Shortly before their wedding, Edward and Wallis received an unwelcome gift. It came in the form of anonymous correspondence entitled ‘Public Opinion – The Truth about Mrs Simpson’. Forwarded to the Metropolitan Police by Herman Rogers, the document called Wallis ‘a scheming adventuress’ and a ‘Delilah and a harlot … [who has caused] more grievous harm to the British empire than any other foreigner’.1 Special Branch declined to take any action, on the grounds that, as the assistant commissioner Norman Kendal mused, the allegations were ‘rather well done [and] surprisingly accurate’. The most scandalous details, which were treated as fictitious, concerned the apparent Nazi sympathies of both the duke and the duchess, arising from their friendship with a group of German-American social climbers. Had the truth been known, Kendal may have been less sanguine.
Charles Bedaux remains an enigma. Born in Paris in 1886, he emigrated to America in 1906, where he married, had a son and worked in a series of menial jobs. He made his fortune from the development of an efficiency scheme of scientific management adopted by businesses around the world, the so-called ‘Bedaux System’, which calculated how much work per minute could be achieved by the average person in normal circumstances. By 1927, he was wealthy enough to have purchased the Château de Candé in the Loire, renovating it in 1930. He took no day-to-day part in his organisation, but instead amused himself with financing polar expeditions and hunting big game. The former king and his new wife would be the most impressive specimens to grace his trophy room.
The wedding held at his home in June had few guests, but it brought international attention to his activities. Bedaux relished the publicity.* He knew that his association with the duke and duchess could be advantageous, as he was anxious that the Nazi regime in Germany was unsympathetic to his business interests. Their continued operation had needed a large bribe to be paid to the German state, and for Bedaux to acknowledge that his German work would henceforth take place under the jurisdiction of the Arbeitsfront, the Nazi labour organisation. It seemed likely that this situation would not last.
Bedaux knew that Edward was sympathetic towards the Germans, and so planned a high-profile visit by the duke and duchess to Germany in the autumn of 1937. This would promote Edward’s interest in how the Nazis had improved the lot of the ordinary working man – with a view to reporting the intelligence back to Britain – and additionally give Hitler a propaganda triumph. At the same time, Bedaux hoped to strengthen his own connections with a country that he believed would dominate Europe, and the world, over the coming years. He contacted Hitler’s adjutant Fritz Wiedemann, who confirmed that the Führer would be amenable to such a trip. Now all he had to do was convince Edward and Wallis.
He was helped by the deflation that both the duke and the duchess felt after their wedding. Like many newly married couples, the excitement of the day had swiftly worn off, and they knew that they remained pariahs as far as British society was concerned. One unwelcome reminder of Edward’s brief reign came in the form of a letter from his would-be assassin, George McMahon. After a failed attempt either to warn the former king, or to kill him, in July the previous year*, McMahon was newly released from prison and continuing to make protestations of loyalty and affection. He included the detail that he had kept a picture of the duke on his cell wall, where others may have placed an image of a wife or sweetheart. Edward passed on McMahon’s unsolicited good wishes to Monckton to be dealt with in the usual fashion.
Other, more important figures were less forthcoming. The duke was furious that his mother had not bothered to send a wedding present, and wrote to say, ‘I was bitterly hurt and disappointed that you virtually ignored the most important event of my life’, hissing that ‘You must realise, by this time, that as there is a limit to what one’s feelings can endure, this most unjust and uncalled for treatment can have had but one important result; my complete estrangement from all of you.’2 She did not reply.
The couple’s reputation in England had declined even amongst their intimates. Nicolson wrote in his diary of 14 July that at a dinner thrown by Edward’s former mistress, Sibyl Colefax, he sat next to Diana Cooper, who confided that she had turned against Mrs Simpson, saying, ‘I am the largest of all the rats.’3 She also told Nicolson that Wallis had lied to all her friends that there had been no physical relationship between her and Edward prior to their marriage, and that it was likely that they had had sex on their cruise on the Nahlin the previous year, given the fact that they had had adjoining cabins.
The duke could no longer count on the loyalty of his former friends. Even as he wrote to Sibyl to thank her for a wedding present of a gilt dish and called their current situation ‘a real haven of rest after all we have been through’,4 he knew it was illusory. Exile particularly affected Wallis. Monckton wrote that ‘she wanted [Edward] to have his cake and eat it … she could not easily reconcile herself to the fact that by marrying her he had become a less important person’.5 She had informed Sibyl earlier in the year that ‘I am neither surprised or disappointed at the way people have behaved … it is a cruel world and honesty doesn’t seem to be the quality that gets you the longest way’.6
The duke reserved his greatest contempt for his own family, egged on by Wallis. She told Sibyl that ‘I fail to understand how the Royal Family have allowed one of its members to be so unfairly attacked – it does not increase the prestige of anyone.’7 The king wrote an anguished letter to his elder brother shortly after the wedding, complaining that the duke had caused their mother ‘a great deal of pain’. After claiming that ‘whatever I have done has been absolutely necessary for the sake of the country’, he bemoaned his own compromised situation. ‘How do you think I liked taking on a rocking throne, & trying to make it steady again? It has not been a pleasant job & it is not half finished yet.’ Even as he half-heartedly suggested that ‘I am only so anxious that we remain the best of friends’, he had to delete some of the more contentious passages from his letter, such as the suggestion that ‘all the bitterness is on your side’.8 Any neutral observer would have suggested its distribution was evenly weighed.
Edward was, naturally, infuriated. ‘When you informed me that my letter pained Mama and that writing to her makes her absolutely miserable, had you ever stopped to think how unhappy I have been made by the family’s treatment of me or how much it has hurt me?’ He took exception to his brother’s description of the ‘tottering’ throne, and said, ‘I do not think that even my more vindictive enemies would deny that I have done a great deal to preserve the system, over which you now preside.’ Once again, he presented himself as a wronged elder statesman whose motive for abdicating was a patriotic one, rather than a selfish dilettante. ‘I have always felt that one of the sources of power of the monarchy in Great Britain has been the fact that we were a united family, with no public discords and working together as one for the welfare of our people.’
Finally he issued two threats. Firstly he suggested that ‘I therefore have it in mind to discontinue my use of the title of Royal Highness’, which would have been embarrassing if it was mined for publicity; secondly he hinted that unless Wallis was to be sent the same medal commemorating the coronation that he himself had received, he would make his estrangement from his brother public knowledge. As ever, he seemed unconcerned with mere facts, instead adopting the righteous stance of an elder brother to tell the king, ‘I am sure that on reading this letter over, you will agree that any weakness to the structure of the throne that may have been caused by my being forced to leave could surely have been equally well repaired, without attacking the dignity of the position of my wife and myself.’9
If Edward could not influence his brother, he could at least try and put pressure upon others at court. In July, he wrote to Monckton, who thought him ‘better than I have seen him for a long time … more peaceful & easy’,10 to thank him for a wedding gift and to say that ‘life continues very peaceful and pleasant here’. But he then continued, ‘how sore I feel [towards my mother and the king] from their humiliating treatment of me ever since I left England in December’.11 Even the Duke of Kent, the most sympathetic of the royals, was unable to visit him. Queen Mary announced that she considered it inappropriate for any of her children, or their families, to acknowledge the Duchess of Windsor publicly.
Edward bemoaned the ‘incredible information … that the Duchess of Kent should not meet my Duchess’. He wrote to his mother, ‘I unfortunately know from George that you and Elizabeth instigated the sordid and much publicised episode of the failure of the Kents to visit us’, and declared, ‘it is a great sorrow and disappointment to me to have my mother thus cast out her eldest son’. He also put pressure ‘in no unmeasured tones’ on the king for this restriction to be lifted, which it was. The Duke of Kent was therefore allowed to come for a visit in September (‘not that we cared one way or the other’), and Edward believed that he had seen into the psyche of George VI. ‘It is interesting to observe a definite change of policy, and it was only brought about my taking a firm line with Kent, and telling him that if his wife could not come, then there was no point in his coming alone.’12
Edward took a minor concession to be a major victory, which was symptomatic of the war he waged against the king and a ruling class that had refused to accept or acknowledge Wallis. But in fact, his youngest brother had not especially wanted to visit, not least because he foresaw the possibility of a row developing if he and his wife were expected to meet Wallis. As he wrote to the king on 13 August from a yacht in Constantinople, ‘[David] telephoned on arrival & he asked us both to come over – I told him Marina couldn’t as she wanted to see her family. I could come alone – he said no – they wanted us both to come, as we were going away would we come in September – I told him I’d let him know. The next day he called up, said he’d been thinking our conversation over – and wanted me to be frank. Was Marina not wanting to come or wasn’t she allowed to – I told him the truth therefore – that she didn’t much want to meet [Wallis], & also that it was settled by both Marina & [Queen Elizabeth] that she shouldn’t.’
Edward was, inevitably, ‘very upset’ but informed Kent that although their friendship remained unaffected, he would be unable to see him alone, as to do so would be tantamount to an insult to Wallis. Kent telephoned him in an attempt to repair relations, but his wife remained resolute – ‘she thinks she’ll be very much criticised & that it is the thin edge of the wedge for W meeting her – and also that it looks as if we were giving in to him’. He therefore turned to the king as arbiter. ‘I had asked your advice and you had given it … we must do what you wanted, but I told Marina that I would write to you and explain the circumstances to you and see what you thought when you had read this letter. D said he would much like to see me as he had lots of things to discuss – but I don’t know of anything important.’13 Marina’s refusal to meet Edward’s wife created, as Monckton wrote, ‘bad feeling between the two families … from that moment on’.14
The duke had no idea of the diplomatic or social problems that his bull-in-a-china-shop attitude had created. Before his wedding, Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, had written to Hardinge and described the issue of how the exiled couple should be handled as ‘bristling with every conceivable sort of problem’. He reported Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden’s belief that the two should be treated abroad by ambassadors and dignitaries ‘rather as they would a member of the Royal Family on a holiday’, and decided, ‘I think that in any case we shall need instructions or confirmation from the King’.15 These were seldom forthcoming, even as the monarch attempted to maintain some civility. But the question of Wallis’s title dominated all.
Shortly after the wedding, Monckton wrote to his fellow guest Allen to say that he was ‘disturbed at the course which HRH proposes to adopt’, apropos Wallis demanding the title of Her Royal Highness. He stated that the British public still thought of their former ruler with ‘courtesy and goodwill’, but believed that ‘a great number of people would regard a challenge of the Letters Patent* as a challenge to the King in whose name they were issued’.16
He was convinced this would be a catastrophe. ‘Nothing should be done now to raise a controversy … [Edward’s] patience and forbearance in very difficult circumstances are having their effect and I am sure the tide is beginning slowly to turn in his favour.’ He knew his former monarch’s inclinations. ‘If he wants eventually to make his home in this country it is essential to do nothing to spoil this result … [otherwise he] will be accused of having put [the king] into a position he never wanted and then increased his troubles.’ Monckton added, ‘He was determined to be married at all costs – and the cost goes on mounting up. This present trouble is one of the items in it but I do think it has got to be paid.’17
Bedaux, meanwhile, asked his own substantial price, but Edward and Wallis were happy to pay it. When the idea of an industrial tour of formerly depressed areas of Germany was proposed to the duke, followed by a longer visit to America, he responded with alacrity. He was pleased both by the prospect of a holiday in his wife’s home country and by the chance to spend time in a land that he had great fondness for, thanks to his family connections there.
His warm relationship with members of the German embassy to Britain, not least the ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was still remembered. He believed that he would be treated with more respect and dignity within Germany than he had been in his home country since the abdication. He also believed that he could be the instrument of peace and harmony between the two countries, and show his family how they had underrated his abilities.
The self-appointed ambassador was not given any counsel against the visit, although word had reached his brother. ‘Are the rumours true?’ he asked Monckton, who answered that he did not know. ‘I do not think it wise’,18 the king said. In late 1937, Anglo-German relations were still theoretically cordial, but by then few were under any illusions as to the scale of Hitler’s ambition. Monckton shared the king’s disquiet both at Edward being used as propaganda by the Nazis, and at the damage to his reputation in Britain. But there was nothing he could do.
Monckton had worked hard to bring about better relations between the duke and his family, and saw that a visit to Germany, whatever its motivation, could be disastrous. One problem was that Edward was not offered any formal advice, because anyone doing so could expect anger from the sovereign and his courtiers. Monckton lamented that ‘Kings not only live in glass-houses but have constant access to the best advice in every sphere … responsible advisers never went near [the duke] and instead he was surrounded by friends who, for one reason or another, lived abroad largely divorced from English society and interests’.19 Even the lawyer was not allowed the chance to remonstrate with him. The duke cancelled a planned meeting with him in Paris, fearing that his counsellor would seek to change his mind about his German visit.
Like many thoughtless men, Edward acted impulsively and then presented his decisions as a fait accompli. It was left to smaller people to clear up the chaos left in his wake. He refused to listen to Monckton or Churchill, who remained both sympathetic and unable to check the worst of his impulses. This made him prey for false comforters and manipulators alike. The actions that he now undertook would affect his reputation until the day he died, and beyond.
Although the king was not told about his brother’s plans to visit Germany until 3 October, the press rumours were ubiquitous. Wallis wrote to her aunt Bessie on 13 September to confirm them, saying, ‘We are actually planning on going there to look at [workers’] housing and conditions as the Duke is thinking of taking up some kind of work in that direction.’ She described Bedaux as ‘Germany’s No. 1 gentleman’ and hoped that the visit would be interesting. Yet even as she warned her aunt, ‘it is a secret so say nothing’,20 she knew that when the news broke, it would be received in England with horror.
The press release that appeared on 3 October was inevitably provocative. It stated that ‘in accordance with the Duke of Windsor’s message to the press last June that he would release any information of interest regarding his plans or movements, His Royal Highness makes it known that he and the Duchess are visiting Germany and the United States in the near future for the purpose of studying housing and working conditions in these two countries’. Investigations were made into the credentials of the organisers, and the Nazi politician Robert Ley, the head of the Arbeitsfront and the man that Bedaux was desperate to impress, was denigrated by the security services as ‘a drunkard who used to live in a Cologne brothel’.21
Edward’s actions were viewed by the king and the queen, as well as their courtiers, as a challenge to royal authority, especially the planned visit to America. This was the prerogative of the monarch, and strengthened fears that the duke was attempting to establish himself as king over the water. The king described the news to Monckton as ‘a bombshell & a bad one too’, and did what he could to frustrate at least the American leg of the trip. He informed his mother, ‘I have told my ambassadors that the embassy staff cannot help him in any official sense … the world is in a very troubled state, & there is plenty to worry about’, and lamented that ‘D seems to loom ever larger on the horizon.’22
Phipps was sent to see Edward and to dissuade him from being himself. He wrote in his report, ‘I warned His Royal Highness that the Germans are past-masters in the art of propaganda and that they would be quick to turn anything he might say or do to suit their own purposes.’ Yet the duke was nonchalant. ‘He assured me he was well aware of this, that he would be very careful, and would not make any speeches.’ Even if this was true, there was dread in Phipps’s final line, that ‘the Duchess told a member of my staff last night that when in Germany they would be entertained by Herr Hitler’.23
The question of who Bedaux was, and what he wanted, now became pressing. On 17 October, George Ogilvie-Forbes, counsellor to the British embassy in Berlin, informed Vansittart that Prentiss Gilbert, his American equivalent, believed that Bedaux’s actions were dictated by his wishing to obtain recognition from the United States government when the duke visited. This would therefore allow Wallis to be treated with all the dignity that an HRH would usually receive. Gilbert remarked that ‘the American Press correspondents who had hitherto painted in vivid colours the trivialities in the life of a married couple which had stirred the enjoyers of the vulgar, had now decided that HRH had entered the arena of politics and that they would now develop that aspect’.
Gilbert was also scathing about Bedaux’s motivations, which he believed stemmed from his desire to sell his efficiency system to the German government. He told Ogilvie-Forbes, ‘it was clear that this individual was “running” HRH and probably paying his expenses for the tour outside Germany’. Alluding to future planned trips, including one to Sweden during which the duke would be introduced to a millionaire with plans for bringing about world peace through labour reconciliation,* Gilbert reported that ‘[Bedaux] even went so far as to express the opinion that HRH might in due course be the “saviour” of the monarchy!’ Ogilvie-Forbes noted of the ‘painful reading’ that ‘it would be as well to keep an eye on Mr Bedaux’s activities’.24
The king and queen felt ‘extreme nervousness’ about Edward’s antics, according to Sir Ronald Lindsay, British ambassador to the United States. Lindsay believed that ‘his theatrical appeals to popularity and these visits of inspection [are] perfunctory and no doubt pretty insincere, but none the less evidence of his readiness to bid for popularity’.25 He argued that the duke should be treated with the courtesy and dignity that he would usually merit, but the king, Hardinge and Lascelles laid into Edward, describing him as an international embarrassment who sought the company of Nazi sympathisers in an attempt to bring about a comeback.
Yet Lindsay was more affected by the queen, who, rather than blustering with indignation, spoke ‘in terms of acute pain and distress, ingenuously expressed and deeply felt’. She remarked that she felt grief more than anger, and remained, despite everything, affectionate towards ‘David’. She added, ‘He’s so changed now, and he used to be so kind to us.’ Lindsay wrote that ‘with all her charity she had not a word to say for “that woman” … I found myself being deeply moved by her’.26
Lindsay’s opinion of the king, less than a year into his reign, was that ‘he is like the medieval monarch who has a hated rival claimant living in exile’. Although the analogy had its limitations – ‘I don’t think George wanted the throne any more than Edward, and if he is there it is owing to a sense of duty which Edward lacked and not owing to a love of power which one sometimes thinks Edward may have after all’ – he remarked that the circumstances in which George VI found himself had parallels with his forebears. The king felt ‘uneasiness as to what is coming next – sensitiveness – suspicion’, and wondered what Edward and Wallis really wanted, concluding that she wielded the power in the relationship. He remained ‘violently prejudiced’27 against her.
Yet for all his anger, the king could do nothing to prevent his brother from visiting Germany. Despite international tensions, the two countries were at peace, and Edward’s intentions for his visit were worthwhile, if naïve. The trip was arranged for 11 to 23 October, under the auspices of Bedaux and Ley. The highlight would come on the penultimate day, when Edward and Wallis would be received at Berchtesgaden. The Führer had his holiday home in the mountains there, and was keen to meet them both.
While Edward was still king, Adolf Hitler had tried to bring him round to the Nazi cause, courtesy of the ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop.* Although this had been unsuccessful, Hitler continued to admire a man he described as ‘a kind of English national socialist’. He had supported him in his desire to marry Wallis, whom he praised as ‘a girl of the people’, and believed that his intentions had been frustrated by ‘plutocrats and Marxists’.
Back in 1935, political gossip suggested that Edward had been radicalised by the Nazi sympathiser Emerald Cunard, not least when he made what Channon called ‘an extraordinary speech’ to the British Legion suggesting friendship with Germany. When he was forced off the throne, a secret civil service memorandum stated that Hitler was ‘very distressed at the turn that affairs had taken in this country, since he had looked upon the late King as a man after his own heart, and one who understood the Führerprinzip,† and was ready to introduce it into this country’.28 Now, at last, he had his chance to make his acquaintance.
‘I am sure that, with him, we could have achieved permanent cordial relations with England’, Hitler sighed to his Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer. ‘With him, everything would have been different.’29 Wiedemann, who had made the necessary introductions, knew that his superior ‘had always had a certain weakness for the Duke of Windsor’,30 but also wanted to make sure that there would be adequate press coverage of the meeting with the distinguished visitor. Despite the relationship between Ribbentrop and Edward, little had been achieved towards the end of 1936, so this represented a chance to redress matters.
Before their encounter with the Führer, the tour had gone well. Hardinge attempted to prevent anyone from formally receiving the duke and duchess upon their arrival, on the grounds that to do so might be seen as condoning their actions. A document stated that ‘His Royal Highness and the Duchess must not be treated by His Majesty’s representatives as having any official status during the visit, and the Embassy must scrupulously avoid in any way giving the appearance that His Majesty the King and His Majesty’s Government countenance the proposed tour.’
Yet Ogilvie-Forbes refused to accede to the demand, as he considered it ‘extremely embarrassing and painful’ to snub Edward. The duke was grateful when Ogilvie-Forbes called upon him, in defiance of the Foreign Office’s order that ‘you and your staff should refrain from entertaining His Royal Highness or the Duchess’.31 The diplomat commented in 1940, of attempts to frustrate his ‘very pleasant evening’* with Edward, that ‘it was a series of similarly gauche blunders committed by the Foreign Office that is greatly responsible for the appalling mess that the world is in today’.32
Edward enjoyed his visit to Germany, because it represented a change of scene and an opportunity to be feted, rather than merely tolerated, on the international stage. Beaverbrook’s Daily Express reported that the duke had visited a beer hall in Munich, not unlike the one from which Hitler had attempted to launch his coup d’état in 1923, and had drunk pints of beer while wearing a false moustache before gushing about how much he was enjoying his visit to the city. Yet such frivolity was exceptional. Wallis was pleased that Nazi officials called her ‘Her Royal Highness’ at all times, and told Aunt Bessie on 18 October that ‘no words can express how interesting this trip is, but very strenuous’,33 as they marched around factories and housing settlements, looking to be impressed and photographed.
They met several leading Nazis, including Rudolf Hess, Joseph Goebbels (who affectionately called the duke ‘a tender seedling of reason’) and Göring, as well as renewing their acquaintance with Ribbentrop, still ambassador to Britain, at a dinner in Berlin. There, they were also introduced to leading film stars including Marianne Hoppe and Gustav Gründgens. The meeting with Göring was good-humoured, as both he and the duke enjoyed playing with a toy aeroplane that dropped wooden bombs onto a convoy of trains below. It was believed that Edward restrained himself from offering any Nazi salutes during his visit, but recently unearthed photographic evidence of his giving a salute while visiting a coal mine in the North Rhine-Westphalia district suggests otherwise.* This would not have been an isolated occurrence during his travels.34
And then it was time to ascend into the mountains and meet the man Channon had called ‘some semi-divine creature’. Whether or not Edward saluted Hitler during their reception on 22 October, it proved to be both an auspicious encounter and a fruitless one. The Führer kept the duke waiting for an hour, but once he greeted him – Wallis was not granted access to their interview – he was friendly and warm, as if seeking to compensate for the treatment that Edward had received in England. He did, however, place distance between the two men by insisting on speaking through the interpreter Paul Schmidt rather than directly, despite the duke’s fluent German.
This meant that there was a witness to the conversation, but according to Schmidt, nothing important was discussed. ‘Hitler was evidently making an effort to be as amiable as possible towards the Duke, who he regarded as Germany’s friend, having especially in mind a speech the Duke had made some years before, extending the hand of friendship to Germany’s ex-servicemen’s associations.’ He noted that Edward was apolitical: ‘[there was] nothing whatever to indicate whether the Duke of Windsor really sympathised with the ideology and practices of the Third Reich’, although Hitler assumed that he did. Edward offered some ‘appreciative words’ for what Germany had achieved in terms of social welfare and housing, as contrasted with the slums of Britain that he had visited, aghast, while king.*
Hitler and the duke parted on amicable terms, pleased that they had managed to meet.† They were then photographed alongside Wallis, both formally and informally. In the staged pictures, the three of them stood alongside one another, Wallis on the left, Hitler on the right and Edward in the centre. The duke had a half-smile on his face, which could be interpreted either as amusement or regret at the situation that he had placed himself in. Wallis gazed directly at the camera with an enigmatic look that hinted at concern for how the photograph would be received. And Hitler wore a grim expression of determination, as if anxious to get back to subjugation and conquest but tolerating this for a moment. He was warmer in the casual photographs, in which he was seen smiling and laughing with the duke and duchess, both of whom seemed amused by his conversation.
‘What did you talk about?’ Wallis asked afterwards.
‘What Hitler’s trying to do for Germany and to combat Bolshevism,’ the duke replied.
‘And what did he say about Bolshevism?’
‘He’s against it.’35
Then it was time to head to Munich, to be feted once again at a gala dinner at the Vier Jahreszeiten hotel, before returning to France. Edward and Wallis were sure they had performed a valuable diplomatic service, and looked forward to their American trip later in the year.
The visit was a propaganda coup for the Nazis. After the disappointment of the abdication, it showed that the duke could still be a useful tool for influencing British opinion. One German ambassador crowed that it had indicated Edward’s ‘special sympathy and understanding of Germany’, and that as a representative of ‘liberalism’, or pro-German feeling, in Britain, ‘the Duke of Windsor is by no means finished in his work’.36 Edward himself wrote of his trip as ‘intensely interesting’, and portrayed himself as ‘an independent observer studying housing and industrial conditions’. He remarked that he was glad that the ‘apolitical’ visit had not caused offence.
Despite the fears of the king, Hardinge* and various diplomats, the trip was well enough received in England. Churchill wrote to Edward shortly afterwards that ‘I am told when scenes of [your tour] were produced in the news reels in the cinemas here, your Royal Highness’ pictures were always very loudly cheered.’ While acknowledging that ‘I was rather afraid beforehand that your tour in Germany would offend the great numbers of anti-Nazis in this country, many of whom are your friends and admirers’, he professed himself glad that ‘it all passed off with so much distinction and success’.37
Before complaining that ‘politics here are horribly dull … there are no quarrels, no vehement debates, no stormy scenes’,38 Churchill advised Edward to travel aboard the Normandie to America rather than the Bremen, thereby avoiding antagonising public opinion by making connections with his recent visit to Germany. This advice was ignored, and Edward and Wallis prepared to embark on the Bremen. Chamberlain received a note from the Foreign Office accepting the inevitability of the trip: ‘it is embarrassing that HRH should contemplate embarking on a second such visit, but I imagine that there is nothing to be done’.39
Yet even as Churchill assured the duke that ‘the American journey I feel sure will be prosperous and you will get a reception from that vast public which no Englishman has ever had before’, he showed tone-deafness as to how Edward’s German embassy had been received in the United States.
The American reaction to the duke and duchess’ wedding had previously been warm, and critical of the royal family’s actions. The New York Herald Tribune wrote in an editorial of 29 May that ‘we wish to remark upon the contrast, steadily growing more marked, between the dignity and rightness of the conduct of the Duke of Windsor and the course being pursued by the powers that rule England’, and suggested ‘there can be no question of the duke’s stature … he has grown, not diminished, in the eyes of the world since he made his dismaying decision’. They called the royal boycott of the wedding ‘as unwise as it is unworthy’ and referred to Edward as ‘now still the object of wide affection and sympathy’.
The visit to Germany destroyed this affection and sympathy. The response of the New York Times to the publicity was typical. It remarked that ‘The Duke’s decision to see for himself the Third Reich’s industries and social institutions and his gestures and remarks during the last two weeks have demonstrated adequately that the abdication did indeed rob Germany of a firm friend, if not indeed a devoted admirer, on the British throne.’ It even suggested that he had lent himself ‘unconsciously but easily’ to Nazi propaganda, and that ‘there can be no doubt that his tour has strengthened the regime’s hold on the working classes’.40
Bedaux planned on taking a leading role in the duke and duchess’s American tour, and had arrived in New York on 1 November to begin making the necessary arrangements. He was surprised firstly to be presented with bills for unpaid income tax, and then by the inquisition of a hundred journalists. All of them seemed opposed to both the trip and Bedaux’s involvement within it.
If Wallis had hoped to visit her home city of Baltimore and be received rapturously, she would have been disappointed to learn that the Baltimore Federation of Labour condemned her and her husband’s visit to Germany for giving succour to ‘the world’s most notorious foe of democracy and freedom of conscience’. The Federation also stated that for all of Edward and Wallis’s public concern for life in Germany, similar conditions in Baltimore ‘are to be studied by one who while resident here in no way showed the slightest concern nor sympathy for the problems of labour or the poor or needy’.
Bedaux, shocked by the collapse of his ambitions, retreated from America and telephoned the duke’s secretary to tell him that the trip was off. He sent a telegram the following day absolving himself from any involvement in the visit: ‘I am compelled in honesty and friendship to advise you that because of mistaken attacks on me here I am convinced that your proposed study tour would be difficult under my guidance … I respectfully suggest and implore that you relieve me completely of all duties in connection with your American tour.’41
Edward contacted Lindsay in Washington for advice as to whether to proceed with the visit, and was told that, given the hostile publicity, it seemed inadvisable to travel at great expense to a nation that no longer seemed keen to receive him. He issued a press statement cancelling his much-anticipated trip owing to the ‘grave misconceptions which have arisen … regarding the motives and purposes of his industrial tour’.42 He claimed to be nothing more than an apolitical observer, but it was too late.
The duke and duchess reacted stoically to the disappointment. She remarked to her aunt Bessie that ‘we feel we made a wise decision about the US’, and he wrote to Bedaux on 9 November to say, ‘my decision was the only one possible’. But they had been shown that they remained pariahs. Their actions, whether knocking back steins of lager in Munich beer halls or fraternising with Nazis, ensured that respectability and acceptance remained distant. Never mind, they thought. Time to dust themselves off, resume hostilities with George VI and try and get what they could out of him.
Unfortunately, a pressing matter was shortly to occupy the king’s, and Britain’s, attention.