‘the evil day’ coming to pass, saying, ‘I cannot think of any valid argument with which to confute the [American] arguments.’15 Nonetheless, he knew that it was obligatory to consult the king or his courtiers and, ultimately, the Duke of Windsor, and warn them that the dam was about to break. It was agreed that he would discuss the matter with Lascelles, who suggested that if the papers were to be selected for publication, the duke, along with Churchill, need only be informed shortly before the actual point when they would enter the public domain: as Bevin wrote, ‘I approve this course … It assumes that, in the interval, there will be no leakage, but that is a risk that I think we must take.’16 Attlee scrawled, ‘I agree’ on the document.
The reason for the acceptance of the document’s publication lay in part with something that had occurred earlier that year. On 15 March, the American Secretary of State, George Marshall, together with Bevin, was attending a meeting of foreign ministers in Moscow when he was alerted to the existence of an incendiary document. Accordingly, he sent a top-secret telegram, marked ‘For Your Eyes Only’, to Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson that read, ‘Bevin informs me that Department or White House has on film a microfilm copy of a paper concerning the Duke of Windsor. Bevin says only other copy was destroyed by Foreign Office, and asks that we destroy ours to avoid possibility of a leak to great embarrassment of Windsor’s brother [the King]. Please attend to this for me and reply for my eyes only.’17
It remains uncertain as to precisely what this document – which presumably was destroyed at Bevin’s request – was. Given the damning nature of the existing material that relates to the Duke of Windsor, the fact that there should be something so damaging that it would have to be destroyed by the Foreign Office can lead to the wildest speculation as to how extensive the duke’s Nazi sympathies and contacts were. Whatever happened in March, it was clear by the summer of 1947 that little could be done to prevent the appearance of the remaining files, whatever was contained with them.
Accordingly, the king reluctantly consented in July to the Marburg papers being returned to the archives in Berlin, in the knowledge that their eventual publication would be inevitable. The duke was informed of their existence, but he refused to take the possibility of public humiliation seriously, commenting to Godfrey Thomas that ‘the German Ambassador was making up a good story on the lines that he thought would please his chief, Ribbentrop’. That Ribbentrop had once been a friend to both Edward, when he was king, and Wallis was unmentioned; Thomas loyally suggested that this ‘had already occurred to us as a possibility’.18 The story that the art historian Anthony Blunt – later exposed as a Russian agent – and the Windsor librarian and archivist Owen Morshead had been sent on a top-secret mission to Germany to retrieve the documents relating to the duke, and that the contents of these documents enabled Blunt to use his knowledge as a bargaining chip to prevent his imprisonment when his own nefarious activities were exposed, is an amusing piece of Boys’ Own intrigue, but, alas, entirely false.
If Edward was concerned about the documents being made public, he was at least distracted in July by the arrival of Murphy at La Croë. It soon became clear to the ghostwriter that the duke intended these initially uncontroversial pieces of journalism to act as a Trojan horse of sorts, and that his truer intention was to begin work on a memoir that would articulate his own story. As Murphy later wrote of their collaboration, ‘Edward VIII was becoming as dim and insubstantial as Edward II … those handsome features, recently so clear and sharp in the public memory, had begun to blur. To arrest that process, to restore the lustre of his reputation, to assure that his side of the story was presented fairly, and to regain some measure of his self-respect, he decided to write an apologia, although it would be disguised as his autobiography.’19
Murphy was struck by the sense of how desolate the lives of the duke and duchess were. They were given over to self-aggrandising theatricality, as if in compensation. He recorded that a couple of his acquaintance remarked how ‘a tiny little white table for us four was set on the huge lawn. There were rows of footmen … the night was furiously hot, but the Duke was in full Scottish regalia. I thought he was staging a production of some sort.’ Murphy was similarly dismissive about the relationship between the duke and his wife. When remarking of their presence at a Monte Carlo gala, he wrote, ‘she had on every jewel. He wore a kilt. It was like watching a couple in pantomime – the studied gestures, the automatic smiles.’20
The collaboration soon became tense. As Murphy later wrote, ‘The Duchess managed to keep the Duke amused at La Croë, but it was at [my] expense.’ He became ‘increasingly disheartened to see how much time the Duke devoted to idleness and frivolity, and how little he could find for his autobiography’. The duchess wished to become a grande dame of Parisian society, and so would uproot the household to the French capital almost on a whim; Murphy had little option than to go along with the couple. It reduced him to frustration and fury by turns. Had he known that he would continue to work with the duke for several more years, he would have thrown up his hands in despair and left him to it.
Still, they managed to find enough time together to complete the four contracted Life articles, even if the duke complained to Thomas that he had never worked as hard or with such concentration. Ominously for his family, he also commented that he had enjoyed the experience and was prepared to write a fuller autobiography. When the Life pieces began to run, from 8 December 1947, there was no cause for criticism, given their innocuous nature, but Queen Mary, who considered it deplorable that any member of the royal family should commit their thoughts to public view, wrote to her son to criticise his decision.
His response was both suave and combative. ‘I was surprised you thought it a pity I wrote of so many private facts … I would submit that the personal memoir of Papa undertaken by John Gore at your and Bertie’s request contains far more intimate extracts from Papa’s diaries and glimpses into his character and habits than I would have dared to use or thought suitable to include in the story of my early life.’21 This was something of a shift in his attitude towards his mother, and his wider family. In October 1947, he had been on the defensive, writing in the usual sentimental fashion about his wife. ‘I am always hoping that one day you will tell me to bring Wallis to see you as it makes me very sad to think that you and she have never really met. After all ten years is a long time since all the commotion of my abdication and as we are not growing any younger it would indeed be tragic if you, my mother, had never known the girl I married and who has made me so blissfully happy.’22
Now, buoyed by the Sunday Express editor John Gordon’s comments to Allen that the articles, which he had published in Britain in his newspaper, had done the duke’s reputation ‘immensely more good than anything in years’ and that ‘in 20 years of editing this newspaper I recall nothing which aroused keener reader interest’,23 he resumed his partnership with Murphy. He was hell-bent on writing his autobiography. The two men came up with A King’s Story as a working title, and for want of anything pithier, that remained its name. It would first exist as a series of exclusive articles in Life, and would then be released in expanded book form.
It should have been a harmonious collaboration, but the relationship between the two men would soon worsen. Yet the duke’s difficulties with his ghostwriter would soon be the least of his problems, as his total estrangement from his family was publicly demonstrated once more.