‘FOR TEN YEARS BEFORE HE MET MRS SIMPSON,’ WROTE Lascelles, the Prince of Wales ‘was continuously in the throes of one shattering and absorbing love affair after another (not to mention a number of street-corner affairs)’.1 To follow these fleeting romances in any detail would be difficult and unprofitable. None was of real importance to the Prince. As late as 1931 he was still telling Freda Dudley Ward: ‘I love and adore only you really my darling.’2 For another three years he turned to her for advice and comfort and treated her home as an extension of his own. But as he moved into early middle age he began to hanker for a relationship that would fulfil his sexual needs and yet offer something nearer permanence; he looked for someone who would be more than a temporary mistress, though still less than a wife.
For a time he thought he had found her in Thelma Furness. Lady Furness was one of the Morgan sisters, twin daughters of an American consul. Her sister Gloria married the immensely rich Reginald Vanderbilt. Thelma first eloped at the age of sixteen with a roué twice her age, divorced him, and then married the even more elderly Lord Furness, scion of the shipping family. ‘Duke’ Furness was irascible and earthy, something of an oaf; his young wife was exquisitely pretty, glossy, elegant, good-natured and relentlessly frivolous. She had tired of her husband and was ripe for an affair by the time she met the Prince, who was dutifully awarding rosettes to prize-winning cows at the Leicester Fair. ‘The Prince of Wales … has been going great guns with Lady Furness,’ wrote Bruce Lockhart in Bayonne in September 1931. ‘Lord Furness is miserable about it.’3 By then the affair had been spoken of for a year or more and Lord Furness’s misery did not prevent him finding distractions in other directions.
It was a pleasant and undemanding relationship. Thelma Furness was quite content to take things as she found them and had no wish to reform the Prince or to appropriate him exclusively: ‘We talked a great deal, but mostly about trivialities,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘The Prince was not a man for abstract ideas or ponderous thought …’4 Almost the only time she caused a furore was when she took the Prince to Lourdes and he knelt as a priest went by carrying the Blessed Sacrament. Indignant Protestants wrote to protest at photographs of the heir to the British throne ‘kneeling in the mud at a Catholic ceremony’.5 But though she did little positive harm, her hedonism and indifference to any consideration that did not bear directly on her comforts encouraged the Prince in traits that were already too well pronounced. Freda Dudley Ward had curbed his selfishness and self-indulgence, Thelma Furness encouraged them. In Paris after the trip to South America Aird went out to the airport, waited several hours for the Prince, then got a message that the flight would have to be postponed till the next day. Returning to the hotel Aird found that the two Princes, after visiting the Queen of Spain, ‘had joined Lady Furness, got rather tight and arrived too late to get across in daylight, a bad show … as they were to stay at Windsor with Their Majesties’.6 Mrs Dudley Ward would never have abetted such delinquency. The Duchess of Sutherland and Lord Rosslyn found him ‘more irresponsible than he was. They blame Lady Furness, who has a bad influence on him. Freda, at any rate, kept him under restraint.’7 To Chips Channon she was the woman who ‘first “modernized” him and Americanized him, making him over-democratic, casual and a little common. Hers is the true blame for this drama.’8*5
This judgment attaches too much significance to an essentially minor figure. But though the true blame could not fairly be assigned to Thelma Furness, she was the unwitting agent who set the drama rolling. It was she who, early in 1931, first introduced the Prince of Wales to Mrs Simpson.
The career and personality of Wallis Simpson have been the subject of so much speculation, so much lurid and unbridled fantasy, that it seems ungenerous to the reader to resort to established truth. If all the books and articles on the theme can be believed, she was illegitimate; she was both a lesbian and a nymphomaniac; she was a spy for the Nazis and probably the KGB; she was Ribbentrop’s mistress and had a child by Count Ciano; she learnt her sexual techniques in the brothels of Hong Kong, or was it perhaps Shanghai? It is notoriously almost impossible to prove that something did not happen, but the evidence for all these charges seems, to say the least, unlikely to hold up in court. A typical example is the ‘China Dossier’, a report allegedly commissioned by Stanley Baldwin for George V which explored the iniquities of the then Wallis Spencer during her time in the Far East. As with all the best ghosts, everyone had a friend who had a friend who had read the dossier, yet no one seems actually to have read it himself. It is inconceivable that the King would have asked for such a report and supremely unlikely that Baldwin would have done so. No copy or reference to a copy exists in any official archive. Unless the document unexpectedly emerges it can safely be forgotten.
To stick, then, to prosaic and verifiable truth. Wallis Warfield was born on 19 June 1896, two years after the Prince of Wales. Both the Warfields and her mother’s family, the Montagues, were of distinguished Southern stock and Wallis was brought up as one of the Baltimore aristocracy. She was, however, a poor relation; her father, Teakle Warfield, had little money and died of tuberculosis when his daughter was only five months old. Teakle’s widow existed on the charity of relations, eked out by what she made from letting rooms in her apartment. Wallis was brought up in a world in which her friends and relations had nicer clothes than she did, lived in bigger houses, took for granted as the necessities of life what to her seemed almost unimaginable luxuries. ‘Here was the root of her ambition,’ wrote Michael Bloch perceptively, ‘– a desire to avenge early struggles, to prove herself in the eyes of rich and snobbish cousins, to restore herself to a social and material level which, in her heart, she felt to be rightfully hers.’9
She had little natural beauty to help her in her battle. ‘Nobody ever called me beautiful or even pretty,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘… My jaw was clearly too big and too pointed to be classic. My hair was straight when the laws of compensation might at least have provided curls.’10 Her assets were fine eyes, a radiant complexion, an excellent figure and a sense of style which was refined with time but apparent from the moment she first took responsibility for her own appearance. Cecil Beaton found her ‘alluring. Her skin … was incredibly bright and smooth like the inside of a shell, her hair as sleek as only the Chinese women know how to make it … I like her surprised eyebrows when she laughs and her face has great gaiety.’11
She was no more an intellectual than she was a beauty. She rarely read books, cared little for painting and nothing for music. She was quick-witted and enjoyed a retentive memory but as a schoolgirl neither excelled in class nor wished to do so. Her main preoccupation from an early age was boys, and to attract them she had wit, blazing vitality, a capacity for total concentration on her interlocutor of the moment, a shrewd perception of masculine weaknesses and an understanding of how to exploit them to her advantage. In society she was ruthless and voracious, the fact that a boy belonged to some other girl was a challenge to secure him for herself. One of her oldest friends and admirers, Herman Rogers, is quoted as saying that she was the most selfish woman he had ever known – ‘Even men she didn’t want, she didn’t want anyone else to have.’12
In 1936 Nancy Dugdale, the wife of Baldwin’s parliamentary private secretary, showed a sheet of Wallis’s handwriting to the German graphologist Fräulein Gusti Oesterreicher, who spoke no English and could have had no inkling who the writer might be. Miss Oesterreicher’s report described Wallis as being:
A woman with a strong male inclination in the sense of activity, vitality and initiative, she must dominate, she must have authority, and without sufficient scope for her powers can become disagreeable … In the pursuit of her aim she can be most inconsiderate, and can hurt, but on the whole she is not without some instincts of nobility and generosity … She is ambitious and demands above all that her undertakings should be noticed and valued. In the physical sense of the word sadistic, cold, overbearing, vain.13
It is a harsh verdict, but it reflects some credit on the science of graphology.
Her main preoccupation was to get away from Baltimore, and she snapped up the first remotely eligible husband who came her way. The marriage proved disastrous. ‘Win’ Spencer was a handsome naval officer who seemed to have a promising career ahead of him, but he proved to be a moody and sometimes violent alcoholic. How far a more sympathetic wife could have helped him is another matter – Wallis was not kind to failures – but as it was the marriage soon became intolerable. Wallis left him, lived alone in Washington for six years during which she had at least one flagrant love affair with an Argentine diplomat, briefly rejoined her husband in the Far East, left him again but spent another year in China before she returned home in 1925 and sued for divorce.
It had been a rackety ten years, and when she remarried it was for respectability. Ernest Simpson worked in the family shipping business. He had an English father and an American mother, preferring the social pretensions of the former. He had served briefly in the Coldstream Guards, an all-important association in his eyes, and valued highly such connections in high places as he could muster. He was diligent, ponderous, uninspired. For Wallis he meant security; what she meant to him is harder to say, but undoubtedly he loved her. They married in July 1928 and settled down in a rented house in London to live the life of a prosperous upper-middle-class couple with social aspirations slightly, though by no means absurdly, beyond their purse. Wallis was a highly competent manager and quickly established herself as a hostess who gave her guests excellent food and drink and, more important, made sure they enjoyed themselves and left in the belief that they had been appreciated. Their friends were mainly Americans in London, among them Benjamin Thaw, the First Secretary at the US Embassy, who was married to another of the Morgan sisters. It was through Thaw that she came to know and – in so far as she could be on affectionate terms with another woman – to make a friend of Thaw’s sister-in-law, Thelma Furness.
Lady Furness’s claim to have introduced Wallis Simpson to the Prince of Wales is not undisputed. Mountbatten insisted that the first meeting took place at his brother’s house, Lynden Manor. Lord Milford Haven, presumably to oblige the Prince who was staying nearby, invited Thelma Furness for the weekend. She brought the Simpsons with her. The Prince duly came over to lunch and seemed wholly unimpressed by Wallis’s charms. Within a few weeks, however, she had somehow ‘reached a position where they went to bed. From that moment he lost all sense of reason.’14 The dates, at least, are wrong. The gap between first meeting and the start of the affair proper was far longer than a few weeks. It seems certain that they first met at Lady Furness’s country house, Burrough Court, near Melton Mowbray, on 10 January 1931, when the Thaws fell ill and the Simpsons were asked to stand in at a weekend house party.15 But it is true that Wallis made little impression at their first meeting. Lady Kimberley, who was dining with the Furnesses, says that Wallis was sitting opposite the Prince at dinner. Suddenly she leant forward and said, ‘Sir, do you think me very like Rita Kruger?’ (a woman whom the Prince had courted in New York). ‘Good God! No!’ said the Prince, and turned back to his neighbour.16
Wallis was delighted to have met the Prince and hoped that she would see more of him in the future. The most exalted London hostesses found the company he kept a little louche, but they were none the less gratified when he graced their assemblies with his presence. He was not merely at, he was the pinnacle of society. To be accepted as one of his circle of friends would be for Mrs Simpson an achievement as glorious as she could well imagine. ‘Probably we will never hear or see any of them again, however,’ she wrote resignedly to her aunt and most faithful correspondent, Mrs Bessie Merryman.17 It was May 1931 before they did meet again; mid-January 1932 before the Prince dined at their flat in Bryanston Court – he stayed till 4 a.m. – and the end of that month before they spent a weekend at Fort Belvedere. By 3 May 1933 she had passed several more weekends at the Fort and the last two nights dancing with the Prince at the Embassy Club, but, she told Aunt Bessie, ‘Thelma is still the Princess of Wales’.18 For the first time, however, the possibility that this shadowy title might become hers was forming in her mind.
The coast was soon clear. In January 1934 Thelma Furness sailed to the United States. In her memoirs she describes how she asked Wallis to ‘look after him while I’m away. See that he doesn’t get into any mischief.’19 If she was genuinely anxious to keep the Prince to herself she played her cards singularly badly. First she left the field open to somebody whom she must have realized was potentially a dangerous rival, then on the way back from New York she conducted a flamboyant flirtation with that celebrated rake, Aly Khan. The news of this escapade stilled any pangs of conscience the Prince might have felt. She went to Fort Belvedere for the weekend soon after her return, but the atmosphere was uncomfortable, the Prince distant and at pains to avoid any intimate conversation. At dinner she noticed that the Prince and Wallis were having private jokes together; when the Prince picked up a piece of salad Wallis playfully slapped his hand. Thelma looked disapproving. ‘Wallis looked straight at me. And then and there I knew the “reason” was Wallis … I knew then she had looked after him exceedingly well. That one cold, defiant glance had told me the entire story.’20 Next day she left the Fort and the Prince of Wales’s life.
It did not take long before those who knew the Prince well realized that this was not just a casual affair, that Mrs Simpson was there to stay. She established her authority with unrelenting thoroughness. She would not make the same mistake as Thelma Furness. Any rival must be eliminated. For several months Freda Dudley Ward had been wholly preoccupied by the illness of her elder daughter. In mid-1934, with the crisis behind her, she began to pick up the threads of her life and telephoned York House. With extreme embarrassment the operator told her that she had been instructed not to put her through to the Prince. The brutality of this ending to an intimate friendship of sixteen years cannot be condoned; it can only be explained by the assumption that Mrs Simpson had told the Prince it must be either her or Mrs Dudley Ward, and the Prince had lacked the courage to break this news to the victim. Wallis herself denied this, claiming that she had tried to ensure the Prince at least kept in touch with Freda Dudley Ward’s children.21 Whatever she may have said, she can have intended one thing only, the relationship must end.
The Prince cut out of his life not merely Freda, but also the two daughters who had been so close to him. When Angela married a soldier, Robert Laycock, the Prince did not attend the wedding or even send a token present. He had never kept the letters of women before he met Wallis, so it is not surprising that virtually no trace of Mrs Dudley Ward’s existence survives among his papers, or even his vast collection of photographs. One scrap of evidence is to be found, however. In 1944 Angela Laycock took advantage of the fact that her husband had to write to the Duke on official business to include an affectionate letter of her own.22 The Duke of Windsor did not answer it but he kept it among his records. Perhaps the fact meant nothing, but it is possible to imagine in such a gesture some degree of nostalgia for the past.
John Aird was at the weekend party that saw Lady Furness’s final retreat, but had no suspicion what was happening. The Prince, he said, could not have been nicer or more charming but ‘his friends of his own selection are awful and one of the worst examples was there, a couple called Simson [sic], she is an American 150 per cent and HRH seems to like her a bit extra; he is a very unattractive and common Englishman … They seem terrible at first and this feeling does not decrease as one sees them more often, although basically, I think, they are quite nice …’23 By the following weekend his eyes were beginning to open. Halsey had told him that he thought Lady Furness had been dismissed and Aird concluded he must be right ‘as Wallace Simson [sic sic!] seems to do all the things she used to except the cigar lighting’. He continued to find the Simpsons uncongenial bores; ‘he seems full of general information like a Whitaker, while she pretends to have taste in decoration and food – maybe the first, but certainly not the second’.24
She did indeed do all the things that Lady Furness had done, and more besides. She made herself felt in every aspect of life at Fort Belvedere; ‘she ploughed it up,’ in the phrase of one of the staff. A footman brought in by Thelma Furness was quickly dismissed, the cook soon followed. She infuriated the staff by visiting the kitchen at 2 or 3 a.m. and cooking bacon and eggs, leaving ‘the hell of a mess’ behind her. She was not actively rude, but hostile and assertive.25 The Prince’s valet, Jack Crisp, even claimed that she would go round the Fort breaking the tips of the pencils so that the staff would have to sharpen them – a somewhat far-fetched charge which perhaps says more about the paranoia she induced among the servants than her actual behaviour.26
‘If Ernest raises any objections to the situation I shall give the Prince up at once,’ Wallis told Aunt Bessie in May.27 It is clear that she then, and for many months to come, saw her relationship with the Prince as being an enjoyable extra, with her marriage as the bedrock of her life. So far as possible she included her husband in all her royal engagements and she sedulously maintained that all three were the best of friends. Nor was she being untruthful: the Prince at this stage was perfectly happy to endure the presence of Ernest Simpson while Simpson, snobbishly reverent of all things royal, basked contentedly in the reflected glory of his wife’s conquest.
The first time Simpson was significantly absent was in August 1934, when the Prince took a party to Biarritz and then for a cruise in Lord Moyne’s yacht, the Rosaura. Aird was responsible for organizing the holiday. It started badly with two days of continuous rain and the Prince suffering from a surfeit of langoustines and being sick at his table in the Café de Paris. Wallis complained that she was not being introduced to all the English notables whom she felt sure were to be found at Biarritz. ‘I think she would complain more if she was,’ commented Aird drily. ‘I feel that she is not basically a bad sort of tough girl out to get what she can, but unless she is much cleverer than I think, she does not quite know how to work it so as to cash in best.’28 At this stage Aird thought he detected signs that the Prince was tiring of his liaison and seeking ways to escape from it; by mid-August he had revised his views. ‘Behaviour in public excellent, in private awful and most embarrassing for others,’ he wrote. The Prince ‘has lost all confidence in himself and follows W around like a dog’.29
On the whole Aird at this stage thought Wallis’s influence was beneficial; she made the Prince dress better, and except for introducing him to Old Fashioned cocktails, kept his drinking down. He revised his opinion when the party took to sea. A storm blew up. Wallis was never good when confronted by physical danger and the Prince seems to have been infected by her fear. ‘He was really frightened, and in my opinion is a coward at heart,’ wrote Aird.30 His previous record shows him, on the contrary, to have been physically intrepid. Yet Aird was partly right. Formerly the Prince had delighted in flying in small aircraft and had always been the one who wanted to push on in bad conditions; once Wallis came on the scene he seemed to lose all confidence in aeroplanes as a means of transport. It is a striking illustration of her influence over him.
This holiday inspired the first reference in the press to the Prince’s new romance. Time, in a September, referred to the fun that ‘Edward of Wales [was] having at Cannes last week with beautiful Mrs Wallace Simpson’.31 Aird still saw no danger; at the end of the holiday he concluded ‘she does not seem to have any illusions about the situation and definitely does not want to do anything that will lose her husband’.32 But there could be no doubt about the ever-increasing importance the Prince attached to the relationship. ‘I have had the best holiday in my life,’ he told Godfrey Thomas.33
Up till now Mrs Simpson’s existence had been tacitly ignored by the King and Queen. In November 1934, however, the Prince included Mrs Simpson’s name in a list of people he wanted invited to an evening party in Buckingham Palace in honour of the Duke of Kent’s wedding. The King scratched her out. According to Wigram the Prince nevertheless introduced her surreptitiously into the Palace; Cromer says that it was the Duke of Kent who reinstated her on the list.34 At all events she was present, ostentatiously squired by the Prince. Christopher of Greece was taken up to meet her and asked who she was. An American, the Prince answered; ‘Then he smiled. “She’s wonderful,” he added. The two words told me everything.’35 He introduced Wallis to his mother, ‘and would have done to HM if he had not been cut off,’ wrote Aird.36 The King was outraged. ‘That woman in my own house!’ he stormed to Mensdorff. At least Mrs Dudley Ward had come from a better class. As for the Prince: ‘He has not a single friend who is a gentleman.’ When Mensdorff pleaded that the Prince had many qualities, the King replied: ‘Yes, certainly. That is the pity. If he were a fool we would not mind.’37 He gave orders to the Lord Chamberlain that Mrs Simpson was not to be invited to any Silver Jubilee function nor to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.38
The Prince’s staff became seriously alarmed when in February 1935 he set off on another expedition with Wallis in the party and no husband in sight. This time it was a skiing holiday in Kitzbühel. ‘People will not remain silent for ever,’ Halsey wrote apprehensively.39 Bruce Ogilvy took Aird’s place. He was asked to bring along another man and chose his Scottish neighbour and old friend Andrew Lyall. Lyall, however, was an enthusiastic skier; Wallis, after her first tentative foray on to the slopes had ended in disaster, decided the sport was not for her. Ogilvy had to find another man to entertain her, and from the few available unwisely chose the extremely handsome James Dugdale.40 Wallis took a fancy to him and insisted on sitting next to him at every meal; the Prince fretted miserably; Dugdale, finding the situation impossible, began to skulk in his room all day. When Ogilvy tried to tip the waiter more than the obligatory 10 per cent, Wallis spotted what he was doing and at once objected; and most of the presents which had been brought along for presentation to local dignitaries remained in their cases because she saw no reason for their distribution. It was not a relaxing holiday.41 It was, however, popular with the Austrians who interpreted the presence of the heir to the British throne as an encouragement to them in their efforts to resist the pressure of Nazi Germany.42
It was this holiday which convinced Wigram that enough was enough. He called on the Prince at the Fort and tried to convey to him how worried the King was about his private life. ‘The Prince said that he was astonished that anyone could take offence about his personal friends. Mrs Simpson was a charming, cultivated woman.’43 Halsey had pressed Wigram to make this démarche and was convinced that good must come of it – ‘I do believe that you have given him a good shake,’ he wrote, but Thomas knew his employer better. He doubted if the Prince was at all shaken, he told Wigram; on the contrary, he was planning a holiday with Wallis in Italy for the spring.44 Aird, too, had no illusions. The result of the protest was nil, he wrote, ‘and the devotion of HRH if possible greater’. Two rooms at the Fort had been turned into one for Wallis’s benefit, presumably to obviate the risk that, when the house was full, the dressing room adjoining her bedroom might be occupied and access thus impeded.45 Trotter had joined in the chorus of disapproval and been equally unsuccessful in persuading the Prince to change his course. More optimistic than Thomas, however, he believed that the Prince knew ‘in his inmost heart’ that he was behaving badly. We must be patient, he told Thomas: ‘I am sure his eyes will be opened to the folly he is making of himself, and when he does come for help and sympathy, I am sure you will respond as I know I shall.’46
Halsey had previously urged the King to support the efforts of his courtiers, but George V refused to speak directly to his son, saying that he had tried to remonstrate with him about Lady Furness and had achieved nothing. ‘He went as far as to say that he was beginning to think it would almost be better if the POW abdicated, but of course that was a course which would be bound to cause trouble.’47 His ban on Mrs Simpson’s appearance at court did, however, lead to a confrontation with his son. First the Prince tackled Cromer, the Lord Chamberlain, and having made no progress with him, asked the King direct that the Simpsons should be invited to the Court Ball. The King said he could not invite his son’s mistress on such an occasion. The Prince swore that she was not his mistress, the King accepted his word and said that she could come; ‘I think this is all for the best,’ wrote Aird in his diary, ‘but it is rather a shock to think of the Prince of Wales lying on his oath, which a lot of people who know think he has.’48
The Prince always maintained that he had never slept with Mrs Simpson before his marriage, and sued for libel an author who referred to her as his mistress. Few of those who were closest to him believed his word. After the Prince’s talk with the King, Wigram wrote that ‘Halsey and the staff were horrified at the audacity of the statements of HRH. Apart from actually seeing HRH and Mrs S in bed together, they had positive proof that HRH lived with her.’49 Aird saw him emerge early in the morning ‘with his upper lip all red!! So that’s that and no mistake.’50 Alan Lascelles said that he would find it as easy to believe in the innocence of their relationship as in ‘a herd of unicorns grazing in Hyde Park and a shoal of mermaids swimming in the Serpentine’.51 Yet no one knows what happens behind a bedroom door except those who are inside. It is perfectly possible, and indeed not out of keeping with what is known of Mrs Simpson’s character, that the Prince had been kept at bay and that, technically at least, he was telling the truth when he promised the King that Mrs Simpson was not his mistress. The question can never be resolved but the King at least was convinced by Wigram that his son had lied. Wallis went to the Court Ball, danced only once with the Prince, and behaved impeccably; but when, after supper, the King left, Aird noted that ‘HRH went as far as the private door but got no remark from HM, not even “goodnight”’.52
The rest of the royal family shared the King’s dismay. The Duchess of York openly said that she would not meet Mrs Simpson, though in fact they encountered each other on several occasions and Aird was amused to see them in the same room when the Prince gave a party at Fort Belvedere.53 William Teeling, the author and traveller, was dining with the Yorks at the Dorchester when the Prince and Wallis arrived in another party – ‘After one dance the Yorks decided to leave and our party broke up.’54 The Duke of Kent was better disposed towards his brother’s affair, but it was widely said that his wife too was reluctant to meet somebody whom she considered a dangerous adventuress. Meanwhile the relationship became more and more widely known. Lady Constance Gaskell ‘talked of the terrible way the Prince of Wales carries on’; Miss Bigge, Stamfordham’s daughter, ruled that his behaviour was ‘deplorable and wretched’;55 Lord and Lady Stanley were said to ‘loathe the Prince of Wales’s attitude’.56 These were the voices of the Establishment; many others could have been found who saw little or nothing wrong in the Prince’s conduct. But the Establishment was a powerful force, and once on the move could be hard to resist.
No one doubted that the Prince’s holiday in 1935 would again include Mrs Simpson. Thomas felt that, if they had to be together, it was best it should be outside England. His concern was that they should not travel out together: ‘He has drawn so much attention to it on previous occasions abroad by taking her out with him, passing her and her luggage through Customs under his laissezpasser.’57 George V agreed, and made this a condition of his sanctioning the trip.58 At one point the Prince announced that he planned to tour the Italian coastal resorts; since tension over Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia was then extreme the King consulted Hoare about the ‘silly yachting trip David wants to make in the Mediterranean’, and then quashed the idea.59
Aird was back in attendance and was disconcerted when, on arrival at Cannes, the Prince rushed to the house they had rented and himself arranged the rooms, giving the best bedroom to his equerry and apportioning himself ‘a rotten little room next to W’. An hour later the decision was reversed, ‘at whose suggestion I do not know’.60 Aird noticed that Ernest Simpson was mentioned less often than the year before and then only in a disparaging way.61 But he persisted in his conviction that all would come right in the end: ‘I feel she is getting tired of the pace and having secured the cash will chuck her hand in,’ he wrote hopefully in his diary.62
The pace continued to quicken, and Wallis’s hand was far from being chucked in. Some time in the summer ‘G’ Trotter wrote to the Prince, criticizing the transfer of his loyalties from Thelma to Wallis – ‘very stupid and impudent,’ Aird considered Trotter’s behaviour. ‘… after all, there is nothing to choose between the women, both are tough girls, and if one can’t treat tough girls like this, what is the point of tough girls?’63 The Prince did not respond, but brooded on the offence, and when Trotter reverted to the matter shortly before Christmas he found himself summarily dismissed. The Prince refused even to shake hands with him. Aird thought the dismissal justified, if only because Trotter had most evidently not been up to the job over the last year or two, ‘but the manner in which it would appear HRH did it is unpardonable … especially in view of G’s age and what G has done for and with him’.64 Thomas gloomily speculated that he might be the next to get into Mrs Simpson’s bad books and meet the same fate: ‘I steer completely clear of her, but HRH knows only too well what I think of the whole business, and one day I may blurt out more than I’ve already said and produce a crisis.’65
New Year’s Eve found them at Melton for a fancy dress ball: the Prince, Wallis and, for once, Ernest, all dressed as pirates, which since the theme of the ball was ‘1066 and Before That’ seemed doubtfully appropriate. The Prince was in notably good spirits and did not appear in the least put out at being confronted by some of Freda Dudley Ward’s closest friends and both her daughters – ‘I do not think he noticed any women there except Wallis,’ recorded Aird.66 But though the Prince was unaware of it, a Freda faction – and indeed a Thelma faction – had formed, who criticized his fickleness as vociferously as any of the starchier figures who deplored illicit liaisons of whatever kind. Harold Nicolson went with him to the theatre a fortnight later. ‘I have an uneasy feeling that Mrs S … is getting him out of touch with the sort of person he ought to frequent,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Yet the Dudley Ward row prevents all that, and I fear that her supporters are better than us, although Lady Furness’s supporters are worse than us.’67
Within a few days of this diary entry being made the King was on his deathbed. The next time that Nicolson met his theatre companion he would be on the throne.
No holds were barred when the gossips of the period or the friskier biographers of a later age sought to analyse the appeal that Wallis Simpson held for the Prince of Wales. Wigram believed she was, to all intents and purposes, a witch. Lady Cynthia Colville discussed with the psychologist Dr William Brown the theory that Mrs Simpson had hypnotized the Prince. Brown did not dismiss it out of hand but thought it more likely that the Prince’s sex life had hitherto been ‘difficult, unsatisfactory and a constant source of inward misery’ to him. Mrs Simpson had dispelled these difficulties – by arcane arts studied in a Far Eastern brothel, say the more fanciful – and so appeared ‘in the guise of a wonderful saviour’, who easily obtained undue ascendancy over her victim. Lady Cynthia hastened to impart these speculations to Queen Mary.68 Wigram read her letter, and nodded his head sadly over the infinite frailties to which the human heart was subject. Dr Brown’s thesis confirmed what he had long suspected, that the Prince ‘had a weak spot in his mental equipment which Mrs S by foul and unfair means has exploited for her own advantage. As long as HRH is under this spell it would be useless to try to get him to go to a doctor to dispel this evil influence. She has him too tight in her grasp and is like a vampire.’69
Lady Furness is among others who advanced the theory that the Prince was sexually deficient and that only Wallis found the means of releasing him from his inhibitions.70 Bruce Ogilvy, who lacked Lady Furness’s specialized knowledge of the subject but, not being a woman scorned, has a greater claim to objectivity, took the same view.71 The trouble with the theory is that, far from finding sex difficult, unsatisfactory or a constant source of inward misery, the Prince appeared to rate it among his greatest pleasures. The hectic abandon with which he pursued women during the interwar years is surely hard to reconcile with the vision of an inhibited and bungling lover? Any man may accept humiliation once or twice; to court it time and time again would be conduct hard to comprehend. That Wallis Simpson provoked in him profound sexual excitement is self-evident. That such excitement may have had some kind of sadomasochistic trimmings is possible, even likely. That she introduced him to a brave new world which had previously been closed to him is, to say the least, not proven. We shall anyway never know: what Yeats called ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ is mercifully padlocked against even the most prying and prurient of biographers.
Nor does it greatly matter. Wallis Simpson’s sexual allure might have gained the Prince’s attention, quickened his interest, engaged his passionate commitment, but it could not have retained him for a lifetime. Until the day he died his eyes would follow her around the room; if she went out he would grow anxious and would shortly find a reason for following her; at the dinner table he would be always craning forward to hear what she was saying; at a party he would watch her, to see if there was some service he could render. Total devotion it certainly was, slavish devotion some would say, but he found contentment in it.
It was her personality, not her appearance or her sexual techniques, which captivated him. She gave him something that he had never found before and which he now realized he needed desperately. All his adult life he had been surrounded by deferential courtiers and fawning hostesses. Halsey and Thomas were honourable men, who were ready to tell him when they felt he was doing wrong, but they did so with profound respect, respect for the office if not always for the man. Wallis respected neither office nor man, and made it abundantly plain that this was so. No Englishwoman, however assertive, however independent, however little wedded to the cause of monarchy, could have done the same. Wallis was harsh, dominating, often abominably rude. She treated the Prince at the best like a child who needed keeping in order, at the worst with contempt. He invited it and begged for more. When the weekend guests at Fort Belvedere had departed, she would taunt and berate him until he was reduced to tears.72 ‘She completely dominates every situation in which he is present,’ remarked Victor Cazalet.73
Nor did he ever weary of this sensation. At a dinner party in Paris after the war, the Duke of Windsor unthinkingly asked the butler to give the chauffeur a message about his needs the following day. The Duchess, who missed nothing that happened at her table, raised her hands high in the air and brought them down with a crash that set the plates and glasses rattling. A horrified hush fell on the company. ‘Never,’ hissed the Duchess, ‘never again will you give orders in my house!’ Realizing that she had gone a little far, she then turned to her neighbour and explained, ‘You see, the Duke is in charge of everything that happens outside the house, and I on the inside.’ Far from resenting this somewhat cavalier treatment, the Duke cringed and for the next ten minutes muttered incoherent apologies.74 Ulick Alexander, a courtier who was perhaps more devoted to the Prince of Wales than any other in the inner circle, described him as being possessed by ‘the sexual perversion of self abasement’.75 A psychiatrist would perhaps venture some explanation based on his relationship with his mother or bullying by his nanny. Whatever the origins, now he was a man of forty the facts were clear: he was frightened by Wallis Simpson, enjoyed being frightened by her, and accepted her lightest word as law. He loved her; it was perhaps a peculiar kind of love, but it was love all the same.
Whether she loved him is another, more difficult question. Certainly she exploited him. She was a mean and acquisitive woman: cheerfully accepting a present of £50 from a friend with an invitation to a royal reception provided as a recompense, buying her clothes half-price at Mainbocher’s in Paris and making the Prince fly them back duty free in his private aircraft.76 The author Mrs Belloc Lowndes exclaimed with surprise that a woman as well dressed as Mrs Simpson should wear such garish costume jewellery. The other women present, all in the Simpson circle, ‘screeched with laughter, exclaiming that all the jewels were real, that the then Prince of Wales had given her fifty thousand pounds’ worth at Christmas, following it up with sixty thousand pounds’ worth of jewels a week later at the New Year’.77 The figures seem high, but not out of all contact with reality; certainly the Prince several times drew more than £10,000 from the Duchy accounts, apparently to finance purchases of jewellery. Nor was it just presents of jewels. In July 1935 Halsey admitted to the King that Mrs Simpson was receiving ‘a very handsome income’ from the Prince: ‘I also told HM that in my opinion Mrs S and her husband were hand in glove in getting all they could out of HRH.’78 Aird, at about the same time, put the sum at £6000 a year and recorded that ‘W looks like succeeding to get some more money out of him’.79
But it is possible to exploit someone and still to love them. Bruce Ogilvy’s opinion is that she was at first dazzled by the royal glamour, then genuinely attracted by his charm.80 She never matched his consuming passion, but for some months at least he was all-important to her. By the time he succeeded to the throne, however, the man and his worldly position had long been separated in her mind. Duff Cooper talked lengthily to her and concluded, ‘she is a nice woman and a sensible woman – but she is hard as nails and she doesn’t love him’.81 She was touched by his devotion to her, felt protective towards him, but it was no more than that. She was loyal to him, however, and by her own lights good-natured. She wanted him to be happy, and knew that she could make him happy as nobody else could. What would happen to him when he became King she did not know, but of one thing she was sure: she was not going willingly to relinquish her hold on his affections.