That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (14 page)

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Authors: Anne Sebba

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Royalty, #Rich & Famous

BOOK: That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
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Wallis hated skiing and the Duke himself hardly excelled. Dudley Forwood, later the Duke’s equerry but then a young attaché at the British Legation in Vienna, who had been hauled out of post and was expected to accompany the Duke everywhere, recalled Wallis standing on the mountainside in Kitzbühel in unsuitable high-heeled shoes looking anxious. As the Duke descended the slopes Forwood heard him call out to her in his strange, half-cockney voice: ‘Aren’t I doing splendidly, Wallis?’ Not many thought he was.
This almost month-long holiday in February 1935 – after Kitzbühel they went on to Vienna and Budapest – caused a definite turning point in other ways aside from the fact that Austria was an unstable country with a growing pro-Nazi party and that its leader, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, had been assassinated the previous year. A hurt letter from Wallis to the Prince around this time – which she asked him to tear up – indicates just how precarious her position was or at least how precarious she thought it was, as well as pointing to a rare occasion when he did not do as she asked. Preserving smooth relations with Ernest mattered intensely to her and she reveals that she had had ‘a long quiet talk with E last night and I felt very eanum [a private word between Wallis and Edward meaning small, weak or insignificant] at the end’. She berated the Prince for staying too long on his visits to their flat, demanding too much of her, constantly telephoning and thoughtlessly stepping on other people. ‘Doesn’t your love for me reach to the heights of wanting to make things a little easier for me?’ She begged him for a little more consideration of her position with Ernest and told him she thought he had not grown up where love was concerned ‘and perhaps it’s only a boyish passion’. Still convinced that this was an infatuation that would pass, she told him that his ‘behaviour last night made me realise how very alone I shall be some day – and because I love you I don’t seem to have the strength to protect myself from your youthfulness’. If she was not deemed good enough for Felipe Espil when she was a decade younger, surely it was only a matter of time before the heir to the British throne treated her in the same way? Frozen with anxiety, she could not move. The Prince responded by giving her more gifts of money and jewellery, further sapping her resolve to walk away. It would not be out of character to imagine that Wallis was making a mental calculation of what she would need if she were to be abandoned by both men. Admiral Sir Lionel Halsey, Comptroller and Treasurer to the Prince since 1920 when he retired from the navy, was the Prince’s closest adviser and, for a time, had the confidence of both King and Prince. He told the King in July 1935 that Mrs Simpson was already receiving ‘a very handsome income’ from the Prince. Aird put the figure at £6,000 per annum.
At the same time, several royal courtiers now started openly to voice their disquiet over Mrs Simpson. Halsey warned that the newspapers would not stay silent for much longer about the forty-one-year-old Prince’s unsuitable attachment to a married woman. As Wallis recognized after her return from skiing, there w Ciine-yas scarcely an evening when she was not with the Duke at the theatre, at an embassy reception or for dinner. She described Jubilee Year as a wave that was bearing her upwards, surging ever faster and higher. She told her aunt that she was invited everywhere in the hope that the Prince would follow in her wake. Society was madly gossiping, and the arch-gossiper Chips Channon noted astutely on 5 April, following a luncheon party he hosted to do a ‘politesse’ to Mrs Simpson: ‘She is a jolly, plain, intelligent, quiet, unpretentious and unprepossessing little woman, but as I wrote to Paul of Yugoslavia today, she has already the air of a personage who walks into a room as though she almost expected to be curtsied to. At least, she wouldn’t be too surprised. She has complete power over the Prince of Wales.’
But society was forming two camps. There were those, broadly speaking of ancient lineage, who stood squarely behind the King, found her unacceptable and did their best to avoid her if possible – the establishment. The Duchess of York had said openly she would no longer meet Mrs Simpson, which resulted in her group having to make a hasty retreat when ‘that woman’ walked in to the same party. Helen Hardinge (née Gascoyne-Cecil), a friend of the Yorks, explained that ‘Of course, we did not seek her company, ourselves.’ She and her husband Alexander (Alec) Hardinge, Assistant Private Secretary to the King, both came from families not of vast wealth but involved in public service as diplomats, colonial administrators or soldiers for generations, several of whom had given their lives in the service of their country. Alec had met Wallis only once by 1935 and Helen insisted that she and he were ‘quite uncensorious’, as servants of the King must be, even if the idea of a woman with two living husbands consorting with the heir to the throne was distasteful. They did their best not to confront Wallis but they had friends in society who, if they came across her, could not avoid her.
Helen wrote about one who, when introduced to Wallis at a party,
absolutely refused to shake hands with her.
‘What did you do?’ I asked her.
‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘it was quite easy. I dropped my handbag just as she got to me so I had to stoop down to find it.’
 
Others, many of whom had American connections and money and were new to London – ‘the Ritz Bar Set’ as they were often called – felt differently. ‘To them Mrs Simpson seemed to provide a heaven-sent opportunity to enter Royal society.’
At the end of May Channon noted a revealing scene in Lady Cunard’s box at the opera. Emerald Cunard, the former American heiress Maud Burke, had married Sir Bache Cunard but lived separately from him and was widely known as a patron of the arts and mistress of Sir Thomas Beecham. ‘I was interested to see’, wrote Channon, ‘what an extraordinary hold Mrs Simpson has over the Prince. In the interval she told him to hurry away as he would be late in joining the Queen at the LCC [London County Council] Ball – and she made him take a cigar out of his breast pocket. “It doesn’t look very pretty,” she said. He went, but was back in half an hour.’
Lord Wigram, a sixty-three-year-old former soldier and experienced courtier who had served his sovereign for two generations, decided it was time for action. Urged on by Halsey, he paid a special visit to the Prince after this holiday to convey how worrie Cey itd the King was about his private life. But he was merely the first of many to receive a princely rebuff. ‘The Prince’, he reported, ‘said he was astonished that anyone could take offence about his personal friends. Mrs Simpson was a charming, cultivated woman.’ This was more or less the attitude he took throughout the rest of his life. He believed that Wallis was a uniquely wonderful woman and that anyone who did not share those views, having met her, was blind to the facts. Wigram’s shot across the bows had, as Godfrey Thomas, who was closer to the Prince, was well aware, been totally ineffective.
It was not only the King but the government which was now concerned about this unorthodox alliance. A surveillance report by Special Branch in June 1935 sent to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police indicated that the Simpsons’ activities were already being monitored because it was believed that Wallis was not only juggling Ernest and the Prince of Wales but also seeing another man whose identity they had not yet ascertained. A week later, the man they suspected was revealed as Guy Marcus Trundle. Trundle, a vicar’s son born in York and a well-known rake, was said to be a married man and a motorcar salesman employed by the Ford Motor Company. According to this report, ‘Trundle is described as a very charming adventurer, very good looking, well bred and an excellent dancer … He meets Mrs Simpson quite openly at informal social gatherings as a personal friend, but secret meetings are made by appointment when intimate relations take place. Trundle receives money from Mrs Simpson as well as expensive presents. He has admitted this.’
It’s a curious story. Clearly detectives were now talking to those who knew the Simpsons, including their staff, in the hope of finding some indiscretions. While it is quite possible that Trundle met Wallis Simpson and that this led him to boast about ‘intimate relations’ – after all, he was known to boast that every woman he met fell for him – it is highly unlikely that they had any personal relationship. But it was also not out of character for Wallis to enjoy making men jealous. It was part of the flirtatious and promiscuous behaviour pattern which provided her with continual reassurance of her attractiveness to men, and one meeting with a rogue such as Trundle would have been enough to inflame the Prince’s ardour, had she chosen to tell him. The Special Branch reports are bald but, as Stephen Cretney makes clear in his account of the abdication crisis, ‘whether they could have been sustained in legal proceedings is not clear’.
But there is another line in the report which states: ‘Mrs Simpson has said that her husband is now suspicious of her association with other men as he thinks this will eventually cause trouble with POW.’ If this is what she told Trundle, which he repeated, it gives further evidence that the man Wallis most wanted to keep was Ernest and that she was using the Prince of Wales for the time being, intending to revert to Ernest as soon as the shine faded. Ernest, according to the report, ‘is bragging to the effect that he expects to get “high honours” before very long. He says that P.O.W will succeed his father at no distant date. He has mentioned that he expects, at least, to be created a Baron. He is very talkative when in drink.’ The report was obviously circulated to a select few in the government as Sir Edward Peacock, Receiver General to the Duchy of Cornwall, and responsible for the royal finances at many levels, later told Joseph Kennedy when he became US ambassador, that ‘they all had evidence Wallie [sic] was having an affair with a young man and of course this embittered the Cabinet more than ever. Peacock is convinced’, added Kennedy, ‘they would have gladly taken an American for Queen but not Wallie.’
King George did manage one conversation about Wallis Simpson with his son at this time. The King insisted he could not invite his son’s mistress to the forthcoming Court Ball. The Prince swore to his father that Mrs Simpson was not his mistress. The King relented and she was therefore invited. But although there are various reports of the Prince having always protested that he had not had sexual intercourse with Mrs Simpson before they married, this was of course open to dispute then as it is now. His servants and staff knew that one of the bedrooms at the Fort, previously a dressing room situated between Wallis’s and the Prince’s bedrooms, had now been allocated to her as an extra room allowing unimpeded access between the rooms. Courtiers
au fait
with the latest gossip were more horrified than ever, believing now that their future sovereign was a liar as well as an adulterer. Wigram wrote: ‘Apart from actually seeing HRH and Mrs S in bed together they [the staff] had positive proof that HRH lived with her.’ Aird joined in, giving details of how he had seen him emerge early one morning with his upper lip all red!! So that’s that and no mistake.’ Wigram’s view was the one the King believed in the end – that his son had lied to him. The sovereign wrote in his diary on 6 November 1935 following the marriage of his third son Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester to Alice, daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch: ‘Now all the children are married except David.’ A few weeks later he was heard to exclaim: ‘I pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet [the pet name for Princess Elizabeth, the King’s granddaughter] and the throne.’
The Prince had known it would be impossible to arrange for Wallis officially to see the Jubilee procession on 6 May, the actual anniversary of the King’s accession which, that year, happened to fall on a glorious summer’s day. Instead, he begged a favour of Helen Hardinge, as her apartment in St James’s Palace overlooked the processional route to St Paul’s Cathedral. Could she, he asked, find accommodation for ‘one or two scullery maids’ to watch as the windows of his own residence at York House did not overlook the processional route? Slightly puzzled as to why the Prince could not find space for his humble servants at a Buckingham Palace window, she nonetheless obliged. ‘Some time after we returned home … I learned the identity of the “one or two scullery maids”. They were Mrs Simpson and one of her friends.’ The Hardinges came to believe that the Prince had not deliberately played a trick on them. So consumed was he by his love affair with Wallis, he assumed that everyone else was too and that the identity of the scullery maids would have been obvious. A week later Wallis was, grudgingly, invited to the Jubilee Ball, where she ‘felt the King’s eyes rest searchingly on me. Something in his look made me feel that all this graciousness and pageantry were but the glittering tip of an iceberg … filled with an icy menace for such as me.’
In spite of referring to the occasion as the ‘Silly Jubilee’, Wallis was happy to receive a pair of beautiful diamond clips as a Jubilee present from the Prince. Yet the real lessons of the Jubilee seem to have passed her by. In her bubble of worry about losing both husband and lover, she had failed to see just how deeply the British monarchy was loved and revered, not just in London but throughout the country and the wider Empire. When on Jubilee Day itself King George and Queen Mary appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, some 100,000 people cheered enthusiastically, a scene repeated every night that week and which she could not fail to have been aware was happening. His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gord Cy, haton Lang, ‘listened with evident satisfaction to the words which fell from royal lips’, wrote his chaplain, Alan Don, in his diary that Jubilee night. No wonder. The Archbishop had written them. Men like Don and Lang were increasingly worried about how they would ever be able to write such speeches for King George’s son to utter with conviction when the time came.

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