Royal Babylon (33 page)

Mountbatten had been part of a gay circle at Cambridge that included the socialite Peter Murphy, who eventually moved into the Mountbatten home. At one point the young Mountbatten was sternly rebuked by Queen Mary for spending too much time “hanging around actors,” especially Noel Coward. Mountbatten brought Murphy, Coward, Somerset Maugham and many more of his gay acquaintances into Edward VII's circle of friends, and, according to some sources, Noel Coward slept with the then Prince of Wales. “The Duke [of Windsor],” wrote Coward in his memoirs, “although he
pretends not to hate me, he does because I'm queer and he's queer. However, unlike him, I don't pretend not to be.”

Rumors about the nature of the relationship between the Prince of Wales and his cousin Mountbatten first began during the Prince's Empire tours, during which time they were hardly ever apart, causing the ship's crew to swap crude jokes about how Mountbatten was monopolizing the Prince's time. Dickie wrote to his mother, “You've no idea what a friend David [the Prince of Wales was known as David to his family] is to me .  .  . how I wish he wasn't the Prince of Wales and then it would be so much easier to see lots and lots of him.” Later he wrote, “I don't know if I have ever told you exactly what friends David and I are .  .  . I have told him more about myself and he has told me more about himself than either of us have ever told anyone before in our lives.” None of this would be remarkable if it weren't for the Windsors' pretense of archetypally “straight” family values.

The Prince's preference for gay male friends continued well into married life with Wallis Simpson. In 1951, his wife, by then the Duchess of Windsor, had an affair with a famously disreputable American bisexual, Jimmy Donahoe. The grandson of the chain-store founder Frank W. Woolworth, Donahoe was a flamboyant transvestite who liked to embarrass his mother by floating around the house in drag while his parents entertained important guests. He mixed with male prostitutes and drug addicts in New York, and subsequently died of alcohol and barbiturate poisoning. Both Windsors enjoyed his company and, for three years, the trio were so inseparable that there were rumors of a ménage à trois. “The fag hag must be enjoying it,” Coward observed. “Here she's got a royal queen to sleep with, and a rich one to hump.”

         

George V's eldest son, David, the Prince of Wales, was born on June 23, 1894. He reigned briefly as Edward VIII, then skulked at length in self-imposed exile as the Duke of Windsor. He was arguably the blackest sheep in 300 years of royal-family history. His daily routine was that of a useless libertine, enjoying all the benefits that life on the Civil List carried, but unwilling to offer anything in return. Born and bred to be the King of England, and still unmarried at forty-one, the Prince of Wales was the world's most eligible bachelor, attracting adoring females wherever he ventured. North America danced to the popular song: “I've danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales .  .  .”

All four of King George V's surviving sons were heavy drinkers, but Edward's relentless thirst astounded people around him. In the 1920s there were frequent public sightings of him drunk, although none was ever reported in the press. His Private Secretary Alan Lascelles confessed bluntly, “I can't help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him, and to the country, would be for him to break his neck.”

He was also seemingly incapable of keeping out of the beds of married women. His first adulterous affair was with Lady Marion Coke, wife of Viscount Coke, heir to the Earldom of Leicester, and the cuckolded husband eventually had to warn the Prince to stay away from his wife. In the spring of 1918 the Prince began an affair with a Liberal M.P.'s wife, Mrs. Freda Dudley Ward, which lasted for about sixteen years. At around the same time he was sleeping with
the twenty-five-year-old American Thelma Furness, whose husband was head of the Furness shipping line. In January 1931, the Prince of Wales attended a party with Lady Furness where he met for the first time Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Simpson. The Prince dropped Lady Furness when he discovered that she had also slept with an Indian, Prince Aly Khan. The jilted mistress took her revenge by informing everyone within earshot that the Prince of Wales was very poorly endowed and useless in bed.

For most of her life, Wallis was investigated, for one reason or another, by just about every intelligence-gathering agency in the Western Hemisphere. She was born on June 19, 1896 (although Queen Mary's personal private investigation into her background put the birth date years earlier), and was raised in Baltimore in a three-story house on East Biddle Street. She was brought up by her mother, Alice, after her father died of tuberculosis when she was five months old. In 1916, aged nineteen, she married Earl Winfield Spencer, a naval pilot and a violent alcoholic. In 1924 she and her husband traveled to China and Hong Kong. According to the so-called China Report, a spurious dossier prepared by MI5, in the mid-1920s Mrs. Wallis Spencer indulged in “deviant” sexual activities in the high-class brothels popular with senior naval personnel stationed in Hong Kong. It is now generally accepted that the China Report was fiction, a smear campaign to blacken her name.

Earl Spencer kicked his wife out of their home when he discovered she was having an affair with a naval ensign. In 1927 they were divorced, and in the following year she was married to Ernest Simpson. On November 29, 1934, she made her first
major appearance at a formal court occasion, the wedding of Prince George and Princess Marina. Over the next two years, the Prince often entertained the Simpsons at his country retreat, Fort Belvedere, outside London. Soon Ernest slipped into the background, and the Prince met Wallis alone. “He was the open sesame to a new and glittering world,” she would later reflect. “Yachts materialized; the best suites in the finest hotels were flung open; airplanes stood waiting .  .  . It was like being Wallis in Wonderland.”

Although she was still married, Wallis Simpson had been the Prince of Wales's mistress for some time when he became King. The British newspapers knew all about it, but the press barons kept the story under wraps until the abdication crisis forced it into the open. Consequently you could read all about the King's affair just about anywhere in the world except Britain. The U.S. press found it particularly amusing that the King of England was copulating with an American divorcée and none of his subjects was allowed to know anything about it.

Ultimately, the heir to the throne bought Wallis for
£
100,000. This was the amount he gave Ernest Simpson, via a secret bank account, partly to compensate him for the theft of his wife, and partly to get him to appear to be the adulterer in subsequent divorce proceedings. When the Prince of Wales told Louis Mountbatten in 1936 about his intention to marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson, his cousin took him to one side and quietly reminded him of the tradition of kings. He should do what his grandfather Edward VII had done: marry a suitable royal princess while continuing to fornicate with whosoever he chose for the rest of his life. Mountbatten's advice was ignored and the British royal family found itself with the first abdication crisis in 500
years. Nearly forty years later, he offered exactly the same advice to his great-nephew Prince Charles.

For a while, Wallis Simpson held the position of Britain's Most Hated Mistress, a title later held by Camilla Parker Bowles in a fine tradition stretching back to George IV's paramour, Lady Isabella Hertford. In keeping with the aforementioned royal mistresses, Mrs. Simpson was far from beautiful. The photographer Cecil Beaton described her as “attractively ugly,
une belle laide
.” “She was a dominatrix type,” commented author Gore Vidal, “and he [the Prince], having been beaten up by nannies and governesses all his life, needed a strong woman to bawl him out.” By many accounts, Wallis was content with the status quo and was happy to stay as royal mistress. According to Donald Spoto's book
The Decline and Fall of the House of Windsor
, by this time Wallis Simpson “was bloody bored with the King and wanted out.”

When the Prince announced his plans to marry her, the situation was on the brink of constitutional crisis. The Church censured divorce; Parliament refused to grant Wallis Simpson a title, and English law had no precedent for a wife of the King with no title or official capacity; the British public hated her. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin forced the Prince to choose marriage or the monarchy. Edward was widely perceived as a charming gadabout, weak-willed and incapable of making up his mind, but when he finally came to a decision it astonished the English-speaking world. He chose to abdicate. On December 11, 1936, in a radio broadcast that reached millions, the newly proclaimed King announced: “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love.”

When her connection with the King was first revealed to the British public, Wallis Simpson received hate mail and even death threats, and bricks were thrown through her windows. Considering some of the things that the royal family had got up to, the backlash against her was both extraordinary and unfair. Her family background was checkered, but not as shocking as the King's. In the final analysis, Edward VIII was not forced to abdicate because of any Act of Parliament or royal precedent. There is nothing in the British constitution that prevents royal marriages to divorcées: it only forbids marriages to Catholics. The precedent of marrying a divorced woman was set by Henry II's marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Edward VIII's government were simply able to get rid of him by appealing to old-fashioned British snobbery. Neither the public nor the establishment could stomach Wallis Simpson. She was perceived as vulgar, common, ambitious and, worse still, American. The prospect of this bejeweled Aunt Sally appearing on Britain's postage stamps, Winston Churchill reflected after the abdication, was “too horrible to contemplate.” But there was, however, another angle on this story that neither the American nor the British press got hold of.

At best, Edward's links with Nazi Germany on the run-up to, and during, the war were ill-advised and insensitive. Many historians believe, however, that there is enough circumstantial evidence to prove that his actions were treasonable and that if he hadn't been a member of the royal family he would have been arrested, tried, and most probably executed. In fact, Churchill seriously considered charging him with treason in 1940, but resisted.

There is substantial evidence that both the King and his
mistress were unashamed Nazi sympathizers. In this they were not of course alone. At that time a substantial minority of leaders felt that war with Germany would be a tragedy and that Britain should be uniting with Hitler against the Soviet Union. Even in 1940 some members of the British establishment believed that there were still sufficient grounds for a compromise peace. German secret documents published after World War II show that the Duke of Windsor was an admirer of Hitler as early as 1935.

Both the Duke and his wife were surrounded by Fascist friends and influences. Their mutual lifelong friends were the British Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana, who kept framed bedside pictures of her idols Hitler and Goebbels. Diana Mosley said later that Edward VIII's politics were “far to the right” of even her husband's. Edward's cousin, the British-born Duke of Coburg, who was Hitler's personal emissary before the war and who turned up at his father's funeral wearing a Nazi uniform, described Edward as “an ardent Nazi.”

The German documents detailed Wallis Simpson's friendships with leading Nazis and Fascists, including Joachim von Ribbentrop. Indeed, Stanley Baldwin had received a security report that showed she was in contact with several leading German Nazis, many of whom had befriended her quite independently of Ribbentrop. Before she met the Prince of Wales, she had had an affair with Mussolini's son-in-law.

The Prince of Wales was under constant surveillance by MI5 and Scotland Yard, separately and independently, long before he married Wallis Simpson. MI5 agents learned quite by chance (at the time they were following Errol Flynn) of the couple's infamous visit to Germany after the abdication. The
Duke and Duchess met Hitler at his mountain home at Berchtesgaden. A German aide present at the meeting recalled that the Duke appeared throughout to be in awe of Hitler and grovelingly eager to please: he so overdid the “Heil Hitlers” and the Prussian heel-clicking that it even embarrassed his Nazi hosts. “It was all a little bit ridiculous,” recalled von Ribbentrop's secretary, “but no one dared to tell him.” The Duke later had private meetings at his home in Paris with Hitler's deputy, Rudolph Hess, and with Martin Bormann. “There is no need to lose a single German life in invading Britain,” Hess reported back to the Führer. “The Duke and his clever wife will deliver the goods.”

Edward married Bessie Wallis Warfield at the Chateau de Cand, France, on June 3, 1937, and they set up home in Paris. When the French capital was occupied by German troops, they fled to Portugal. Churchill sent three flying boats to bring the Duke and Duchess back to England, but the Duke refused to return. Churchill had to threaten him with a court-martial. The Duke eventually agreed to go to the Bahamas, where they spent the rest of the war. There the British royals were befriended by the murderous Mafia boss Meyer Lansky, a man personally involved in about 800 gangland killings. Meanwhile, in German-occupied Paris, Hitler made sure that the Duke's home, his personal possessions and even his bank account were left exactly as he had left them. The Duke was still in touch with the Germans, via a Spanish intermediary, until shortly before Berlin fell. Whether he was aware of it or not, the Duke of Windsor was Hitler's puppet-king in waiting. According to British intelligence, in the event of a German victory the Duke was to have been kidnapped by Hitler and restored to the British throne.