CHAPTER FIVE

Wallis Stole My Man

Wallis’s wandering days were over. At least for the time being. After sailing around the globe in the vain search for a divorce, the Baltimore girl discovered to her “astonishment” that she could obtain one in the neighbouring state of Virginia, ancestral home to the Montague side of her family, for the princely sum of $300.

Naturally, though, there were hoops to jump through. She had to produce a letter from Win stating that he no longer wished to live with her, be separated from him for three years, and live in Virginia for two years. In order to fast-track the proceedings so that she would be free by late 1927, Win would have to backdate his letter of separation. He went along with the scheme, which was clearly collusive, dating his letter to June 1924, when he was first assigned to the Far East. His letter ticked all the relevant boxes:

I have come to the definite conclusion that I can never live with you again. During the past two years since I have been away from you I have been happier than ever before. Please be kind enough not to annoy me with any more letters. Yours, Win.

That settled, she now had to establish residency, choosing to stay in the Warren Green Hotel in the leafy town of Warrenton, just twenty-four miles from her cousin Corinne at Wakefield Manor and a short train journey to Washington. Before moving into her new abode, she visited her mother to pack up her belongings. Her mother was now finally reconciled to Wallis proceeding with her divorce. “If you and Win can’t get on, there’s no sense in your trying to pretend that you can,” she commented.

Not that she was especially keen on her daughter spending a year living alone in a country hotel. She offered to travel with her and spend a few days helping to get her settled. Wallis declined, saying: “Nothing could possibly happen to me in Warrenton. From what I hear about the Warren Green Hotel, it would be a proper place for a bishop’s daughter.”

Her mother, who usually had the last word, replied: “Perhaps so, but you are no bishop’s daughter.”

“I shall conduct myself as if I were one,” Wallis said. “Besides, like Moses I am going into the wilderness to reflect.”

She was certainly travelling to a social wilderness, swapping the bright lights of Paris and the delights of Peking, the dinners, the dances, and the beaux, for room number 212, a miserly fifteen-by-twelve-foot chamber, and a shared bathroom. Her temporary home was decorated with “faded flowered wallpaper, a high brass bed, battered night table, imitation mahogany bureau… a classic example of what my mother used to call ‘inferior decorating.’” Hardly the suite of rooms and servants she enjoyed with the Rogerses.

The days of chatting with ambassadors, antiquarians, and military attachés were now distant memories. Instead she was on nodding acquaintance over breakfast with harassed men carrying attaché cases, travelling salesmen who formed the bulk of the hotel’s weekly trade. As she recalled: “For a woman seeking a divorce, the price also included the prospect of being voluntarily buried alive for two years.”

She did, though, make new friends and renew acquaintances, her circle including former school friends from Arundel and Oldfields; a one-time crush called Lloyd Tabb, her first boyfriend from the Burrland summer camp; fashion designer Jane Derby; and—remarkably—Dr. Miles Lewis Allen, the physician who delivered her.

“On the whole, my first year at Warrenton was the most tranquil I have ever known,” recalled the party girl who had spent her twenties obeying the rallying cry of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and had burned the candle at both ends. “I simply rusticated, and when I wasn’t rusticating, I vegetated with equal satisfaction.”

Short of transport, she was taken in tow by an old beau, Hugh Spilman, who squired her around in his old three-pedal rattling flivver. Then working as a lowly $125-a-week teller at the Fauquier National Bank, he introduced her to the horsey set, played golf with her on a nine-hole course, and played poker late into the night. She was, he duly reported, a bad-tempered loser.

Young Spilman, though, was besotted. “I was pretty crazy about her even though she was an awful little flirt,” he recalled. Of course, Spilman was simply not in her league, so when he finally screwed up the courage to ask her to marry him, her refusal reflected realism rather than romance. “You’re poor, I’m poor, and we both need money,” she told him.

Later she told her friends that she would have married Hugh “if he knew how to read anything besides the Daily Racing Form.” While Spilman was devoted to racing guides, the intellectual runners and riders in Wallis’s world, so she claimed, were novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, and Ford Madox Ford. For someone who boasted that she never read a book, Wallis was also, according to her account, busily declaiming poetry and wrestling with the history of philosophy. One book particularly captured her attention. Unusually for her, Wallis read it from beginning to end.

This was The Passing of the Great Race, a bestseller written by lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant, who argued for scientific racism, asserting the superiority of the Nordic, or what the Nazis would call the Aryan, race. Jews, the Chinese, people of colour, Roman Catholics, even the French all failed the eugenic test of racial superiority. As part of his overarching argument, Grant supported the sterilization of “undesirables” and “worthless race types” in order to reinvigorate the dominant Nordic ethnic group. Such was the impact of Grant’s thinking on the then-unknown German political rabble-rouser Adolf Hitler, that he wrote to the author saying that his book had become his “Bible.”

Like thousands of her fellow white Protestant Americans, Wallis subscribed to Grant’s thesis. She was from a class, an age, and a region where, quite unselfconsciously, Wallis and her friends, including Mary Kirk, were nonchalantly racist. Unsurprising given that her family were one-time slave owners who considered the local black population to be at the bottom of the social pyramid, unworthy of the franchise. In letters and table talk she casually referred to people of colour as “niggers,” “coons,” or “darkies.” Indeed, it was not until the Second World War, when Wallis was based in the Bahamas, that she first shook the hand of a person of colour.

In correspondence, Wallis and her friends would refer to someone as “a Jew,” in a way that was not so much personally disdainful as indicating their place in the social pecking order as someone not of the first rank. On one occasion, for instance, she wrote to her aunt Bessie, describing how her friend, diplomat Martin “Mike” Scanlon, had married a woman who could not bring herself to “marry the rich Jew” and so had accepted Scanlon’s offer instead.

During the 1920s what was known as “polite discrimination” towards Jewish people was a growing feature of American life. At that time Jews were barred from numerous social clubs and societies, such as golf clubs and the Freemasons, discriminated against in employment, particularly for white-collar jobs, prevented from visiting some resorts, and subject to a quota system at Ivy League and other colleges. Like others of her class, Wallis’s automatic social reflex was anti-Semitic, a mindset that played an important part in the next phase of her life.

From time to time Wallis left her books, newspapers, and magazines behind and travelled to Washington to see her mother or to New York to stay with Mary Kirk and her husband, Jacques Raffray, at their charming apartment in Washington Square.

Like many of Wallis’s girlfriends, Mary was keen to see her friend happy, settled, and married once again. She had visited Wallis in Warrenton and appreciated Wallis’s need to get out of Dodge. The matchmaker in her believed that once her divorce was finalized, Wallis should marry again as soon as possible. She was now thirty, and the clock was ticking—for her looks, her chance of starting a family, and of achieving financial security. Whenever Wallis arrived to stay, Mary would always ensure that a possible suitor was lined up to be given the once-over. Mary was, as her younger sister, Anne, remarked, a “useful friend.”

In the winter of 1925 Mary and her husband were guests of Ernest Simpson and his wife, Dorothea, at the opera. For some reason, Jacques had to drop out. Mary contacted the Simpsons and asked if a friend of hers who had recently returned from China could take his place. Enter Wallis. Her first impressions of her host were of a man who seemed too serious, but upon second glance she noticed his twinkling blue eyes and mischievous smile. That he was of Jewish descent did not feature in the description of that first fateful encounter in a chain of events that was to rock an empire.

That Christmas, the Simpsons were invited to a party at the Raffrays’ apartment. Wallis was there, too, and clearly made a favourable impression on Dorothea, who later recalled: “She was witty and clever, far cleverer than I. She made any party something special.” Wallis and Dorothea, though, were like night and day: Dorothea was diffident, withdrawn, and prone to illness, Wallis hard-boiled and hard-wired for fun.

At first Dorothea didn’t see her as a threat, even though Wallis had clearly caught the eye of her husband. Ernest, a year older than Wallis, was always happy to come over to the Raffrays’ to make up a fourth for an evening of bridge. From time to time he would partner with Mrs. Spencer, and slowly but surely the Wallis magic, her ability to mesmerize a man by focussing her burning blue eyes on what they were saying, seemed to be working. In their conversations she appreciated his wonderful mind, which was “playful and good humoured,” but he also exhibited a curiosity about the world which she found stimulating and rather sexy. Ernest, who won a poetry prize at school, was always ready to declaim a stanza or two and had the knack of making up rhyming couplets for any social occasion. “Well read and very sure of himself,” was the verdict of Clare Boothe Brokaw (later Clare Boothe Luce), then an editor of Vanity Fair, who attended one of the Raffrays’ parties.

The sly, unstated chemistry that existed between the married man and the eager, unattached woman exploded that Easter of 1926. After attending the traditional Sunday parade, Ernest and a fellow Guards officer arrived at the Raffrays’, bursting with bonhomie and bright smiles after enjoying the hospitality of various New York hostesses. They were, according to Mary’s sister Anne, “the souls of amiability and glamour, and they brought the odors of fresh spring flowers with them.”

Wallis was ready to pick the bloom. Anne continued: “There, all ready with her open arms, was Wallis, with her heart on her sleeve, and seemingly saying to Ernest: ‘You are a gallant Knight on a White Charger, coming to rescue me from the wicked world of poverty and oblivion where most of my friends go, never to return to the bright life of fame!’ I can see her beautiful blue eyes now and her square hands clawing the air in ecstasy.”

She certainly had her talons directed at Ernest, a man who was, to all intents and purposes, Herman Rogers Lite. Like Herman, he had gone to an Ivy League college—Harvard rather than Yale—was a competent linguist, was interested in foreign cultures, and was widely travelled—during his school summer holidays his father took him to Britain and Continental Europe. Unlike Herman, he had a full-time job, working at his father’s shipping company, Simpson Spence & Young, which had offices in London and New York.

His nationality was similarly split; his father, also Ernest, was from a Jewish family, the Solomons, which originated from Warsaw in Poland. Ernest Sr. became a naturalized American citizen shortly after he arrived in New York in 1873. An Anglophile to his fingertips, he was thrilled when his daughter Maud, twenty years older than Ernest Jr., married a prominent British member of Parliament, Peter Kerr-Smiley.

By contrast, Ernest’s mother, Charlotte, the daughter of a well-connected New York lawyer, was hostile to the Old World, found the French dishonest and the English dull. If Wallis had the conflicting characteristics of the Montagues and Warfields in her make-up, so Ernest enjoyed—and endured—the push and pull of his joint American and British heritage.

In the midst of the First World War, Ernest finally decided where his true loyalties lay. He abandoned his studies at Harvard and sailed for England, believing that it was his patriotic duty to fight for king and the country of his father’s birth. He enlisted in the Officer Cadet Battalion of the Household Brigade, and in June 1918 was gazetted second lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards. He remained in training until the armistice, never seeing action.

At the end of the war, he decided to become a naturalized British subject even though he was back in New York and worked for his father. When he walked down Madison Avenue dressed in his pinstriped suit and Guards tie, carrying a rolled umbrella, his moustache neatly trimmed, he had the air of a classic English gentleman heading for his office in the City of London.

Like his sister, Ernest had made a good match, in February 1923 marrying lawyer’s daughter Dorothea “Dodie” Parsons Dechert. Her great-grandfathers were respectively a US senator and a chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. They lived on the fashionable Upper East Side where, a year later, Dorothea gave birth to her second daughter, Audrey. She already had one daughter, Cynthia, from her marriage to former Princeton student and sometime businessman, James Flanagan Dechert.

So while Wallis found Ernest attractive, sensible, and cosmopolitan, he shared another unwelcome characteristic with Herman—an inconvenient wife and, additionally, a highly inconvenient daughter and stepdaughter. The useful Mary assured her friend that though Ernest had not been married long, he was unhappy.

She and her sister Anne had taken tea with the fragile, prematurely greying Mrs. Simpson at their Upper East Side apartment, duly reporting to Wallis that she was ill and “neurotic.” Shortly afterwards she sailed for France and the American Hospital of Paris, where it seems she had treatment for a nervous condition. Ernest was left behind, lonely and vulnerable. As he and Wallis began seeing one another on a more regular basis, it was not too long before Wallis’s mother got wind of developments in New York. It was not hard to imagine her horrified response. An impetuous marriage to a drunken sailor aviator was one thing; the deliberate seduction of another woman’s husband who was the father to two young daughters was quite another.

She discussed her concerns with her sister, Bessie, who had a solution, suggesting Wallis accompany her on a Mediterranean cruise that summer and fall. A change of scene from Warrenton would do her good, and maybe the company on board the cruise would take her mind off her latest enchantment. “Your mother tells me that you think you may be falling in love again,” Aunt Bessie asked.

They sailed from New York and into the Mediterranean, steaming by the whitewashed villages along the Amalfi coast before landing at Trieste in northeast Italy. From there they motored along the French Riviera and travelled to Paris.

As Aunt Bessie predicted, there were several shipboard beaux who took her dancing after dinner and generally paid court to her. They included a Pennsylvanian lawyer and later a “tempestuous and gallant” Irishman who learned to take no for an answer.

Her stay in Paris brought back bitter memories of her past rather than thoughts of her bright future. After dinner one evening in late October 1927 she saw on the front page of the American edition of the Paris Herald Tribune a story about the death of her uncle Sol. While versions vary, Wallis, “upset and scared,” hurried back to the Hotel Lotti to tell her aunt. Bessie had herself just received a cable from her sister Alice, Wallis’s mother, informing her of Sol’s death. Aunt Bessie sighed: “Sol Warfield may not have been the most tolerant man on this earth but he was good to you, Wallis.”

Wallis searched her heart for something to say but struggled, reflecting only on his coldness and how he saw her as the black sheep of the family.

Even though they sailed for New York as soon as they were able, they missed Uncle Sol’s funeral—and the reading of the will. It was widely expected that Wallis, whom Sol had legally made his ward, would be left the bulk of his estimated $5 million fortune. Instead she learned that he had bequeathed his money and his country estate, Manor Glen, to be used as a home for distressed gentlewomen in memory of Anna, his mother and Wallis’s grandmother. For her part, Wallis received the interest every quarter on $15,000, which was held in a trust fund. Even this meagre amount—interest rates were around two per cent in 1928—ceased upon her remarriage. Wallis learned to her horror that two months before his death, Uncle Sol, enraged that Wallis had gone ahead with her divorce against his wishes, had changed his will.

Wallis was not just angry about Uncle Sol and his will; she was, according to Mary Raffray, furious. She fumed at the injustice and raged at the hypocrisy of her uncle who, as she had concluded from the many photographs of female singers and actresses in his New York apartment, was not averse to a pretty woman. In her eyes he had shirked his chance to ensure her financial independence, forcing her continued reliance on men. His niggardly gesture was another example of him “tipping” her—this time from beyond the grave.

After talking it over, she and another relative contested the will, the legal back-and-forth taking another three years to resolve. (On appeal she received a larger payout, approximately $47,500 worth of US stocks, the money not paid until January 1930. By then the stock market had crashed and Uncle Sol’s stocks were worth a fraction of their previous value. Once again Montague luck snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.)

In the midst of the drama over Uncle Sol’s will, Wallis finally got her divorce. On December 6, 1927, just a few days after her return from Paris following her three-month European trip, her divorce petition was submitted to Fauquier County Circuit Court, where it was heard by Judge George Latham Fletcher. During the various dispositions made by her mother, Win, and others, Wallis swore on oath that she had not seen Win for three years. Their encounters in Hong Kong and more recently in Chicago, where she had stayed with his family for a few days, were conveniently forgotten. The judge may have raised his eyebrows at the inconsistencies but turned a blind eye, granting a divorce decree on December 10. “It was just a matter of incompatibility,” observed Wallis’s lawyer, Aubrey Weaver.

There seemed to be no hard feelings, Win Spencer coming to the courthouse before the divorce was granted and chatting with his soon-to-be ex-wife. “Wallis and he shook hands and departed friends,” Weaver recalled.

She was now free to remarry, the primary candidate for her hand the pinstriped figure of Ernest Simpson, who had also, somewhat conveniently, recently secured his own divorce. While Wallis saw herself as a passive observer in this marital drama, Ernest’s now ex-wife Dorothea, frail and with little energy, saw things differently. Her early favourable impressions of Wallis had understandably soured, and she accused her now of infiltrating her life while she was ill and snatching her husband away. “Wallis was a very helpful woman. First she helped herself to my apartment, then she helped herself to my clothes, and finally she helped herself to my husband.”

He was not the only contender for Wallis’s hand. With jaunty exaggeration, her Warrenton beau Hugh Spilman liked to boast that he proposed to her every day. He claimed that during her stay in Virginia she had had at least thirty different proposals, many from young men who attended the regular parties hosted by her cousins, the Barnetts, in the horsey town of Front Royal.

As a gambling man, though, Spilman would have put his money on Ernest Simpson. He was a racing certainty to win the prize. During her visits to New York he took Wallis to the theatre, out dancing, and had shown her the sights. He was down-to-earth, sensible, sober, and kind—the exact opposite of her first husband. Indeed, when she had first met him, he and Dorothea were part of the temperance movement.

Thoughtful, too, Ernest taking at face value Wallis’s boast that she had read widely while biding her time in Warrenton. He gave her armfuls of books to read, notably Lytton Strachey’s 500-page biography of Queen Victoria. As he would later discover, her real literary diet was fashion magazines leavened with the odd work of light fiction. His choices were indigestible.

More palatable was his serious talk of marriage. He had already told her that when they were free he would like her to be his bride and partner in life. She had hesitated. Having pursued him and wrested him from the arms of another, she now had second thoughts. There was much to consider.

Freeing herself from Win had taken the best part of a decade, during which time she had led a rootless, somewhat self-indulgent life. She didn’t want to make another mistake.

Then there was Ernest’s ambition to live in London, learning the details of the shipping business away from his father’s constant interference. While Ernest loved England and the English, Wallis knew nothing about the country, its customs, or its climate. She would be saying goodbye to her mother, her aunt, the Montagues, and her loyal circle of friends for an uncertain future.

Moreover, she would not just be taking on another husband and a new country but becoming stepmother to a little girl, Ernest’s daughter Audrey. Wallis as a mother, even at one remove, is not an image that readily springs to mind. Then there was the fact that Ernest was part Jewish. While she was never explicit in referring to his ethnicity, in her memoir she made oblique allusions to his race, writing that Ernest had always yearned “to follow the ways of his father’s people.” In a knowing jab, she suggested that Ernest never seemed to be an “altogether typical Englishman.”

Perhaps most significantly, she also nursed the belief, based on her lawyer’s advice, that she was odds-on to become a wealthy woman. The signs were that the court case involving Uncle Sol’s will would go in her favour. The winter of 1928 was a time of uncertainty but also of hope that she could hit the jackpot. If Lady Luck smiled on her she would never need to rely on men again. Stick or twist. She decided to hedge her bets. First she said yes to his proposal, then no, and finally asked for more time to consider. In the meantime, the newly divorced Ernest sailed for London and a new life.

She had only the modest settlement from Win to rely on, and Wallis’s friends encouraged her to take a job. Her friend from Warrenton, Jane Derby, ran a dress shop in New York, and Mary Raffray worked in a fashion store run by a Mrs. John Betz on Fifty-Seventh Street. Ernest’s ex-wife Dorothea had worked in the same store for a time. When she was in New York, Wallis visited the store every day, invariably going out for lunch with Mary.

As shop owner Mrs. Betz recalled: “She was always chic, she loved clothes and knew how to wear them with an air.” It seemed the commercial world of fashion was calling but, even though she had contacts, she never pursued a career working in an up-market dress store where her fashion and sales sense would have been put to use. Instead she dipped her toe into the waters of fashion by entering a writing competition where the prize was an editorial job at Vogue magazine. For a woman who considered writing letters and visiting the dentist to be her two pet hates, it was hardly surprising that her essay on spring hats was rejected.

Somewhat curiously, she spent three weeks in Pittsburgh with her friends Morgan and Elisabeth Schiller, learning how to be a saleswoman for their tubular steel scaffolding company. Even though Morgan was keen on the prospect of employing a sassy young woman to convince hard-boiled construction engineers about the benefits of his product, Wallis was not convinced. She walked away from his job offer, citing her poor mathematical ability.

Now living in a top-floor garret hotel room in a freezing New York winter, her savings diminishing daily and with no work on the horizon, it seemed that her options were rapidly running out. As she pondered marriage to Ernest and life in a strange country, out of the blue she received an invitation from Herman and Katherine Rogers to join them at their new villa, Lou Viei, in the coastal town of Cannes on the French Riviera. It was to be something of a China reunion as Constance Coolidge was also joining them.

There was an ulterior motive behind her acceptance of their invitation. Ostensibly she wanted their advice on whether she should remarry so soon. As the Rogerses had never met Ernest Simpson, this seemed an odd proposition. In truth her hesitation spoke volumes about her feelings for Ernest Simpson. She simply didn’t love him the way she had Win Spencer in the early days of their marriage, or Felipe Espil during their torrid affair in Washington, nor had she felt the easy companionship she did with Herman Rogers. She didn’t need to sail more than three thousand miles to ask a question when the answer lay much closer to home—in her heart.

Before committing herself to solid, dependable Ernest, she wanted to see for herself the state of the marital union between the man she would have married in a heartbeat and her friend Katherine Rogers. She had pried one man away from his wife. Why not another? When she arrived in Cannes, she was disappointed to discover that Herman and Katherine were still happy and close, neither of them suffering the seven-year itch.

As Herman’s stepdaughter-in-law Katharine “Kitty” Blair observes: “Knowing Wallis’s personality, when she went to the South of France it was probably to see my stepfather and sound out if he would make a move regarding divorcing Katherine. At the very least she needed Herman’s approval to go ahead with the wedding.”

It was the arrival of the Queen of Peking herself, Constance Crowninshield Coolidge, that really drove Wallis into the arms of Ernest Simpson. As Constance relayed the story of her disastrous second marriage, Ernest became more and more appealing.

Since they had last seen Constance, she had divorced American diplomat Ray Atherton and then in October 1924 married an impecunious French count, Pierre Chapelle de Jumilhac. Though she became Comtesse de Jumilhac, the marriage itself was a disaster. The first months—when she was beguiled by this “charming cad,” in thrall to his physicality and wild ways—were a sexual adventure. He was, she confessed, a most affectionate and exciting lover. As Constance told her diary: “The first years with Pierre were worth a whole life. I was a slave of love and he passionately loved me.”

She paid a high price, her husband squandering much of her fortune on buying horses, gambling, and drugs. When he was high on cocaine he got angry and beat her cruelly, on one occasion bursting her eardrum.

By the time the Comtesse de Jumilhac blew into Lou Viei, the bloom was off the rose. Her husband’s behaviour, particularly his drug use, was now so outlandish that Constance was also actively considering divorce—she finally won her freedom a year later. She may have been a rich adventurer with a healthy appetite for men and sex, but at that time of crisis in her own life, someone like safe, kind, and gentle Ernest may have been very appealing.

The same thought occurred to Wallis as she, Herman, and Katherine listened to Constance’s lurid account of her failing second marriage and then discussed her own future with the dependable and mature Englishman.

Wallis loved men—but not in the same way as the Queen of Peking. Her vision was much more traditional, of a woman as a steady helpmate rather than a wild romantic. “I was a product of my upbringing—a Southern girl brought up to believe that a woman’s role is to marry, bring refreshment, variety, amusement and if possible love into a man’s life.”

With Constance’s experience firmly in mind, Wallis wrote to Ernest in June accepting his offer of marriage. Ernest wrote back at once and said he had already begun making arrangements. “I put all my wistful thoughts behind me,” she wrote. “I was happy.”

She said goodbye to the Rogerses and the countess on June 23, 1928—only four weeks before her wedding day. She took the train to Paris, where she bought a yellow wedding dress with a matching blue coat before catching the Golden Arrow boat train.

She arrived in England just three days before her wedding, Ernest meeting her at Victoria Station with a brand-new yellow Lagonda touring car and a chauffeur called Hughes, who was wearing a uniform of a rather more subdued colour. After installing her in a service flat in central London they headed off to ritzy Bond Street to buy her a wedding ring. Amidst the excitement, her first impressions of London were “grey, shapeless, and blurred.”

“I felt like I was entering a man’s club,” she recalled.

The couple spent the first night alone, catching up on the last few months. On the second they were joined by Ernest’s father, a “tiny dwarf-like figure, with piercing eyes and snowy white hair”—a caricature description of an elderly Jewish businessman—who left Wallis in no doubt that though he was retired he kept an iron grip on his shipping company.

Before her wedding day she took the trouble to send a telegram to her Warrenton beau Hugh Spilman: “Unexpectedly I find myself marrying Ernest tomorrow much love.” The wording suggested, as ever, that she was backing reluctantly into the marriage contract.

They married on a sunny and warm summer’s day at Chelsea Register Office at eleven in the morning of July 21, 1928. While she was taken to the venue by their new chauffeur, the brief ceremony was a far cry from the romantic church service she enjoyed the first time around in Baltimore. She was hurried through gloomy corridors to a tatty room where a bored official gabbled through the requisite legal vows before pronouncing them man and wife. Even Ernest remarked it was a “cold little job.” After several glasses of “good champagne” at the sooty Great Western hotel near Paddington Station, they headed for Paris and a honeymoon visiting the châteaux and vineyards of the Loire valley and beyond into northern Spain.

Wallis was happy. Or so she told herself.