WHEN THE WINDSORS ARRIVED IN MIAMI ON 4 MAY 1945 life stretched in an alarming blank ahead of them. Between the abdication and September 1939 the Duke had been in waiting; quite what was going to turn up he did not know, but that something would, he knew. The war did, and for the next five years his life had been, if not wholly satisfactory, then at least structured. He had always known what he was supposed to be doing, unappealing though it might sometimes be. Now he found himself with no commitment save that of administering his own affairs. He was left with two overriding ambitions: to find himself a job and to secure his wife’s recognition by the royal family. These were to dominate the next few years of his life; in both he failed.
It was the autumn before they felt the time was ripe for a return to Europe. In the meantime they spent an uneventful four months, mainly in New York, with breaks in Newport and for fishing in New Brunswick. The previous year the Duchess had been operated on for cancer of the stomach; the operation seemed to have been a total success, but worries about his wife’s health added to the Duke’s concern about his own future. As if these preoccupations were not enough, he was profoundly pessimistic about the future of the post-war world. For five years he had predicted that the only beneficiary from the conflict would be the communists. When he stayed with Jock Balfour, the British Minister in Washington, he made it clear that he still thought ‘if Hitler had been differently handled, war might have been avoided’, and that the world in such a case would have been a better and safer place.1 He was convinced that an already disastrous situation had been made immeasurably worse by the surrender of the ailing Roosevelt to Stalin at Yalta, and the subsequent irruption of Soviet power into the heartlands of Europe.2 He called on Roosevelt’s successor, Truman, in August and found him ‘in a state of utter gloom’. Word had just come in that the Japanese had rejected the American ultimatum. ‘I now have no alternative than to drop an atomic bomb on Tokyo,’ said the President despairingly.3 The Duke was impressed by his obvious determination and integrity, but alarmed by his naivety and ignorance of international affairs.
The greater part of his personal possessions was still in France, and it was there that most people expected him to settle, yet he viewed the future of that country with the utmost gloom. France had not been a first-class nation since the time of Napoleon, he told an American friend, Robert Young. She had lacked the stamina to resist the Germans in 1940, and that same lack of stamina was impeding her recovery in 1945. De Gaulle was ‘not the leader he is portrayed and he would do a lot better if, instead of trying to lift France’s prestige abroad by assuming high-hat attitudes, he concentrated upon exhorting the people to get on with the job of reconstruction’. But even if he did, the cards were stacked against him; he had ‘the Communists on his neck and … cannot take more than a superficial stand against them’.4 A year later, in October 1946, he had almost lost hope; the ‘Moscow-directed campaign to sabotage our free-enterprise system’ was on the point of final success; de Gaulle was ‘both too weak and too late to rally the French people sufficiently’.5 The conclusion he drew for himself was that he should be extremely careful before he committed more of his resources to a doomed continent; before he even returned to Europe he was telling George Allen that he did not regard France ‘as a healthy place of residence for anyone without an official job there … I have in back of my mind a speedy return to America as soon as we have been able to make adequate dispositions regarding our possessions.’6
Though such jeremiads now seem extravagant, the situation in France was indeed precarious in the years immediately after the war, and the Duke was not alone in predicting a rapid descent into first chaos and then communism. He was more obviously wrong in his consistent misjudgment of the political situation in Britain, whose plight he felt to be little if at all less parlous than that of her continental neighbour. The general election of 1945, when Britain swept Churchill from power and installed a Labour government with an overwhelmingly large majority, seemed to him ‘discouraging and a great surprise’. Although he pronounced virtuously that ‘tradition precluded any political comment on his part’, he once again demonstrated that for him tradition was something to be ignored when he continued: ‘I must admit to a sense of disappointment – not so much for Great Britain herself, who is well able to control the extent and tempo of new political and economical experiments with sanity and moderation, but as regards the effect of the British Socialist victory in this country [the United States] and on the continent of Europe, where the spread of Communism was the greatest danger confronting us and must now be a certainty.’7 With Britain pink, France must inevitably take on the most lurid shade of red.
Soon he was not so confident about the ‘sanity and moderation’ of British government and people. The exponents of the free enterprise system, he told Queen Mary, would have to fight hard against ‘the politically powerful advocates of nationalization or statism … I hope and believe the people of Britain will eventually rebel against the theoretical and ideological socialists they acclaimed and elected to power a year ago; only I hope it won’t take too long to realize it backed the wrong horse, or before the present Government can enact too much unpractical and destructive legislation. And to add fuel to the general conflagration, the Socialist policy towards India is a disaster and will only create another vacuum which must eventually be sovietically absorbed.’8 To Lord Portal, the Chairman of the Great Western Railway, he wrote sympathetically of ‘the headaches this railroad nationalization scheme imposed by these crazy and dangerous Socialists must be giving you’.9 ‘Crazy and dangerous’ were the epithets he used also in a letter about His Majesty’s Government to His Majesty himself. How unfortunate for the King, he wrote, to have no option but to accept the Socialists’ disastrous policies. Their ‘concerted attack upon any form of wealth, their determination to nationalize many industries, and their continuation of rationing for rationing’s sake, is as alarming as is the apathy of the people towards all the rules and regulations imposed on them’.10 By the end of 1946 he was telling Queen Mary that Crossman and fifty other left-wing Labour members were communist in all but name, and that the political trends in Britain as well as France were ‘very discouraging if not alarming’.11
The only minister in whom he had any confidence was Ernest Bevin, whose opposition to Soviet expansionism was robust enough to satisfy even the Duke. Adrian Holman, at the British Embassy in Paris, had a long talk with him in September 1945 shortly after his arrival in Europe and reported that ‘his main preoccupation seems to be the growing menace of Soviet Russia’.12 He welcomed enthusiastically Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, in which the former Prime Minister proclaimed the existence of the cold war and warned the Western democracies to be on their guard. ‘No one but you has the experience to tell the world the true implications of Soviet foreign policy,’ he assured Churchill.13 It was high time, he wrote to Queen Mary, that someone exposed ‘Soviet Russia’s manoeuvring and land and oil-grabbing aims’. Surely, even the ‘ill-informed and misguided masses’ of Great Britain would now see the danger before it was too late.14
The very fact that he wrote to his brother and his mother with such frankness shows that in the last two or three years there had been something of a thaw in the relationship between the former monarch and the court. Allen wrote to report that he had been summoned by the King, who wanted to know what plans his brother had, and that he had also seen Lascelles, ‘who displayed the utmost goodwill’. The good will was limited. To Churchill, Lascelles wrote that, while he would not go so far as to state that the King was unwilling to meet the Duke, ‘HM would not be sorry if his brother did not come to England for the next ten years’.15 In saying this, he made the King sound more hostile to his brother than in fact he was. King George VI was always ready to see the Duke, if not looking forward to the meeting with any great enthusiasm. So were the Queen and Queen Mary. The King showed that the situation was in all essentials unchanged in a letter to his mother written shortly before the Duke arrived in London.
It seems to me that when he does come here … we must take the line that he cannot live here. We (the family) have told him we are not prepared to meet ‘her’ and they cannot live in this country without ever meeting us. I have always been told by Walter Monckton and Peacock that the taxation here will be a great deterrent to his settling over here, but the same thing applies in America if he settled there. I can well understand his not wishing to live in France or anywhere in Europe owing to the conditions prevailing there now, but none of us can relish the thought or contemplate the idea of those two persons living in this country even for a few months in the year without some misgivings. She does not like either us or this country, and the life she has been accustomed to live no longer exists here. He seems to think that when he gave up his work for which he was trained he could ‘live’ it down and return here as a private individual and all would be well. But he has to consider others beside himself, and I doubt whether even now he realizes the irrevocable step he took nine years ago and the ghastly shock he gave this country.16
The Duke deposited his wife in France, himself stayed two weeks in Paris, and then flew to London on 4 October. The auguries seemed propitious. He had written to his brother to announce the visit – the first letter beginning ‘Dear Bertie’ and ending, ‘Yours, David’ which had been received for several years17 – and also to his mother to ask if he could stay with her at Marlborough House. The King had telegraphed to say that he would come down especially from Balmoral to meet him, while Queen Mary replied enthusiastically: ‘I need scarcely assure you what a joy it will be to me to see you once again after all these years, for I have missed you very much indeed.’18 The joy was genuine, but that it was not entirely unconfined was shown by the rather more cautious note of her letter to the Countess of Athlone: ‘I hope he does not bother me too much about receiving her – as nothing has happened since to alter my views about that unfortunate marriage.’19 The Queen, if no one else, realized what a turmoil of emotions the Duke’s return must be arousing behind the immaculate facade Queen Mary presented to the world. ‘I pray that his visit will give you pleasure,’ she wrote, ‘for whatever the sad events of the past, it is very hard for a mother to be parted from her son.’20
On the whole the Duke’s stay in England did give pleasure, and a measure of reconciliation was achieved. King George VI told Peacock that he was greatly gratified by the way the visit had gone, ‘and more than once he said it was a great comfort to him that matters had thus been restored to a more natural basis, and he looked forward with hope to this continuing’.21 He said to Mackenzie King that he had been anxious about the visit before it took place, but now felt it had all been to the good and that the bitterness of the past was over.22 Queen Mary was still more enthusiastic: ‘It was the greatest pleasure for me to see you again after all these long years, looking so well and young, and so full of energy – and so nice to have had those nice talks on so many subjects in which both of us are interested. I have felt so much being cut off from you for such ages …’23 They had probably never spent so long alone together in their lives before, mused the Duke, and he had enjoyed every minute of it. The only thing he had regretted about the years since the abdication had been his separation from his mother. But his last words set the limits to the reconciliation: as to the future, ‘I can only ask you to remember that I am no longer a bachelor’.24
On the underlying problems that concerned the Duke, no progress was to be made. Ulick Alexander had recently married a divorced woman but retained his post at court, a development which the Duke believed, or professed to believe, must indicate some change of heart on the part of the royal family.25 He was quickly disillusioned. King George VI was surprised to find that the Duke still could not see his wife as ‘the villainess of the piece’ or at least accept that that was how the British people saw her. ‘I could tell that he is very happily married and that he wants to do his best for her in their future life together,’ he told Queen Mary. ‘But we cannot help him in this and I don’t see how we ever can.’26 Lascelles was equally struck by the Duke’s ‘intense devotion’ to his wife, and saw in it some consolation for the King when he regretted the pain he was inflicting on his brother by thus keeping the Duchess at bay. ‘As long as he and she are together, I don’t think anybody need worry about his being happy or not,’ Lascelles wrote to the King. ‘All the more reason therefore that, having got what he wants, he should reconcile himself to accepting the drawbacks of his position as well as its advantages. One can’t have everything in this life.’27
Lascelles had a long talk with the Duke and spoke to him with greater directness than King George VI or Queen Mary could ever have managed. They met at Marlborough House. ‘The first thing that struck me about him was his voice,’ Lascelles noted in his diary, ‘wh. seems to have got shriller, and is now more pronouncedly American than that of many Americans … He is noticeably, almost painfully thin, and his face is much lined though not unhappily … I had had a hint from Allen that he looked on me as having been “obstructionist” towards his plans, but there was no suggestion of any hostility in his manner wh. was courteous and even friendly throughout, even when I spoke most frankly.’ And he did speak very frankly. He said that he was convinced the King and Queen Mary would never receive the Duchess, and when asked what his own opinion on the matter was, replied categorically that he thought that for them to do so would have ‘a very damaging if not dangerous effect on public opinion both here and all over the Empire’. When the Duke referred to Ulick Alexander’s new wife and other cases of divorcees being received at court, Lascelles retorted that ‘there is in this world one law for Kings and another for commoners’. The abdication had been necessary because of a conflict of principle, and that principle applied as much now as it did then. Could the Duke not accept this decision for once and for all and thus spare the King endless worry and embarrassment? He had already sacrificed his throne and had won himself happiness in so doing, could he not now make a further sacrifice ‘on behalf of your brother, who, in order that you might lead your own life, took on, in your place, the most difficult job in the world, and saddled himself for life with cares and responsibilities, which he had never expected to assume, but for which you had always been prepared’?28
His conversations with King George VI and Lascelles did not finally cure the Duke of any wish to spend at least part of the year in England. In March 1946 he wrote to Alexander and referred to the possibility that Fort Belvedere might be sold by the Crown. If that were to happen, he asked, could he please be told, since he had ideas on the subject.29 His idea seems to have been that he could spend the spring and autumn of each year in England, winter in Palm Beach, and visit France or the Mediterranean for the summer. Given the royal family’s belief that the less time spent in Britain by the Windsors, the better it would be, it is not surprising that the Fort was never offered him. It languished without a tenant for several years, until finally in 1955 a ninety-nine-year lease was sold and the building passed from royal hands.
But if he could not live in Britain, perhaps he might at least return there after his death. In August 1946 he obtained the King’s permission for the erection of a mausoleum in the grounds of the Fort where he and the Duchess could be buried.30 Albert Richardson, the architect, was summoned to the Fort to discuss the project and was drawing up plans when he heard that, for fear of vandalism, the site had been changed to Frogmore. Then he was told that once again plans had changed, the Duke had decided to be buried in his wife’s home town of Baltimore.31 There the matter rested, until the final solution was arrived at some years later.
But the most pressing matter which the Duke had to decide on his visit to London was in what country, and on what terms, he would live, and what work he could find to occupy his time. When he saw Lascelles he told him that he did not feel confident enough of the future of Europe to make his home there, and that for the moment at least he and the Duchess proposed to return to the United States.32 To Duff Cooper, who had now become Ambassador to France and who derived little satisfaction from the Windsors’ sojourning in Paris, the idea seemed an excellent one. ‘I dare say his presence will not render the task of future Ambassadors any easier, but I am sure it is the best solution of the problem,’ he told Lascelles. ‘He can do no good in this country. Neither of them have ever liked the French or will ever begin to understand them; and here he can only find a place in that little cosmopolitan world, the existence of which in Paris will probably always continue, and which can never do anything but harm. The best French people, as you know, avoid it.’33 What seemed so sensible to Cooper in Paris, appeared very different to Halifax in Washington. He strongly deprecated any suggestion that the Duke should pay more than fleeting visits to the United States. Lascelles was alarmed at this intransigence. ‘The King feels strongly – as I do myself – that USA is the only place in which he can live,’ he told the reluctant Ambassador, ‘and that he should be urged to make it his permanent home as soon as possible.’34
When Lascelles put this to the Duke he met with the plaintive query: ‘I want to do something useful; if I do go and live in America, what am I going to do?’ When asked what he wanted to do, he replied that he would like to help improve Anglo-American relations. Lascelles at once declared that this was precisely what he would be able to do, what nobody could do better. With his name, experience and contacts, he would be able to attract to his house all the most interesting people in America and mix them with British visitors, he would keep alive the old wartime friendships, he could foster whatever pet schemes for Anglo-American cooperation in the fields of education, agriculture, architecture, might appeal to him.35 He could lead, suggested Lascelles, the life of a great nobleman of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, recreating somewhere in the southern states the elegance, distinction and, above all, usefulness of an English stately home. The Duke found some appeal in this vision of a Charleston Chatsworth or a Longleat reared above the waters of Lake Marian. Perhaps, he suggested, he might also provide the Ambassador with private reports on the individuals with whom he came in contact. An excellent idea, agreed Lascelles, then in an access of caution, ‘always provided the reports were private’.36
The more that he thought about it, however, the more it appeared to the Duke that he could achieve nothing in the United States unless he was given some kind of formal appointment. He must have a ‘proper background’ for whatever work he was to undertake, he told the King. George VI would have to tell the State Department that his brother enjoyed his personal backing. ‘The truth of the whole matter is that you and I happen to be two prominent personages placed in one of the most unique situations in history, the dignified handling of which is entirely your and my responsibility, and ours alone.’37 But even the most forthright support from the throne would not be enough by itself. Life in America would be expensive in any case, any sort of representational work would be impossible ‘without some form of tax relief which could be most easily and properly taken care of by the granting of diplomatic status’.38 It was this financial angle which more than anything else convinced the Duke that, be it never so ill-defined, some sort of an official ambassadorial status must be assigned to him.
Peacock raised the matter with the King a week after the Duke had returned to Paris and reported that George VI had taken the point and wanted to help.39 But as soon as he began to take advice on the subject, whether from his ministers or the intractable Lascelles, the King found that there were many formidable if not insuperable objections. Apologetically he wrote that he did not think it would be possible to create an official post specially for the Duke, but that he could still do important work in a private capacity: ‘I honestly believe that you would get better results in this way than in a position which, however carefully camouflaged, would appear to have been invented for you alone.’ Churchill was visiting Paris the following week, wrote the King, and would take advantage of the opportunity to discuss the matter with the Duke.40 If the King had wanted to settle the matter for once and for all, he could hardly have found a more dangerous emissary. Churchill was never one to respect bureaucratic niceties, particularly when he was in opposition and would not have to suffer the consequences of his rashness. He told the Duke that, since as an ex-King of Great Britain his position was unique, there was no reason why a unique post should not be invented for him. What was needed, he insisted, was that the Duke should operate ‘within the ambit of the British Embassy in Washington’. Joyfully, the Duke passed on this news to his brother, adding that ‘it was essential that no hint or suggestion ever be made in America of the question of my taxation … for with the diplomatic status which functioning “within the ambit of the Embassy” … would automatically bestow, no taxation problem in America would ever arise’.41 Churchill argued the same case when he got back to London, emphasizing the advantages of keeping the Duke ‘under some general control’ and with regular access to good advice. ‘I would even go so far as to say that there might be serious disadvantages in utterly casting off the Duke of Windsor and his wife from all official contact with Great Britain, and leaving him in a disturbed and distressed state of mind to make his own life in the United States.’42
Like so many pleasant-sounding phrases, Lascelles complained a few months later, ‘within the ambit of the British Embassy’ was a will-o’-the-wisp which raised false hopes but had no real meaning.43 At the time, however, the King took it seriously and instructed Lascelles to preach its merits to all and sundry. He got little reward for his pains. Halifax’s opposition could have been taken for granted. The proposal would inevitably lead to trouble, he argued. It would cause embarrassment to the Ambassador and whatever Consul was responsible for the Duke’s area of operation. It would mean that the Duke would have to see policy telegrams: ‘I should myself feel little confidence in his discretion.’ He might win a few friends for his country but the ‘extent of press reports of society engagements in Newport, New York and Long Island would, as they have done before, tell heavily the other way’.44
It would have been surprising if the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, had taken a line substantially different from that of his Ambassador. Lascelles explained how anxious the King was that his brother should be given every possible encouragement and help to settle in the United States. Bevin was sympathetic but said that any official appointment would be unfair to the real Ambassador. In his diary Lascelles noted that Bevin ‘laid bare the obvious nigger in the wood-pile – that if any sort of diplomatic status … were given to the Duke of Windsor, the Americans would immediately say that the chief reason for it was to get the Windsors immunity from taxation (and the Americans will not be far wrong)’.45 To the King – and thus to the Duke – he stressed Bevin’s concern about the status of the real Ambassador, and said that the Foreign Secretary had promised to review the matter after an unspecified period of time.46 The Duke read this with chagrin; surely, he wrote to Monckton, his record over the last nine years ‘and my retiring nature should be sufficient guarantee that I possess the goodwill, tact and experience of State affairs to prevent any infringement on the important and exalted post of British Ambassador in Washington’.47
Before any such riposte could be made, Attlee in his turn had rejected the idea, supported by the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, Alec Cadogan.48 Nor was the Prime Minister any more enthusiastic when Lascelles revived with him the suggestion that the Duke should become Ambassador to Argentina; a dream which had been rekindled in the Duke’s mind when he dined with the outgoing Ambassador, Sir David Kelly, and spent a happy evening discussing domestic arrangements, allowances and such details.49 Lascelles pointed out that the Duke had certain skeletons in his cupboard – ‘Axel Gren, Bedaux and Ricardo Espirito Santo, all proven German agents’ – which would be enough to bar any professional diplomat from employment under the Crown. Furthermore, when the Argentine government were asked for their agrément they could legitimately enquire whether the Duke’s wife was received at the Court of St James. ‘To this the only answer could be “No”.’ Not surprisingly, Attlee was impressed by this somewhat tendentious presentation of the case by the King’s private secretary and agreed that the idea could not be contemplated.50
The Duke’s hopes were temporarily revived when an old friend, Archibald Clark-Kerr, was appointed to replace Halifax in Washington. Bevin had hinted to the Duke that the attitude of the British Ambassador would always be a crucial factor; the Duke was sure Clark-Kerr would raise no objection.51 Whether he was given a chance to do so is uncertain; Bevin and Attlee were adamant. ‘I have used all my persuasive powers with both of them to make them see our point of view,’ the King told his brother. ‘I know this will be a blow to you and I am so sorry that I have not been able to arrange it for you.’52 The Duke bore the rejection manfully. ‘I am neither surprised nor disappointed,’ he wrote, ‘for I have sensed for some time that there was little chance of our plan maturing.’ He must now look around for another job ‘in whatever sphere and country I can find one suitable to my qualifications’ – a statement that must have caused vague disquiet in the Palace.53
The King genuinely wanted his brother to be given some sort of official status in the United States and was disappointed that it could not be arranged. Lascelles had made up his mind from the start that there could be no place for the Duke of Windsor under the British Crown. The British Empire was like a clock which had to be kept ticking away, he at one time or another told the Duke, the King, Lord Halifax, and no doubt others too. Its mechanism was delicate. He and others had taken it to pieces a hundred times to try to fit in an extra wheel – the wheel of an ex-King. They had never found a way of doing so without damaging the works. In answer to this the Duke protested that the extra wheel had seemed to fit in perfectly well in the Bahamas, indeed had proved not to be an extra wheel at all. Ah yes, replied Lascelles, but that was in wartime; ‘the experiment had worked once but could not safely be repeated’.54 It is difficult not to agree with the Duke that the British constitution and the stability of the Empire would not have been in peril if some job had been created for him in the United States. Equally, Lascelles was right in thinking that such a post would have been of doubtful value and a considerable irritant to the incumbent Ambassador. In blocking it as effectively as he did he was fulfilling what he saw as being his role as an efficient private secretary; it was bad luck on the Duke, however, that he should have been the victim of Lascelles’s unflinching rectitude.
The Duke did not follow up his threat – if threat it was – to look around for another job. Even after his rebuff by Attlee and Bevin he continued to believe that some day there would be a change of heart; at the worst, if he waited long enough, Churchill might return to power and his wrongs be redressed. This conviction curbed the enthusiasm with which he might have gone out in quest of something else, and the Duchess, who had no particular wish to see their seasonal programme interrupted by the demands of a husband’s career, did not encourage him to fresh endeavours. Yet he was only a little over fifty; an age at which his more successful contemporaries were becoming ambassadors or admirals, ministers of the crown or captains of industry. Instead he seemed doomed to the life of a discontented Tennysonian lotus eater: why should he only rest, who was the first of things? In retrospect one can see that there would have been many jobs of a social or charitable nature which would have been suitable to his talents and to which he could have devoted as much or as little effort as he wished. At the time there seemed convincing arguments against any particular activity, and so he lingered on, filling the time agreeably enough and waiting for something to turn up.
Nothing saps the spirit so surely and so irrevocably as a failure to put one’s abilities to work. Susan Mary Patten, wife of an American diplomat, sat next to him at dinner in Paris. He was pitiful, she found, ‘looks young and undissipated, and the famous charm is still there, but I never saw a man so bored’. She talked of a club for enlisted men at which she worked and he said how much he would like to visit it. ‘You know what my day was today?’ he asked. ‘I got up late, and then I went with the Duchess and watched her buy a hat, and then on the way home I had the car drop me in the Bois to watch some of your soldiers playing football, and then I had planned to take a walk, but it was so cold that I could hardly bear it … When I got home the Duchess was having her French lesson, so I had no one to talk to, so I got a lot of tin boxes down which my mother had sent me last week and looked through them. They were essays and so on that I had written when I was in France studying French before the Great War … You know, I’m not much of a reading man.’55
They returned to Paris to find that the freehold of their house in the Boulevard Suchet had been sold and that they could not negotiate an extension of the lease beyond April 1946. Paris that first winter was a grim and uncomfortable city. ‘It’s not the same Paris, as you warned us,’ the Duke wrote to an American friend, ‘and the lack of food and fuel will be acutely felt.’56 The electricity would be cut off, sometimes for five hours at a time; the exchange rate for the franc was ridiculously low; ‘the most expensive discomfort she had ever known’, the Duchess described it.57 The restaurants were either closed or subsisting on the black market and charging outrageous prices for inferior food. Only the foreign embassies could afford to give dinner parties, otherwise cocktail parties were the usual form of entertaining, and to these the Windsors rarely went: ‘However this lack of social life does not worry us any, and in fact the only time we are not depressed is when we are at home.’58 Those who saw the Windsors together in Paris felt, as King George VI and Lascelles had done, that they were entirely content in each other’s company. Noël Coward met them at dinner at the British Embassy. ‘He loves her so much, and at long last I am beginning to believe that she loves him,’ he wrote in his diary, and then a few months later: ‘The Windsors were charming. I like her, and I think that now she is genuinely fond of him.’59
They were spared the worst of the privations by the fact that they drew British Army rations and had a resourceful and none-too-scrupulous chef to fill the gaps. There were seventeen for dinner on 2 January 1946, and fifty more came in after the meal: ‘We had a buffet of hot dogs from the US, ham mousse from tinned ham, salade russe from tinned vegetables, sandwiches of cheese and cress and black market eggs stuffed – our only extravagance,’ the Duchess told her aunt Bessie. They drank thirty bottles of champagne and three of whisky.60 The cuisine could have been more haute, but nobody starved. Susan Mary Patten, who dined there a few weeks later, complained more about the level of the conversation. ‘Awful evening,’ she wrote. ‘The Duchess determined to play word games, despite her complete lack of education and the competition of Lady Diana Cooper, who learned history with her mother’s milk … The Duke couldn’t remember Metternich and Castlereagh …’61
The presence of Duff and Diana Cooper at the British Embassy did much to ease what could have been a slightly awkward return by the Windsors to Parisian society. But though they were hospitable, and Lady Diana obstinately defied protocol by curtseying to the Duchess, the Coopers were sometimes critical of their royal succubi. ‘The two poor little old things were most pathetic,’ Diana wrote when she met them again in September 1945. ‘Fear, I suppose, of losing their youthful figures, or homesickness, has made them Dachau-thin. She is much commoner and more confident, he much duller and sillier.’ Second impressions were slightly less unfavourable: the Duchess was ‘slim and svelte as a piece of vermicelli’, while the Duke was ‘common, of course, and boring, but not so puppetish as I thought’ – but no sort of rapport was established.62 Duff Cooper was forced to agree with Lascelles that the Duke could not properly fill a diplomatic post in the United States, but made it plain that he would not be unhappy to lose him from ‘his own bishopric, Paris’.63 ‘I feel nothing but goodwill, and, indeed, affection and gratitude towards His Royal Highness,’ wrote the Ambassador, ‘but I must admit that his presence in Paris does not make things any easier … At the same time I am quite sure that he himself only wants to do the right thing and be helpful, and that they are both conducting themselves with the greatest propriety.’64
Soon after they arrived in Paris, Duff Cooper’s deputy, Adrian Holman, gave the Duke a warning that the French press, in particular the left-wing papers, would be watching their activities closely and would be quick to report any evidence that they were making unsuitable friends among those suspected of collaboration with the Germans, or were obtaining supplies on the black market. The Duke promised to heed this advice, and though the Duchess might occasionally have regaled her guests with black-market eggs, any transgressions were on a scale that even the most censorious French journalists found venial. The worst that Duff Cooper could accuse the Duke of was a tendency to entertain official personages as if he himself had some role in public life. ‘Important Canadians, American Senators, members of delegations … have all been received by him, one can only suppose that he feels it his duty to receive them, because few of them possess any overwhelming social attraction.’ Once he had got them to his house he tended to pontificate – lecturing the Prefect of Police, with all the authority of a former Governor, on police administration and the need for complete incorruptibility.65 ‘He was always given to holding forth,’ wrote Lascelles in his diary, ‘and indeed, as long ago as 1928, showed increasing signs of becoming a hearth-rug bore.’66
In April 1946, with the house in the Boulevard Suchet gone for ever, they had no recourse but to move south to their villa La Cröe in Antibes, another rented home but one which offered slightly greater hope of permanence. The move, in fact, suited the Duke well enough. His ‘ultimate aim was to make his home in the south of France’, Gray Phillips told Lascelles,67 and La Cröe was more of a home to him than anywhere he had lived since Fort Belvedere. Though the Italians and Germans had billeted themselves in the garage, mined the sea front and cut down trees to provide a field of fire, the house itself had remained virtually unscathed until an American shell burst nearby, blowing in all the windows.68 Other damage was negligible and the Duchess soon had the house in operation again. The scale was reduced but still impressive. By 24 April there were twenty-two people employed there: ‘I imagine outside of embassies it is the only house run in this fashion in France and probably England today,’ the Duchess told Aunt Bessie with mingled pride and ruefulness.69 As a Major General, the Duke continued to draw rations from the British Army depot at Marseilles,70 a dispensation which made it possible for them to entertain the stream of visitors who passed through the house.
The Metcalfes were not among the guests. For some long-forgotten reason the Duke at this time took violently against his old ally. When his millionaire American friend Robert Young arrived in Southampton the Duke warned him that he might be met by a ‘certain Major E. D. Metcalfe’, who was now employed by Arthur Rank and would undoubtedly swamp the new arrival with invitations. ‘Well, Bob, you know my make up and that it is not vindictive, but if what I predict happens, I would appreciate your ignoring Metcalfe’s invitations, until I have an opportunity of explaining my reasons for this request and telling you what a four-flusher Metcalfe is.’71 He was justified in saying he was not vindictive, and this assault on someone he had known and cared about for so long was out of character. It did not endure. Within a year he was writing in the friendliest terms to suggest a meeting,72 and when Metcalfe died in 1957 the Duke made a special visit to London for the funeral. ‘He was, as you know, one of my oldest and closest friends,’ he told Ali Mackintosh. ‘We shall miss him a great deal.’73
It has been said that the Duke briefly played with the idea of living in Ireland. Nothing in his own papers suggests that this was so. The story probably arose from an exchange with Sir Shane Leslie at the end of 1945. In a letter to Leslie the Duke mentioned his admiration of the Church of Rome, which it seemed to him was one of the few sure bulwarks against communism in a distracted and divided world.74 Leslie responded with a suggestion that the Duke should visit Ireland, so as ‘to investigate the roots of Irish feelings, as expressed at home and abroad’.75 Before he could have received any reply, he was excitedly telling Lascelles that the visit was as good as arranged. ‘This is a good instance of the Duke of Windsor’s irresponsibility and lack of political (and personal) judgment,’ fulminated Lascelles, ‘for it is a crazy idea which wd certainly do him harm.’76 Crazy or not, there is no reason to believe that this particular idea was ever entertained seriously by the Duke, though Lascelles can hardly be blamed for believing Leslie. The urge to make himself conspicuously busy, and incidentally to irritate the British government, might easily have driven the Duke to Ireland, possibly with the same ill effects for his reputation as had been earned by his visit to Germany before the war.
Instead he began to pay more frequent visits to England, staying often with the Metcalfes. In the autumn of 1946 he brought the Duchess with him. The Duke made no attempt to secure an invitation to any royal residence, or even to establish contact with his family. They stayed, as they hoped inconspicuously, with the Dudleys at their house, Ednam Lodge, near Sunningdale. Their hopes were disappointed; ill fortune had it that their visit featured in the headlines of all British and most foreign papers. The Duchess had brought with her a large part of her jewellery, and one night a burglar climbed into the house and removed everything except what she was wearing and a few Fabergé boxes which were evidently felt to be too difficult to dispose of. Lady Dudley, her hostess, wrote that among the jewels stolen were ‘a great many uncut emeralds which I believe belonged to Queen Alexandra’;77 she was as likely as anyone to have known the contents of the Duchess’s jewel case, but even if the emeralds existed in the first place and had been made over to the Duchess, it seems surprising that they were still uncut at the end of 1946, or that, if they were, they would have formed part of her travelling collection. Emeralds or not, the theft was on a majestic scale and left the Duke and Duchess distraught. They had much enjoyed the ‘charming hospitality’ of the Dudleys, the Duke told his mother and their only regret was the ‘bitter and costly discovery that Great Britain is no longer the secure and law-abiding country it used to be’.78
Rejected as he felt himself to be by his native land, it seems to have given the Duke some consolation to muse on the discredit that the robbery reflected on post-war Britain and on the tribulations that the British people were now experiencing. Britain at the end of 1946 was suffering austerity more grim than anything it had known during the war; the rich felt themselves oppressed and hard done by; the prospect of relief seemed infinitely remote. ‘It has been quite a shock to notice how social and economic conditions have changed since 1936,’ the Duke told Lord Portal. ‘The old values have disappeared and been replaced by strange tendencies, and one senses an unfamiliar atmosphere throughout the country.’79 He might have reflected that it was those very values which had created the conditions against which he had protested so valiantly in the 1930s, but he was in no mood to make allowances. He would not shake the dust of England altogether off his feet, but he was finally convinced that he must make his home elsewhere. It remained to decide how and where.