19

Exile

THE SIX MONTHS BETWEEN HIS DEPARTURE FROM BRITAIN and his marriage to Mrs Simpson were the unhappiest of the Duke of Windsor’s life. To abandon totally what one has for forty years been taught to believe is sacred and immutable must be for anyone a traumatic experience. For the Duke it was made doubly destructive by the fact that he was bored and lonely, those two corrosive elements that can destroy happiness as surely as any tragic accident. ‘I can never describe to you, darling Mama, the complete and utter loneliness of these endless months of separation from Wallis …’ he wrote to Queen Mary. ‘It really is a nightmare and so much worse than I ever expected.’¹ He was as ill-equipped as any grown man could have been to grapple with these new and fearful pressures; pressures the worse because they were accompanied by the disappearance of all those mundane and practical compulsions which beset an active monarch. His intellectual resources he had never cultivated; he had been sustained by a hectic routine of duties and pleasures and total dependence on one adored human being. Now the routine had been abolished, and the human being was far away. Lascelles judged him harshly but there was some truth in his assertion that the Duke was ‘like the child in the fairy story who was given everything in the world, but they forgot the soul. He has no spiritual or aesthetic side at all. He did not know beauty when he saw it … He cared for nothing in nature.’²

Cut off from his roots, he almost visibly withered. He clung pathetically to those few relics of his most precious relationship which he had managed to carry with him into exile. Brownlow described him as sleeping in a room which was almost entirely bare except for several large photographs of Mrs Simpson: ‘No bibelots, nothing personal at all except a little yellow pillow on his bed that once was hers.’³ There was no shortage of people to talk to, but there was only one person to whom he wanted to talk. He had never found intimacy easy – perhaps no Prince of Wales could – and now it had become impossible. ‘So much has been written and said of the bad influence of his “intimates”,’ wrote Brownlow. ‘So far as I know he had none! … and he told me in Vienna that he was proud of this fact as being a Kingly virtue – but if friendship and an open heart are vices, what hope is there for a man in trouble?’⁴ When the Archbishop attacked Edward VIII’s circle of friends, Malcolm Bullock, a Conservative member of parliament and son-in-law of Lord Derby, exclaimed: ‘The late King had no friends.’ ‘It’s terribly true,’ reflected Channon, ‘only Fruity Metcalfe with his checks and his brogue. No other man friend did the King ever have.’⁵

His only solace was interminable telephone calls – after three months the bill was over £800 – which often left him more distracted than when he had begun. For the rest, he had endless time in which to brood, to imagine slights where none had been intended, to build up minor grievances into intolerable misfortunes. It is impossible to read the letters which he wrote before he rejoined Mrs Simpson without sensing the bleak and anguished desolation that lay behind them. They were written by a man who had not merely lost all sense of proportion but who was – in the most literal sense possible of that most metaphorical phrase – out of his mind.

To those who saw the Duke casually none of this was evident; most accounts stress his cheerfulness and freedom from apparent strain. Indeed, things at first did not go badly. His original idea had been to take up the reservation in the Zurich hotel which had been made by Legh a week before, but Mrs Simpson and Brownlow joined in protesting that the former King of England could not retire to a hostelry, however respectable. They jointly concocted the plan that he should borrow from Baron Eugene de Rothschild his country house, Schloss Enzesfeld, near Vienna. He had visited the house briefly during his stay in Austria in September, and had had a cold at the time. Brownlow now telephoned to ask whether ‘his young brother David, the one who had the bad cold last time’ could come to stay.⁶ Kitty Rothschild cracked this simple code, and said she would be honoured and delighted. Mrs Simpson wrote to thank her: ‘Dear Kitty – be kind to him. He is honest and good and really worthy of affection. They simply haven’t understood.’⁷

Walford Selby, the British Ambassador, met him at the station and was relieved to find him ‘looking less tired than I had expected after the terrific strain through which he must have passed’. The platform had been cleared but the Duke insisted that the dozens of journalists and photographers who had made the journey from all over Europe should be allowed to approach him. Then it was off to the Schloss; an ideal site, Selby thought, among remote woods in the foothills of the mountains, with large and secluded grounds and plenty of scope for golf and skiing within a few miles.⁸ It had only two flaws, in fact: it was not Fort Belvedere and Wallis Simpson was far away.

It would never have been much of an idyll, but what little chance there was of the Duke finding tranquillity at Schloss Enzesfeld was quickly dispelled. The first blow was struck by the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘My heart aches for the “Duke of Windsor”,’ Lang wrote directly after the abdication, ‘remembering his childhood, his boyhood, his days at Oxford, the rich promise of his service as Prince of Wales – all ruined by his disastrous liking for vulgar society, and by his infatuation for this Mrs Simpson.’ Presumably the Duke would now go through ‘some form of marriage’ with his mistress. ‘Then either his better self will be destroyed, or if it survives and he longs again for his old interests and occupations he may try to return … Either prospect is dark.’⁹ The Archbishop elected to demonstrate his aching heart by an address on the BBC in which he attributed the King’s failure to carry out his responsibilities to a ‘craving for private happiness’, and denounced the ‘vulgar society’ which had led him down this primrose path.¹⁰ Baldwin, Reith, Lord Salisbury and Queen Mary predictably wrote to congratulate him on this effort, but of the 250 letters Lang received within the first day or two, most were abusive and many violently so.¹¹ Churchill wrote to tell the Duke that there had been a storm of anger raised against Lang for his unchivalrous references to the late reign: ‘Even those who were very hostile to your standpoint turned round and salved their feelings by censuring the Archbishop.’¹²

The Duke was outraged. ‘The strain here is pretty great as you can imagine,’ Piers Legh told Thomas, ‘and the Archbishop’s outburst hasn’t helped.’ Legh proposed to stick it out till the end of the year, when he hoped that Thomas, Alexander, or the naval equerry Charles Lambe, would relieve him. Lang’s address, he reported, had caused much comment in Vienna and left the ‘haute noblesse’ wondering whether the Duke should still be treated as a member of the royal family.¹³ Monckton, alarmed by the rumblings of indignation from Schloss Enzesfeld, urged Lascelles to get the King to do all he could to forestall such fulminations in the future. So far he had managed to stop the Duke making any public statement but at any time he might insist upon ‘rushing to the defence of those who have tried to help him’.¹⁴ The King needed no such warning, the night after the broadcast he had to endure a ‘tirade which went on endlessly’ from his brother on the subject.¹⁵

Not to be outdone, the Archbishop of York now chose to include a passage on the abdication in his diocesan letter. ‘I was considerably annoyed to see that my brother of York, after an interval of more than a week, had seen fit to publish his own remarks about poor King Edward,’ wrote Lang, with slightly belated squeamishness.¹⁶ George VI was thoroughly put out; he felt that his brother had given certain undertakings and that the other side of the bargain was not being kept. To show his feelings he proposed to include in his New Year’s Day message a reference to ‘a brother whose brilliant qualities gave promise of another historic reign – a reign cut short in circumstances upon which, from their very sadness, none of us would wish to dwell’. Evil-minded persons, remarked Lascelles blandly, might detect in this a veiled rebuke to the Archbishops, ‘but I think their minds would have to be very evil to do that!’¹⁷

Even more disturbing to the Duke was the proposal to withdraw British police protection from Mrs Simpson. John Simon had a point when he asked how he was supposed to justify in the House of Commons the expenditure of public funds for this purpose, and Baldwin another when he argued that the presence of British policemen achieved little and annoyed the French, but Mrs Simpson was convinced she was about to be a target for the vengeance of royalist fanatics and she communicated these fears to the Duke colourfully and at length. Legh believed that the withdrawal of police protection would ‘drive HRH mad quicker than anything else’ and added that in that case he would not be responsible for what might happen.¹⁸ He said as much to the Prime Minister when he got back to London. ‘I imagine that he thought the Duke might go to join her,’ noted Baldwin; a thought alarming enough to ensure that the police were retained for the time being.¹⁹

The arrival of Fruity Metcalfe in January 1937 did something to relieve the tension at Schloss Enzesfeld. He was not allowed to bring his wife, however, on the somewhat unlikely grounds that it might be mentioned in the papers if he did. The Duke made it clear he wanted no woman around the Schloss.²⁰ The true reason for this became clear to Metcalfe early in February when Mrs Simpson berated the Duke for having an affair with his hostess, Kitty Rothschild – ‘This is d – d funny, but I can tell you it was no joke last night.’²¹ Mrs Simpson’s nerves were every bit as frayed as those of the Duke, and she found some relief in nagging him ruthlessly over the telephone. ‘I feel so sorry for him, he never seems able to do what she considers the right thing,’ commented Metcalfe, and again a week later: ‘God, that woman’s a bitch, she’ll play hell with him before long.’²²

Meanwhile hundreds of letters a day poured in, most of them hostile, some viciously so, in particular in their attacks on Mrs Simpson. The majority were intercepted by the staff but the Duke saw some and was aghast: all his life he had been fawned on and flattered, suddenly to find himself execrated was a painful experience. The press was even worse. ‘The papers (the bad ones) are too horrible and so mischievous about David,’ the Queen wrote to Queen Mary. ‘He doesn’t realize that they are doing so much harm I feel sure, and thinks that Beaverbrook and Rothermere are “on his side” and worth cultivating.’²³ To the royal family in London it seemed as if the Duke was deliberately fomenting publicity so as to advertise his grievances; to the Duke it was equally obvious that ‘those in power’ were using the press to boost the monarchy at his expense.²⁴ In fact the press needed no encouragement from either party to report or invent scandalous titbits about the story which had done so much to boost their circulation. To the Duke, however, it all seemed part of the giant conspiracy which had driven him from the throne and now sought to extinguish him altogether. He was, reported Legh, generally in good spirits, but ‘I cannot pretend that he is in a normal state of mind, and on occasions he becomes most excited and causes me much anxiety’.²⁵ ‘I do hope David’s nerves will stand the strain of waiting so long,’ wrote George VI apprehensively.²⁶

Not all the mail was hostile. Lloyd George sent Christmas greetings from a former minister ‘who holds you in as high esteem as ever, regards you with deep and loyal affection [and] deplores the shabby and stupid treatment accorded to you’.²⁷ Lloyd George’s championship of Edward VIII had earned him a bulging post bag, nearly all supporting his stand. The most common theme was that of a Mr Hawkins who said he would be loyal to George VI but ‘our hearts will be with that great socialist Edward’, while another correspondent said the late King’s two greatest enemies had been ‘Finance and Moscow’; finance because he supported the poor and unemployed, Moscow because he was ‘the most formidable obstacle to Communism in the country’.²⁸ Fortified by such messages, Lloyd George contemplated a campaign in favour of the ex-King. ‘Nothing would suit me better than to have a damn good fight at the end of my days … I will make such a stink that the Coronation won’t count for very much.’²⁹

He got no encouragement from the Duke. Nor did Mr Gordon of Brighton when he wrote to propose the setting up of a ‘King’s Party’ which would make public its support for the former monarch. ‘The suggestions do not commend themselves to His Royal Highness,’ replied a private secretary coolly.³⁰ Nor did many other similar proposals. In the dying weeks of his reign he had refrained from any action that might embarrass his successor, and he did not intend to change his ways now that he was in exile. The furthest he would go was to welcome the setting up of an informal committee, which met at the Marlborough Club under the aegis of Godfrey Thomas with Monckton and Philip Guedalla among the members, to consider how best to counter the attacks of the press.³¹

The many accounts that survive of this period show how effectively he disguised his depression from the outside world. Mensdorff dined at the Schloss just before Christmas and was made to watch old films about the Emperor Franz Joseph’s jubilee; he found the Duke ‘well and in fairly good spirits’.³² Queen Marie of Romania met him a month later at the British Legation: ‘He was looking well and … seemed less jumpy than he used to be – but he does look rather sad.’³³ Another month again and Amery lunched with him. He was ‘in great spirits … He shows no outward sign of strain, and it may be that he really doesn’t care.’³⁴ Aird, who spent February in the Schloss, found the Duke rather pathetically looking at his official diary of the previous year. He had just been to a dinner for Anglo-American businessmen and Aird noticed that he seemed to welcome the chance to attend such ‘tawdry but worthy shows’. He was much more at ease with the Americans present than with the British; a fact Aird somewhat chauvinistically explained as being because ‘HRH naturally likes common people, perhaps because he feels assured he is superior to them. He now uses frequently some terrible common slang such as “good egg”.’³⁵ It must have been at this same dinner that the young English journalist Douglas Reed was presented to the Duke. All the other Englishmen had been asked what school they had been to, and Reed, who had left school at thirteen, was awaiting with some relish the chance to answer. Years of experience warned the Duke, however: ‘What paper do you represent?’ he asked.³⁶

In the first two or three weeks he found it particularly hard to find any occupation. He consoled himself, said Legh, by ‘playing the jazz drums very loud and long to a gramophone record; he also drank quite a lot of brandy, and performed his celebrated imitation of Winston Churchill trying to persuade him not to abdicate: “Sir, we must fight …”’³⁷ By the time Metcalfe had arrived, the household had settled into a routine of golf, skiing or shopping in Vienna by day, poker and conversation until 4 a.m. by night. Metcalfe found the Duke’s energy as phenomenal as ever, and was perpetually exhausted, but ‘never have I found him easier or more charming, he is at his very best, and quite in his old form. I must say I am devoted to him.’³⁸ Every time Metcalfe settled down late at night to write to his wife, the Duke would come to his room to talk over old times and the wonders of Mrs Simpson. ‘It’s very pathetic. Never have I seen a man more madly in love.’³⁹ Food at dinner was cooked by the French chef and was delicious, but breakfast was in the English style; Charles Lambe had to arrange for Fortnum and Mason to send out kippers and six pots of Oxford marmalade.⁴⁰

Walford Selby told Aird that it had been difficult to explain to the Austrian aristocracy why the Duke was staying with a Jew.⁴¹ The point does not seem to have caused the Duke any concern; indeed, one somewhat unconvincing report states that he told the Baron he planned to write a book in defence of the persecuted Jews.⁴² Kitty Rothschild, however, got on his nerves; helpfulness itself, but always saying she was just about to go and never doing so. Mrs Simpson effectively poisoned the atmosphere between them, and when the Baroness finally did leave, the Duke was on the telephone to Cannes and failed even to say goodbye.⁴³ ‘I feel she will be a dangerous enemy for HRH to have made, especially as he must be in the wrong,’ wrote Aird.⁴⁴ In fact she remained a good friend, always maintaining that the Duke had been a perfect guest and denying gossip that he had left unpaid a large bill for the telephone.⁴⁵

At the end of March he moved on to the Landhaus Appesbach, near St Wolfgang. ‘Gosh, I bet you were glad when you went down that drive for the last time,’ wrote Metcalfe, a remark that suggests life at Schloss Enzesfeld had become oppressive in the previous few weeks. He would probably have found life equally gloomy anywhere else, however, and he cannot have been cheered by Metcalfe’s report on a visit to Fort Belvedere: the daffodils were out, and the tulips well advanced – ‘I went into the house, but it looked so sad, all empty, that I did not stay long.’⁴⁶ Life, in fact, was much the same at Appesbach as it had been at Enzesfeld. The only difference was that hiking had taken the place of skiing; ‘and I think on the whole you would dislike the hiking most,’ the Duke told Aird.⁴⁷

Before this he had received his first royal visitors. Early in February his sister, the Princess Royal, arrived with her husband, Lord Harewood. ‘Although they both try their best they do not add to life,’ judged Aird, but even so they were ‘better than nothing’.⁴⁸ It was not an easy visit and made no easier by a malicious story in the Daily Mirror about the financial negotiations then going on between the Duke and the royal family. Mrs Simpson rang up in high indignation: ‘I tried to calm him,’ Harewood told the King, ‘but I expect she gave him Hell down the telephone.’ ‘I have a feeling that David has told her that she will be received by his family with open arms as soon as they are married,’ Harewood went on, ‘and that his whole future will be jeopardized if she thinks this is not so. I am therefore very much afraid of intimate conversation.’⁴⁹ The last sentence contradicts Aird’s belief that the main purpose of the visit was to break to the Duke the news that Mrs Simpson would not be received by the royal family even after she had become Duchess of Windsor.⁵⁰ If this unpleasant message was delivered, it must have been so sugar-coated that the Duke did not fully take it in.

He was still less likely to get unpalatable truths from the Duke of Kent, who visited him three weeks later. It had at first been proposed that Kent should come in early January, but King George VI vetoed the proposal on the grounds that at last the newspaper interest in the abdication had died down and a visit at this time would make it front-page news again. ‘It is too soon after what has happened to take any risks in this way, and we both want David’s future life settled in April. The best chance for him to marry Mrs Simpson is by lying low.’⁵¹ The Duke could not accept this explanation. The King, he believed, had been coerced by his advisers into banning something which might result in favourable publicity for the former monarch. ‘How can I possibly think otherwise,’ he asked his mother, ‘or not feel that having got me “down” certain forces who have done their best to achieve this, wish to keep me there.’ It was the first reference to the ‘great conspiracy’ theory which was increasingly to dominate his thoughts. So far the royal family themselves were deemed innocent: ‘While not blaming Bertie in any way for the inspiration or the operation of this plan I do feel that he could assert himself a bit more on my behalf … I know that he and I could not be on better terms as brothers and that he is watching out for my interests in England in every way he can.’⁵²

If he had known rather more about the threats to the divorce proceedings he would have been more tolerant of his brother’s apparent timidity. Even before the abdication a solicitor’s clerk called Francis Stephenson had served an affidavit on the King’s Proctor alleging that the Simpson divorce was founded on collusion and that the decree should therefore not be made absolute. ‘It is by no means certain that she will get her divorce,’ wrote Neville Chamberlain; ‘in fact the probabilities are the other way.’⁵³ The King’s Proctor summoned Stephenson, who said that he was working on his own initiative and based his belief in Edward VIII’s adultery with Mrs Simpson ‘on rumours he had heard from friends in America on the Stock Exchange’. He had also heard from the same source that Simpson had been paid £100,000 or perhaps £150,000 to let his wife divorce him. The Proctor politely suggested that this could hardly be called conclusive, whereupon Stephenson agreed and abandoned his attempt.⁵⁴

A more serious threat was that of Anthony Cox, who took an obsessive interest in the abdication. Where Stephenson’s driving force seems to have been ‘Justice must be done’, Cox was more concerned that ‘The King must be saved from himself’. He began vigorous investigations to prove that the King had committed adultery with Mrs Simpson and found several promising leads but no evidence that would stand up in court.⁵⁵ When he in turn appeared before the King’s Proctor, the best he could offer was witnesses from a hotel in Budapest who would be prepared to come to London to give evidence provided they were paid £300–£600 each. The Proctor said that no funds were available for such a purpose, nor would it be proper to pay witnesses to give evidence.⁵⁶ Mr Cox then too disappeared from the scene.

The King’s Proctor, however, felt bound to launch his own investigation. On the issue of collusion, he concluded that the suit had clearly been an arranged one but that there was no evidence to prove this. On adultery, he concentrated on the crew of two yachts, the Nahlin and the Rosaura. The evidence he secured was reminiscent of another famous divorce case in 1820. ‘Non mi recordo’ had been the refrain of Queen Caroline’s steward, Majocci; ‘I ain’t seen nothing,’ was the prudent response of all the stewards. One serving in Rosaura had thought it odd that they should have adjoining cabins but saw nothing to suggest ‘Mrs Simpson was other than a respectable lady’; his counterpart in the Nahlin, after careful observation, did no more than conclude that she was ‘a personal friend of the King’.⁵⁷ With some relief the King’s Proctor decided that there were no grounds on which the decree absolute could be refused, but the Attorney General did not give a final ruling on the point until March 1937. At any moment before that there was a real risk of the question being reopened, with results that could have been painful for the Duke.

He said nothing to indicate that the threat was weighing on his mind, but it can never have been wholly forgotten. There were other, more immediate issues to cause him chagrin. He had left England in such haste that many questions about his future status had not been considered; one by one they were decided, and usually, as he saw it, against his interests. He had assumed, for instance, that since the Duke of York had been his personal ADC when he was King, he would fulfil the same role now the positions were reversed. Harewood wrote to disabuse him. King George VI, he said, took the view that ‘it would be looked upon as a slight to you to put you straight into his service thus’. He could not step directly from the throne into the position of a younger son. ‘The truth is that such an appointment would be treated as a joke, and neither you nor Bertie want to be looked on in that light.’⁵⁸ The logic of Harewood’s letter does not seem compelling. It left the Duke ‘very upset’, wrote Metcalfe. ‘He said just now: “Well, I suppose I have no standing of any kind now – I used to be a Field Marshal and an Admiral of the Fleet – but now I’m nothing!!”’⁵⁹

A still unkinder cut came from the Welsh Guards. The King knew that his brother was anxious to retain the Colonelcy of the regiment, and put the question to General Sergison-Brooke, saying that he would like this to be done if it were acceptable to the officers. Sergison-Brooke took soundings and reported that the senior officers did not want the Duke, they felt he had let them down.⁶⁰ This was broken to the Duke as tactfully as possible, but he wrote to Queen Mary to say that he was ‘hurt and disappointed that they seem to be anxious to have the vacancy of Colonel filled at once and don’t seem to care to wait until such time as it would be considered suitable to reappoint me. However, this is only one of many small hurts that have been coming from various quarters lately.’⁶¹ Colonel Beckwith-Smith wrote to assure him how much every Welsh Guardsman, past or present, regretted that he could not continue as their Colonel.⁶² The message was no doubt kindly meant but it fed the Duke’s suspicions that it was not the Guards’ officers who were to blame but that nefarious clique of courtiers whom his brother seemed so reluctant to call to order.

He had also taken it for granted that he would remain a member of the Privy Council. The Law Officers’ Department, however, concluded that he had no automatic right to resume his place and, furthermore, that in abdicating he had obviated the constitutional tradition by which close relations of the sovereign were usually Privy Councillors.⁶³ The question was put into the pending tray where it mouldered until the time was long past for any such gesture of trust or friendship. Not everything was lost, however. Mrs Simpson was nervous lest they removed his Garter – ‘That is what they did to Beauchamp and people of that sort.’^64*11 One of George VI’s first acts, however, had been to reappoint his brother as a Royal Knight on 12 December; some doubted whether the reappointment had been necessary, but everyone accepted that it settled the matter for ever.

Almost as insulting as rebuffs of this kind were the offers of employment that flowed in, particularly from the United States. From Detroit came an invitation to open the Zorine Springs nudist colony; he was pressed to become mayor of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin; the Orpheum Theatre, Los Angeles, offered him and his ‘lovely lady’ a million dollars and a Hollywood mansion to star in a ‘stupendous historical film’. At least the ‘peaceful little city of Orlando, nestling among half a hundred lakes in the picturesque citrus heart of Florida’ offered nothing except ‘a haven of happiness’. Since their letter was addressed to ‘Mr Edward Windsor, Balmoral Castle, London’, it is perhaps surprising it was received at all.⁶⁵

The Duke had left Windsor on a wave of emotional good will. In the first few weeks of exile he suffered various unpleasant shocks but he assumed that, in so far as anyone was responsible for them, it was those whom he had identified as his enemies: Hardinge and Lascelles, who were now respectively private secretary and deputy private secretary to George VI, from within the court; Baldwin, Lang and Dawson from outside it. His attitude was set out in a long letter which he wrote to the King in mid-January.

The events of December are past history and you and I have now only the future to look forward to. You have your life as King and you know how hard I have tried to make your succession as easy as possible. And I will throughout your reign (which I hope will be a long and grand one) … do all in my power to help and support you … For me the future is different. For the first time in my life I shall be very happy – that is, when Wallis and I can get married. Until then it is difficult for both of us … and you and the family can help us so much by giving us your support just now and creating a dignified background for our marriage and our married life … you and you alone can dispel … any of the doubts and rumours that are abroad to the effect that you and Mama disapprove of us and that anyone who does stick to us as friends will have a bad mark against them in your ‘book’ … I doubt your ever having heard that such gossip and rumour are being spread indiscriminately. But believe me, they are, Bertie, and it hurts like the dickens. Of course a great deal of the bunk is levelled at Wallis and I can’t take it because you must always think of Wallis and myself as one from henceforth … and anything said or aimed against her hits me a thousand times harder. So that anything you can do towards putting a stop to all the detrimental bunk will be making it more dignified for our future, and for our sakes let it be known that on the contrary by giving us ‘the cold shoulder’ or spreading false rumours, people would be getting in wrong with you … After all, Wallis and I have committed no crime. All we ask is our married happiness, and then we hope to be of use and service to you and the community later on. I know that you want to help as you’ve told me so all along, but it’s some of the government and the court and other officials who are against us … Oh! Bertie, a lot of people are kicking us for the moment and you can stop it all. Please do so quickly for our sakes … You can and you must do that.⁶⁶

George VI did want to help but he did also disapprove of the marriage to Mrs Simpson. Left to himself he would probably have gone further than in fact he did to support his brother, but Queen Mary was rigid in her insistence that nothing should be said or done to suggest the royal family condoned the relationship or were prepared to accept Mrs Simpson – married to the Duke or not – as one of them. In this attitude she was supported by her daughter-in-law, the Queen, and abetted by the courtiers. The latter worked diligently to stiffen the King, who they feared might otherwise succumb to his generous instincts and do more than they felt to be prudent in championship of his predecessor. The first few months after the abdication show a melancholy pattern of eroding good will between the royal brothers, with the Duke, isolated, forlorn and increasingly embittered, swinging rapidly from protestations of eternal friendship to the blackest hostility.

For the first few weeks George VI was bombarded by telephone calls as his brother expounded his needs, poured out his woes, or held forth on the various problems of kingship on which he felt his views would be of interest. George VI, a slow thinker and, thanks to his stammer, a still slower speaker, contributed little to these conversations and found them increasingly arduous. ‘I had a good long talk with Bertie last evening and was able to ask him to think over a few domestic points as regards myself,’ the Duke told his mother.⁶⁷ To the King the talk was more long than good. What to his brother was a vitally important link with the outside world, to the King became a dreaded imposition. His increasing impatience was shown towards the end of January when he refused to speak to the Duke before 6.45 p.m. next day as he was too busy. ‘It was pathetic to see HRH’s face,’ wrote Metcalfe. ‘He couldn’t believe it! He’s been so used to having everything done as he wishes.’⁶⁸ Urged on by his staff, who felt that the strain on him was too great and who anyway disliked the King receiving advice through other channels than their own, he finally struck. According to Monckton it was he who was entrusted with the delicate task of cutting off the fusillade of calls.⁶⁹ The Duke recorded two other versions of what happened. In one it was the King himself who said the telephoning had to stop. ‘Are you serious?’ asked the Duke. ‘Yes, I’m sorry to say I am.’⁷⁰ In the other Ulick Alexander telephoned from Sandringham to explain that the conversations made the King nervous. In either case the result was the same. ‘Our relations as brothers were, as far as I am concerned, severed,’ the Duke later told his brother.⁷¹ The statement was over-dramatic, but there is no doubt that from that moment the Duke ceased to look upon the King as a champion and began to suspect that he must be numbered with his enemies.

But it was financial matters that first put a serious strain on the relationship. When the Duke left England the new King had pledged himself to pay £25,000 a year to his brother if the government did not take on the burden. This promise had been made, however, in the belief that the Duke would otherwise be reduced to relative penury. As it became more clear that this was not the case, the King’s advisers urged him to declare the agreement null. Any hope that the government would settle the issue by themselves giving the former King a pension was quickly quashed. Chamberlain told Peacock, even before the abdication, that it was most unlikely and would depend on the acquiescence of the opposition. That acquiescence was not forthcoming.⁷² Pierson Dixon, then a young diplomat in Ankara, returned to London in February 1937 to find that opinion in the House of Commons and Whitehall had moved solidly against the Duke and few could be found to support the principle of a pension.⁷³ Indeed, so strong did feelings run that when those concerned met in Warren Fisher’s office on 10 February it was said that, if it became known that the King had himself promised his brother £25,000 a year, there would be a move to cut the Civil List by a similar amount. At the same meeting Allen stated that the Duke had deposited £800,000 abroad, though a large part of it was under the control of Mrs Simpson. Fisher said that an extra £80,000 would shortly be due to the Duke as a result of the balances from the Civil List and the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster.⁷⁴

The Daily Mirror now came out with the story about the financial agreement which had so upset the Duke. To him it seemed a typical example of the failure of the authorities in London to protect him, even perhaps of their active wish to harm him. To his brother it seemed more likely that the story had been fed to the Mirror by someone who wished to bring pressure on him to honour the agreement – the someone being probably Mrs Simpson. Neither judgment was fair; it is only too easy to understand why both seemed convincing at the time. The King wrote to say how unfortunate the timing was, when the Civil List was about to be debated. ‘There seems to be a strong feeling in the House of Commons that the Country shall not provide for you directly or indirectly,’ he wrote, adding, ‘You see, I think they are still a little sore with you for having given up being King.’ It was essential that he should know exactly how the Duke stood financially, ‘I understood from you when I signed the paper at the Fort that you were going to be very badly off.’⁷⁵

To the Duke it seemed as if his brother was trying to wriggle out of a moral if not legal obligation. The £25,000 had not been calculated on the basis of his personal fortune, why should that now be taken into account? If it was related to anything it was to a fair rent for Sandringham and Balmoral. ‘It would be a grave mistake, if the private means of any member of the Royal Family were to be disclosed at the Select Committee and … it would only embarrass you and your advisers if I were to put you in the position of being able to answer questions on this subject.’ He stuck to his assertion that he was badly off, ‘which I am, considering the position I shall have to maintain and what I have given up’. ‘I have kept my side of the bargain,’ he concluded, ‘and I am sure you will keep yours.’⁷⁶

George VI accepted that in the end the £25,000, or at least the greater part of it after certain deductions, would have to be paid, but he declined to be hurried. When the Select Committee considered the Civil Estimates, he had to be able to tell them that he had made no binding commitment to pay a pension to his brother: ‘You know that I don’t want to let you down, but … I do want you to give me a free hand … A new agreement will, of course, have to be arranged legally as soon as the Civil List is passed.’⁷⁷ The trouble was that the Duke was no longer certain that the King did not intend to let him down. The unfortunate Monckton, trying to retain the confidence of both parties, found that increasingly each one doubted the other’s good intentions and that the Duke in particular was convinced that he was being cheated.

When the Select Committee began to discuss the Civil List, the fact that the Duke of Windsor’s name was not included struck some of its members as being unfair if not unacceptable. Churchill knew too much of the background to press any such demand, but he told the Chancellor, Chamberlain, that he must be satisfied that the Duke was going to get his £25,000 a year from one source or another.⁷⁸ The discussion dragged on, but early in April Churchill returned to the charge: ‘The best solution would surely be that the King should honour his signature about the £25,000 a year, and that the Duke of Windsor should intimate to you that he does not desire to make any request for provision in the Civil List?’ he wrote to Chamberlain. Otherwise someone was bound to mention the extent of the Duke’s fortune and the Labour Party would argue that, if savings on such a scale could be made, the Civil List could certainly be cut.⁷⁹ In some alarm Chamberlain posted off to see the King. In his record of the meeting Wigram wrote that the Chancellor was authorized to tell Churchill that King George VI and his brother were on friendly terms, ‘and that HM would look after his brother’.⁸⁰ In his diary Chamberlain merely remarked that the Fort Belvedere agreement struck him as ‘vague and contradictory’ and needing replacement by ‘something more specific and carefully prepared. I hope the King will take steps to set about this soon.’⁸¹ Wigram, evidently uncertain how explicit Chamberlain would be, himself went round to see Churchill and told him he could be sure that the King would not let his brother down. Churchill accepted the assurance. ‘I therefore hope and trust that all will be well,’ he told the Duke.⁸²

In the end it was, but there was much bargaining to come and it was 1938 before the agreement was fully worked out. The haggling generated much ill-feeling, but alone could never have accounted for the embittered hatred for his family which the Duke conceived as the day of his marriage grew closer. Until the last moment the Duke shut his eyes to the fundamental refusal of his closest relations to accept, to tolerate even, his future wife. His chagrin was all the more fierce when at last he was forced to acknowledge it.

Mrs Simpson had foreseen their attitude long before. At the end of 1936 she was already expressing her concern about the lack of support the family was likely to give the wedding: ‘After all, we have done nothing wrong so why be treated that way?’⁸³ In every direction, it seemed to her, the Windsors were to be traduced and let down, and she had no doubt that she was the principal target. Even when she tried to get her wax effigy removed from Madame Tussaud’s – ‘It really is too indecent and so awful to be there’ – she could achieve nothing. She could only object, she was told, if so placed as to bring her into hatred, ridicule or contempt, for instance in the Chamber of Horrors. As it was she was grouped with Voltaire, Marie-Antoinette and Joan of Arc; curious companions, perhaps, but giving her no grounds for protest.⁸⁴

It was her belief that the Queen – the Duchess of York, as she always referred to her – was their most inveterate enemy. Channon, on the other hand, was convinced that it was Queen Mary who was most hostile to any recognition of the marriage. He maintained that she hated Wallis Simpson ‘to the point of hysteria’; when Lord Queenborough asked her when the Duke of Windsor would return to England she was said to have replied: ‘Not until he comes to my funeral.’⁸⁵ If the remark had been reported to the Duke, he would have known that his mother could never have thought, still less spoken, such a thing; but he could not comprehend that her love for him was complemented by rigid opposition to his marriage. He told her she was the only member of the family he could fully trust: ‘Your letters to me are so sweet and sympathetic that I hope when the time comes you will extend all those feelings you have for me to Wallis. It is no longer a matter for approval or disapproval. I left with dignity, and now Wallis and I are going to live our life together with dignity.’⁸⁶ Queen Mary did not reply directly to his implicit question; ‘I assure you we are all out to help you in every way we can,’ she wrote, ‘knowing only too well what a dreadfully difficult time you are going through.’⁸⁷

The help that was all important to him was over his relationship with Mrs Simpson, first and foremost over his wedding. It is difficult to overestimate the significance that he attached to the ceremony. He had, as he saw it, been fortunate enough to win this love of a woman of transcendent quality, fit to grace any position on earth. He had failed her. Instead of the throne which she deserved; instead, at least, of a position of honour in his own country, he had inflicted upon her the hounding of the world’s press and ignominious imprisonment in a villa in the south of France. The rest of his life was to be dedicated to making up to her for this betrayal. The first and most significant opportunity would be their wedding.

According to the Duke of Connaught the Duke originally believed that Queen Mary herself would be prepared to come to France for his marriage.⁸⁸ It seems almost impossible that he could so have misjudged his mother’s sense of propriety, but he was encouraged by his cousin Louis Mountbatten to believe that the King and the other royal Dukes were likely guests: ‘I succeeded in fixing a date for your wedding that suited Bertie, George etc,’ wrote Mountbatten, but then ‘other people stepped in’ and the atmosphere changed dramatically.⁸⁹ Whether Mountbatten was indulging his characteristically ebullient optimism, or the King really was at one time thinking of attending the wedding, is uncertain; anyway, when Monckton made an approach to Wigram in early April, all illusions were quickly dispelled. Queen Mary had apparently remarked casually that it would be ‘rather nice’ if there were some sort of religious service; Monckton seized on this to suggest that a royal chaplain should officiate and at least the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester be present. Wigram was outraged. He wrote to Lang to say that to agree to such a request would be to hammer ‘a firm nail in the coffin of monarchy’. ‘Excuse this outburst,’ he said, ‘but my religious feelings are really hurt by such monstrous suggestions.’ He and Hardinge were ‘hand in glove’, and they were telling the King that he could shelter behind Baldwin and the Dominion Prime Ministers: ‘I am sure they would never advise HM to allow any of his family to be present at such a mock ceremony.’⁹⁰

Whether, left to themselves, ministers would have wished to express any strong views on the issue, is doubtful. Once consulted, however, it was inevitable what their advice would be. Chamberlain and Simon were both emphatic that no member of the family should be present. If any did attend, wrote Simon, it would be taken as proof that they were ‘accepting the future Duchess for all purposes into the Royal Family’. This would have unfortunate implications: ‘If, for example, it is desired to discourage return to this country, absence from the wedding would be indicative of a desire to maintain a certain aloofness.’⁹¹ Baldwin claimed that he had not been directly consulted but told Brownlow that ‘he would be anxious regarding public opinion and Press comment’ if any of the Princes attended.⁹²

King George VI did not need much persuading; quite apart from Simon’s subtler arguments he shared Wigram’s revulsion from the thought of a member of the family attending a service which would not be accepted by the Church of England. But he dreaded the painful task of telling his brother. ‘I have been preparing draft after draft of what I should say and how to put it, so that the news should not hurt his feelings too much,’ he told Queen Mary. ‘It has been such a worry to me all this time, as he is bound to be very upset about it.’⁹³ The final version was despatched on 11 April 1937. He could not do as the Duke wished, he wrote:

I can’t treat this as just a private family matter, however much I want to. I am afraid it will not be possible for Harry and George or any of the family to come out to your wedding. I simply hate having to tell you this; but you must realize that in spite of the affection which of course there still is towards you personally, the vast majority of people in this country are undoubtedly as strongly as ever opposed to a marriage which caused a King of England to renounce the throne. You know that none of us in the family liked it, and were any of them now, after a few months’ interval, to come out and, so to speak, help you get married, I know that it would be regarded by everybody as condoning all that has happened; it would place us all in an impossibly false position and would be harmful to the Monarchy … This is a matter where I can’t act like a private person and I have had to get advice from Ministers … Do understand how much I loathe having to do this, but with your knowledge of the world, you will appreciate the fact that I cannot do anything else.⁹⁴

He was not surprised to hear the King loathed writing this letter, the Duke replied bitterly. ‘I will never understand how you could ever have allowed yourself to be influenced by the present Government and the Church of England in their continual campaign against me.’ After this insult he felt that he would never wish to set foot in Britain again. All that remained was to arrange his marriage in the most dignified way possible. ‘I appreciate your frankness, and there is nothing more for me to say, except that I shall always be sorry to remember that you did not have the courage to give me the same support at the start of my new life, that I so whole-heartedly gave to you at the beginning of yours.’⁹⁵

After this hammer blow, the Duke found little comfort in Mountbatten’s assurance that he had not ‘quite given up all hope yet’ that he might be able to attend the wedding,⁹⁶ or the protestations of the Duke of Kent: ‘You have always been a wonderful friend to me and you know (I hope) my great affection and regard for you, and so I am very sincerely sad at not being with you on June 3.’⁹⁷ But there was worse besides. The newspapers were abuzz with speculation about who would be allowed to attend, and after some anguished pother those courtiers who had been invited decided that they would not put the King in the position of having to grant or refuse permission, but would decline without more ado. ‘I am terribly sorry that, largely owing to this damned press, things have developed over here in this way,’ wrote Thomas apologetically.⁹⁸ Aird, who had already written to accept, heard what was going on and hurriedly recalled his letter. He would not be able to get away from his course at Sheerness, he explained to the Duke, adding in his diary: ‘Feel a slight shit at leaving HRH to be married with only the Metcalfes and Walter Monckton at the ceremony.’⁹⁹ In fact another old friend, Hugh Lloyd Thomas, had no difficulty in getting permission to attend in a personal capacity, although he was Minister in the Embassy in Paris.¹⁰⁰ Walford Selby, from Vienna, was advised not to go, but his wife was allowed to make the journey.¹⁰¹

Lord Brownlow was asked early in May by the Bishop of Lincoln whether he would be going to the wedding. He said he had not yet been invited but supposed he would. The Bishop then said that, as Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire, Brownlow could not possibly countenance this masquerade, and that if he did go there would be ‘a storm of criticism, censure and hostility’ which would force him to resign. Brownlow told this to Harry Crookshank, the Minister of Mines, who disconcerted him by agreeing with the Bishop. To attend the wedding, Crookshank argued, would only ‘provoke a further unpleasant and squalid controversy around the Duke of Windsor’. Brownlow duly received his invitation and wrote to the King to ask his wishes. He got no reply, asked Ulick Alexander what was happening, and was told that the courtiers had refused the invitation themselves on their own initiative.¹⁰² Brownlow withdrew his letter, whereupon Hardinge wrote to say: ‘His Majesty is grateful to you for your consideration in not asking for a decision from him in the matter to which your letter referred.’¹⁰³ In fact the King told Monckton that, while he did not want to rule on the question, he would have liked Brownlow to have attended the wedding and was disappointed when he heard of his refusal.¹⁰⁴ Brownlow cabled to the Duke: ‘Fear considerable difficulties here. Letter follows’, to which the Duke replied coolly, ‘Quite understand. No point in writing.’¹⁰⁵

The letter followed nonetheless, written ‘unwillingly and in a state of considerable embarrassment’. Brownlow realized, he said, that many of his friends would accuse him of ratting, but felt that this was the lesser evil.¹⁰⁶ The Duke did not reply. ‘Ratting’ was indeed an accusation flung at several of those who refused the invitation by those who were fortunate enough not to receive one. No one emerges with great credit from this episode except for Lloyd Thomas, who made it clear he would attend the ceremony whether given permission or not, and the Duke, who met these humiliating rebuffs with stoical dignity.

The dignity soon ran out. From the time of the abdication the Duke had been nervous about the status of his wife after they eventually married. Monckton urged him not to press the point, advice to which he reluctantly conceded.¹⁰⁷ He was not the only one to speculate. Would Mrs Simpson automatically become a Royal Highness? asked the Duke of Connaught. ‘How awful that would be.’¹⁰⁸ In mid-April, after being told that the royal family would not be present at the wedding, the Duke of Windsor wrote to George VI to say: ‘Although Wallis’s royal title comes automatically with marriage in our case, I hope you will spare us the last and only remaining embarrassment, by having it announced that she will be styled “Her Royal Highness” … You know how essential this is for the protocol of foreign countries.’¹⁰⁹

If he had really felt certain that the royal title came automatically upon marriage he would hardly have placed so much emphasis on the need for the King to pronounce it formally. He would have done better to continue to take it for granted and not invite rejection, but he cared much too much about the issue to accept a situation in which there would be any ambiguity. When Mrs Simpson wrote to say that Queen Mary wished to deny her ‘the extra chic’ of being styled HRH, she added that it was ‘the only thing to bring me back in the eyes of the world’.¹¹⁰ The Duke accepted this, and by admitting the possibility that it might be denied, he made it probable that it would be. The officers of the law, however, took some convincing that there was any basis on which the title could be refused his wife.

Wigram put the question to Granville Ram, of the Office of the Parliamentary Council, in mid-January 1937. Would Mrs Simpson automatically become HRH on marrying the Duke of Windsor? ‘The King is certainly of the opinion that such a title requires his consent.’¹¹¹ Ram’s reply was categoric. The question had been settled by the statement in The Times of 28 April 1923 that ‘in accordance with the general settled rule, that a wife takes the status of her husband, Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon on her marriage has become Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York’.¹¹² But things were quite different then, protested Wigram: ‘as the Duke of Windsor does not come under the Royal Marriages Act, perhaps the Home Secretary might see fit to advise another course’.¹¹³ Ram replied that he could see no difference between the two marriages in point of law. ‘The title seems to me to follow, not from the King’s consent, but from the validity of the marriage … I sincerely hope that the Home Secretary’s ingenious mind may find some way of reaching a more satisfactory conclusion, but for the life of me, I cannot see how ever he will achieve it.’¹¹⁴

Wigram now appealed to Simon, admitting that the case was not a strong one but that ‘HM hopes you will find some way to avoid this title being conferred’.¹¹⁵ At first Simon saw no way of obliging, except by depriving the Duke himself of the title of HRH: ‘I should not have thought it possible … to have put the Duke in one position and his wife in another.’¹¹⁶ But he was not known as Sir John Snake for nothing. On 5 April he drew up a memorandum which argued that the title of HRH should be applied only to members of the royal family who were within the line of succession. ‘Why should ladies curtsey to a Duchess who cannot possibly be Queen?’¹¹⁷ Maurice Gwyer, also of the Parliamentary Council, was not impressed. ‘I should have thought myself that an attempt to deprive the Duke’s wife of the title of HRH would have the most disastrous results,’ he told Wigram. ‘I have no doubt at all that it would be popularly regarded as an attempt to strike at the Duke through his wife, and resented accordingly … It would be impossible to imagine a more public or deadly slight.’¹¹⁸

Simon wavered. Would it not be best to let sleeping dogs lie, he asked, and allow Mrs Simpson to assume the title automatically? Wigram had no doubts about the answer. The marriage was not likely to last a long time, he argued; if all the Duke’s wives were to become HRH and bear their titles away with them as a choice fragment of the alimony, then what would become of the monarchy?¹¹⁹ This conviction, that the marriage would not last long, seems to have been an important factor in shaping the views of the royal family. King George VI saw the issue with characteristic clarity, even if a fine indifference to the law. The question was, he told Baldwin: ‘Is she a fit and proper person to become a Royal Highness after what she has done in this country; and would the country understand it if she became one automatically on marriage? … I and my family and Queen Mary all feel that it would be a great mistake to acknowledge Mrs Simpson as a suitable person to become Royal. The Monarchy has been degraded quite enough already.’¹²⁰

Chamberlain and Baldwin were initially as hesitant as Simon while Warren Fisher and Horace Wilson opposed the proposal: ‘Theirs was a sentimental point of view that the working classes would think that The King was kicking his brother when down,’ explained Wigram.¹²¹ But eventually everyone was cajoled into line. Even Gwyer agreed that the ‘vulgar press propaganda and photographs issued by the Duke of Windsor’s press department’ had so far forfeited public sympathy that there would be no resentment at the decision.¹²² The legal justification was minimal, but they would get away with it, seems to have been the resigned conclusion of the law officers of the Crown. Curiously enough, the most robust support for the King’s position came from Winston Churchill, who told Wigram that any government to be found in England would advise against creating the Duchess HRH. ‘The fact that such an issue was still being proposed would certainly be an obstacle to the Duke’s wishes in other respects.’¹²³

It remained to break the news to the Duke. Monckton was asked to prepare the way by warning him of the likely outcome of the legal wrangle. ‘The Duke was at first rather excited, but afterwards asked Walter Monckton to see The King and tell him how much he would resent it,’ Hardinge noted.¹²⁴ The King’s letter followed. The first draft laid heavy stress on the fact that the Duke, not being in the line of succession himself, had no right to be styled HRH, and that the only way this privilege could be retained was by issuing Letters Patent specifically limiting it to him alone.¹²⁵ ‘The King evidently found it a great relief to be able to tell his brother that so far from taking anything away, what he had done was to give him a title from which he would otherwise have been debarred,’ noted Chamberlain, with what one must suppose was a touch of irony.¹²⁶ King George VI evidently felt on reflection that this was not a point he wished to labour, the final version of his letter was considerably shorter.

‘This is a nice wedding present,’ was the Duke’s bitter comment when the letter was handed over.¹²⁷ His immediate reaction was to renounce his own right to style himself HRH, but Monckton and Mrs Simpson between them convinced him that to do so would achieve nothing except to give satisfaction to his enemies. For the moment he contented himself with firing back a rejoinder claiming that he was HRH by right, not Letters Patent, and that he considered the new Letters to have no validity.¹²⁸ But this insult to his wife, as he saw it, rankled in his mind throughout the ceremony and honeymoon and finally led to an outburst of rage which destroyed whatever relationship survived between him and his family in England.

The first salvo was fired at Queen Mary a week before the wedding. He began his letter ‘Dear Mama’, then relented and changed ‘Dear’ to ‘Darling’. But that was the last concession. Her letters to him, he said, read as if they were written ‘to a young man who is stopping for a while in a foreign country in order to learn the language’. That was disheartening enough, but his brother’s behaviour left him ‘definitely disgusted’ …

And to be quite frank, many things that I have heard of your attitude do not encourage me. You are more than right in your supposition that I am happy now. And I can further assure you that for the first time in my life I am happy and can honestly say that I look forward to the future.

Thank you for your good wishes, but it saddens me that the present conditions do not make me feel that they ring very true.

Your disappointed son. David.¹²⁹

After brooding for a few weeks the Duke struck vengefully again. His mother had not even bothered to send a wedding present, he complained. ‘I was bitterly hurt and disappointed that you virtually ignored the most important event of my life.’ George VI had consistently humiliated him ever since the abdication, he claimed. The King had tried to shelter from the charge that he had insulted the Duke in the eyes of the world by pretending that he had acted only on the advice of his government, ‘a sorry enough show of weakness’, but there was ample evidence that ‘this humiliating policy is not only the policy of the present government, but is also Bertie’s personal attitude towards myself, and further, I regret to say, your attitude and that of the whole of my family. You must realize by this time, that as there is a limit to what one’s feelings can endure, this most unjust and uncalled for treatment can have had but one important result; my complete estrangement from all of you.’¹³⁰

Queen Mary showed the letter to the King, who wrote to say how much pain it had caused her. The Duke could not really believe that his family wanted to humiliate him. Everything the King had done had been ‘absolutely necessary for the sake of the country’. The Duke did not realize what a shock he had given to the monarchy: ‘How do you think I liked taking on a rocking throne, and trying to make it steady again? It has not been a pleasant job, and it is not finished yet.’ Let them now forget what had happened and work together for the future, ‘and if you do want to let yourself go, do write to me and not Mama, as it makes her absolutely miserable’.¹³¹

The Duke was beyond the power of dulcet phrases, and found in his brother’s letter only fresh reason for indignation. He picked up the statement that he had made his mother miserable. ‘Have you ever stopped to think how unhappy I have been made by the family’s treatment of me?’ he asked. He listed all his grievances, including the award of a Coronation medal when none was offered to his wife, and went on:

I do not agree with your description of the throne as ‘tottering’. I know it has not been easy for the Monarchy to adjust itself to the trend of the times, and I do not think that even my most vindictive enemies would deny that I have done a great deal to preserve the system, over which you now preside … I have always felt that one of the sources of power of the Monarchy in Great Britain has been the fact that we were a united family, with no public discords and working together as one for the welfare of our people. What other motive had I in abdicating except a patriotic one, and to avoid a conflict between the Crown and the Government? As you knew when I left in December, that I was going to marry Wallis, it would have been far better had you expressed your personal opinion of this marriage to me privately at that time, rather than publicly later.¹³²

Overtures from other members of the family were rebuffed with equal harshness. A wedding present of a Fabergé box was returned to the Duke of Kent with the sharp retort: ‘The only boxes I happen to be collecting now are those that can be delivered on the ears.’¹³³ Nor did a cable of congratulations win a kinder response. He did not doubt the sincerity of the Kents’ good wishes, wrote the Duke, but they were ‘not at all in tune with the attitude that has been taken by Mama, by Bertie, and by the rest of the family’. Nor had the Duke of Kent done anything to show he wished to follow a different line. ‘I tell you, here and now, that I will never forgive or forget the lead Bertie has given you all in your behaviour to me ever since I left England.’¹³⁴ In the summer of 1937 there was no doubt in the Duke’s mind that his family had betrayed him and that he had done with them for ever.

Meanwhile the decree absolute had at last come through on 3 May 1937. ‘I am into the last week now, thank God, and I am too excited to know whether I am coming or going,’ the Duke wrote to Thomas a few days earlier.¹³⁵ He was going, and on 4 May he went. The Orient Express was stopped forty-five kilometres from Paris so as to avoid the press and the Duke continued his journey unmolested to join Mrs Simpson at the Château de Candé in Touraine. Candé was a renaissance castle which had been transformed by its multi-millionaire owner, Charles Bedaux, into a miracle of modern comforts with a pipe-organ costing $40,000, a $15,000 telephone system, avant-garde American plumbing and the vault transformed into a bar. Bedaux had made his fortune and won the hatred of organized labour by inventing the time-and-motion study and showing big business around the world how to apply it. He was an important figure in the United States but was anxious to establish closer links with the leadership in Germany and was looked at askance by the intelligence services of France and Britain.¹³⁶ The Duke was blindly unaware of this, as indeed was King George VI, who thought that a castle in Touraine sounded a far more suitable place for his brother’s marriage than a villa near Cannes. When Bedaux, who was a friend of Herman Rogers, offered his château for the wedding it was accepted with alacrity. Bedaux’s only condition was that it should be stated publicly that the Duke and Mrs Simpson were there as his guests, ‘for I am a hard-working business man and in these critical times, if the erroneous thought were to penetrate the public that we rented Candé for the purpose intended, it would be sure to have a disastrous effect on my business career’.¹³⁷

The Duke’s hope of getting a royal chaplain to perform the wedding service had been rapidly shattered by his brother. His second choice, the Rev. Martin Andrews whose parish was in the Duchy of Cornwall, regretfully refused on the grounds that ‘it would be letting the church down, and as long as I hold office in the church I must keep the rules, however cruel they may seem’.¹³⁸ Though after the ceremony a bevy of clergymen protested how pleased they would have been to conduct the service if only they had been invited, at the time it proved difficult to find anyone prepared to defy the church hierarchy by giving a religious marriage to a divorced person with a husband, let alone two husbands, living. At one time the only candidate seemed to be the Rev. Rolfe Davies, who rested his claim on the fact that ‘The late Sir John Williams, who was Physician Accoucheur in 1894, was a first cousin of my father’s’.¹³⁹ Then the Rev. J. A. Jardine, a turbulent priest from Darlington, offered his services. Lang described him as ‘a seeker of notoriety, a Kensitite at heart’. How, the Archbishop enquired, could a man who had been King of England a few months before have ‘so far lost his dignity as to ask a man of this sort to celebrate his marriage?’¹⁴⁰ The Duke’s answer might have been that he did so because the Church of England made it impossible for a man of any other sort to play the part. In fact both he and Monckton thought that Jardine seemed a decent and straightforward man; it was only when he embarked on a lecture tour in the United States to delight audiences with the inside story of the Windsor wedding that they began to wonder if they had chosen well.

Fruity Metcalfe was best man, to replace the royal ‘supporters’ the Duke had expected. Metcalfe and his wife, the Bedaux, Walter Monckton, Aunt Bessie Merryman, Lady Selby, George Allen, the young equerry Dudley Forwood and Herman and Katherine Rogers made up the total congregation at the wedding. Outside, more than two hundred journalists including Winston Churchill’s son Randolph (who in fact was more often inside than outside) vied for what scraps of news might emanate from the château. Cecil Beaton arrived the day before the ceremony to take the photographs; he hoped to be asked to stay for the wedding, but invitation came there none. He talked late into the night with Mrs Simpson and decided she ‘not only has individuality and personality, but is a personality – a strong force. I find she is intelligent within her vast limitations … She has obviously a tremendous admiration for the Duke and considers him one of the greatest brains … of our times. She admires his character, his vitality and is determined to love him, though I feel she is not in love with him.’¹⁴¹

A bogus renaissance chest adorned with plump caryatids was hauled out to provide an altar. ‘The Duke, like a little boy home from school for the holidays, in staccato tones would exclaim: “Marvellous – that’s marvellous – couldn’t be better – but put it further back – put it here – there – no, a little more this way” – and completely lacking in self-consciousness he would get down on hands and knees to tuck in the carpet under the altar.’ The caryatids were swathed in a coffee-coloured table cloth from Budapest which the indignant lady’s maid had to unpack from one of Mrs Simpson’s trunks. Constance Spry and her minions swamped the room in an avalanche of flowers. Beaton then photographed the Duke. ‘His expression, though intent, was essentially sad, tragic eyes belied by impertinent tilt of nose. He has common hands – like a little mechanic – weather-beaten and rather scaly and one thumb-nail is disfigured. His hair at forty-five [in fact he was almost forty-three] is as golden and thick as it was at sixteen. His eyes, fiercely blue, do not seem to focus properly – are bleary in spite of their brightness and one is much brighter than another.’¹⁴²

For reasons best known to herself Mrs Simpson had on 8 May changed her name by deed poll to Wallis Warfield. On 3 June Queen Mary wrote in her diary: ‘Alas! the wedding day in France of David and Mrs Warfield … We all telegraphed to him.’¹⁴³

After the service Walter Monckton took the new Duchess aside and told her that she was deeply disliked in England because she had been responsible for the King abandoning his throne: ‘If she made him, and kept him, happy all his days, all that would change; but if he were unhappy nothing would be too bad for her.’ She received this somewhat direful prophecy simply and kindly, recorded Monckton, just saying: ‘Walter, don’t you think I have thought of all that? I think I can make him happy.’¹⁴⁴