CHAPTER ELEVEN

“You God-damned Fool”

The plot was simple but audacious, to blow up King James I and his Protestant Parliament and strike a blow for the Roman Catholic faith. Fortunately, the king got wind of the conspiracy and, after a search of the Houses of Parliament on November 5, 1605, barrels of gunpowder were discovered along with a man named Guy Fawkes, who was holding a slow fuse. He and his fellow conspirators were arrested, tortured, and then hanged, their bodies cut into quarters and dragged through the streets of London. Every November 5, in celebration of the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot, bonfires are lit, effigies of Guy Fawkes are burned and fireworks exploded.

On Bonfire Night 1936, the king’s friend Charles Winn, a member of the Yorkshire family who own Nostell Priory, attended a friend’s firework party with a number of fellow aristocrats. High on the bonfire a straw effigy was well alight. “I see you have Guy Fawkes up there,” he remarked to his host.

“Oh no,” said his friend, “that’s Wallis Simpson.” He continued, laughing: “Now, an unmarried man needs a girl now and again, but marrying her? Can you believe it?” While the British public remained in the dark about the existence of the now twice-divorced American, Winn’s experience that night demonstrated that the flames of publicity were crackling ever nearer.

Among the widening circle of those in the know, events were moving apace. The ashes from the nation’s bonfires were still smouldering as members of Parliament were gripped by open talk of either an abdication or Wallis’s replacement by an eligible European princess. Guests at a dinner party hosted by Lady Colefax were consumed by rumours that the king intended to make Wallis the Duchess of Edinburgh and marry her. Diarist and MP Harold Nicolson observed: “The point is whether he is so infatuated as to insist on her becoming queen or whether the marriage will be purely morganatic.”

A gaggle of aristocrats cornered the American ambassador at one soirée and warned him that the situation was “grave” and the monarchy “in danger.” Amidst this hysterical speculation, Emerald Cunard nursed the delicious possibility of being the power behind the throne after a rather tipsy Leslie Hore-Belisha, minister for transport, told her that Edward was to marry Wallis in the chapel at Windsor Castle and that a new pro-king government would be in power within weeks.

The gathering conflagration centred around exactly whom the king could marry. Under the Royal Marriages Act he could choose anyone he wished—apart from a Roman Catholic. As Wallis was Presbyterian, she passed that test. Where the conflict arose was not because she was American—wealthy American girls had been keeping the British aristocracy financially afloat for a century—but because she was twice divorced with two husbands still living. This directly contradicted the teachings of the Church of England, which the king, as Defender of the Faith, vowed to maintain. Archbishop Cosmo Lang wrestled with the “heavy burden” he felt at possibly consecrating Edward as king. If he went ahead and married Mrs. Simpson it would “shake the foundations of the Church’s influence and teaching.”

Not only did Edward have to hurdle objections from the Church, he faced opposition from the Dominions, Parliament, and the Cabinet. Early on, Stanley Bruce, the Australian high commissioner and former prime minister, lay down the gauntlet, saying that his country would leave the empire should Wallis marry the king.

A clash between king and Parliament would create an explosion that even Guy Fawkes would have been proud of. King versus country. It was a recipe for a constitutional crisis.

From the beginning the king seemed to have no conception of the forces ranged against him, and even if he did, stubborn as he was, he was sure he could find a loophole. After all, didn’t his charm, his popularity among the people, and his lifelong service to the empire count for anything? On this occasion, the answer was nope. He believed, wrongly, that his popularity as king translated into personal popularity. On such an intimate matter as his choice of bride, he felt that John Bull would rally behind him. Wallis, knowing little if anything of the British constitution, believed it, too, arguing that a radio broadcast to his loyal subjects would swing the tide in his favour. Baldwin shut that door pretty sharpish, informing the king that he could not make a broadcast without the consent of his ministers, and consent would not be forthcoming.

Feeling trapped and helpless, Wallis even consulted her own advisor, former American actress now celebrity astrologer Nella Webb, at her London home. Her prophesy was not too wide of the mark, the seer telling Wallis: “The opposition to you cannot be sidestepped. It will have to be faced or managed. You may be able to rise above it. The bonds of love will be made secure and fast… a marriage could occur sometime next year. In August or September.” Besides consulting her astrologer, Wallis’s other contribution was to suggest that Edward hire a New York public relations whizz kid to present the king’s case to the world.

Within days she needed no crystal ball or PR handout to tell her that the opposition was already at hand. On November 13 the “phoney war” ended when the king’s private secretary, Alex Hardinge, sent a letter alerting him to the fact that within the next few days the press were likely to go public regarding his friendship with Mrs. Simpson. Furthermore, should he insist on marriage to the American divorcee, the government would resign and a general election would be called. His advice was that Mrs. Simpson should go abroad without delay.

As obstinate as he was foolhardy, the king was adamant that she should stay and told her during a tense evening conversation at the Fort that if the country would not approve of them marrying, he would go. On November 16 he repeated this threat to Baldwin. That same day he went to Marlborough House for dinner with his mother, Queen Mary, and sister, Mary. They were shocked and disbelieving when he said he was prepared to give up the throne for Wallis. While his mother retained her dignity and composure, she later gave vent to the sense of betrayal she and the royal family felt regarding his utterly selfish behaviour.

“I do not think you have ever realized the shock which the attitude you took up caused your family and the whole nation. It seemed inconceivable to those who had made sacrifices during the war that you, as their King, refused a lesser sacrifice.” It was not long before he had similar audiences with his three brothers, who took the news with varying degrees of shock and anger. Bertie, the stuttering, somewhat slow Duke of York and now king-in-waiting, was utterly devastated while, according to Lady Furness, the Duke of Gloucester slapped his elder brother across the face.

All the while, the king undertook his duties impeccably, opening Parliament, inspecting the Home Fleet, and, more contentiously, visiting the impoverished mining towns of south Wales, where he uttered the phrase that would define his brief reign—“Something must be done”—in relation to the near starvation and unemployment suffered by so many families.

As the king walked past the hollow-eyed, hopeless parents and their ragged urchins, Wallis was dining at Claridge’s with newspaper proprietor Esmond Harmsworth, who suggested morganatic marriage as a way out of the impasse. Unheard of in Britain but common on the Continent, especially in German royal houses, it was a form of marriage where the commoner, in this case Wallis, did not take the royal husband’s rank or title upon marriage. It would, though, require special legislation. The king was distinctly cool—“a strange almost inhuman concept,” he thought. Prime Minister Baldwin promised to ask the eleven Dominions their view. He was not hopeful.

Meanwhile, the new sovereign was being counselled by, among others, Churchill, Beaverbrook, Monckton, and Duff Cooper to be patient, to go through with the coronation, introduce Wallis to the world gradually, and then marry whom he pleased when he was firmly established as sovereign. It was only the king’s impatience that had created a constitutional crisis in the first place. Whether he stayed or abdicated, he would still have to wait six months, until April 27, before Wallis was officially divorced and could remarry. During that time he had ample opportunity to save the throne and his bride. Propelled by furious angels, he had turned a moral issue into an unnecessary constitutional and political tug-of-war between himself and the prime minister, a battle he was bound to lose. As Wallis’s friend Elsa Maxwell noted: “She might have been Queen of England had they been better intriguers, had they kept very quiet and she out of England. When he had been crowned he could have married her and asked no one’s permission.”

Churchill and Beaverbrook felt it imperative that Cutie, their nickname for Wallis, leave the country. The king disagreed. The impish Beaverbrook took it upon himself to encourage a journalist from his newspaper, the Daily Express, to throw stones at her rented house in Regent’s Park. The tactic worked, a flurried Wallis hurrying to the Fort for safety, Aunt Bessie in tow. She was not there for long.

On Thursday, December 3, 1936, the long-predicted storm broke, every British newspaper filled with stories about the royal friendship or, as H. L. Mencken, the sardonic sage of Wallis’s Baltimore, put it: “The greatest news story since the Resurrection.” Under the banner headline GRAVE CRISIS, the august Times of London laid out the Establishment case. In a leader it noted that an American wife for the king would be a not-unwelcome innovation for the House of Windsor. Then came the “but.” “The one objection, and it is an overwhelming objection… is that the lady in question has already two former husbands living from whom in succession she has obtained a divorce.” This was the settled consensus, so much so that American ambassador Robert Bingham was impressed enough by a “beautifully conceived and expressed” article in the liberal Observer by editor J. L. Garvin to write a warm letter of congratulation. While his opinion piece, penned in December 1936, praised the “goodwill and good judgement of the Empire” during the abdication crisis, the king and Wallis were minded to ignore the message, believing that it was the result of an Establishment plot to drive him off the throne.

As he leafed through the morning’s newspapers, Wallis’s picture on every front page, the king gallantly but reluctantly agreed for Wallis to head overseas so that she did not have to see or hear what was being said about her. Though he was primarily concerned about her health—she had been confined to bed for a week’s rest—it was a catastrophic mistake, one Wallis regretted for the rest of her life. At a critical time when every decision led to an inevitable and irreversible conclusion, Wallis needed to be on hand as a trusted sounding board to discuss grave matters regarding her future and that of the monarchy. She may not have known much about the British constitution but she had practical common sense—and knew how to change the obstinate king’s mind.

On that fateful day she had one idea in mind—to get out of Dodge and save her own skin. There was no thought of standing by her man in his hour of peril. “I was hurt deeply and I was desperate. I said I had to leave as my position had become impossible,” she later recalled.

She contacted Herman Rogers, the one man in the world she could rely on, and took him up on his offer to stay with them. After a fluster of packing, she made a hurried late-night exit from the Fort, heading for the place she considered her second home, Lou Viei, in the South of France, where she had spent so many weeks on holiday. Here at least she would be among trusted, loving friends.

The decision may have soothed Wallis’s jangled nerves, but it did little to advance her cause to become queen. As Beaverbrook noted of the king and his desire to protect Wallis: “His anxiety was intense, but he was anxious about the wrong things. All his energies should have been devoted to the main issue, which was the struggle to remain on the throne and to marry in due time.”

It was a doleful parting for the couple on that dank evening of December 3, 1936. As they kissed goodbye, neither knew when or where they would meet again. Wallis left him her dog, Slipper, the first significant present he ever bought her, for company. “I don’t know how it’s all going to end,” he told her. “It will be some time before we can be together again. You must wait for me no matter how long it takes. I shall never give you up.”

Besides a Scotland Yard detective, her companion for the journey was Lord Perry Brownlow, the king’s trusted friend and lord-in-waiting. Unknown to his master, Brownlow was involved in a benign conspiracy among the king’s supporters to encourage Wallis to renounce the marriage outright and thus avoid the king’s abdication.

Essentially it was a further variation on Beaverbrook and Churchill’s playing-for-time argument. They had barely left the Fort when Brownlow ordered the car to stop and strongly suggested that she stay at his country estate in Lincolnshire, arguing that from there she could more easily influence the king and prevent him from making drastic decisions in the heat of the moment. She was tempted but decided to stick to the plan. She did not want to be blamed if the strategy went wrong, and she wanted to get as far away from this cursed isle as she could. “Today I am in the pillory, tomorrow I will be in the Tower of London,” she said, somewhat histrionically. It was a fatal mistake. From the moment they reached Dieppe they were playing catch-up, never once at the pitch of discussions in London.

Within minutes of landing in France they were spotted and the hunt was on. For the next two days Wallis endured a nightmare journey of fog, snow, ice, route changes, car chases, near collisions, and escapes from the clutches of the press by climbing through bathroom windows. At roadside inns she made desperate attempts to call the king on crackling phone lines where her words were barely intelligible if heard at all. It was, she later recalled, “like a nightmare in which one dreamt that one’s living soul was suddenly confronted by the corpse from which it had taken leave.”

In the early hours of December 5, Wallis, crouching in the back of the car with a blanket over her like a fugitive from justice, was driven through the iron gates of Lou Viei. Her new home, high on the hills above Cannes, was a former monastery that had been ransacked by Saracens during the eighth century. It was named Lou Viei or “Old One” after the ghost of one of the murdered monks who still roamed the house. That night, even Herman, who claimed to see the ghost four or five times a week, was shocked by the apparition before him.

Wallis looked like a wraith, drip-white, exhausted and crumpled, a world away from the figure of neat perfection she normally presented to the world. Katherine gave her a hug of welcome and ushered her inside, where a log fire was blazing.

She awoke late, not to the sound of birdsong but chatter from the vicinity of the garden gates where the world’s media, described by Wallis as a “ravenous besieging army,” were camped. Her first mistake was to open the bedroom windows to admire the view over the seaside resort. The next day, the picture of her in her pink nightgown appeared on front pages around the world.

She would not make that mistake again. It was a salutary reminder that she was a prisoner as surely as if she had been convicted and sent to Alcatraz, Wallis unable to go out into the garden to admire Herman’s planting or enjoy the sublime view over the Mediterranean without being photographed. Katherine told her to keep her curtains closed, as several cameramen had climbed nearby trees and had their long lenses focussed on her bedroom. Restful it wasn’t, the confines of the modest villa further compressing jangling nerves. After lunch she sat down and wrote a somewhat incoherent fifteen-page letter to the king, which she sent by airmail in the hope it would reach him before he had taken any irrevocable step. As ever, she urged him not to abdicate, and to delay any decision until late the following year—as Beaverbrook and others consistently advised. By the time the letter reached the king, the die was cast.

Meanwhile, Wallis was under siege from without and betrayed from within. Her Scotland Yard detail were more of a nuisance than a help. Herman had one detective sent home after discovering he was leaking information to eager newsmen. Then the remaining officers telegrammed a report to London suggesting that Wallis was about to flee to Germany because she was “frit,” vernacular for “frightened.” This merely added to the hysterical opinion that she was in the pay of the Nazi high command, ambassador von Ribbentrop both her controller and her lover.

Local telephone operators were bribed to listen in to phone calls, Herman’s butler was offered ten thousand French francs ($600) to allow a newsman to dress as one of the workmen who were installing a new bathroom, and even Herman himself was offered nearly one million francs ($60,000) for his home movies of Wallis’s visit to Balmoral and the Nahlin cruise.

While Herman turned the offer down out of hand, he did agree to parley with the waiting press, giving daily briefings of a purely factual nature about events in the villa. His straight-talking and truthful manner earned the respect of the hard-boiled news corps. After the crisis was over, the gentleman of the press all signed a letter of thanks for his efforts on their behalf.

Media were one thing, madmen quite another. Wallis had given Herman the task of weeding out the hate mail from the growing pile of letters she received daily. Among the letters in the crackpot file was a worrying series of threatening missives written by a seemingly well-educated Australian who had posted his threats from several London postal districts. He made it clear that he was travelling to France to find Wallis and put a bullet in her. Herman said nothing to Wallis, who was already in a state of high anxiety, but he quietly alerted Inspector Evans, in charge of the Scotland Yard detail, who passed the warning on to London. For the next few months Herman slept in a bedroom adjoining Wallis’s, a loaded pistol by his bedside.

Amidst this sinister cacophony, Wallis tried to speak to the king. It was a losing battle. What with dropped connections, intense static, and echo, Wallis felt like she was speaking from another planet, let alone another country. What Herman remembered from that fevered period was the sound of Wallis shouting down the telephone: “Do not abdicate. Do nothing reckless. Listen to your friends.”

It was an increasingly hopeless cause. Though she was the cause and possible resolution of the drama, Wallis was now relegated to the role of onlooker as events in London moved to their inevitable climax. The king was resolutely sailing his ship of state alone, implacable in his solitary resolve. He was past counsel, past argument, past pleading. For Wallis it was like talking to a stranger. The king was “remote and unreachable.” She had pleaded with him. Abdication would be “disastrous for you and destroy me.” He was deaf to all entreaties.

Terrified of becoming, as she described, “the blackest woman in history,” she decided to take the initiative herself. After discussions with Herman and Perry Brownlow, she settled on a strategy to prevent the abdication. First she would release a statement saying that she would give him up, then she would head for either Genoa or Brindisi in Italy and catch a liner bound for China.

Her detective, Evans, was sent to reconnoitre. She needed to make the king understand that the price of marriage was not only damage to the Crown but, as she said, “the destruction of my peace of mind, my reputation, and my self-respect.”

However, her announcement, which the king greeted at first with shock and then reluctant agreement, fell short of a public disavowal, which by now was the only trick left in the game. Her statement proclaimed her innocence but failed to say that she would withdraw from his life forever. It read:

Mrs. Simpson, throughout the last few weeks, has invariably wished to avoid any action or proposal which would hurt or damage His Majesty or the Throne. Today her attitude is unchanged, and she is willing, if such action would solve the problem, to withdraw forthwith from a situation that has been rendered both unhappy and untenable.

Brownlow and Herman drove to the Majestic Hotel in Cannes, where Brownlow read it to the assembled throng. Much as Wallis wanted the statement to dilute the animosity towards her, the London newspapers saw it as a sign that the crisis was passed and Edward would remain on the throne.

As Churchill, Beaverbrook, and others mulled over the mood music, from Cannes came the most extraordinary twist in this drama. Out of the blue, Wallis’s divorce lawyer, Theodore Goddard, arrived in the South of France in the company of the well-known gynaecologist Dr. William Kirkwood. Unsurprisingly, the media circus went wild, assuming that Wallis was pregnant by the king or even by Ernest Simpson.

In her memoir Wallis recalled: “I was shocked to the core of my being” at this bizarre turn of events. It seemed that Prime Minister Baldwin had asked Goddard to see Wallis with an unknown plan to resolve the crisis. When he learned of Goddard’s arrival, the king warned her not to even speak to him.

The addition of Dr. Kirkwood was an unexpected plot twist. Eventually it emerged that as Goddard had a weak heart, he wanted his medical friend to accompany him on the hazardous plane journey from London. He didn’t realize that the fact that the doctor was a gynaecologist would create such high drama. After a dressing-down from Brownlow for his guileless behaviour, it was a chastened lawyer who explained the reason for his visit: to urge Wallis to withdraw her divorce action against Ernest Simpson and remain married to the shipping agent.

If she went down this road it would prevent any possibility of the king marrying her, and thus the crisis would be resolved. After some reflection she agreed to this last reckless throw of the dice. It was too late. When she finally telephoned the king, she was told by his lawyer George Allen that the formal procedure for the king’s immediate abdication was now under way.

What is fascinating is that in her first version of this momentous event, which she told her ghostwriter Cleveland Amory, it was she, not Prime Minister Baldwin, who was the author of this melodrama. “Mr. Goddard came to Cannes at my personal request,” she firmly recalled. She had learned, through Perry Brownlow, that the king had decided to abdicate. Faced with this “shattering revelation,” she wanted to stop him at all costs.

Wallis takes up the story:

There is one thing I can do. My plan, which had long been revolving in the back of my mind, was to withdraw my petition from the British courts. By such an action I would in effect admit error in my original application. There could be no marriage, because I would not be free to marry. The king would be confronted with an abyss if he abdicated. I arrived at this conclusion only after a soul-wracking debate within myself.

Once she had consulted Goddard and he had advised that the plan was practical, she spoke to the king. Though she was “less than frank” about Goddard’s arrival in Cannes, her quixotic scheme was doomed to failure. The king passed the telephone to his lawyer George Allen, who informed her that the machinery of abdication was now in motion.

While this episode vividly illustrates how difficult it is to accept Wallis’s memories at face value—her second ghostwriter, Charles Murphy, wearily observed: “Her recollections of the course of events were seldom the same”—it also exposes a deeper fault line in the relationship between the king and Mrs. Simpson.

At this critical moment in their lives, when they should have been acting in concert, they were deceiving one another, the king about his decision to abdicate, Wallis about her own intentions for the future. She was busily trying to save herself and her reputation, he was marching obstinately into oblivion. Both were taking life-changing actions that affected the life of the one they ostensibly loved without discussion or debate. As she would later remark: “He never even asked me to marry him, it was just assumed.” They made their lies, now they must lie in them for the rest of their lives.

Wallis’s exasperation was summed up in the telephone call from the king informing her that abdication was now inevitable. Her response, as recorded by the French police, the Sûreté, was curt: “You god-damned fool.” From what the French could gather from their conversations, she was not happy about becoming his morganatic wife. She wanted the top job, to be crowned queen.

Wallis had been firmly led up the garden path, convinced by the king that, if they played their cards right, she could be his queen. The reality was that their love affair was built on the shifting sands of lies and deception, leading, ultimately, as far as Wallis was concerned, to profound and lasting disenchantment.

Many, including the king’s nanny, believed Edward’s underlying motive was to get out of being king and pass on this high responsibility to his brother, the Duke of York. For years he had expressed his horror of becoming king, even as a child, as well as his loathing of day-to-day Court ceremony and the immutable royal round. As passionately as Wallis nursed an ambition to be queen, so Edward held a long-standing view that he never wanted to be king. As a result their future life together was constructed on faulty foundations, the couple doomed to an interior life of disappointment and reproach.

As his biographer Frances Donaldson argues: “That’s why he misled her into believing that they might reach safe ground. The great attraction was that she enabled him to give up the monarchy.” It seems that his great attraction to her was precisely that he was king. Their ambitions ran counter from the start.

Certainly that was the conclusion Cleveland Amory came to after six months of conversations with Wallis. He believed that her ambition was to be queen and that her failure to achieve that goal haunted her for the rest of her life.

As Amory’s stepdaughter, Dr. Gaea Leinhardt, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, recalled:

She absolutely wanted to be queen. Absolutely and intensely. It was her ultimate ambition and she wanted it very badly. The abdication was clearly a miscalculation, because Edward believed he could pull it off.

Edward lived his whole life in a bubble, and with the abdication that bubble burst. Wallis assumed that he would stay king and it was based on an understandable misconception of the power of the throne, conflating the symbolic authority with political power.

Typically, Wallis never whispered a word about her true ambition. After the abdication she stuck steadfastly to the party line, always vigorously denying any such thoughts. She told Charles Murphy: “I never dreamed I could be queen. Let me be positive about that. The idea didn’t rhyme with anything. It would have been preposterous—the king as Defender of the Faith, the queen a divorced woman. There were ways around the queen problem. Morganatic marriage was one.”

It is as well she kept her ambition quiet. Few others, apart from Lady Cunard, genuinely believed that she would reign. As John Colville, the private secretary to Winston Churchill, wrote: “I do know for a fact, because they both told me so, that neither Queen Mary nor Winston Churchill ever contemplated the possibility of Mrs. Simpson being Queen of England.” Indeed, Churchill admitted the prospect was “too horrible to contemplate.”

Even in republican America, there was little appetite for one of their own ascending the throne—as her cousin, writer Upton Sinclair, found to his cost when he wrote Wally for Queen! “I thought it was hilariously funny,” he said. No one else did. First he sent the play to his friend, Broadway producer Arch Selwyn, who wrote back: “Upton, are you crazy or do you think I am?” His editor wired “Swell but unpublishable,” while his literary agent cabled: “Desolated but compelled to agree skit unprintable very charming.” When his normal printer refused to print the work, he did the job himself, selling copies for twenty-five cents a time. There were few takers.

Beneath the jokes, which did the rounds at the Harvard and Yale clubs—Wallis’s new title was “Lady FitzEdward” and the proposed new royal motto was Honi soit qui Wally pense—most of the American elite shuddered at the possible damage to the institution of monarchy and the authority of the British Empire. One diplomat’s wife noted: “During one week the British empire trembled for fear of its very existence.” As for Wallis, former under-secretary of state and ambassador to Japan William R. Castle was not alone in thinking that if Wallis had engineered this crisis in order to become queen, she should be “shot at dawn.”

Villain or victim, almost to the last Wallis remained a figment of the collective imagination. Quite simply, nobody knew what she looked like. Newspapers were reduced to using muddy, out-of-date photographs or shots from foreign cameramen who had taken pictures during her various cruises. With the king about to make his historic radio broadcast, she agreed to show the world that she did not have horns growing out of her head and cleft feet. Wallis, together with Perry Brownlow and Herman and Katherine Rogers, posed for a rather self-conscious picture at the entrance to Lou Viei. At last the public could see for themselves what all the fuss was about. When a photographer asked her to smile, she responded: “Why smile?”

Her mood had not altered when she was introduced to Hearst Syndicate colour writer and author Stanton B. Leeds, who was chosen from the media pack to give a pen portrait of the most talked-about woman on the planet. She was depleted and downcast, clearly consumed by the events unfolding in London. He wrote:

She came into the room quietly, like a shadow, looking even a little somber, in a severely cut blue dress, with a slight opening that showed that firm, white throat of hers. There was a wide costume bracelet on her wrist, silvery, studded with large stones. “How do you do?” she said in a lifeless voice and sat down.

For a brief moment she stroked her hair, then sat very still, folding her hands in her lap. Capable hands, it occurred to me, very white. It seemed fantastic to think of that, for I had looked into her eyes and now I too sat very still. It struck me that I did not want to move, that I should not want to move for quite a long while. I could think of nothing to say. I had never seen such a look in anyone’s eyes.

The light in them seemed set far back, beyond memories, beyond tragedies. It may seem far-fetched to say so, but I had the impression that here was a little girl—a little girl who had grown up and grown wise—a little girl from whom they had taken a doll. They were breaking it to pieces before her eyes and throwing it places.

On Friday, December 11, 1936, as King Edward VIII gave his historic address from Windsor Castle and explained he had found it “impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love,” the woman in question lay on the sofa of the Rogerses’ living room. She and the Lou Viei staff heard the king emphasize that the decision had been “mine and mine alone.” After he finished, the others quietly left Wallis alone, her eyes closed to stem the tears, as she contemplated her doom. She is supposed to have wisecracked: “You can’t abdicate—and eat it.” Not that night, though. Not that night.

The abdication united foes and friends alike. For once, President Roosevelt, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini were all on the same page—baffled and contemptuous of the king’s decision. FDR was “disgusted” by the abdication and thought that Edward “could have forced this situation. He could have been crowned and then announced that Mrs. Simpson was now ‘the Duchess of Cornwall.’”

Wallis’s misfortune, though, was Mary Raffray’s gain. In a letter to her sister, Ann, she was jubilant.

What an excitement we have been living through here. It seems incredible that the king could have actually abdicated—the whole country is shocked and grieved but also there is much bitterness against him and the feeling against Wallis is terrific.

Lots of people who used to lick her boots are now saying they hardly knew her—Lady Cunard particularly, I am told. Of course, I did not see her—she has been hateful towards me and I can’t pretend that I am sorry she has gone. It will be much easier for me to make my way in London with her gone.

For the most part, women, especially those who knew the parties, sympathized with Wallis’s predicament, none more so than Constance Coolidge, Comtesse de Jumilhac, who after listening to the historic address in her Paris apartment, asked Helen Worden: “Can you imagine a more terrible fate than to have to live up publicly to the legend of a love you don’t feel? To have to face, morning, noon, and night, a middle-aged boy with no other purpose in life than a possessive passion for you?”

In London the king’s former lover Lady Thelma Furness listened to the broadcast with growing horror before putting on a gramophone record by the Ink Spots and playing it at full volume.

Her response was remarkably similar to that of Constance Coolidge. “If I had to wake up every morning and look down at him in bed and realize it was for me he had given up his people and his country and his life…” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head. “He loved his people and he was a good prince of Wales.”

American journalist Lorena Hickok, the lesbian lover of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, caught the mood in Washington. “I’m sorry for Mrs. Simpson. She will have an awful job on her hands. What will he do with himself all these years that are left? He’s only in his early forties. They can’t go sailing around on yachts forever. I wonder if he won’t be very bored and restless and unhappy… and if she can keep him happy. He probably doesn’t know it now—but I am afraid he is in for some very bad times.”

It was a view shared by Wallis’s love rival Courtney Espil: “They will have no country and he no job. Can any love exist or be nourished on this slender fare? Will it grow stale? For Edward is no longer king. In her eyes he can only be a poor weak man who depends on her now, who has given away his all. Can they dance every night at a different cabaret to keep life gay?”

There was one undoubted winner from the abdication crisis—Wallis’s first husband, Lieutenant Commander Win Spencer. In November 1936 he faced a general court-martial after being found drunk on duty on board his ship, USS Ranger. However, his commanding officer, Sinclair Gannon, decided to quietly sweep the matter under the red carpet, arguing that the publicity surrounding Spencer’s ex-wife might lead people to infer that the Navy’s punishment of Commander Spencer was disproportionate to the offence and garner unfavourable headlines for the Navy. Fellow officers were not impressed by the lenient treatment meted out to Spencer.

For the king, once a Navy midshipman himself, there was nothing shipshape and Bristol fashion about his own departure. His leaving, like the abdication crisis itself, was a shambles of haste and poor planning. Initially he was supposed to sail for the Continent on board the HMS Enchantress, a Royal Navy sloop that would have been a headline writer’s dream.

Once disembarked, he was due to take a train to Zurich, where rooms were booked in a small hotel. Then wiser counsel prevailed, Perry Brownlow contacting Kitty Rothschild and asking if his “brother,” their agreed code for the king, could stay at their home of Schloss Enzesfeld in Austria. She willingly agreed.

Even with these new arrangements, calamity struck. His chauffeur got lost in the sprawling Portsmouth docks as he searched for the new ship taking the ex-king, who was now Duke of Windsor, into exile. Certainly his new transport, HMS Fury, had a more fitting title to indicate how his family, some friends, and many of his former subjects felt about him.

He let it all wash over him. A few hours later he was ensconced in his new residence, feeling buoyed after a long conversation with Wallis. Conscience clean and clear, he was reported to be “singing in his bathtub.”