BY THE BEGINNING OF 1952 IT HAD BECOME FINALLY evident that the Duke of Windsor would never be offered an official post that would make any serious demand on his time or energies. He would never be able to live permanently in Great Britain. Of the countries in which he could contemplate living and in which taxation made it feasible, France continued to seem the most attractive. The parameters of his life were thus laid down; it remained to live out the years that were left as agreeably and as comfortably as possible.
To find a permanent home in France was the first priority. The Duchess would have preferred to live in a house in central Paris, perhaps with something rather less grand than La Cröe for stays in the south of France, more probably renting houses or living in hotels as the mood took them. The Duke preferred the country and would have been happy to have his main residence somewhere reasonably accessible but not too close to the capital. In the end they found a solution which suited both of them remarkably well. First, early in 1952, they visited and were enchanted by the Moulin de la Tuilerie, an old water mill in the valley of the Chevreuse, less than an hour’s drive from Paris yet in an as yet unspoilt pocket of country. The Mill had been made habitable, but not much more, by the painter Etienne Drian. The Windsors leased it, and then decided to buy. Without too much difficulty the Chancellor of the Exchequer, then R. A. Butler, was persuaded to make available the necessary £30,000 odd from the Duke’s capital in England, which was still blocked by currency control.1
Then began the serious work of putting house and garden in order. ‘Fixing houses is a headache anywhere,’ the Duke complained a year or so after they had taken possession, ‘but it’s an exhausting and discouraging occupation in “Frogland” where there seems to be no organization or supervision of work whatsoever. Plus the fact that the ouvriers consume two to three bottles of red wine a day on the job; the sign saying “men working” should read “men drinking”.’2 Gradually the job got done, and the Mill was transformed into a comfortable and peaceful home. Its heart was the old barn, which was adapted as the main sitting room, called the Museum since it was there that the Duke kept his most precious relics: two large drums of the Grenadier and Welsh Guards, used as occasional tables; a frame containing specimens of every button used by the British Army during the First World War; an enormous wall map, equipped with flashing electric light bulbs which traced his travels as Prince of Wales; three golf balls mounted in silver to mark the three occasions he had done a hole in one.3 It took three years’ work and much expense before the house was completed to their satisfaction, but when it was done it ranked second only to Fort Belvedere in the pantheon of his affections.
The Duke told Harold Nicolson that he hoped the Duchess might be cured of her passion for New York and Paris if he provided her with a country seat.4 In this he deluded himself, but while work on the Mill was still in progress, a solution was found to the problem of accommodation in Paris. In October 1952 the Duke was grumbling to his mother that houses or flats in Paris, not to mention their renovation and redecoration, were ‘so incredibly expensive that one hesitates to take the plunge’.5 Within a few months the City of Paris put at his disposal, at a very reasonable though far from nominal rent on a twenty-five-year lease, a solid white mansion set in two acres of grounds on the Neuilly side of the Bois de Boulogne. It offered privacy, quiet, splendid rooms for entertaining, limited but adequate accommodation for guests. He accepted the offer with alacrity.
The keynote of the Mill was informality, comfortable and expensive but in no way intended to impress the visitor. 4 Route du Champ D’Entraînement was a very different matter. If the Windsors could not live in a palace, then at least the Duchess was determined that the setting of their daily life should be palatial. Stéphene Boudin, who had first met the Duke and probably worked for him when he was Prince of Wales, and who specialized in producing aristocratic eighteenth-century French interiors for the affluent bourgeois of the twentieth century, was hired to manufacture a background fit for a man who had once been king.6 The effect was artificial, theatrical even, but never vulgar; the portrait of Queen Mary by Llewellyn which dominated the principal salon seemed slightly out of place but not in the least disgraced by its surroundings. Some found the total effect over-ornate, others deplored its arid formality, but it avoided pomposity, the detail was of the highest quality, it provided a sumptuous setting for entertainment in the grand manner.
The fact that he was now settled firmly in France and had been treated with such generosity, both by the municipality of Paris and by the government, did not make the Duke any more disposed to like the French or to feel at home in their company. His command of French remained frail, and he was noticeably more eager to air his German or his Spanish. When the French in 1954 torpedoed the negotiations for a European Defence Community he exploded with indignation: ‘And I guess that being in Germany right now, where there is no Communism and the work of reconstruction incredible, one despises the “Frogs” all the more. Taking into account that the Germans liquidated the French in 1940 as no nation ever has been before, the arrogance and stubbornness of their politicians passes all comprehension.’7 It was partly the feeling that, though he was committed to living in France, he still wished to keep a toe-hold elsewhere that led him to reject an offer from Lord Brownlow in 1952 to buy his Alberta ranch. Possibly he still had some faint hope that the will-o’-the-wisp of an oil strike might one day after all prove a reality; but more seriously, he was reluctant to part with the only land which he owned apart from the Mill. He would not sell now, and he did not believe he ever would, he told Brownlow;8 in fact he did, but not for another decade, and only after increasing ill health made it obvious that he could never get pleasure out of visiting the ranch again.
While the Windsors were thus digging themselves in in France, things changed dramatically in England. Early in February 1952 King George VI died suddenly at Sandringham. Even for those who had been closely in touch with him the news came as a surprise; for the Duke, who knew little more than any other newspaper reader about the King’s health, it was a stunning shock. His rancour had been too great for too long, and the brothers had grown too far apart, for him to feel deep grief; but the death of a sibling who had once been so close to him was still profoundly disturbing. There were other considerations too. What effect would the death of the King have on the Windsors’ standing in Great Britain? Not much, he reckoned – at any rate while Queen Mary lived – but might there not be some relenting on the part of the new generation? He hastened from New York, where he was staying when he received the news, to attend the funeral. His wife sped him on his way with sage advice and responded enthusiastically when he told her that he had been well received: ‘Now that the door has been opened a crack try and get your foot in, in the hope of making it open even wider in the future because that is best for WE … Do not mention or ask for anything regarding recognition of me.’ She suspected that Queen Elizabeth*16 would be as much of an obstacle as Queen Mary to the Duke’s ambitions, attributing her hostility to a particularly ferocious letter he had once written to his mother.*17 Queen Mary, she felt, should ‘have kept it to herself’, but instead she had shown it to King George VI, who had passed it on to his wife. She urged him to see Queen Elizabeth and try to explain what his feelings had been at the time: ‘After all, there are two sides to every story.’9
To some extent, the Duchess’s urging bore fruit. ‘Of course, David rushed over at once, nice of him but a bit disturbing,’ Queen Mary told the Athlones. ‘However, he saw E and the girls, he had not seen them since 1936, so that feud is over, a great relief to me.’10 But the reconciliation did not go very deep. The Duke made brief notes of the principal conversations which he held during his stay in London. ‘Mama as hard as nails but failing,’ he noted. ‘When Queens fail they make less sense than others in the same state. Cookie [the Windsors’ nickname for Queen Elizabeth] listened without comment and closed on the note that it was nice to be able to talk about Bertie with somebody who had known him so well.’11 He was not left with the feeling that the Duchess would be more welcome in London than she had been while King George VI was alive, or that his niece, the new Queen, would be likely to start her reign by defying what she knew to be the deeply felt convictions of her grandmother and mother. The most tangible consequence of his brother’s death was that he lost the £10,000 a year which had been paid to him by King George VI as an allowance. The loss, at a time when he was expensively refurbishing the Mill and about to engage on the still more expensive decoration of the house in the Bois, was notably inopportune, even if it did not, as he told his mother was the case: ‘necessitate a complete revision of the style of living we have maintained ever since our marriage, as befits the position of a son of a sovereign’.12
He was back in New York, a year or so after the King’s death, when he received a letter from the royal doctor reporting that his mother was dangerously ill. After three harrowing weeks, in which Queen Mary, barely conscious and in considerable pain, fought death with the same tenacity as she had shown in every field of life, she finally died on 24 March 1953. The Duke arrived at her bedside a few minutes too late. At the sight of her, wholly out of touch at last and yet still without having said a word to accept her daughter-in-law into her family, a dreadful bitterness welled up inside her son. ‘My sadness was mixed with incredulity,’ the Duke told his wife, ‘that any mother could have been so hard and cruel towards her eldest son for so many years and yet so demanding at the end without relenting a scrap. I’m afraid the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they now are in death.’13 It was a brutal comment; yet it must be read in conjunction with the grief that he expressed to his closest surviving friend, Lord Dudley, when he told him how he had dreaded the indefinite prolongation of Queen Mary’s agony: ‘Still, it was terrible when her end came, and her passing has left a great void for our generation, and a last great personal link with our past has gone.’14
Would he have bothered to be hypocritical to someone who knew him as well as did Lord Dudley? Did he, knowing what his wife must be feeling, exaggerate the animosity he felt as he stood beside his mother’s body? Probably he scarcely knew himself. A part of him could never forgive Queen Mary’s treatment of his wife, and that part spoke when he denounced her icy cruelty, but she had still been the first woman to have played an important role in his life, the first woman he had loved, the woman whose love and approval he had craved all his life. It was because he valued his mother’s good opinion so highly that he was bitterly resentful when she withheld it from his marriage; if she had said even a word in recognition of the Duchess’s membership of the family, he would have mourned her with all the passion of which he was still capable. But Queen Mary was not the woman to abandon a principle, even to win a last-moment reconciliation with her son.
His resentment festered within him so that, with his mother no longer there as principal target, he lashed out wildly at any that remained. For the funeral he stayed with the Gloucesters at York House. His sister, the Princess Royal, he told his wife, had ‘been quite sweet and human on the whole and Harry and Alice have been friendly hosts here. But of course they don’t talk our language and never will.’ All his time in London he had been ‘boiling mad’ that the Duchess was not in her rightful place by his side. ‘What a smug stinking lot my relations are and you’ve never seen such a seedy worn-out bunch of old hags most of them have become.’15 He concealed his feelings well; the Duchess of Gloucester remarked how well he got on with his brother and sister: ‘It was particularly moving listening to the Duke, because he was obviously so pleased to be talking with his own family again.’16 Indeed, his pleasure was genuine. He did still yearn to be with his own family again. It would have taken only a few words to transform the ‘smug stinking lot’ into a cherished group of intimates. But those few words would not, could not ever be spoken, and so he reviled them in blind fury and slipped unforgivingly away.
To American friends he professed to feel total indifference towards the royal family, whether the new generation or the old, and to consider the whole concept of monarchy as a faintly comic anachronism. In October 1952 he told Robert Young that he had just been to London and had found the new regime well installed – ‘not that I give a damn’.17 But he did give a damn. He at first cherished the hope that he and the Duchess would be invited to the Coronation in June 1953, though with Queen Mary still alive and Lascelles installed as private secretary to the new monarch, it is hard to believe that he entertained it very seriously. Certainly he had abandoned it before the end of 1952. He prepared a statement for the press which he showed to Churchill, explaining that it would be contrary to precedent for any sovereign or former sovereign to attend the Coronation. Churchill confirmed that this was indeed the case and that the statement would provide a most dignified reply to anyone who asked whether or not the Windsors would be attending.18 Possibly the Duke had hoped that his approach to Churchill would bring about a miraculous last-minute change of heart; his reply confirmed that he was ‘disappointed and depressed that you foresee no change in my family’s attitude towards the Duchess or to her rightful official status as my wife’.19
Instead he watched the ceremony on television from the house of American friends in Paris, regaling the company with a well-informed and only occasionally ribald commentary on what they saw. He told Princess Arthur of Connaught that he had found it very moving, ‘and we thought Lilibet conducted herself superbly throughout the long and trying ceremony’.20 To another friend he remarked that a Queen enjoyed a marked advantage over a King on such an occasion, when a combination of ‘humility and resplendent jewellery play so important a role. A woman can go through the motions far more naturally and gracefully than can any man.’21
Though the Coronation was thus a source of fresh humiliation, it provided a temporary solution for what was now the principal problem of his life. Harold Nicolson identified this accurately when he met the Duke at lunch and observed: ‘He pretends to be very busy and happy, but I feel this is false and that he is unoccupied and miserable.’22 He would never be entirely miserable so long as he shared his life with the Duchess, but he was indeed bored and under-employed, knowing that his talents were going to waste, resentful of the fact, and yet unable to think what to do about it. He was therefore delighted when it was suggested that he should write a long article on the constitutional role of the monarchy, to appear at the time of the Coronation. He set about the task with relish, to such effect that he produced not only articles for the Sunday Express and the Women’s Home Companion, but enough material to make up a slim book which, under the title of The Crown and the People, 1902–1953, was published in September 1953.
Much more than his autobiography, The Crown and the People was the Duke’s unaided work. Once he had completed a first draft, he appealed to Harold Nicolson to cast a professional eye over his work. When Nicolson telephoned to make an appointment to come to see him he was cut off with some abruptness. Later that day the Duke wrote to apologize. The reason for his rudeness, he explained, was that ‘my brother Harry was in the room. He knows nothing of the article, for in these matters I believe in the element of surprise!’23 Nicolson mainly confined himself to modifying or urging the omission of some of the more astringent passages, including an unflattering reference to the British Labour Party.24 ‘He fusses so much about his article that it might be the President of the United States preparing an address to Congress,’ commented Nicolson. ‘But what he does not see is that it is wrong for him to write it at all.’25 At least he accepted all Nicolson’s proposed changes, as well as some still more drastic censorship imposed by George Allen. The final result was an uncontroversial series of recollections of the two Coronations in which the Duke had participated, with some reflections – perfectly sensible if neither profound nor original – about the nature and future of the monarchy. He wrote appreciatively of the contribution of his father and still more of his mother: ‘She was not only the loving wife who bore him six children but also his gracious and enlightened Queen Consort.’ King George VI, he wrote, had been a faithful reflection of his father; if his own reign had run its course ‘it is possible that its mood and texture would have followed more that of Edward VII’. One remark must have seemed especially noteworthy to the royal family: after reflecting on the strain to which the late King had been subject during his reign the Duke added, ‘and I am not insensible of the fact that through a decision of mine he was projected into sovereign responsibilities that may at first have weighed heavily upon him’.26
This slight offering was followed by another even slighter. In 1960 a series of articles was again cobbled into a book, this time entitled A Family Album and largely ghosted by Patrick Kinross. This curious little book contains a certain number of quite entertaining anecdotes but consists mainly of random recollections about clothes worn or not worn by the royal family. It abounds in incidents in which, as Prince of Wales, the author committed some sartorial solecism and was duly reprimanded by his father. That concluded the Duke’s literary career. The year after A Family Album appeared a contract was drawn up for a biography of King George III which the Duke was to write with help from Charles Murphy.27 A first draft of what had by then become ‘My Hanoverian Ancestors’ was completed in 1964 but does not seem to have found favour with its nominal author.28 The project languished and died; it was hardly a promising enterprise from the outset. The Duke meanwhile had been taking a keen interest in progress on the Duchess’s exceedingly profitable memoirs, which were published as The Heart Has Its Reasons in 1956.
The very considerable sums that the Windsors made by their writings were needed to support the lavish style of their life, but even if they had not been they would have given much satisfaction to the Duke. On the straitened canvas of his interests, the management of his investments bulked among the most conspicuous. He enjoyed the best advice. ‘Many thanks for … the welcome check in the amount of $100,000,’ he wrote to the railway mogul, Robert Young. ‘With another of $75,000 to follow, it certainly is a quick and generous profit on an investment of £40,000 eight months ago.’29 It certainly was, and though such spectacular conjuring tricks were never commonplace, they happened often enough to ensure that an already substantial fortune grew comfortably with the years. The Duke of Windsor was a rich man; he needed to be, and never felt that he was wholly secure, but by the standards of the generality of mankind, he had little to complain of. It was not all good luck and good advice. He was shrewd, well-informed, cautious without being timid: if the circumstances had made it possible he would have proved a formidable stockbroker.
Golf and gardening were the other diversions which made the greatest demands on his time and energies. Golf had always been a favoured pastime, gardening had languished since the days of Fort Belvedere but was resumed with enthusiasm after the acquisition of the Mill. A large and long-neglected walled garden was first purged of its few surviving vegetables and richer crop of weeds, then laid out with two typically English herbaceous borders filled with the traditional flowers he had favoured at the Fort – delphiniums, phlox, asters. On the other side of the stream that ran through the property he constructed a rock garden, set with alpine blooms, through which water piped from the river cascaded to the stream below.30 When James Pope-Hennessy visited the Duke he found him supervising the erection of a sundial. He was led to the spot by ‘a yelping noise (which I later identified as the Duke’s theme when he is excited) and a stream of German oaths … I found the Duke, wearing a cerise felt baseball cap. He was jumping about rather wildly, and shouting ‘Jawohl! Jawohl!’ and other military German expressions to a troop of French gardeners.’31 The head gardener in fact came from Alsace, hence the choice of language; the only surprising feature of the scene was that the Duke was not himself helping to manhandle the sundial into position. In gardening he was very much of an interventionist proprietor, usually to be found digging or weeding as vigorously as any of his employees.
He kept up his Spanish, taking lessons twice a week; practised his German whenever an opportunity occurred; resolutely refused to improve his French. He wrote many letters, read newspapers and magazines, set his archives in order and then reordered them. The dogs demanded much attention: the cairns had been replaced by pugs – Disraeli, Trooper and Davey Crockett in 1958 – ‘We did have a fourth, called Peter Townsend,’ the Duchess explained to James Pope-Hennessy, with her least nice grin, ‘but we gave the Group Captain away.’32 It was not a crowded life, but no less eventful than that of most men of more than sixty; it is only when it is compared with what it might have been if the Duke had been more ambitious or dedicated that its triviality becomes so obvious.
Entertaining, or more accurately supporting his wife in her role as hostess, was a major preoccupation. The guest lists had not changed noticeably since the days of the Boulevard Suchet, a sprinkling of French or foreign guests of real distinction set amidst what Frank Giles with some hauteur described as ‘a motley and not very attractive company: blue-rinsed widows of American millionaires, members of French cafe society, hangers-on of one sort or another’.33 The food, drink and service were more to be relied on than the company; the Duchess’s manner was very grand indeed, and she entered in a lavishly formal style that only rarely tipped over into ostentation. Kenneth Rose dined there in January 1972 and found it ‘like stepping into a fairyland of fantastic luxury. Almost everything seemed to be made of gold or crystal. There are wonderful carpets, exquisite gilt furniture, little tables covered with thickets of jewelled bric à brac. The only light comes from candles, which cast their golden haze from chandeliers and sconces. Beautifully arranged flowers. Two pictures dominate the room – one of the Duke in Garter Robes and another of Queen Mary.’
The party moved on into dinner. ‘The room is again lit entirely by candles. There are two tables of eight or ten each, covered with gilt and silver objects, painted porcelain candlesticks, delightful flowers and porcelain-handled cutlery that is rather heavy and difficult to manage. Endless butlers and footmen, all in white ties. Throughout the meal, the Duchess catches their eye from time to time so that they may receive swiftly whispered instructions, perhaps even rebukes.’ The food was excellent: a rich fish stew with rice and olives accompanied by several different kinds of bread; saddle of lamb, ‘which characteristically has sprouted ten kidneys instead of the usual two’; chocolate pudding, decorated with truffle chocolates; wafer thin pastry cups two inches high filled with hot cheese soufflé – ‘They are unbelievably delicious.’ They drank hock, claret, champagne, then claret again with the savoury. The women left once dinner was over, but within two or three minutes the Duchess was back, beckoning the men into the drawing room. Once there, a man sat down at the piano and began playing ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and other tunes of that period.34
When they were not entertaining they were being entertained. Inevitably they were the guests of honour, and in most of the houses to which they went the Duchess was accorded something very close to royal status. Cecil Beaton remembered a dinner party early in 1960, when sequin crowns were distributed to the more favoured female guests. ‘One of course was popped on to the Duchess of Windsor’s head – a moment that would have been a flashlight photographer’s scoop, but the Duchess looked quite a bit embarrassed as she smiled with her mouth turning down at the corners. Then, delighted at having a quotation to hand, she witlessly and clumsily and with wild little eyes shouted as she leaned across the table “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”’35 On such occasions the Duke would drink as much as most, but rarely enough to be classified as drunk by any except the most censorious. When he did take too much, it showed itself in exuberance rather than bellicosity or alcoholic stupor. In St Moritz he danced the Charleston and a sailor’s hornpipe with Noël Coward: Princess Sixte de Bourbon was decidedly shocked but ‘there was no harm in it,’ reflected Coward; ‘it looked only faintly ridiculous to see us skipping about with a will.’36 Anna Neagle, who was on the same liner for an Atlantic crossing, found him an exceptionally good dancer. They tried out a new and complicated rumba rhythm. She trod on his feet. They tried again. He trod on hers. ‘We both laughed and he led me back to the table. “Difficult,” he said, “but thanks for trying.” No wonder they’d called him the Prince Charming.’37
Oswald and Diana Mosley were a couple whom they saw often, though more frequently in the country, where they were neighbours, than in Paris. Lady Mosley’s sister, Nancy Mitford, considered the friendship was based wholly on a shared nostalgia for the days of the Third Reich: ‘They want us all to be governed by the kind clever rich Germans and be happy ever after. I wish I knew why they all live in France and not outre-Rhin.’38 No doubt Mosley and the Duke shared certain political assumptions but one does not need to look for any close affinity of views to explain why two exiled couples should seek each other’s company; especially since, for the Duke, the Mosleys represented a society and a way of life from which he was now largely cut off but for which he still felt a wistful if almost reluctant longing. Diana Mosley noticed how eager he was to indulge in genealogical gossip whenever the occasion offered. ‘He remembered people’s sisters and cousins and aunts. He would say: “Now let me see. Lady so-and-so was Lord so-and-so’s great-aunt. Recto?”’39 The Duchess, perhaps in emulation of her husband, liked to gossip about the American upper crust, and at dinner regaled the British diplomat, Charles Johnston, with a laborious exegesis of inter-marriages between the Biddles and the Dukes.40
‘I loved the Duke and have seldom met his like for charm,’ wrote Lady Mosley. ‘He was always ready to laugh and be amused and then his rather sad and anxious expression changed and his face lit up in a most engaging way. He had the almost miraculous memory that royal personages so cleverly cultivate and which everyone finds flattering.’41 James Pope-Hennessy, who spent some time at the Mill when he was working on Queen Mary’s official biography, was surprised to find that the Duke was ‘exceedingly intelligent, original, liberal-minded and quite capable of either leading a conversation or taking a constructive part in one. He is also one of the most considerate men I have ever met of his generation.’42 Nearly everyone agreed about his consideration, not all would have shared Pope-Hennessy’s admiration of his intelligence or prowess as a conversationalist. J. K. Galbraith, for one, was not impressed. He met the Duke just before he left to take over as American Ambassador in New Delhi. The Duke claimed to be something of an authority on the Indians. ‘You will find the people most agreeable in their own way,’ he declared. ‘They have been most uncommonly decent to my niece.’43
In this judgment, the Duke was being unusually polite about a race who suffered from the dual disability of being both coloured and left-wing. Though Pope-Hennessy found him ‘liberal-minded’, he often seemed reactionary to the point of caricature. Susan Mary Patten remembered a dinner at the British Embassy at which the Duke stung her diplomat husband to fury by announcing that General Marshall was unquestionably a communist. Patten demanded to know the Duke’s evidence and a row ensued: ‘At the end of it I happened to look at the Duchess. She was tight-lipped and cobra-eyed. I think we will not be invited to the Windsors again.’44 They were not. When Eisenhower was nominated as the Republican candidate for President, the Duke was dubious and said that he would have felt safer with Taft. ‘He is a sounder man, of independence and integrity … Besides, one doesn’t know exactly to whom the General is committed, or whether he won’t be the prisoner of some of the gang who control the present administration from behind the scenes in Washington.’45 This opinion he soon revised. He wrote to Queen Mary after meeting Eisenhower in New York shortly before the inauguration and told her that he thought the new administration had already brought about a change of heart in America. ‘President Eisenhower has lately revealed two encouraging and hitherto little known characteristics which may well have a profound influence on his foreign policy. One is the fact that he is a deeply religious man. The other is that, although he chose the army as a career, he is fundamentally a man of peace. Who knows but that these two estimable traits will make for a more effective approach to the solution of the “cold War”, and a formidable spiritual counter-attack to ruthless Soviet aggression.’46
But his ideal among American politicians was that stalwart of the ultra-right, Senator Barry Goldwater. Early in 1962 he was telling a Republican friend that Goldwater inspired him more and more. ‘He would make a wonderful President to our way of thinking. Still, I am afraid there are too many “liberals” in his party to stop his nomination.’47 He never wavered in this belief, surprising Sulzberger two years later by his insistence that Goldwater was a great man. He added, ‘I was against Dewey, but I am for Barry.’48 The failure of the American people to share his point of view led to a gradual loss of faith in the future of the United States. By 1969 he was telling Loel Guinness that the country was on the road to revolution and that nothing was being done to check the process. ‘Having disrupted the normal functioning of the universities and colleges and even the high schools, the white and black revolutionaries, aided by communist funds, are now going to focus [?on] their enterprise system and all other elements of the American Establishment and replace it by a communist state.’49
He judged the United Nations to be only a little less dangerous than the Soviet Union. He rejoiced at the death of Dag Hammarskjold and predicted that, with ‘Hammarskjold eliminated … that dying duck the U.N. is about to die too, to the relief of the American taxpayer’.50 Adlai Stevenson seemed to him the paradigm of effete liberal, whose reckless determination to appease the Russians and support every kind of ‘progressive’ impulse was sapping America’s power to stand upright in a dangerous world. Batista, the dictator of Cuba, was everything that Stevenson was not. ‘I was intrigued to meet so forceful and yet so fair-minded a man who was a revolutionary only for his Country’s sake,’ the Duke told Arthur Gardner, United States Ambassador in Havana. ‘I judge that the longer he remains in power the better for Cuba.’51 They could have done with a Batista in Britain: the Conservatives, he was convinced, were not sufficiently aggressive to combat ‘rabble-rousing demagogues like Bevan’,52 and when they did get back to power they seemed distressingly ready to acquiesce in all the misguided legislation that had been imposed on Britain under socialist rule. He saw nothing to deplore in the Anglo-French action against Egypt at the time of the Suez crisis, except in the British failure to take the United States along with it in support of the adventure. ‘This serious difference in the official thinking of our two countries … couldn’t come at a worse time.’53
His fears for Britain’s future did not diminish his affection for its people, nor, it seemed, their affection for him. With the passing of time the bitterness of those who had felt themselves betrayed had faded and the Windsors began to benefit by the romantic light which suffuses all those who have renounced wealth or position for the sake of love. When they went to the theatre to see Witness for the Prosecution, the first play in London they had attended since the abdication, the audience stood and clapped when they entered their box and a large crowd assembled outside the theatre. ‘Certainly to my mind,’ wrote the play’s producer, Peter Saunders, ‘there was no doubt about the feeling of the people of England towards the couple.’54 The relationship between them was perhaps not quite so idyllic as was believed by the more susceptible of their admirers, but on the whole it justified the faith of those who felt that the Duke’s sacrifice had not been in vain. The Duke certainly felt himself bereft without her. At the end of 1955 she went alone to the United States in connection with the publication of her memoirs while the Duke stayed behind to supervise the replanting of the garden at the Mill. ‘The lonely weeks have dragged since Wallis left, and I can hardly wait for her return,’ he told one friend, and a fortnight later wrote to another: ‘It is wonderful having the Duchess back with me after seven lonely weeks separation. It has been tough being left alone here … a grim experience I am determined to avoid in the future.’55 That her dependence on him was less great hardly needs restatement, but she too pined during his absence and the letters she wrote to him have the ring of sincerity. ‘I hate, hate having you go away alone,’ she wrote in 1952, ‘but you are not really alone because I am so much a part of you … Darling, I shall miss you each second and you know that I love you more than anything in the world for always.’56
On one of his visits to London the Duke was unpleasantly reminded of a passage in his past which he would rather not have resurrected. At the end of the war a vast collection of captured official archives had been removed from Germany for inspection by experts from Britain, France and the United States with a view to their eventual translation and publication. John Wheeler-Bennett, later to be the official biographer of King George VI, was in charge of the British end of the operation, and it soon became clear to him that some of the papers, if published, would be embarrassing to the Duke of Windsor. The despatches written by German ambassadors before the war might cause a few eyebrows to be raised but little more, the papers relating to the Duke’s sojourn in Spain and Portugal in 1940 were more dangerous since these made it plain that the Germans believed the Duke could be induced to play a Quisling’s role in an occupied Britain. They would inevitably give rise to unkind speculation as to how far that belief might have been justified. In August 1945 Attlee had sent Churchill a dossier containing the most mischievous of the papers, with a comment that ‘little or no credence could be put on the statements made’ but that publication ‘might do the greatest harm’. Churchill replied the following day: ‘I earnestly trust it may be possible to destroy all traces of these German intrigues.’57
It was, of course, impossible; the existence of the papers was already known to the Americans and even if they had not been, the official historians involved would have resigned rather than allow such important evidence to be suppressed. There was no question of publication until all the papers had been translated and properly edited, so the matter was allowed to rest. In the inner circle, however, there was much gossip about what was involved. Bruce Lockhart noted in his diary in November 1946 that Wheeler-Bennett had ‘found some damaging material on the Duke of Windsor. There are various protocols of Nazi conversations with him, including one at Lisbon during the war. Jack is worried, because we are sharing documents with the Americans who will certainly publish this material. If we do not, we shall look very foolish.’ Wheeler-Bennett, who had been given a completely free hand by the government to publish whatever he thought fit, was taking the line that he would tolerate no interference unless it stemmed directly from the King. Since it was obvious that George VI would not wish to intervene, it seemed the papers must eventually be published.58
In her important biography of King George VI Sarah Bradford has drawn attention to a request from Bevin to Marshall in March 1947 that a microfilm copy of a paper relating to the Duke of Windsor should be destroyed.59 The archives at the Foreign Office and at Windsor contain no reference to such a request, and do not establish beyond doubt what the paper in question may have been. Sarah Bradford surmises that it may have related to some episode during the period in which the Duke was Governor of the Bahamas and was ‘under American surveillance’. If this is correct it is hard to imagine why the Americans should have possessed only a microfilm of the document rather than the original, nor why the British should only have become concerned about its existence in 1947. It seems more probable that the same German dossier was in question. Two months before Bevin’s approach to Marshall, the American Ambassador, John Winant, told Lascelles that he had finally been instructed to hand over the originals of the documents to the Foreign Office.60 It is likely that Bevin, encouraged by this success, was now asking that the microfilm copy still in Washington should be destroyed. If so, he seems to have gained little satisfaction. In July of the same year the King finally ruled that the papers should be returned to the archives in Berlin for eventual publication if the editors of the German records felt it necessary.61 Godfrey Thomas recorded that the King had warned the Duke, who made light of the whole affair, ‘suggesting (as had already occurred to us as a possibility) that the German Ambassador was making up a good story on the lines that he thought would please his chief, Ribbentrop’.62
Legend has it that a cache of yet more sensitive documents was recaptured from various private German archives by a secret task force consisting of the art historian, Anthony Blunt, then working for Military Intelligence, and the Windsor librarian, Owen Morshead. The revelations contained in these documents, according to the most picturesque version of the story, were so hair-raising in their implications as to enable Blunt to blackmail the royal family and government into granting him immunity from prosecution even after his treasonable activities as a Russian agent had been detected. Reality is more prosaic. Blunt and Morshead did indeed visit Germany and later Holland on the instructions of the King; their mission, far from being secret, was widely reported in the press at the time. From Germany, with the approval of the Landgravine of Hesse, they brought back for temporary deposit in Windsor until conditions in Germany had settled down a trunk containing letters from Queen Victoria to her daughter, the Empress Frederick. These were returned in 1951. From Holland came various relics of the Kaiser of particular interest to the British royal family – his Garter star, Field Marshal’s baton and so on – and, as an afterthought, photographic copies of a few nineteenth-century letters. No single paper brought to England by Blunt and Morshead related to the Duke of Windsor.
It was 1953 before the documents relating to 1940 were in a state where a final decision on publication was required. Churchill wrote to Eisenhower to urge that the Lisbon papers be suppressed: ‘The historical importance of the episode is negligible, and the allegations rest only on the assertions of Germans and pro-German officials in making the most of anything they could pick up.’63 Eisenhower was amazed to hear that the papers still existed. They had been called to his attention in 1945, he said, and his experts had then concluded that ‘there was no possible value to them, that they were obviously concocted with some idea of promoting German propaganda and weakening Western resistance, and that they were totally unfair to the Duke’.64 With both Churchill and Eisenhower intent on destroying the documents it might have seemed that their fate was certain, but when Monckton called on the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, he was told that the French would agree to their publication being delayed, but not to their suppression.65 With an obstinacy which, whatever the significance of the papers themselves, can only seem heartwarming, the British and American official historians defied their governments and threatened resignation if the papers were not published in full. King George VI, who shortly before he died had reconsidered the issue, insisted only that, if publication were inevitable, the Duke should be given warning and a chance to comment.66 Churchill accepted the principle of publication, but ensured still further delay, and it was not until 1957 that Volume X of the Documents on German Foreign Policy containing the Lisbon papers finally appeared.
The Duke was distressed but not unduly disturbed. ‘While it is a bore that Washington insists on publishing the “Lisbon documents”,’ he told Churchill, ‘Walter Monckton and I examined them very thoroughly over the weekend and will have a démenti prepared … in advance of their publication.’67 When they came out the Foreign Office issued a statement affirming that the Duke ‘never wavered in his loyalty to the British cause … The German records are necessarily a much-tainted source. The only firm evidence is of what the Germans were trying to do in this matter and how completely they failed.’68 The Duke for his part issued a statement, describing the communications which passed between Berlin and the German Ambassadors in Madrid and Lisbon as being ‘in part complete fabrications and in part gross distortions of the truth’. The national press accepted this version, and the Germans involved in the affair were dismissed as self-deluded fantasists intent only on enhancing their own reputations.
Once a rumour has been launched it is not easily suppressed. Documents continued to trickle out, including the reports provided to Berlin by the absurd Duke of Saxe-Coburg, which revived suspicions of the Duke of Windsor’s political inclinations. ‘Secret papers have disclosed his pro-Nazi perfidy which, of course, I was perfectly aware of at the time,’ wrote Noël Coward with lofty omniscience. ‘Poor dear, what a monumental ass he has always been!’69 Ass perhaps, perfidious no: the papers show that the Duke felt the war could and should have been avoided, that he was defeatist about the prospects of victory in 1940 and 1941, that he preached the virtues of a negotiated peace. He had been indiscreet and extravagant enough in what he said to give the Germans some grounds for believing that he might be ready to play an active part in securing such a peace and returning to the throne after it had been negotiated. That is bad enough. What they do not show, and cannot show since no evidence exists, is that the Duke would ever have contemplated accepting such an invitation if it had been issued.
Lack of evidence rarely inhibits the more venturesome biographers. Many other fantasies have been voiced in the last thirty years. The laws of libel mercifully ensured that the most grotesque have been published only after his death and thus did not trouble him. Ever since his successful libel action against Geoffrey Dennis in 1937, he had, however, been obsessed by the need to protect his, and still more his wife’s reputation. He was disturbed in 1953 by the publication in America of Iles Brody’s Gone with the Windsors, and wrote indignantly: ‘Whatever inspired him to write so vindictive and inaccurate a diatribe remains something of a mystery … Of course, the book never will be published in Great Britain; my lawyer assures me it contains sufficient libel to scare any publisher from doing so.’70 His lawyers were right, but he fared less well with Geoffrey Bocca’s She might have been Queen. In June 1953 he wrote to the proprietors of the American publishers, Henry Holt, to ask if his lawyers could see a typescript of Bocca’s book so that he would have a chance to remove anything offensive – ‘I have been trying to get the low-down on this guy Bocca’s book since March.’71 Next thing he knew was that it was to appear in Britain and, a cruel cut, to be published by Express Books: ‘Old Max Beaverbrook certainly has reached an all time high in his unpredictability by publishing that lousy Bocca book about the Duchess.’72
But the book which caused him greatest concern, just because it was certain neither to be ‘lousy’ nor ‘vindictive’, was John Wheeler-Bennett’s official biography of King George VI. The Duke had spent some time with Wheeler-Bennett while the book was being researched, and in 1956 asked that he should be allowed to see in typescript those passages that related to him; after all, he argued, ‘in the references to me … you are actually writing part of the official history of a living former Sovereign’.73 Wheeler-Bennett cautiously replied that he must put the matter to The Queen since it was she who had commissioned the book. The Queen equally cautiously ruled that she would read the biography herself before deciding whether any other member of the royal family needed to see it before publication.74 The Duke’s worst suspicions were aroused: obviously ‘that evil snake Lascelles’ had been working on Wheeler-Bennett to ensure that the author put King George VI on a pedestal and presented the Duke ‘in as bad a light as possible’.75 In the end he was sent a copy when the book was in proof and seems to have accepted that, though he would have liked certain things to have been expressed differently, there was nothing to which he could reasonably take exception. He asked for only two changes, one a minor error of fact, one no more than a typist’s slip. Both the corrections were made.76
The Duke’s complaints about the royal family’s discourtesy in withholding Wheeler-Bennett’s biography until it was in the final stages marked the only occasion on which he voiced any criticism of The Queen. On the whole he accepted that the vendetta which had marred his relationship with his mother’s or his own generation of the royal family, did not carry through to the new regime. He never changed his view that the Duchess should be formally recognized but he no longer made the failure to do this an act of war. Indeed, he went out of his way to avoid anything which might seem unacceptable to the Palace. Dan Ingman wrote a play about the months before the abdication called The Woman I Love which was very sympathetic to the Windsors. Peter Saunders sent it to the Duke with a letter extolling its virtues. The Duke returned it unread, saying that he ‘would not agree to any play being performed on the subject in question’. Saunders tried again, offering to arrange a private showing. His reward was a solicitor’s letter, threatening legal action if the matter was pursued.77
There comes a point in nearly everybody’s life when he must accept the fact that he is old; from that moment onwards all that is left is a melancholy process of decay, sometimes mitigated by remissions or apparent recoveries, sometimes proceeding headlong to total degeneration. With one victim the mind decays more quickly than the body, with another the physical collapse comes first, but always the path leads the same way, only the pace is different. For those less fortunate the fatal moment can come early, others may postpone it until they are seventy or much more. For the Duke of Windsor the point was reached in 1958, when he was nearly sixty-four and was harrowed by a long, painful and debilitating attack of shingles. ‘Only those of us who have been thus afflicted know the physical and mental ravages of this wretched malady,’ he wrote to a fellow sufferer.78 He recovered, but suddenly he was conscious of his age, unable to take anything approaching violent exercise, lethargic where he had once been hyperactive, forgetting facts and faces with disconcerting rapidity. He was far from senile but he realized that, for once and for all, he was past his best. In 1964 he endured open heart surgery while in America, the following year he underwent a serious eye operation, each ordeal slowed him up and made him that much more aware of his mortality. While he was in the London Clinic for the second operation The Queen called on him and met the Duchess for the first time since the abdication.
The operation accelerated the gradual withdrawal from activity which is the lot of the elderly. An arthritic hip, which forced him to walk with a cane from 1968, deprived him of any role in gardening beyond the purely supervisory and drove him towards a still harsher sacrifice: ‘We have almost sold the Mill,’ he told Aird. ‘We are sorry to have let this attractive property go, but we must look for some place in the sun.’79 He could still play nine holes of golf, he added proudly, but soon that pleasure also was denied him. The sale of the Mill dragged on interminably, and in the end fell through; sometimes they would go down to the increasingly shabby property and wander around, hating all they saw, yet unable to keep away. Not far from the house, blocks of flats were springing up and a petrol station, particularly offensive to the Duke. ‘It had a row of flag poles in front of it which he called “those gh˘astly m˘asts”,’ Lady Mosley remembered.80
He was concerned to protect his wife’s position after he died. She would anyway have been a rich woman, but he was disturbed by the fact that, on his death, the £10,000 or so which he received each year, in lieu of rent for his life interest in Sandringham and Balmoral, would cease. In August 1968 he appealed to The Queen to continue this for the Duchess’s life.81 She agreed to go on paying £5000 a year and in the same letter told him of Prince Charles’s coming investiture as Prince of Wales: ‘I have hesitated to enquire whether you would like an invitation considering the circumstances,’ she wrote, ‘but if you would reply to this indirect form of invitation in whatever way you feel, I shall quite understand.’82 ‘As I do not believe that the presence of his aged great uncle would add much to the colorful proceedings centered upon Charles, I do not feel that I should accept,’ replied the Duke. ‘At the same time I do appreciate your nice thought.’83
If The Queen had specifically included the Duchess of Windsor in the invitation, he would perhaps have felt otherwise. When, a few weeks later, he was invited to the dedication of new Garter windows in St George’s, he refused on the grounds that he would be on the way to the United States at the time. ‘Although you did not include Wallis by name in the invitation,’ he added, ‘… I presume that you would have expected her to accompany me. You see, after more than thirty years of happy married life, I do not like to attend such occasions alone.’84 It was a mild rebuke, if a rebuke at all. Much of the bitterness had gone out of the issue since, in June 1967, The Queen had invited the Duchess to accompany her husband to the dedication of a plaque outside Marlborough House in memory of Queen Mary. It was a curious touch of irony that so intimate a family occasion, honouring the woman who had done most to ensure that the Duchess of Windsor should never be accepted as a member of the royal family, should be the occasion at which the Duchess first took her place in their midst. The newspapers were preoccupied above all by the question of whether the Duchess would curtsey to Queen Elizabeth (she did not); for the Duke the significance of the occasion was far more profound. He had not won his wife all that he had wanted for her, but at least the worst of the humiliation was behind them.
At an earlier meeting with The Queen, the Duke had asked if he and his wife might be buried in a private mausoleum in the gardens of Frogmore, the secluded Georgian house near Windsor Castle where he had spent much of his childhood. When, in 1968, he came over for the funeral of the Duchess of Kent, he was struck by the tranquil dignity of the royal burial ground at Frogmore, where since 1928 most deceased members of the royal family except the sovereigns clustered around Queen Victoria’s sombre mausoleum. He asked The Queen if he could change his mind and be buried alongside his wife and amidst his relations. Permission was given in August 1970. The burial plot was not to lie vacant for long. Towards the end of the following year a tumour in his throat was found to be malignant. No operation was possible so cobalt therapy was prescribed – that dread treatment that is almost worse than the condition it is supposed to cure. His appearances in public became increasingly rare. On 24 November 1971, he failed to turn up at a dinner where he had been expected until the last moment. ‘The poor fellow is dying of cancer of the throat,’ wrote a fellow guest. ‘He is such a frail little man that, at seventy-five, one would have hoped he could have died by having a stroke or a heart attack. Apparently the cancer is very near the jugular vein, so that he might go at any time or survive painfully for months.’85
He survived painfully for six months, knowing that he was dying, patiently accepting all the tedious and degrading rituals that afflict a fatal illness, awaiting his end with courage and determination. Some years earlier the Bishop of Fulham, in whose diocese Paris lay, had told him that changes in the Church of England’s legislation meant that, if he wished, he could now be readmitted to communion. The Duke replied politely that he had discussed the matter fully with his wife: ‘While we are both of us, at heart, deeply religious, we feel that in the light of all that has passed regarding our position with the Church, we would prefer to leave matters as they stand and not risk any more controversy.’86 He experienced no deathbed change of heart. If religion was any solace to him as he lay dying, he gave no sign of it. As they had been for nearly forty years, his thoughts were all with the wife who had so filled his life and who would now have to face the future alone.
In May 1972 The Queen visited Paris and wished to pay a last call on her uncle. The Duke insisted on leaving his bed and dressing for the occasion.*18 He could not be deprived even for a few minutes of the drip that sustained his life, and so an elaborate arrangement was fitted up by which a long tube attached him to the fluid flasks concealed behind a nearby curtain. It was a precarious and ramshackle contrivance, and the doctor was aghast when the Duke insisted on getting up and bowing at his niece’s entry. The connection remained in place and Queen and former King chatted cheerfully for a quarter of an hour. After she had left, the Duke asked his doctor, Jean Thin, whether he had been presented. ‘When I replied that I had not, he seemed very annoyed. This was the only time I saw him display irritation throughout the whole of his long and difficult illness.’ He survived another nine days, then one evening the doctor noticed that the pug, which had scarcely left its master’s bed over the past few weeks, had moved away and was lying nearby on the floor. It was 27 May 1972. In the early hours of the following morning the Duke died.87
Three days later his body was flown by the RAF to Britain and on 1 June he lay in state in St George’s Chapel. There he remained for two days, while sixty thousand mourners filed past the coffin. On the first day the queue waiting to enter the Chapel was said to be more than a mile long. The Duchess of Windsor arrived on the second day, visited the coffin of her husband, and stayed with The Queen at Buckingham Palace. She was shocked, frightened, ill, but at least she was where the Duke would have wished her to be.
At 11.15 a.m. on Monday, 5 June, the funeral service took place at St George’s. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, and the Dean of Windsor headed the procession of church dignitaries; the royal family were there in force except for the Duke of Gloucester, who was too ill to attend; the King of Norway; Mountbatten; the Prime Minister; and a little band of the Windsors’ personal friends. When the Duchess of Windsor appeared in the Choir with The Queen, Lady Avon told Cecil Beaton, ‘she seemed very strange … did nervous things with her hands and kept talking. “Where do I sit?” “Is this my seat?” “Is this my prayer book?” “What do I do now?” … Clarissa said The Queen showed a motherly and nannie like tenderness and kept putting her hand on the Duchess’s arm or glove.’88 The service began with the hymn ‘The King of Love my Shepherd is’, followed by prayers and the ninetieth psalm, ‘For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday’. The most stirring moment came when Garter King of Arms proclaimed the style and titles of the late Duke: Knight of the Garter, of the Thistle, of St Patrick, Knight Grand Cross of a multiplicity of Orders, one-time King Edward VIII of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Emperor of India. To everyone in the congregation this roll-call of heraldic honours must have provided a vivid reminder of how much he had given up; the slim, wasted figure of the widow in black recalled with equal vividness why he had made the sacrifice. And so his coffin was removed to Frogmore where he was interred that afternoon in privacy, under a simple stone on a quiet lawn, awaiting the time, fourteen years later, when the Duchess would lie beside him.
* * *
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,
Am an attendant Lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince …
It was the peculiar tragedy of the Duke of Windsor that he was Prince Hamlet and was meant to be Prince Hamlet, but found himself temperamentally disqualified from playing the part. Prufrock’s limitations were not his – ‘politic, cautious, and meticulous’; his courtiers, indeed, might have said these were the very qualities required by a constitutional monarch in the twentieth century and would happily have traded them for the Duke’s restlessness, recklessness and febrile rejection of any kind of discipline. But he could not, or would not meet the demands that the starring role imposed on him. He wrote his own script, made up his own rules, directed his own performance. At his best he could be dazzling in his style and his dexterity; at his worst he was disastrous.
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous –
Almost, at times, the Fool.
‘Wonderful as the service was, I was not moved by the death of this man who for less than a year had been our King,’ wrote Cecil Beaton when he wrote up the events of the day after the Duke of Windsor’s funeral. He must have been almost the only person in the congregation to feel no emotion. For most of those present, and for many millions who were not, it was a moment of poignancy; poignancy because of the sense of opportunities lost, of talents wasted, of a heritage thrown away. There was much he could have done; he did so little. And yet he himself would never have seen it in such a light. To his own mind he had done the one all-important thing; he had rejected the stultifying trammels of a career which he detested to secure the greatest of human joys, the total commitment of himself to another being. ‘This above all: to thine own self be true,’ Polonius/Prufrock had advised; others might say that he had betrayed his people and his patrimony, he knew that he had been faithful to himself.
In those unregenerate days when narrative history was still in vogue, and children were taught of kings or battles rather than economic or demographic trends, it was permissible to attach to monarchs a convenient label which fixed them for ever in the minds of those who studied them. For those of a certain age Ethelred will always be Unready, Edward a Confessor, William a Conqueror, Richard a Lion Heart. How should one describe Edward VIII under such a system? Edward the Unworthy, the unkind might say, yet to do so would beg some fundamental questions, for while it might be argued that he was unworthy of the throne, it has also been maintained that no throne could have been worth the price he was required to pay for it. Edward the Obstinate would not be wholly unfair, for no man could cling more doggedly to a point of view or a line of action, and greet any attempt to move him as fresh reason for sticking to his guns. Edward the Amiable? Certainly, in the original sense of the word, for he was loved by many till the day he died, loved for his charm, his humility, his good will. Edward the Well-meaning? That perhaps most of all, for no monarch can have been more moved by the sufferings of his subjects, or more anxious to relieve them.
The limitations of such nomenclature are at their most obvious in this last example. Edward was indeed well-meaning; yet though no monarch can have been more anxious to relieve the sufferings of his subjects, few can have done less to achieve their aim. Whatever efforts he might make were quickly frustrated by his inability to resist distractions, a superficiality of thought and feeling that ensured he would rarely pursue any objective to the end, and none to the bitter end. His every virtue, and they were many, seems to have been complemented by a corresponding vice – or every vice by a corresponding virtue. He could be quixotically loyal – yet certain old friends he abandoned ruthlessly when the going, for one reason or another, became too difficult. He was notoriously mean – and yet at times he was capable of the most striking generosity. No man is consistent, yet more than most he seems to have been a kaleidoscope of conflicting elements; his character is evanescent, bewildering, rippling and swirling like a mountain stream which is whipped by the wind and broken by the boulders in its path.
Yet one objective he did pursue to the bitter end, one feeling was not superficial, to one ideal he was constant. Whether the Duchess of Windsor was worthy of the devotion which he lavished on her is a question to which no objective answer can be found. What sort of a king he would have made if he had remained a bachelor or had found a more suitable woman to sit beside him on the throne is a problem no more easy to resolve. But the greatness of the sacrifice he made for her, the fortitude with which he battled for her over the thirty-six years of their marriage, the steadfastness of his love until the day he died, are matters which should not be forgotten when any final judgment is essayed of the life and character, if not the reign, of King Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor.