CHAPTER EIGHT

Hitler’s Good Queen Wallis

It was the improbable figure of Charles Bedaux, described in a New Yorker profile as having a “boldly battered face, dominated by his fine, dark eyes,” who made the duke feel relevant and alive once more. During their stay at Bedaux’s Loire château the two men had struck up an unlikely friendship, playing golf during the day and at night putting the world to rights over a couple of glasses of fine brandy. While Bedaux had made his considerable fortune studying work practice, the duke, too, along with his younger brother the Duke of Kent, had always had an interest, however sporadic, in factories and the welfare of the working man.

The duke was keen to know how the working man fared in Hitler’s brave new world. Could Bedaux arrange a visit through his contacts? Ever the expansive salesman, Bedaux blithely suggested that the duke include other European countries and America in his itinerary. He had excellent business connections in many parts of the world. Unspoken was the fact that he believed that a royal association would do his name and companies no harm at all.

He contacted political advisor Robert Murphy at the American embassy and labour leader Dr. Robert Ley in Germany. Subsequently the duke met Hitler’s adjutant Fritz Wiedemann, the long-time lover of Princess Stephanie, at the Ritz hotel in Paris to seal the deal.

The plight of the working man, though, was something of a fig leaf. Both men had other motives, Bedaux to use the duke’s name and prestige to regain and expand his corporation in Germany and the duke to show his new bride the true meaning of being royal. His equerry, Dudley Forwood, always maintained that the reason behind the visit was “not to give a public statement of his approval for the Nazis. We went because he wanted his beloved wife to experience a State visit. He wanted to prove to her that he had lost nothing by abdicating. And the only way such a State visit was possible was to make the arrangements with Hitler.”

While the proposed royal tour was being secretly arranged, the duke and duchess journeyed to Borsodivánka in Hungary, where Charles Bedaux had rented a hunting lodge. The duke was clearly intrigued by Bedaux, a man of vision and a constant fountain of utopian ideas. He had even developed his own political theory, equivalism, which he saw as the economic basis to develop an ideal world in which labour, management, and the wider community could live in harmony. At a stroke it would replace capitalism and communism and thereby bring about world peace. This was the unfolding vista the immensely persuasive Bedaux conjured up for the gullible duke, a movement for world peace where he would play a leading role. For a man seeking a sense of purpose and relevance, his honeyed words struck a chord. The duke’s supporters believed he could still play a major public role, Herman Rogers writing to his former headmaster Dr. Peabody: “His future interests me. He is of great potential value to any universal—not political—world cause.”

It was not idle talk. At Château Candé in the spring, the duke had been given a letter from Colonel Oscar Solbert, a senior executive at Eastman Kodak, who first met the duke on his 1924 tour of the US East Coast. In his letter he suggested that the duke “head up and consolidate the many and varied peace movements throughout the world.… I am not a pacifist, as you know, but I do believe that the one thing the world needs more than anything else is peace.”

On the duke’s behalf, Bedaux sent Solbert an encouraging response, saying that he was interested in leading an international peace movement and “devoting his time to the betterment of the masses.” As well as Solbert, Bedaux had already involved IBM executive Thomas J. Watson, who agreed to sponsor the Windsors for their projected tour of the United States. Watson, whose slogan was “World Peace through World Trade,” had already met Hitler, attended a Nazi rally, and accepted the Order of the German Eagle. The German government was IBM’s second-largest client, its punch card technology, according to controversial award-winning author Edwin Black, ultimately helping to facilitate Nazi genocide, a claim refuted by historian Peter Hayes among others.

Were Bedaux and Watson “naïve idealists” or cynical collaborators turning a blind eye to the unfolding horrors of the Nazi regime, their calls for world peace simply a cover for a pro-German accommodation? As Professor Jonathan Petropoulos argues in Royals and the Reich, there are “compelling reasons” to see Bedaux as a more “sinister” figure: “This rhetoric of peace and reconciliation was a front for pro-Nazi sentiment, and occasionally the correspondence between the Windsors, Bedaux, Solbert, and Watson reveals this thinking.”

Certainly the surreptitious and secretive planning behind the visit to Germany and America caused outrage inside Buckingham Palace and the Foreign Office, his surprise announcement catching everyone off guard. The new king described it as a “bombshell and a bad one too.”

Even the duke’s supporters were concerned; Herman Rogers thought the visit “untimely,” while Churchill and Beaverbrook both opposed it, the press baron even travelling to Paris to remonstrate with the duke. He warned him that he would offend all Britons by consorting with Hitler’s bullies. The duke was unmoved.

It left the Foreign Office nonplussed about how to deal with an ex-king on a private though officially sponsored tour. The king’s private secretary, Alex Hardinge, described the visits as “private stunts for publicity purposes” which would not benefit the workers themselves. The king felt strongly that the duke and duchess should not be acknowledged as having official status in the countries they visited, nor should they be invited to stay at any embassy or legation. If they were to be met at a railway station it should be by a junior member of staff. British representatives abroad were expressly forbidden from accepting invitations or hosting dinners for the duke. They were only allowed to give the ducal couple “a bite of luncheon.”

The respective ambassadors argued that it would be bad policy to cold-shoulder the ex-king and his wife. Britain’s ambassador to Washington, Sir Ronald Lindsay, though regarding the forthcoming visit with “unmitigated horror,” still felt the embassy should host the ducal couple.

He was summoned to Balmoral for discussions, where he found the king, queen, and their advisors in a state of “near hysteria” when faced with the prospect of dealing with this loose royal cannon. In his account Lindsay later recalled that the royal family felt that “the Duke was behaving abominably, embarrassing the king and dropping bombshell after bombshell.” They feared that he was trying to stage a comeback with the help of his “semi Nazi” friends and advisors.

Of course the Germans saw the twelve-day ducal visit, which began in Berlin, as a propaganda triumph. It was not just the Nazi hierarchy who welcomed his arrival but the general German public. They considered the duke to be modern, progressive, vigorous, and accessible. Even his mock Cockney accent with a touch of American seemed more down-to-earth and unaffected than the disdainful patrician tones of a man like Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. He remained an intriguing international celebrity, his marital turmoil only enhancing the iconic mystery surrounding the man. As historian Gerwin Strobl argues, the duke was not seen, either privately or publicly, as a collaborator, appeaser, or traitor to his country. Far from it.

In his study of German attitudes to the British between the wars, he observes: “When the Nazis were dealing with a useful fool, they could never quite disguise an element of contempt in their language.… There is nothing of this in the descriptions of the Duke’s conversations in Berlin or the later wartime recollections of his actions and opinions. Instead there is something one comes across only very rarely in Nazi utterances: genuine respect; the respect felt for an equal.” In their eyes, the harsh treatment of this charismatic man of the people was an indication of the rottenness at the heart of the British Establishment, which they saw as increasingly incompetent, hidebound, snobbish, and decrepit.

Relentlessly insulting, too. At least in the duke’s eyes. The most-travelled monarch-in-waiting in history discovered that his quarter century of loyal, dutiful service to his country counted for nothing. When the ducal couple arrived at Friedrichstrasse station in Berlin on the morning of October 11, 1937, they were met by the forlorn figure of the British embassy’s third secretary. He handed them a letter from the duke’s long-time friend, Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, now the chargé d’affaires, politely and somewhat apologetically informing them that British ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson had left Berlin and that Ogilvie-Forbes had been directed to take no official cognizance of their visit.

It was their Nazi hosts who provided the duke and duchess with a friendly welcome. No effort had been spared to make them feel at home, the station decorated with Union Jacks neatly alternating with swastikas. As the duke and duchess alighted from the train the crowd cheered “Heil Edward,” while a brass band struck up a hearty rendition of “God Save the King.” They were greeted by the portly German Labour Front leader Dr. Robert Ley, heading a large and deferential German delegation and watched by enthusiastic, cheering crowds.

They left the station in the company of their host, Dr. Ley, with four SS officers hanging on to the running-boards for dear life as Ley barrelled through the streets at breakneck speeds before arriving at the Hotel Kaiserhof, where a specially invited crowd of Nazi members greeted the ducal couple with a jaunty song composed by the Propaganda Ministry of Joseph Goebbels.

Then their avuncular but quickly irritating host raced them at high speed in their black Mercedes-Benz to Carinhall, the country estate of Hermann and Emmy Göring where Hitler’s right-hand man, whose visitors included their friends Charles and Anne Lindbergh, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and American president Herbert Hoover, gave them a tour of the estate. The high point was his pride and joy, a model train set valued at $265,000, which had tunnels, bridges, stations, and even a miniature airfield and model planes. Unlike their vulgar escort, the head of the Luftwaffe was interested in intelligent discussion, over tea he and the duke touching on everything from the British parliamentary system to international relations and labour issues. This was more like it.

After the royal guests departed, Frau Göring announced that Wallis would have “cut a good figure on the throne of England.” The duke was so respected that her husband, whom Wallis described as “trustworthy,” ordered Prince Christoph von Hessen to have their phones tapped, a courtesy the Nazi regime extended to most visiting politicians, important businessmen, and so-called guests of the Third Reich.

It was not long before they began to realize that, as the duke recalled, they were treated as little more than “trophies at an exhibition,” raced from housing project to youth camp to hospital in Stuttgart, Nuremburg, Munich, and Dresden, Nazi newsreel cameras capturing their every gesture.

During one tour the party went to a concentration camp that appeared to be deserted. “We saw this enormous concrete building which I now know contained inmates,” recalled his equerry, Dudley Forwood. “The duke asked: ‘What is that?’ Our hosts replied, ‘It is where they store the cold meat.’ In a horrible sense that was true.”

All the while their “odious” host Dr. Ley entertained them with a stream of risqué jokes and boorish comments, his breath frequently smelling of alcohol. This was not at all what the duke had in mind when he described the nature of a royal tour to his wife.

Wallis loathed the man. “A drunkard, a fanatic, quarrelsome, a four flusher [an empty boaster],” she said. There was a point where they did not think they would survive the tour alive, Dr. Ley driving so fast between engagements, sirens blaring, that the duke threatened to travel in a separate motor if he did not slow down.

In spite of Dr. Ley, the duke enjoyed meeting the people, giving off-the-cuff speeches or chatting with well-wishers in the language of his childhood. Wallis was reunited with her erstwhile lover, von Ribbentrop—sans carnations—at a dinner he hosted at the gourmet restaurant Horcher in Berlin, where the ducal couple met with the Nazi leadership, including Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf and Ilsa Hess, and Joseph and Magda Goebbels. All came away impressed by the duke’s demeanour and integrity and the duchess’s style and charm.

Goebbels gushed:

A charming, likeable chap; open, clear with a healthy common sense approach, an awareness of contemporary life and social issues.… There is nothing of the snob about him.… What a shame that he is no longer King! With him an alliance would have been possible.… The Duke was deposed because he had it in him to be a king in the true sense of the word. That much is clear to me.… A great man. What a shame! What a terrible shame.

The Nazi leadership, who collectively had “bottomless contempt” for Britain’s degenerate ruling class, made an exemption with the duke. They saw him not only as someone favouring an understanding with Hitler but as a hard-headed defender of the British empire. Goebbels later described him as “a tender seedling of reason,” writing in his diary that he was “too clever, too progressive, too appreciative of the problem of the under privileged and too pro German [to have remained on the throne]. This tragic figure could have saved Europe from her doom.”

The eagerness of the Nazi leadership was matched by the genuine enthusiasm of the crowds who followed their royal progress, the duke’s magnetic appeal transcending national boundaries. After enduring a week of mixing with the common man, Wallis was treated to an elaborate “what might have been” when she and the duke were guests of honour at a glamorous dinner at the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg, hosted by Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, where the remnants of Germany’s aristocracy came to pay obeisance. She was addressed as “Your Royal Highness” and accepted curtseys from the titled and the high-born. As the New York Times headline put it: “German Society to Fete Windsor.” This was how it felt to be a queen, albeit Hitler’s queen.

If the dinner in Nuremberg was the social highpoint, the private audience with the German leader at Berchtesgaden on October 22 was the political summit. During the trip, the duke had, according to the New York Times, given a modified Nazi salute. On two occasions he gave the full salute, the first time at a training school in Pomerania when a guard of honour from the Death’s Head Division of Hitler’s elite guards was drawn up for his inspection, the second time when he met Hitler at the Berghof, his residence in the Bavarian Alps. “I did salute Hitler,” he later admitted, “but it was a soldier’s salute.” After being kept waiting for nearly an hour, they were ushered into a large room with a view towards the dramatic Untersberg massif. An aide collected the duke while Wallis was left to make small talk, mainly about music, with Rudolf Hess. Music to the ducal ears was the fact that everyone, including Hitler, addressed the duchess as “Royal Highness.”

Meanwhile the duke and the Führer enjoyed a private fifty-minute discussion. Even though the duke’s German was perfect, translator Paul Schmidt was also present. His recollections are the only independent witness to the nature of their talk. He later recalled: “There was, so far as I could see, nothing whatever to indicate whether the Duke of Windsor really sympathized with the ideology and practices of the Third Reich, as Hitler seemed to assume he did. Apart from some appreciative words for the measures taken in Germany in the field of social welfare the duke did not discuss political questions. He was frank and friendly with Hitler, and displayed the social charm for which he is known throughout the world.”

When they emerged, Hitler entertained them to tea, Wallis mesmerized by the “great inner force” of the German leader. She was struck by his long, slim musician’s hands, his pasty pallor and his eyes, which burned with a “peculiar fire” rather like Turkish dictator Kemal Atatürk’s, whom they met during the cruise of the Nahlin. When she met his intent gaze she found herself confronted by a mask. She concluded that he was not a man who liked women.

As Hitler escorted the couple to their car, one of the reporters observed: “the Duchess was visibly impressed with the Führer’s personality, and he apparently indicated that they had become fast friends by giving her an affectionate farewell. Hitler took both their hands in his, saying a long goodbye, after which he stiffened to a rigid Nazi salute that the Duke returned.”

After they drove away, Hitler said to his interpreter: “The Duchess would have made a good queen.” The next time Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe met Hitler she asked him about the duchess. This time he was non-committal. “Well, I must say she was most ladylike,” he said.

In conclusion, the New York Times reporter observed that the duke “demonstrated adequately that the Abdication did rob Germany of a firm friend, if not indeed a devoted admirer, on the British throne.”

Back in Munich, the Windsors spent their final evening at the Harlaching home of Rudolf and Ilse Hess. While there is no extant record of what they discussed, both men were future advocates of a negotiated peace—Hess dramatically flying his private plane to Scotland in May 1941 in the delusional hope that he could meet with first the Duke of Hamilton and then King George VI and begin peace talks.

After the royal couple departed, both sides declared the visit a “triumph.” Even Winston Churchill, an early opponent of the Nazi regime, was moved to congratulate the duke, writing that the visit had passed off with “distinction and success.”

Back in Leipzig, Dr. Ley basked in the warm afterglow of a successful tour, telling the German Labour Front that the duke considered the achievements of the Third Reich nothing less than “a miracle.” He quoted the duke as saying: “One can only begin to understand it when one realizes that behind it all is one man and one will.” The man in the street took this, according to the British consul in Leipzig, as an indication of the duke’s “strong pro-Fascist sympathies.” It was also the conclusion drawn by Russian leader Joseph Stalin, who had kept a beady eye on the royal progress. In 1938, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador to the Soviet Union, wrote to British spy Vera Atkins from Moscow saying that Stalin knew all about “British royalty’s warm feelings for the Nazis.”

The assessment was largely correct, the duke’s equerry, Dudley Forwood, later confirming that both the Windsors had much sympathy and understanding for the Nazi regime, which had, in their eyes, brought order to a country collapsing into chaos during the years of the Weimar government. “Whereas the Duke, Duchess and I had no idea that the Germans were or would be committing mass murder on the Jews, we were none of us averse to Hitler politically. We felt that the Nazi regime was a more appropriate government than the Weimar Republic, which had been extremely socialist.”

Naïve and gullible or conniving and complicit? It is the question that has haunted the Windsors ever since they stepped off the train in Berlin and began their infamous visit to Hitler’s Germany. The duke would later confess that he was “taken in” by Hitler. Writing in the New York Daily News on December 13, 1966, he stated: “I believed him when he implied that he sought no war with England. I thought that the rest of us could be fence sitters while the Nazis and the Reds slogged it out.”

Two weeks after he waved goodbye to the duke and duchess and whispered soothing words of peace, Hitler showed his true colours. At a secret conference of his top military advisors he outlined his vision for Germany’s foreign expansion. In what was to become known as the Hossbach Memorandum, he saw the future as a series of small wars of plunder to shore up the German economy before a major conflict with Britain and France between 1941 and 1944. As far as he was concerned, 1939 was much too soon for a general conflagration. Moreover he saw Britain and France as implacable “hate opponents”—Hassgegner—of Germany. While the Hossbach Memorandum has divided historians, the very least that can be said is that Hitler had little if any interest in peace in Europe.

After Germany, next stop the United States. Bedaux’s proposed five-week visit was to be followed by fact-finding missions to Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and Sweden, where the Frenchman had lined up a meeting with controversial businessman and Nazi collaborator Axel Wenner-Gren.

At first the arrangements for the tour of America seemed to be going swimmingly, though it had the feel of a triumphal royal progress rather than a modest private visit to study working conditions, as billed by the duke. Bedaux, who was underwriting trips to Atlanta, Baltimore, New York, Detroit, Seattle, and Los Angeles, hired a private Pullman train to convey the royal party from coast to coast; General Motors put a fleet of ninety Buicks at their disposal; US government departments offered every facility during their stop-overs; while a Madison Avenue public relations firm, Arthur Kudner, was on hand to deal with the media and publicize the mission.

The White House invited them to visit; the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, intended to show them her pet housing projects, and NBC were lined up to broadcast the duke making a personal plea for world peace. What could possibly go wrong?

The British were incandescent. The duke was embarking on a populist movement at a time when the new king was still finding his feet. British ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay bluntly explained to Sumner Welles, under-secretary of state, that this visit was viewed with “vehement indignation” by Buckingham Palace at a time when the new king was “trying to win the affection and confidence of his country’s people, without possessing the popular appeal which the Duke of Windsor possesses.”

The ambassador became increasingly suspicious of the real nature of the visit. He soon discovered that it was much more than an innocent fact-finding mission about housing and labour conditions; it was an attempt to launch the ex-king as a world ambassador for a peace movement that was effectively a front for Nazi ambitions. The ambassador saw his ploy of cosying up to organized labour as nothing more than an attempt to stage a “semi-fascist comeback in England.”

When Lindsay surreptitiously obtained letters written by Bedaux, it confirmed his view that the tour had a quasi-political dimension. In the duke’s proposed manifesto, Bedaux linked working conditions with the wellbeing of the common man, emphasizing that a worldwide peace movement must have as its task “to raise humanity’s level of life’s enjoyment.” He went on to say: “No better leadership for such a movement could be found than in the Duke of Windsor.”

Bedaux let his guard down further in the unlikely setting of a New York publisher’s office, where he was discussing a self-penned medieval novel with editor John Hall Wheelock. During the meeting he described Hitler as “a man of genius” and foretold that the whole world was “going Fascist.” As for his friend the Duke of Windsor, Wheelock recalled him saying that he would be “recalled to the throne as a dictator.” Essentially he saw the duke’s leadership of an apolitical worldwide peace movement as little more than a front, an arm of German foreign policy that would ultimately result in the duke regaining a powerful role in British governance.

Once the full itinerary was revealed, even the White House realized the duke had gone too far. The duke and duchess intended to start their tour in Washington on Armistice Day, November 11, attending the ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery before making a broadcast to the American nation in which the duke would announce his new international role. In order to avoid a diplomatic incident, Mrs. Roosevelt organized for the royal train, which would have taken them from New York to Washington, to be “delayed” so that at least they would miss the sombre ceremony of commemoration.

Indeed, a visit to America by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had concerned the president virtually from the day they married. In order to avoid what he termed “diplomatic complications,” he suggested to Herman Rogers that he should entertain the couple at his country house of Crumwold, so that the couple could meet the president informally at Hyde Park next door.

Alive to British sensibilities, the president now appreciated that the visit by the duke and duchess to America could have the makings of a “second abdication crisis.” What no one foresaw was the eruption of grassroots hostility towards Bedaux and his guests, the duke and duchess. When Bedaux arrived in New York on November 1, 1937 he was met by a hostile media and organized labour unions eager to use the publicity of a royal visit to exact revenge on a man whose time-and-motion systems meant more work for less pay.

Communist-dominated unions in Wallis’s home town of Baltimore led the charge, criticizing Bedaux’s time-and-motion system and his association with Dr. Robert Ley, the man who had directed the destruction of all German free trade unions. The execution of two Communist labour leaders in Germany days after the Windsors left the country merely fuelled hostility. Labour leader Joseph McCurdy singled out the duchess for particular scorn, saying that when she was a young woman living in the city, she had “not shown the slightest concern nor sympathy for the problems of labour or the poor and needy.” The New York Times weighed in, too, taking a pot shot at the duke. “He has lent himself, unconsciously but easily, to National Socialist propaganda. There can be no doubt that his tour [of Germany] has strengthened the regime’s hold on the working classes.” Many others, ranging from fellow trade union organizations to Jewish societies, weighed in, focusing on Bedaux, his methods, and his Nazi friends.

Several of his clients cancelled their contracts, a number of his engineers resigned in protest, while his fellow directors, seizing the opportunity to stage their own coup, demanded that he disassociate himself from the company. Stunned by the uproar, he agreed to relinquish control but not ownership.

The Internal Revenue Service got in on the act, issuing an income tax notice on Bedaux, while a former mistress lodged a legal suit for breach of promise. Such was the hue and cry that Bedaux slunk out of the Plaza hotel in New York through a side door to avoid the waiting press and drove to Montreal in Canada to take a boat out of the country. As far as Bedaux was concerned it was a government-inspired conspiracy, and he blamed Mrs. Roosevelt for stirring up the labour unions against him.

Meanwhile the Windsors, their trunks packed, waited in Paris for Bedaux to green-light the visit, their stateroom on the Bremen—Churchill chided them for choosing a German liner rather than a French vessel—ready and paid for. Instead they received increasingly hysterical telegrams from the beleaguered businessman urging them to cancel the visit. The duke contacted British ambassadors in Paris and Washington and the American ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, for advice on how to proceed. Only Bullitt voiced his support. The duke, realizing that the paymaster for the visit was hors de combat, decided to postpone the planned tour, announcing that the ducal couple would at an unspecified date go on a fact-finding mission to the Soviet Union to balance the visit to Germany.

While President Roosevelt sent the duke a conciliatory note hoping that the visit would soon take place, in Britain the ducal farrago was greeted with undisguised glee by the ruling class. Even his supporter Lord Beaverbrook advised him to “quit public life.” As for his many enemies, the Earl of Crawford reflected the views of many when he wrote:

He had put himself hopelessly in the wrong by starting his visit with a preliminary tour in Germany where he was of course photographed fraternizing with the Nazi, the Anti-Trade Unionist and the Jewbaiter. Poor little man. He has no sense of his own and no friends with any sense to advise him. I hope this will give him a sharp and salutary lesson.

The duke duly retired from the fray, blaming the American media for spoiling what Wallis described as a “lovely innocent trip.” Before he and the duchess set about restoring their rented home in the South of France, the duke left the British ruling class an unwelcome Christmas present revealing where his loyalties lay. In December 1937 he gave an interview to the left-leaning Daily Herald, stating that if the Labour Party were ever in a position to offer it, he would be prepared to accept the presidency of the English Republic. The incendiary story, which for some reason was never published, was passed on to Sir Eric Phipps, now the British ambassador in Paris, who in turn informed Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and thence the prime minister.

With that, the duke and duchess busied themselves shopping for designer clothes, jewelry, and furniture in Paris, leaving the possible impact of their proposed visits to America, Italy, Sweden, and Russia as one of the delicious “what ifs” of history. Even if his various peace missions had gone ahead, it is doubtful they would have made the slightest difference to Hitler’s timetable of conquest. By March 1938 the government of Austria, the country the duke had chosen for his honeymoon, had allowed German troops to march into Vienna as part of the Anschluss or annexation.

Resource-rich Czechoslovakia was the next country on the German leader’s shopping list, and when Prime Minister Chamberlain made clear that Britain would not risk war to defend Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity—“a faraway country of whom we know nothing”—it was only a matter of time before Hitler acted. The infamous Munich Agreement of September 1938 conceded the German-populated Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to Germany, though it quickly became apparent that the piece of paper Chamberlain waved when he arrived back in Britain and his hollow boast that he had secured “peace in our time” had done nothing to quench Hitler’s thirst for conquest. In March 1939 German troops marched into Prague and Hitler declared that Czechoslovakia no longer existed as a country. There was dismay in London, delirium in Berlin as the German people celebrated their nation’s inexorable expansion without the cost of a single German life.

As the international scene darkened, the duke and duchess enjoyed the blue skies of the French Riviera, focusing purely on matters domestic. The news may have been bleak, the possibility of peace retreating by the day, but for the duke and duchess it was perhaps one of their happiest times. For months they energetically remodeled and restored Château de la Croë, the twelve-acre property beside the Mediterranean they now called home. Complete with gold-plated bath taps, twelve bedrooms, a tennis court, a swimming pool, and footmen in the red-and-gold livery of the British royal family, it was a fitting place for an ex-king to hang up his crown.

A convoy of vans brought heirlooms that were stored at Frogmore House in the grounds of Windsor Castle outside London. There were dozens of cases of fine wines and liquor, chests of silver and French linens, paintings and objets wrapped in canvas, some of which were laid out on the lawn for royal inspection, the duke letting out excited cries “like a small boy at Christmas” when he spotted a half-remembered treasure.

Largely out of the public eye, they celebrated their first anniversary as a married couple with a cruise along the Amalfi coastline onboard the luxury yacht Gulzar with their friends Herman and Katherine Rogers. The smiles and body language of the newly-weds were in complete contrast to the tension and strain of the infamous Nahlin cruise of 1936 when the king was wracked with torment, contemplating abdication so that he could secure the hand of the then married Mrs. Simpson. (The Gulzar had a more heroic future: Two years later, the 202-ton yacht would save forty-seven exhausted soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk before being sunk by German air raids in Dover harbour in 1940.)

During that voyage he had to hide or disguise his affections even when onboard the yacht. This time the duke and duchess were relaxed and publicly affectionate with one another. Herman Rogers, his trusty cine camera at the ready, filmed the couple laughing and joking while they admired the Leaning Tower of Pisa. As they wandered through the ruins of Pompeii they were clearly at ease with one another, as was Wallis when she entertained the elegant Princess Maria of Piedmont, who came for lunch onboard. The duke, a cigarette or pipe never far away, even tried his hand at a concertina as he sat on deck. Fit, tanned, and frequently bare-chested, the duke looked like a man very much at peace with himself.

One incident filmed by Rogers during the holiday perfectly captures the ambivalence of the duke’s position and his political affiliations. As the couple boarded the Gulzar after a day spent sightseeing on the island of Ischia, they were watched by a crowd of well-wishers. The duke turned to the throng and grabbed his wife’s forearm, forcing her into a brief but reluctant salute before waving to the crowd. At first glance it seems as though the duke was encouraging his wife to acknowledge the watching throng. A second look reveals a large painted slogan on the quayside wall where the yacht was moored. It reads in Italian: “Europe will be Fascist.” Was the duke forcing his wife to salute the crowd or to recognize the sentiments of the huge black sign? It remains an intriguing if unanswered question.

Whatever his private feelings, the duke’s one public intervention that year in his self-proclaimed role as Edward the Peacemaker came when he accepted an invitation from American NBC radio to make a broadcast from Verdun, the First World War battle site, appealing for world peace. “I speak simply as a soldier of the last war, whose most earnest prayer is that such a cruel and destructive madness shall never again overtake mankind. The grave anxieties of the time compel me to raise my voice in expression of the universal longing to be delivered from the fears that beset us.” While the emotional text, which the duke wrote himself, attracted thousands of letters of praise and support from worried citizens around the world, it did nothing to appease the royal family. As the king and queen were on their way to Canada and the United States on a crucial visit to drum up support for Britain and to introduce the new king to her most important allies, it was seen as yet another attempt by the duke to steal his brother’s thunder. The queen complained to Queen Mary: “How troublesome of him to choose such a moment.”

During these critical months, while the duke fretted over the designs for the livery, linen, and stationery for his palatial home, his brothers King George VI and the Duke of Kent, and his German cousins, most notably the Hessen family and Prince Max Egon von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, were working to avert the coming storm. The Duke of Windsor may have garnered the headlines, but other royal princes were doing the heavy lifting for peace backstage. The Duke of Kent, who travelled extensively throughout Europe, ostensibly on family business, used these visits to maintain a diplomatic back channel with Germany. As one journalist noted at the time: “The private journeys of members of the British royal house in fact have been quite often equivalent to discreet political missions.”

According to the memoir of Frederick Winterbotham, the head of British air intelligence, the Duke of Kent regularly met with the British agent and aircraft salesman Baron William de Ropp, a clandestine figure who became a confidant of Hitler and Rosenberg.

Though little is known about these meetings—Winterbotham even excised mention of the Ropp-Kent meetings in the second edition of his book—commentators have concluded that “the Duke of Kent obviously had a very real influence on political events. He was uniquely placed to act as an intermediary between high-ranking Nazis and the movers and shakers of British society for the betterment of Anglo-German relations.”

Perhaps his most delicate and controversial meetings were with his cousin and ardent Nazi, Prince Philipp von Hessen, who, for a time, had the ear of both Hitler and Göring. As Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, has confirmed, there was a “tremendous amount” of contact between the Duke of Kent and Prince Philipp von Hessen, the two men, for example, having diplomatic talks at the funeral of Queen Maria of Romania in Bucharest in July 1938.

The most important meeting between the two royals took place a year later in Florence on July 1, 1939, at the wedding of Princess Irene, the daughter of Constantine I, the king of Greece, and Prince Aimone Roberto di Savoia-Aosta, the Duke of Spoleto, the cousin of the Italian king.

The Duke of Kent was ostensibly sent along to represent the British royal family. Much more was going on behind the scenes. With war seemingly inevitable, Britain aimed to keep Italy out of the conflict for as long as realistically possible. The duke was to influence the Italian king in Britain’s favour.

George VI and Prime Minister Chamberlain had discussed the diplomatic brief for the Duke of Kent, even down to the language he would use when he met the king in Florence. Furthermore, George VI argued that his brother should invite Prince Philipp to Britain, where he could be used as a messenger to convey to Hitler that Britain was in earnest about declaring war should he try and invade Poland, the next target on his shopping list of countries.

The prime minister and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax disagreed with the king. They felt that the situation was too complex and unsettled for well-meaning amateurs rather than professional diplomats to be used to conduct negotiations.

While the king, according to his biographer John Wheeler-Bennett, did not press the issue, it is clear that he went “rogue,” defying his prime minister and foreign secretary and instructing his younger brother to initiate delicate conversations with the Italian king as well as with his German cousin Prince Philipp. It is a sign of how strongly the king felt about the possibility of royalty influencing the course of events that he decided to go way beyond his constitutional remit, which is to “advise, encourage, and warn” the government of the day. As historian Tom MacDonnell has argued: “George VI was haunted by the memory of the Great War, and he had been an enthusiastic supporter of Chamberlain’s appeasement policies. Repeatedly he had offered to make his own appeal to Hitler, sharing with his brother the Duke of Windsor the idea that kings and princes still had a meaningful part to play in diplomacy, as if nothing had happened to the map of Europe since 1914 when the Continent had been the private domain of royal cousins.”

At the war’s end Prince Philipp offered his own account of these unofficial royal discussions. He recalled that the Duke of Kent warned him that Britain would regard an invasion of Poland as a casus belli and that Germany should be under no illusions as to the possible consequences. Furthermore, the duke had pointed out that Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop was a “perpetual insult” to Britain and that conflict would always be imminent as long as the former wine salesman was in office.

As Professor Petropoulos observes: “It was bold for a British royal to circumvent established diplomatic and political procedures, and communicate to the Germans what acts would precipitate a war. According to the established practices of the British constitutional monarchy, this was not the purview of the royals.”

After his discussions with the Duke of Kent during the wedding in Italy, Prince Philipp returned to Germany to report to Hitler. The Führer was not especially interested in listening to the German royal, and it was not until August that he was granted an audience.

By then, events had moved on apace. Hitler brushed aside the warning from the Duke of Kent and then showed Prince Philipp exactly why he no longer cared what the British thought. As he stood in the room, the Führer took a phone call from von Ribbentrop, who was then in Moscow. At precisely the moment Prince Philipp was relating the warning from Buckingham Palace, Germany and Russia were signing the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact. Both Hitler and von Ribbentrop believed that the British were too “decadent” to fight. They were proved wrong; Europe plunged into war a month later when Germany invaded Poland.

Just as Hitler ignored the warning from Buckingham Palace, he ignored the urgent telegram sent from the Duke of Windsor on August 29 urging restraint. At least he did him the courtesy of responding, telling him that “if war came” it would be England’s fault. A similar cable, which the duke sent to King Vittorio Emanuele of Italy, evinced a more conciliatory response, the king assuring him that he would do his best to avert conflict. As his equerry, Dudley Forwood, observed: “I think he may have thought that his wise counsel might sway the Führer from confrontation with England.” The same could also have been said about his brother George VI who, in the dogged pursuit of peace, was prepared to provoke a constitutional crisis by exceeding his authority and defying his ministers. In the parallel world of what might have been, if George VI and the Duke of Windsor had reached an accommodation, the king could have used his brother, now a private citizen, to influence the course of war and peace.

For even though the Duke of Windsor believed, according to Forwood, that as abdicated royalty he was of little consequence on the international stage, he had an undoubted charisma that evaded his brother. For the man in the Strasse he remained, whatever his diminished status, a talisman of peace, a living icon who could change events. The profound, almost visceral response he provoked among the public was shown just a few weeks after war was declared.

A wildfire rumour spread throughout the Reich in early October 1939 suggesting that George VI had abdicated and that the Duke of Windsor, once more in possession of his crown, was calling for an end to the war. Propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels recorded that work in shops, factories, and offices, including some government ministries, was suspended amidst spontaneous celebration. “Complete strangers embraced in the streets as they told each other the news.”

It was a false hope but a reminder of the charismatic appeal of the ex-king. Though he was diminished, he was very relevant to the future of Europe—but not in the way he could ever have imagined.