CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“A Whole Nation Against One Woman”

Royal pride coming before the fall of France threatened to place the Windsors in danger. Even as they packed their precious belongings, the duke hesitated about leaving his newly adopted country. The dramatic arrival in mid-June 1940 of the dishevelled, ravenous figure of their comptroller Gray Phillips changed all that. He had hitchhiked his way from Paris, loyally bringing with him several of the duke’s treasured George II silver bibelots. His exhausted presence now embodied their increasingly perilous situation.

Yet when the local part-time British consul offered them a berth on one of two cargo ships that were due to sail from Cannes the following day, the duke considered it an insult that they were restricted to only two suitcases. He thought a destroyer should be sent to collect them. Stubborn and wilful, the duke decided to sit it out, much against the advice of Phillips, who had seen for himself the utter capitulation of France.

Their neighbours Captain George and Rosa Wood added to the chorus urging retreat. Their daughter, Marie-Thérèse, who was married to Prince Ernst of Hohenberg, had been arrested when the Nazis invaded Vienna and had not been seen since. (The couple were incarcerated in Dachau concentration camp but both survived the war.) With the duke’s habitual obstinacy stopping him from seeing sense, in desperation Wallis contacted the one man she could always rely upon—Herman Rogers.

He agreed with the others, reminding them of an uncomfortable home truth, namely the widespread suspicion concerning the couple’s pro-German behaviour. “Remember if you stay and the Germans take you, many people will say that you gave yourself up deliberately,” he told them. “The Germans will see to it that such an impression gets abroad.”

As a clinching point he added: “You have seen enough of the Nazis to know that they are extremely nasty people. I wouldn’t anticipate a comfortable internment in their hands.”

His argument tipped the balance. The Windsors decided to leave for Spain on Wallis’s birthday, June 19, their precious linens, porcelains, and family heirlooms left behind.

Curiously, in a letter to his sister Anne, Herman gave an entirely different version. He told her that he thought the Windsors should have remained in France rather than join the general retreat. “I think the Duke should have stayed—better still the Duke should never have left his military mission—though he was ordered out of Paris by the British ambassador. Nearly everyone lost his head during the last days and it is hard to blame them. The panic amongst the English Colony was indescribable—pitiful but somehow revolting.”

He and Katherine remained in Cannes until September 1941, Herman becoming a Red Cross organizer, delivering wheat and other basic supplies to remote mountain villages. From time to time he sent letters to Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, a fellow Groton alumnus, describing bombing raids and the sense of fear and panic that now gripped the civilian population. Welles forwarded his missives to President Roosevelt to give him a first-hand flavour of the war in France. The president was so impressed by his communiqués that, once Herman had returned to New York, he received an invitation for lunch at the White House to give the president a trusted first-hand account of life in Vichy France.

As for the Windsors, their vacillation about staying or going continued long after they finally reached Madrid in Fascist but still nominally neutral Spain. Their prevarication was to have sinister consequences. The initial plan was for the Windsors to drive west from the Spanish capital to Lisbon in Portugal and fly back to London on two Sunderland seaplanes, which had been dispatched on Prime Minister Churchill’s orders.

The duke, pigheaded to the last, chose this moment of national peril to negotiate an improved position for himself and his wife. He refused to return to Britain unless he was given a significant post and Wallis was granted equal status to himself and received by his family at Buckingham Palace, this meeting to be acknowledged in the Court Circular. Without this agreement, he proposed to remain on mainland Europe.

During this back-and-forth between Madrid and London, the Windsors considered returning to La Croë, feeling that the immediate threat from the Nazis and Mussolini had passed. Wallis telegrammed Herman on July 9 hinting at this possibility and asking if all was still safe in the South of France. “Perhaps they are going to try to come back,” he mused.

In behaviour that could be described as foolhardy or treacherous or both, on two separate occasions, while in Madrid and later in Lisbon, the duke used a Spanish intermediary to secretly contact the Germans to ask them to guard their homes. The German High Command willingly agreed to these requests. Unbeknown to the Windsors, the Nazis had already hatched a plot, codenamed Operation Willi, to kidnap the royal couple and use them as pawns in the coming invasion of Britain. They employed similar tactics when they overran other European monarchies, notably Norway and the Netherlands. They wanted to use the royal heads of state as puppets to order the military and civilian population to accept Nazi rule. Fortunately, these royal families had escaped Nazi clutches.

As the plot to kidnap the Windsors unfolded, Hitler and von Ribbentrop were encouraged by reports, sent by their ambassadors in Madrid and Lisbon, of the Windsors’ contempt for George VI and their defeatist talk, suggesting that heavy German bombing would soon bring Britain to its knees.

While the duke and duchess were unaware of the Nazi plot, their behaviour dovetailed neatly with German ambitions. Their utter self-absorption caused them to teeter on the brink of a Nazi trap. As the duke’s younger brother Prince George noted sadly: “They are extraordinary people and never bother about anyone except themselves.”

It was only when Churchill used the carrot-and-stick approach that the crisis was resolved. First he reminded the duke that he was a serving Army officer and should obey orders. Failure to do so could result in a court-martial. Then he offered him the governorship of the Bahamas, which he reluctantly accepted. It was, as Wallis sourly observed, their Elba, a reference to Napoleon’s exile on a small Mediterranean island.

Significant questions about the behaviour of the royal couple remain. As they had already squirreled away their silverware and other valuables in the mountains, why would the duke, a serving major-general, even feel the need to contact the Nazis to safeguard their rented homes?

The American consul had already agreed to seal their Cannes property, thus technically safeguarding it from all access. Furthermore, at the duchess’s request the consul had visited La Croë and sent her favourite swimsuit to Lisbon, where she and the duke were then staying. As a further fail-safe, Herman Rogers was acting as the duke’s unpaid agent, overseeing payments to staff as well as undertaking other administrative work. The duke sent him £1,000 initially to pay “hungry and faithful” servants as well as outstanding bills. Further amounts were sent during the first years of the war.

More by luck than design, the plot to kidnap the ducal couple came to naught. On August 1, watched by the bitterly disappointed German spymaster Major Walter Schellenberg, the couple sailed for Bermuda on board the Excalibur in the company of several senior American diplomats, including William Phillips, ambassador to Italy, George Gordon, the minister to The Hague, and Anthony Biddle, ambassador to Poland.

During the voyage the Windsors regularly entertained them to tea, regaling them with their indiscreet views on Hitler, Churchill, and the progress of the war.

The duke painted himself as a pro-German appeaser who thought the fighting “stupid” and openly claimed that their tenure in the Bahamas was not going to be long. They thought they were going to return to England in a “high capacity” once the warring parties had come to terms.

Given his diplomatic audience, his pessimistic view soon reached the ears of officials in the State Department and the White House. As for Wallis, “She was even more stupidly outspoken against the British government than he,” recalled Alice Gordon, the wife of Minister George Gordon.

She had been a friend of Wallis’s during her days in Washington when Wallis was the down-at-heel estranged wife of Navy flier Win Spencer. Alice had given her clothes and let her stay in her apartment when she had nowhere else to go. During that fateful Atlantic crossing, Wallis brazenly chose to ignore Alice, not even acknowledging her when they passed in the corridor. It was as if she did not want to recognize her past or allow her husband a glimpse into the world she once occupied.

This new Wallis now ruled a domain of some twenty-nine islands and seventy thousand people, mainly poor blacks and people of mixed race. It was a Ruritanian world seemingly designed to keep her in a state of exasperation, irritation, and humiliation. To her mind, it was as if she had been shipwrecked on an inhospitable desert island, forced to endure the stifling heat and humidity, which she abhorred, and subject to the endless stings and bites of the cloud of two-bit socialites who surrounded her.

From the moment she set foot in Nassau to the day she left, she occupied a secondary status to her husband. The standing Foreign Office instruction was that islanders should bow and curtsey to the governor, but not to the governor’s wife. She was “Her Grace,” he was “His Royal Highness.” Every day, in every way, she was reminded that Buckingham Palace rules held sway.

It gnawed away at her soul, blaming “that woman,” the new queen, as the unseen hand behind her continued “persecution.” At the official welcome, she sat on a chair lower than the duke’s but above the rest of the official audience. The duke, as he did for the rest of his life, insisted that their staff at Government House refer to Wallis as “Your Royal Highness.” It was too much for an English maid called Firth, who walked out in protest. “I couldn’t do it, I would have choked,” she explained.

The homemaker in Wallis was horrified by the state of their ersatz palace, Government House, the official home of every governor since 1801. After carefully and lovingly redecorating La Croë and boulevard Suchet, she could hardly bear to stay a night in the crumbling, careworn official residence. She had spent half a lifetime in dingy, threadbare lodgings, with either her mother or her first husband.

Now the woman who came within an ace of being crowned queen was reduced once again to the shabby and the utilitarian. Government House was not, in her opinion, fit for an ex-king, and it was certainly not fit for Wallis, who wanted to bury her past, not embrace it.

When she first toured the seven-bedroom, six-bathroom wooden house, complete with termites, she sniffed: “But how primitive.” The last straw was when a chunk of ceiling came crashing down in their sitting room.

Wallis demanded that the duke do something, insisting that the residence be remodelled. The new governor managed to snag a grant from the island’s executive council to restore the building to his wife’s liking. In the meantime the itinerant royals lodged elsewhere, for a time staying in Westbourne, the mansion of the island’s wealthiest man, Sir Harry Oakes, where, three years later, he would be murdered.

They stayed there reluctantly, the Colonial Office having turned down the duke’s request to sojourn at his ranch in Alberta, Canada, for the duration of the renovations. This set the pattern which lasted throughout their five-year tenure, the duke and duchess the royal version of Robinson Crusoe and his Girl Friday. They looked for any excuse, any life raft to allow them to escape from the islands they both “hated.”

Madison Avenue not Bay Street, Nassau, was Wallis’s natural hunting ground. Long-established families quickly sensed her resentment at being posted to this benighted territory, feeling that she always had one hand on the door, one foot on the floor, eager to leave. “We were provincials to her. She didn’t warm to us and we didn’t warm to her,” recalled one Nassau socialite. No one was on first-name terms with her.

As far as she was able, Wallis lived, if not physically then vicariously, through her home country. “Be sure to say hello to New York for me,” she would tell departing American visitors. She sent her dry-cleaning to New York and quietly flew in her Manhattan hairdresser, Forest of Antoine, putting him up in a local hotel. She liked his recipe for keeping her hair shiny and nourished: an egg shampoo with two jiggers of rum. During the renovations and beyond, she used Elsie Mendl and John McMullin, now living on the Upper East Side, to discreetly shop for her. Otherwise she relied on the services of Mary Bourke, her former secretary, who had left her to work for Kitty Rothschild.

What with currency restrictions, import duty, and of course Wallis’s image as a spendthrift, she had to be careful in her purchases, which ranged from candlesticks, cocktail glasses, furs, and gloves, to silver picture frames and fancy Christmas gifts chosen by Mr. Cartier himself. More prosaic items included Frances Fox hair ointment and Ogilvie Sisters dandruff tonic.

She was highly sensitive to accusations that she was splashing out on fripperies when Britain was suffering bombing and rationing. In spite of her best efforts, one newspaper report suggested that she had bought thirty-four hats during a brief shopping trip. Wallis was quick to contradict it, saying that the number was five, which she felt was not outrageous. Many others did.

This hostility perhaps explains why she sent a tart note to Mary Bourke reminding her that her silence was vital in this undercover shopping enterprise, emphasizing that certain arrangements were “of the most confidential and private nature.” Of course, Wallis would have preferred to visit luxury stores herself so that she could replace what she called her “refugee rags” with a more modish wardrobe.

It was, though, their own folly that kept them imprisoned on the islands longer than was strictly necessary. Prime Minister Churchill feared, with good reason, that their defeatist talk would only give succour to isolationists who saw the duke as their poster boy in keeping America out of the war. It was why the ducal couple were prevented from sailing to the Bahamas via New York, lest the loose-lipped duke commit some diplomatic faux pas.

Their unpatriotic chatter with American diplomats on board the Excalibur simply continued once they arrived in Nassau. Nor did their choice of friends assuage suspicion regarding their loyalties.

The duke’s close association with Swedish businessman and suspected Nazi collaborator Axel Wenner-Gren was an immediate red flag. The Swede, a confidant of Hermann Göring, was in the crosshairs of the governments of both Britain and the United States, intelligence experts believing he was an enemy agent. It was yet another example of the duke’s lack of judgement and discretion.

Such was his attachment to Wenner-Gren, described by Roosevelt’s advisor Harry Hopkins as “violently pro-Nazi,” that Churchill took it upon himself to send a top secret cable in March 1941 warning him to steer clear of the dubious Swede. His caution coincided with the publication of an interview the duke gave to Liberty magazine, which the prime minister deemed “defeatist” and “pro-Nazi.” The Windsors paid the price. Churchill decided that it would not be prudent to allow them to visit America until their views more closely chimed with those of the British government.

If anything, Wallis was more trenchant than the duke in her criticism of the British, asserting that the suffering of the man and woman in the street was karmic payback for the way the royal family had treated her. At dinner one evening, Wallis told Captain Wood, who was now working for them as an unpaid aide, that she wished Germany had “licked” England, observing that but for Roosevelt’s decision to lend and lease warships to Britain, the country would surely have been defeated. On another occasion, during a discussion about a new American loan to Britain, she blurted out: “Wouldn’t you think that now they are asking for this money the least they could do would be to recognize me?”

Much as she tried to make light of it, the absence of an HRH appellation was a permanent scar. Her self-absorption even shocked her friends. During the early days of the war, she was with Clare Boothe Luce, who expressed her sympathy for innocent civilians living on the south coast of England who had been strafed by Luftwaffe fighters. “After what they did for me I can’t say I feel sorry for them—a whole nation against one woman.” It became a staple of her wartime conversation.

Apart from a brief visit to Miami, where Wallis had a painful molar tooth extracted, the couple remained on their steamy open prison for more than a year before Churchill relented. In September 1941, he gave them licence to travel to the 4,000-acre ducal ranch in Alberta, Canada, and to visit her family in Baltimore, with stop-overs in New York and Washington.

While President Roosevelt signalled his approval, inviting them for lunch at the White House, he privately remained leery, instructing FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to have his agents monitor the Windsors during their stay. Indeed, such was the suspicion surrounding Wallis that her mail was formally censored long after America joined the war. If anything, mistrust of the couple only intensified after the arrest in November 1942 of their friend Charles Bedaux on charges of collaboration. He committed suicide in 1944 while in a Miami prison awaiting trial. When asked for comment, the duke nervously remained silent.

Though the Washington Establishment were chary, Wallis was thrilled at the opportunity at last to show her husband her home town. Baltimore did not let them down, more than 200,000 flag-waving people lining the streets as the royal homecoming queen waved and posed, Mayor Howard W. Jackson insisting that they call Baltimore their second home. This was more like it. They stayed at the farm home of her uncle, General Henry Warfield, the duchess making sure that the local delicacies of crab cakes and fried chicken were on the menu.

During her stay, her one-time friend Mary Kirk, now married to Ernest Simpson, died in London of cancer. She was just forty-five and had only recently given birth to a baby son, Ernest Jr. Mary had found genuine and true love with Wallis’s second husband, the couple living up to the description of “soul mates.” After her death Wallis wrote to Ernest telling him: “God is difficult to understand at times, for you deserved a well-earned happiness.… I know the depth of your sufferings—your son will be a stronghold for the future.” Unlike Wallis, Mary truly loved England, electing to be buried in Somerset in the West Country.

As one link to her past was broken, another was gratefully renewed. Wallis’s extended visit gave her the chance to see her oldest male friend, Herman Rogers, after a parting of nearly two years. She quietly slipped into the Carlton House in Washington for a reunion. The couple were later joined by the duke, who had to attend an official function. During their get-together Wallis insisted, nay pleaded, that he and Katherine join them in Nassau at any time of their choosing. The castaways were desperate for company.

Just four weeks after they returned to Nassau, Wallis’s holiday plans for the Rogerses were truncated following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Herman was put in charge of the French section of the new Voice of America radio station, which transmitted short-wave broadcasts into enemy territory.

The entrance of America into the war at least gave Wallis a purpose and a focus. As chair of the local Red Cross, she organized food, blankets, and medical assistance for the survivors of ships sunk by German U-boats, which were operating in the vicinity. At the same time, the Allies decided to use the islands as a training base for RAF and American air force officers and men. While the duke, as governor, watched over the building of a new runway, the duchess helped to feed the thousands of young men swarming around the new base. Wallis was a familiar face at the canteen, serving up breakfast for the hungry squaddies. By war’s end she estimated that she had doled out forty thousand plates of bacon and egg.

Even her sternest critics acknowledged her selfless endeavours. Her friend Rosa Wood wrote to Edith Lindsay in New York saying: “I really admire the way Wallis has thrown herself into all her various jobs, she really is wonderful and does work hard. I do hope people everywhere are realizing all the good she is doing. I think she has such charm and is always amusing to be with. I really don’t know what I would do without her.”

Brisk, businesslike, and decisive, Wallis was the power behind the throne, the duke asking her advice on everything, big and small. It became a standing joke in the ruling executive council that he would never make a decision of any consequence without reference to her. During discussions at Government House he would often excuse himself and race upstairs, an agenda in hand, looking for his wife.

“I have rarely seen an ascendancy established over one partner in a marriage by the other to so remarkable a degree,” remarked British embassy press attaché René MacColl. “He deferred to her constantly and consistently, always remarking, ‘I’ll see what the duchess has to say about that.’”

Those in his circle knew exactly how to play him. On one occasion when his aide, Captain Wood, asked the duke to wear a dress uniform for a parade, he petulantly refused, saying that it was too hot. Wood replied that it was a significant occasion and emphasized that it was important to obey the social niceties. He made the same case to Wallis, who told him: “Leave it with me.” A few minutes later the duke appeared in full dress uniform and said, somewhat sheepishly: “I’ve changed my mind.”

In spite of his dithering, the duke’s term was assessed as a success, especially given the inherent difficulty of working with an insular, bigoted cabal of local businessmen known as the Bay Street Boys, who effectively controlled the islands’ economy. Though he liked to give the impression of being a fervent believer in democracy, it was an attitude, recalled Wood, that held good only if everyone agreed with him. He was no reformer, continuing the traditions of segregation as practised by the indigenous ruling white population. When a black resident entered Government House, he came in through the back door. Wallis’s military canteen was also segregated. Indeed, at one charity event, after she found herself shaking hands with a multitude of well-wishers including Arthur, their black chauffeur, Wallis, who had black servants during her childhood, remarked to local historian Mary Moseley: “It’s the first time in my life I have ever shaken the hand of a coloured person.”

In spite of her charity efforts, Wallis found that time hung heavily, life in Nassau an endless horizon of tedium. “It really is so intensely DULL here,” she wrote. “I long for news of the big world no matter how trivial.”

Her letters to friends were peppered with complaints about seeing the same old faces on an endless loop. “There is very little news here—same people—behaving the same way and the RAF not producing any Don Juans.”

So when US Republican congressman Joe Martin and a fellow politician arrived in Nassau for a vacation, Wallis wasted no time in inviting them to lunch at Government House. Martin, a lifelong bachelor, was cornered by Wallis and got the full flirty treatment. As he was leaving, she said coquettishly: “Mr. Martin, I think I should like you for my next husband.” Martin blanched—and hurried away.

This was a jolly luncheon in a sea of monotony. One worrying development was her husband’s pronounced drinking, insisting on “No Buckingham Palace measures here” as he shakily poured his evening livener. Amidst the litany of complaint, what is striking about her private correspondence is her enthusiasm to see Herman and Katherine Rogers. She sent a confetti of letters to their apartment in New York and then, in desperation, took to writing to mutual friends, asking them to encourage the Rogerses to make the journey south. In a note to one friend, Edith Lindsay, she admitted she was “heartbroken” that they were not coming and complained that she hadn’t heard a word from them. It seems Herman was busy with his war work for Voice of America.

Wallis explained their absence by citing the “Nassau disease,” everyone looking for excuses to avoid the islands. “If I was in the same boat I would do the same,” she confessed. On October 17, 1942, she wrote plaintively: “How I long for the sight and sound of human beings my mentality is getting dim after over two years here and only two months leave.” How bright would she have shone if “the only man she had ever loved” had visited. Certainly she made clear who she really wanted to see, confiding in Rosa Wood that she considered Katherine to be “a dull, stupid, boring woman.” Or in other words, she had snagged Herman before Wallis had a chance.

From time to time the outside world intruded, invariably in the form of bad news. On August 25, 1942, the duke was informed of the death of his younger brother, the Duke of Kent, in a flying accident. They had once been boon companions and the closest of friends, but the abdication changed that forever. The duke’s reaction said much about the distance that now existed between himself and the rest of his family. In the days before the memorial service, to be held in Nassau’s Christ Church Cathedral, he fretted that the Nazis, knowing that the duke and duchess were to be present, would find a way to bomb the church. As a result, information about the church service was summarily withdrawn, lest it get into enemy hands.

While the duchess dutifully replied to the messages of sympathy, writing of the “terrible shock” and the “irreparable loss” of Prince George, neither ever wrote a note to the grieving widow, Princess Marina, knowing that she and Queen Elizabeth were the most vocal members of the royal family in opposing Wallis and any possible title.

It worked both ways. An olive branch sent by Wallis to Queen Mary, suggesting that she might wish to meet the retiring bishop of Nassau, who was sailing to England and could fully describe her son’s positive contribution to the islands, remained unanswered. When the bishop did indeed meet with Queen Mary, he spoke warmly of the duchess. The queen’s response was icy indifference. Wallis remained a non-person.

Eventually it all became too much. The heat, humidity, workload, and the strain of entertaining her husband, took a medical toll, and the duchess was taken ill with stomach ulcers. It was a condition that affected her for the rest of her life. She was paying the price of keeping everything “tightly wrapped.” A nasty fall downstairs in 1943, which left her badly bruised, immobile, and depressed, merely added to her medical woes. Though the duke was anxious that she go to the mainland to recover, she declined, shuddering at the thought of being criticized for once again leaving her post. The couple were highly sensitive to the merest hint of criticism, for instance the duke threatening journalist Helen Worden with a criminal libel suit following an astringent portrait in the American Mercury magazine.

By the end of 1944 the heat and her hard work had shaved her down from a slender 110 pounds to a gaunt 100 pounds. While she liked to remark that a woman can never be too rich or too thin, there were limits. Her drastic weight loss coincided with another visit to New York—this time to have her appendix removed. These bouts of ill health, as well as visits to see another invalid, Aunt Bessie, who had broken her hip in a fall, meant long periods of recuperation and relaxation away from the dreaded islands. In total the couple were absent for four months in 1943 and a further eighteen weeks the following year.

By then, they were desperate to escape for good and were deeply envious of others who did not have to secure the agreement of the Colonial Office before moving on. When their friends and aides, George Wood and his Austrian wife, Rosa, informed them in December 1944 that they were sailing for Lisbon, the Windsors reacted with fury. They saw the decision as a personal betrayal, a slight to the duke and a snub to the duchess. The Woods became yet another entry in the lengthening roster of loyal supporters who were once cherished and then discarded by the ducal couple. An anguished Rosa Wood expressed her shock in a letter to their mutual friend Edith Lindsay.

We were in Nassau for a fortnight to pack up and say goodbye. Our goodbye unfortunately was a very unpleasant one. The moment the Windsors knew we were leaving they both suddenly became very nasty—made out that we were letting them down and only used them while it suited us. Almost funny when George worked for the Duke for four years without one penny pay, and I certainly did ALL to help Wallis. A very unpleasant ending and undeserved… it has somehow left us with a bitter and disillusioned feeling.

Yet no sooner had Captain and Rosa Wood departed than the Windsors followed suit. They spent Christmas with a fully recovered Aunt Bessie and, after some discussion, decided to curtail the duke’s tour of duty. The couple left for New York in March rather than August 1945, the official date his tour of duty was over. While they were showered with engraved silver trays, boxes, and parchments of appreciation from the grateful Bahamians, there was no official recognition of their service from the Colonial or Foreign Office. No letter of thanks, let alone a campaign medal.

As for Buckingham Palace, the silence was deafening. Though the war in Europe was nearing its conclusion, a new royal Cold War was about to begin.