At the end of October 1936, Wallis Simpson was granted a decree nisi in the Assize Court at Ipswich. Shortly after this, the king told Walter Monckton that he intended to marry her. Although Monckton had realized the depth of the king’s passion, he had not expected this. “I did not before November 1936 think that marriage between the King and Mrs. Simpson was contemplated,” he noted at the time. “The King told me that he had often wished to tell me but refrained for my own sake lest I should be embarrassed. It must have been difficult to him since I had always and honestly assumed in my conversations with him that such an idea (which was suggested in some other quarters) was out of the question.”
Shortly afterward the king’s private secretary, Sir Alex Hardinge, wrote the king a forceful letter in which he suggested that to quell some of the lurid speculation Mrs. Simpson should go abroad for a time. The king then decided to inform Baldwin of his intention to marry, adding that he was prepared to leave the throne if necessary (he told his family the same day). To Walter Monckton, the prime minister said that he did not think either the country or the dominions would stand for the marriage.
From then on, things moved swiftly. On Sunday, November 15, Monckton lunched with the press baron Esmond Rothermere, who put forward the proposal of a morganatic marriage (one in which the wife does not take the rank or title of her husband), suggesting the same thing that evening to Baldwin. The king, desperate to gain his objective, preferably with Wallis as queen, sent for the prime minister and asked him to ascertain the feelings of the dominions and the cabinet, thus forcing Baldwin to take up the matter on an official basis.
Telegrams were sent to the dominions, setting out three possible options: that Wallis should become queen; that it should be a morganatic marriage; or that the king should abdicate. The prime minister concluded: “I feel convinced that neither the Parliament nor the great majority of the public here should or would accept such a plan.” To which the cabinet added its own cadenza: “any more than they would accept the proposal that Mrs. Simpson should become Queen.”
A fourth possibility—that he should give up Mrs. Simpson and remain on the throne—had been decisively ruled out by the king, although privately Walter Monckton believed, like the royal family, that “if and when the stark choice faced them between their love and his obligations as King Emperor they would in the end each make the sacrifice, devastating though it would be.”
The dominions plumped for abdication—Canada somewhat halfheartedly, South Africa and Australia categorically. New Zealand was less emphatic: Mrs. Simpson would be impossible as queen but there was something to be said for a morganatic marriage. By now she had left the house in Regent’s Park, which the king had rented her, for the safety of Fort Belvedere; soon after she went, a booing, jeering mob congregated outside and stones were thrown through the windows. From the Fort, with her faithful Aunt Bessie in attendance, she wrote a somewhat disingenuous letter to Edwina Mountbatten on November 30:
Edwina dear,
I am lying here making all sorts of wise decisions, schemes, etc for leaving England for a while. I am really worn out with all the talk and all the furore the U.S. press has caused here, and I know how happy my departure would make England. I think I shall have to use the story of Paris for hats, and then be hard to find, and then those charming people, the man in the street and the lunatics, will forget me, and all will be well once more.
Love Wallis
Edwina must have received it the day before the event that finally brought the affair into the open. On Sunday, December 2, the bishop of Bradford, concerned at the king’s lack of regular churchgoing, preached a sermon on the sovereign’s duties as head of the Church of England. With what they saw as an attack by a cleric on the king’s morality, the press felt free to unleash the flood of stories hitherto held back by the newspaper proprietors.
The following day, December 3, the king had another audience with Baldwin. He now wished to get Wallis out of the country as quickly as possible. It was decided that she would stay with her old friends Herman and Katharine Rogers at their villa, Lou Viei, near Cannes, escorted thither by Lord Brownlow. The king, Wallis and his old friend Perry Brownlow dined at the Fort that night, after which Wallis set off with a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of jewelry, without saying goodbye to any of the staff.
The news of Wallis’s departure and of the king’s intentions was around London in a flash. Most people felt like Irene, who wrote on December 4: “I feel so hideously angry that the King should have carted his people and England by asking to marry her. Mrs. Simpson has apparently vanished to the South of France. Went to bed raging at this woman and the appalling catastrophe whatever the result she has brought on the King.”
On the same day the king had another interview with Baldwin and asked to see Churchill. As he was not in the cabinet, and Baldwin had no objection, that night Churchill dined at the Fort. His advice was to play for time, largely to see what measure of support the king would gain. Later, Churchill gave an account of that meeting to Robert Bernays, who wrote in his diary on December 9:
Winston told me that the King was in an extraordinary mental state when he visited him and that once or twice he seemed to be seized with a mental anaesthesia.
Where I do sympathise with the King is in his appalling loneliness. Winston found him quite alone. He hasn’t one real friend to lean upon in this frightful emergency. His case seems to be arrested development. He has never passed the stage from boyhood to manhood. He is the spoiled child of success with the film star mentality. He sees his job only in terms of cheering crowds. He has never thought the matter out. He imagined that he could quietly retire into private life, leaving his brother to perform the dreary ceremonial functions while he spent a tranquil life gardening at Fort Belvedere and holidaying on the Riviera, occasionally emerging to open a hospital or review the Fleet and receive the cheers that mean so much to him.
For the first time he has been brought up against the fact that abdication means exile and that for the rest of his life he can serve no useful purpose.
As the terrible week rolled on, the two men who had spent so many of the early, carefree years with the king sent him supportive notes:
My dear David [wrote Mountbatten to his friend and cousin], I can’t bear sitting here doing nothing to help you in your terrible trouble.
Do you realise how many loyal supporters of all classes you have?
If you want me to help you, to do any service for you, or even to feel you have a friend of Wallis’s to keep you company, you have only to telephone.
I don’t want to be a nuisance but I don’t want to feel there is nothing I can do except bite people’s heads off who have the temerity to say anything disloyal about their king—though practically none do so—at any rate in my presence.
Your ever loyal devoted dutiful Dickie
Fruity, whose devotion had never wavered, wrote a heartfelt letter from Wilton Place.
Your Majesty,
Words cannot express how deeply I feel for you during these terrible days of anxiety. When I was in trouble you stood by me, and I wish to God that I could be of some service to you now.
Please always remember, Sir, that I am ready to do anything for you at any time.
Monckton, clever, practical and as a lawyer aware of all the constitutional and legal implications of the various courses of action mooted to the king, put forward the idea that Parliament should pass two bills immediately: one in which the king renounced the throne and the other granting Wallis’s decree absolute* (without this, Wallis would not gain her divorce and the king would have abdicated in vain), but most of the cabinet rejected this as it smacked of a bargain. Everyone, including the king, felt that the matter should be decided quickly, as the general uncertainty was destabilizing.
The king’s own wish was to broadcast his intentions to the nation and then to go abroad for a while to give the people time to come to a measured decision. “I have read the broadcast he wished to make,” wrote Monckton. “In it he asks for the happiness of marriage, etc, and says neither he nor Wallis would insist on her being made Queen but that a title suitable for his wife should be given her.” This broadcast, with its appeal to the emotions of his listeners, was disallowed as being unconstitutional.
By now the king had virtually decided to abdicate, though on December 8 Baldwin went once more to the Fort to plead with him for a reversal of his decision. Again, the king refused, as he did a last-ditch appeal from the cabinet the following day. Though utterly steadfast, he was exhausted, both by the tension of awaiting the outcome and by the constant telephone calls from Cannes in which Wallis alternately threatened to give him up or demanded that he obtain as much as he could get financially from the royal coffers.
“George [the Duke of Kent] came in to see us at six in despair,” wrote Edwina Mountbatten in her diary. “He had just returned from the Fort where the King has definitely made up his mind to abdicate in favour of the Duke of York. Everything these days is too depressing for words.” That night there was the famous last dinner at which were present two of the king’s brothers, the dukes of York and Kent, Walter Monckton and several others. “The King exhausted but puts up magnificent show,” wrote Monckton.
By the end of Thursday, December 10, Monckton was equally exhausted. He arrived at Fort Belvedere at 1 a.m. with the draft Instrument of Abdication (to come into effect on Friday, December 11) and at 2:40 a.m. was caught by the king for a talk before he could retire to bed. At 9:30 a.m. the duke of York arrived at the Fort, followed a few minutes later by the duke of Gloucester, with the duke of Kent arriving at ten.
Within minutes, the signing and witnessing of six copies of the Instrument of Abdication and seven of the address for the House of Commons had begun, the sheets of paper spread over a simple mahogany table, with the king alone unaffected by the atmosphere of despondency. “Dickie down at the Fort all day,” runs Edwina Mountbatten’s diary. “Chaos reigns. Final preparations for the King’s Abdication being made. Everyone completely sunk except the King, who remains fairly calm and cheerful, and completely determined.”
Monckton returned to London with two notes from the king to Baldwin for inclusion in the prime minister’s statement to the House of Commons that afternoon. Later that day Baldwin joined the king, the duke of York and their financial advisers at Fort Belvedere to work out a settlement.
Here the king, no doubt under tremendous pressure from Mrs. Simpson, made an uncharacteristic but fatal mistake: he lied to his brother about the size of his fortune, estimated by most authorities at around £1.1 million, inclusive of a settlement on Mrs. Simpson of three hundred thousand pounds. Instead, he told the duke that he only had ninety thousand pounds. He made the same statement to Winston Churchill, with the result that neither trusted him again—to the immense detriment of future relations.
Baldwin’s statement to Parliament that afternoon was described by Harold Nicolson as “Sophoclean and almost unbearable.” It affected Robert Bernays equally, who wrote:
I suppose none of us who were present will forget as long as they live the scene in the House of Commons on the day of the Abdication.
Baldwin’s speech was an amazing performance. Its material was little pieces of paper with ideas on them contributed obviously by his colleagues. When he came in with the despatch box he found he had lost his key. He desperately searched his pockets for it and then found it under Neville Chamberlain’s legs. Then he tried to sort his papers, upset them and had to retrieve them from the floor. Then Hoare had to answer a question and put his papers on top of Baldwin’s notes with the result that they were upset again and had to be retrieved from the floor once more.
At Denham, Irene went into Micky’s nursery at 6 p.m., where she found him cutting pictures of Mrs. Simpson out of the Daily Sketch and saying, “Nasty Mrs. Simpson,” “Horrid Mrs. Simpson,” before chopping them into pieces. “I gather he had overheard Nanny saying something in the nursery,” wrote Irene. “Tears ran down our faces, both Nanny and I, as we listened to the six o’clock news and Mr. Baldwin’s statement.”
That night the king worked late on his broadcast, getting up early the following morning to finish it. He had invited Churchill to luncheon, to give a final polish, and it was while they were together that he ceased to be king. As Churchill left, he quoted Marvell’s famous lines on the beheading of Charles I: “He nothing common did or mean, upon that memorable scene.” The ex-king’s servants did not share that view; none of them would accompany him into his new life.
That evening the ex-king left the Fort at eight-thirty, with his brothers, to dine at Royal Lodge. After dinner Walter Monckton fetched him and drove him to Windsor Castle, from where, at 10 p.m., he was to make his broadcast to the nation under the title of Prince Edward. “You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duty as King as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love” was the sentence that best sums up his attitude—and his failure.
All over London, audiences trickled out of theaters, where the duke’s speech was broadcast, as they could not bear to stay for the rest of the play. In Wilton Place Irene listened to it with the Metcalfes:
Louis Greig* had told me not to cry as the King had wanted this through and through and I was not to dramatise his agony of heart. I could wish he had left Mr. Baldwin’s fine eulogy of himself as the last picture as his little melodramatic epilogue of seven minutes had no greatness and was rather “hot”-making and mingy. But it made me howl all the same. His voice sounded thick and muddled too. I said it was emotion. Baba said the King was a tortured demented soul, quite different from Louis’s view.
Monckton then drove the duke of Windsor back to Royal Lodge to say goodbye to his family. As it was midnight by then, Queen Mary and his sister Princess Mary soon left for London; the duke and his three brothers “chatted about everything except that which was in their minds,” according to Monckton. “We kissed, parted as freemasons, and he bowed to me as King,” wrote the new king, George VI. Then the duke and Monckton left for Portsmouth, the duke talking easily and cheerfully all the way: it had been arranged that he would leave for France that night on the destroyer HMS Fury, accompanied by courtiers Ulick Alexander and Piers (“Joey”) Legh.
So last-minute were the orders to the destroyer’s captain, Cecil Howe, that he was obliged to borrow bed linen, crockery, glasses and an experienced steward from the royal yacht. The Fury left Portsmouth at 2 a.m. and because the weather was poor lay off the Isle of Wight for some hours so that the ex-king could get some sleep. But his nervous tension was such that he sat up in the wardroom until 4 a.m., drinking brandy and talking of recent events. The Fury reached Boulogne at 3:40 the following afternoon, December 12, tying up at a berth sealed from public view, and the party set off by special Pullman for Austria, where the Baron Eugene de Rothschild had put one of his houses, Schloss Enzesfeld, near Vienna, at the duke’s disposal.
A few days later, the diarist Chips Channon made a perceptive comment. “I heard that garrulous gossip, Malcolm Bullock, with an expertise of felinity, remark for me to overhear: ‘I don’t know what the Archbishop meant, as the late King had no friends.’ It is terribly true; only Fruity Metcalfe with his checks and his brogue. No other man friend did the King ever have.”
A young man called Dudley Forwood, an attaché at the British legation in Vienna, was staying with the Rothschilds for a visit planned to include Christmas when his ambassador, Sir Wolford Selby, called him from the embassy to tell him that the abdication had taken place and that he must return at once. Forwood drove through the night and when he arrived learned that the duke of Windsor was already on his way and that he, Forwood, was to be seconded as his equerry.
With the ambassador, he met the duke on his arrival in Vienna and they drove to Schloss Enzesfeld, set among low wooded hills and with golf and skiing nearby to provide the energetic diversions which the duke loved. Kitty Rothschild, who regarded the duke’s visit as a great social coup, was waiting to welcome him, but her hopes of gaining a foothold in the duke’s circle were to be disappointed, thanks to Wallis’s paranoid jealousy.
There were misunderstandings from the start. The duke, depressed and frustrated at his separation from Wallis, was not an easy guest. It was not so much his habit of consoling himself by playing his drums loudly to a gramophone record until late at night while drinking too much brandy that worried the exhausted Legh as his attitude to his hostess.
While the former king expected everyone to conform to his wishes, Kitty, as a great beauty, was accustomed to have men fall in with hers. Out of courtesy he would go for a drive with her if she suggested it, hoping to entertain him, but these expeditions would irritate him intensely since all he really wanted to do was wait by the telephone for a call from Wallis Simpson.
Wallis, out of her depth, scared and angry, was not bearing up well. During hours of hysterical telephone conversations she berated her lover over virtually every detail of her life and his (in the three months the duke stayed at the schloss, he spent over eight hundred pounds* on telephone calls).
Christmas at Denham was also characterized by tensions and misery. There were thirteen for lunch, with only one servant to cope, and as Tom had given his manservant the day off Irene had to summon a housemaid from London to help out. Only after church did Tom appear, followed by Baba, Fruity and their children, for lunch. Tom’s Father Christmas performance at four o’clock went off as brilliantly as usual and tea, with Christmas cake and crackers, followed by dancing around the tree and presents, was a great success.
From then on, things went steadily downhill. At six o’clock Fruity was delegated to drive Nanny and the twins back to London. Miserable at leaving his wife with the man he so detested, he said goodbye to Irene with tears in his eyes. Boxing Day was marked by a flaming row at dinner, instigated by Tom, in a foul temper at being away from his new bride and the more adult delights of Wootton. Since none of them knew that he was now married to Diana, they could not understand such an outburst of vitriol, triggered by so trivial a cause—the cook’s not sending in a green vegetable at dinner. Working himself up, he swore that he would sack the entire staff, adding that Irene and Baba could get out too. Viv became scarlet in the face, tears sprang from Baba’s eyes, Nick’s spectacles misted up, Granny Mosley talked wildly to get to the end of dinner and Irene, who could take no more, ran out of the room.
Two days later Fruity returned and the season of goodwill ended with another monumental row, this time between him and Baba. Almost at once, Fruity left to ski in Kitzbühel. Baba concentrated on settling into the new house in Wilton Place, dumping her children on Nancy Astor, whom she managed to annoy by her casualness. “I do think you might have the decency to drop me a line when I am looking after your children,” wrote Nancy on January 12, 1937. Baba also heard from the irrepressible Dino Grandi:
Your letter has given me much pleasure and I thank you, darling. I enclose the photo you wish and I hope you will not forget entirely your “impossible” friend, who is and will remain—in his own way—nearer, much nearer, to you than you can possibly believe.
You ask me why I told you of being “dead.” I did it only because I felt, after everything which has happened, that that was the only decent way through which I could ask your forgiveness. The dead are easily forgiven and forgotten . . .
How is Irene? And your children? I am missing London so much, much more than you may imagine. But the future is open and I have many hopes in many ways . . . Naldera, darling, my sweet friend, I am yours.
G.
At Schloss Enzesfeld, Dudley Forwood was finding the crosscurrents of emotion a desperate strain.
It was a very bad time [he recalled later]. The Duke was in a great great state. I was only 24 and not very capable of dealing with a 42-year-old ex-King. I knew he had this curious devotion to Fruity so I telephoned him in his house in Wilton Place and said: “We really need you badly. Joey Legh has left and I’m not coping very well.” And Fruity in a typical Fruity way said: “I’ll be on that airplane first thing tomorrow morning, boy.” And he was.
Before flying, Fruity telephoned the duke to ask him if he would like him to come for a short stay. “Would I like you to!” responded the duke enthusiastically.
Wallis thought otherwise. She now wrote to the duke: “Darling, I have just read in the paper that Lambe [a young naval officer appointed equerry in July 1936] is to return to London on the 19th [January]. Who is coming out in his place? You cannot be alone with Fruity. In the first place, he is not capable of handling the post and dealing with servants etc. In the second place, it is necessary that you have an equerry at all times. Surely you have some friends or your family for you to send someone to you. You must not be alone with Fruity: I won’t have it.”
She may have genuinely felt that Fruity could not deal with letters or servants (although as an army officer dealing with men had been a prerequisite); more likely she feared Fruity’s influence on the duke. They had shared a past long before Wallis came on the scene, they enjoyed sports in which she took little or no part—riding, skiing, golf—and a word or phrase could set them off into uncontrollable schoolboy giggles that mystified onlookers.
After an uncomfortable journey Fruity was met by an army of press photographers. At the schloss, where he was warmly welcomed, there were only Kitty Rothschild, the duke, Charles Lambe and Dudley Forwood, in a household run almost as if the duke were still king. At about nine-fifteen every morning Forwood would enter his bedroom, bare of personal possessions save for a number of large photographs of Wallis, to ask the duke, then just waking up, if he had any special plans. “Nao,” the duke would reply in his curious half-cockney accent, “I think we’ll play a bit of golf.”
Forwood would pass this information on to the senior valet, who would set up a long table, spread with baize, on which he would place all the duke’s golf suits, each with its matching shoes, shirt and socks. From these the duke would select his outfit, have his bath and descend in his dressing gown to a breakfast of kippers (sent from Fortnum and Mason) and Oxford marmalade, after which he would dress. Forwood, who would have arranged a game with the golf pro, would accompany him around the course, walking the three dogs, Cora, Jaggs and Wallis’s dog Slipper, all on leashes.
Back at the schloss, the duke would change into a suit for the light luncheon—a little cheese, some fruit—that he invariably favored. Dinner in the evening, cooked by the French chef, was more elaborate—and meant another change of clothes. Apart from the work of the servants, whatever the duke did required the attention of someone, at once, no matter what they happened to be doing.
“All his life he went on behaving as if he were still what he once had been,” commented Dudley Forwood. “He could never accept that he was now, in real terms, a nobody.” In this he was aided and abetted by Mrs. Simpson, who nagged him violently over the telephone about the way he was living, the people around him and her own fears and problems, all with the underlying refrain that he must stand up for his rights and extract more money from his brother.
When Fruity arrived he was delighted to find the duke in his old friendly, affectionate, amusing form. That night, they sat up talking almost until dawn; the next morning Fruity discovered that, just as in the old days, the duke’s energy was formidable, with everything done to excess. Now that he had a skiing companion they skied until it was too dark to see, then played poker all night.
From Schloss Enzesfeld Fruity wrote Baba a series of letters that reveal an immediate and accurate grasp of the situation, from the duke’s frenetic desire to cram his days until his wedding to his utter subjugation to Wallis.
“I’ve never seen HRH better,” begins the first, written on January 22, 1937.
Happy, cheerful, no regrets about anything—he talked to W for hours after we’d finished playing poker. The conversation did not seem to go well. Talks of marriage early in May, no date fixed. Has NO idea of returning to England for a year or two at least. Do not think he misses England or anything connected with it one little bit—he seems glad to be free of it. I think Kitty has got on his nerves. She won’t leave. He gets quite short with her at times. Says he wants to be with men only and doesn’t want any women about. Yesterday spent the day in Vienna. Turkish bath all evening, he and I, then shopping, then big cocktail party at the Embassy. I never leave him.
Lambe left today for England but Greenacre has just arrived—he was sent out from England before they knew I was coming. I’m glad, as he does the letters etc. Tonight he was told at dinner that H. M. wanted to talk on phone to him. He said he couldn’t take the call but asked for it to be put through at 10 p.m. The answer to this was that H. M. said he would talk at 6:45 tomorrow as he was too busy to talk at any other time. It was pathetic to see HRH’s face. He couldn’t believe it! He’s been so used to having everything done as he wishes. I’m afraid he’s going to have many more shocks like this.
Fruity’s comment was all too true. The negotiations for a financial settlement were dragging (they were eventually resolved satisfactorily) and the duke, who all his life had played the role of elder brother to the full, continued to telephone the new king with advice on the questions of the day which, as Walter Monckton wrote, “often ran counter to the advice which the King was getting from his responsible Ministers in the government.” Eventually, Monckton was charged with the delicate task of visiting Schloss Enzesfeld and conveying to the duke that these calls must cease.
The rest of Fruity’s letter was equally accurate. “[H.R.H.] is just living through each day until he can be with W. The 27 April is the date. He ticks off each day on a calendar beside his bed. Lots of people are marked down as never having heard from them, e.g., Hugh and Helen and Emerald he’s mentioned. He tells me he didn’t know till about an hour before he left England when he was going to. Goodbye dearest one, all my love I send you. You’ve been very wonderful to me and helped me so much. Without you I wouldn’t be here; and this is a great success, and I am so happy I am here.”
Two days later, exhausted from day-long skiing on poor snow and talking until the small hours every night—the duke would wander in and out of Fruity’s room until 4 a.m.—he repeated that Kitty was getting on the duke’s nerves.
He is frightfully keen to have the place to himself. You know how he loves to run his own show—but the fact is she loves to be acting as hostess for him. I am very happy and HRH couldn’t be a more delightful companion—he’s not had one bad day since I arrived.
Of course he’s on the line for hours and hours every day to Cannes. I somehow don’t think these talks go well sometimes. It’s only ever after one of them that he seems a bit worried and nervous. She seems to be always picking on him or complaining about something that she thinks he hasn’t done and ought to do (this sounds as if I hear all the conversation—of course this isn’t so but as my room is next to his and he talks terribly loudly it’s awfully difficult not to hear a certain amount that he says anyway).
He is like a prisoner doing a time sentence. All he is living for is to be with her on the 27 April. As we come back every night after skiing he says “One more day nearly over.” Never have I seen a man more madly in love. The telephone never stops and his mail is enormous, sometimes 300 letters, etc, mostly from mad people! Gosh but some of them are abusive! We never show him any of those of course. They come from all over the world. I wish you were here but there is no chance. He won’t have any women at all!
The duke’s growing obsession with his financial position soon manifested itself: on January 27 Fruity’s letter reported: “HRH is frightfully close about money, he won’t pay for anything. It’s become a mania with him. It really is not too good. But once more let me say; HRH is a 100 per cent and the most delightful companion. If he’d remain as he is now I’d give up anything to serve him for the rest of my life. I really am devoted to him.”
Fruity felt immense pity for his friend, flagellated daily by the woman with whom he was obsessed. “She is at him every day on the phone. He always seems to be excusing himself for something or other. I feel so sorry for him, he is never able to do what she considers the right thing. 3:00 a.m.—HRH came in and stopped till now. I will not have time to write more as we are to leave for skiing at 8:00 to do our first run.”
On February 3 Fruity wrote from the Hotel Bristol, Vienna. “Kitty left yesterday! Terrible show! as HRH was late getting dressed owing to his infernal Cannes telephone call!! Missed her! never saw her to say goodbye or thank her! She was frightfully hurt and I don’t blame her. He is awfully difficult at times and this is the worst thing he’s done yet. I went down to the station with a letter which I got him to write to her, and that made things a bit better. He also never saw the servants to tip them or thank them etc, all due to more d—mn talking to Cannes. It never stops. Isn’t it too awful? Nothing matters when Cannes is on the line.”
Even Fruity’s sweet nature was tested. “The evenings lately have been dreadful!” he wrote to Baba on February 2, 1937. “He won’t think of bed before 3:00 a.m. and now has started playing the accordion and the bagpipes. Last night there was almost a row on the phone. W. said she’d read he’d been having an affair with Kitty! This is d—mn funny but I can tell you it was no joke last night. He got in a terrible state. Their conversation lasted nearly two hours.”
A visit by the duke’s sister Princess Mary and her husband, Lord Harewood, made a welcome change from the exhausting routine of skiing and late nights. By early March the tensions, fatigue and stressful emotional atmosphere were beginning to tell even on Fruity, who had been there longer than anyone else in the duke’s retinue. Soon after telling Baba, “I love being here with HRH but it is very tiring,” he was writing, “I am really very unhappy at the prospect of another month at least of this life. It is a dreadful strain. I am definitely feeling it now. However he needs me and wants me so I must do it for him.”
The duke had again refused to allow Baba to join them. Instead he wanted Fruity to accompany him to a new, more secret temporary abode—the duke of Westminster’s hunting lodge, Château de Saint-Saëns, as Fruity confided to Baba with many underlinings as to secrecy (in the event, the duke did not go there).
Baba was in no hurry for her husband to come home; she was busy planning a motoring trip in France that would take her away shortly before his arrival. She sent him a wire suggesting he put off his return, to which Fruity replied that he had important things to discuss with her.
He explained why he did not wish to stay on longer than March 24. “I’ve carried on here and made a great success of it and HRH is very grateful to me but sweetheart I am very tired and can’t stand it much longer. You have no idea what a strain it is. I am on duty all day and all night and no one person can stand that for long. Dickie arrived yesterday and leaves tomorrow and he will take this letter and will tell you something of what the life is like. Is it too much to ask you to stay in England till I get back?”
Mountbatten had been visiting his lady friend Yola Letellier in Paris and on March 11 flew on to see the duke. The following day was devoted to discussion of the situation. What the duke was chiefly anxious to know was when, in Mountbatten’s opinion, he could return to the Fort—he still had not grasped that giving up the throne also meant giving up England.
“Talking with David and Fruity nearly all day,” runs Mountbatten’s diary. “Also wrote. Important talk with David, and possibility of return.” Next day it was: “Breakfast at 7:15 with David. Very sad saying goodbye on both sides. Caught 9:00 plane for Prague, changed and went on via Nuremberg and Strasbourg. I was terribly sick in the storm.”
Baba refused to put off her trip despite her husband’s pleas. “I am frightfully sorry that I will miss you,” he wrote, “but if nothing will put you off doing your trip as arranged I want you to go and really enjoy it there and have a lovely time—you deserve it after all the work you’ve put in at the house and as you say you’re not looking well it is essential that you get away. It is just unlucky that I am not going to see you. I would have loved it. Is it just you and Edwina doing this trip? I’d have thought you would be very bored with her alone after a bit.”
Fruity’s suspicions were correct. As well as Edwina, and Ronnie and Nancy Tree, the party included Jock Whitney.