That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (17 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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One evening in early February, Ernest went to have dinner with the King at York House and decided to take with him his friend Bernard Rickatson-Hatt, by then editor in chief at Reuters. When Rickatson-Hatt got up to leave, Ernest pressed him to stay. He wanted his friend to hear what he felt he now had to state clearly to the King, ‘that Wallis would have to choose between them and what did the King mean to do about it? Did he intend to marry her? The King then rose from his chair and said: “Do you really think that I would be crowned without Wallis at my side?”’ That evening, according to Rickatson-Hatt’s version, the King and Ernest Simpson reached an accommodation whereby Ernest agreed to put an end to his marriage provided the King promised to look after Wallis.
Naturally, events could not rest there. According to a memorandum by Lord Davidson, Baldwin’s close ally, written immediately after this:
Simpson Mason asks to see Jenks Mason – the
Mari Complaisant
is now the sorrowing and devastated spouse. He tells Jenks that the King wants to marry Mrs S, (unbelievable) & that he – S – would like to leave England only that would make divorce easier – what he wants is his wife back. S suggests he should see the P.M. SB replies to this suggest [sic] with a flat negative. He is the King’s chief adviser not Mr S’s … Clive Wigram, SB and I have a frank talk. I am quite convinced Blackmail sticks out at every stage. HM has already paid large sums to Mrs S and given valuable presents. I advocate most drastic steps (deportation) if it is true that S is an American but if he isn’t the situation is very delicate. The Masonic move is very clever. The POW got S in on a lie – is now living in open breach of the Masonic Law of chastity because of the lie he first told. S and Mrs S, who is obviously a gold digger, have obviously got him on toast … Mrs S is very close to [the German Ambassador Leopold von] Hoesch and has, if she likes to read them access to all Secret and Cabinet papers!!!!!
 
Realizing that Simpson, as a British subject, could not be deported, Sir Maurice Jenks managed to reassure the frightened Wigram that Ernest was an honourable man who wanted above all to avoid scandal. Couldn’t Simpson be persuaded then to go back voluntarily to the United States and take his wife with him, Wigram urged Jenks? The story of the King’s meeting with his nemesis was passed around a frightened inner circle of advisers, including Sir Maurice Gwyer, First Parliamentary Counsel to the Treasury, Sir Lionel Halsey, then a Council Member of the Duchy of Cornwall, and Walter Monckton. Monckton, while questioning whether indeed the King could have said what was attributed to him, predicted ‘blackmail upon an extravagant basis’.
The Davidson memorandum not only lays bare deeply felt establishment concerns about Wallis becoming queen, but, more significantly, makes plain the twin fear some had of her passing on secrets to the Germans at a time of critical international tension. This fear never went away and was partly responsible for royal attitudes towards Wallis in the ensuing decades. Just eight years later the King’s brother and successor George VI was to write in a private and confidential letter to his Prime Minister: ‘I must tell you quite honestly that I do not trust the Duchess’s [Wallis’s] loyalty.’ In 1936 the ambassadors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were actively courting all the hostesses, as well as newspaper editors and politicians. Bernard Rickatson-Hatt’s boss at Reuters, K atelySir Roderick Jones, had been meeting Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German former champagne salesman acting as Hitler’s special envoy, socially since 1933. He described him as a man who, when he invited him to luncheon at his own home, ‘held me there with a flow of argument and talk from which I could not very well escape without appearing discourteous’. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, arguably more aware of the Nazi reality than most through Germany’s bishops informing him of Nazi policy, also lunched with Ribbentrop in the summer of 1935 and described him as ‘most genial and friendly’.
Wallis herself met Ribbentrop at least twice at Lady Cunard’s. This was Ribbentrop’s job, to assess the degree of pro-Nazi feeling in British society, so naturally he made a point of socializing with the woman now being called the King’s mistress. He may even have sent her regular bouquets after the dinners in the hope of currying favour, as Mary Raffray asserted later. According to the Kirk family version, when Ribbentrop was in London he called on Wallis daily, ‘except when some engagement took him out of town and then, said Mary, flinging her arms wide to indicate size, he always sent Wallis a huge box of the most glorious flowers’. As Helen Hardinge noted in her diary, ‘one of the factors in the situation was Mrs Simpson’s partiality for Nazi Germans’. But there is no evidence of an affair with Ribbentrop beyond Wallis’s ever-ready preparedness to flirt – especially with diplomats – and society’s love of gossiping. German diplomats in 1936 believed she would soon be very useful and she enjoyed having their attention. She was probably no more pro-Nazi than the pro-appeasement Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and many of the Cabinet at the time. It is noteworthy that Baldwin himself never accused her of having German sympathies, either then or later. Yet, because many found her untrustworthy on other private matters, it was easy to assume that she was untrustworthy generally. The views of the King himself were more dangerously pro-German, although predominantly pacifist, and more easily bent out of shape; they were views Wallis doubtless absorbed as being easier than exercising her mind about such matters when her own security was paramount. Not only did the King have many German relations, he spoke German fluently and believed, like many, that a repeat of the carnage of the First World War had to be avoided above all else. Recently released German documents have now made clear that the Nazis were ready to exploit the King’s sympathies if the opportunity arose and, although his friends wanted to believe that his deep patriotism would always win through, Wallis’s over-arching influence was an unknown factor.
At the end of March 1936, Wallis returned from Paris ‘in a state of collapse’. Her health was never robust and she often complained of suffering from ‘the old nervous indigestion’. But this time her unhappiness stemmed as much from the King’s almost suffocating need for her as from Ernest’s increasing detachment. She was still convinced that her days with the King were numbered, especially now that the pressures on him to provide an heir were redoubled, and this need she knew she could never satisfy. ‘In the back of my mind I had always known that the dream one day would have to end – somewhere sometime somehow. But I had characteristically refused to be dismayed by this prospect.’ And she soon realized why Ernest was quite so pliant. On 24 March, Mary Raffray had arrived in London again. Even before she came Wallis was annoyed by the idea of having a houseguest. Once she arrived she had no time for Mary and thought the clothes she had brought with her were unsuitable other than for a nightclub. But she was still Wallis’s most intimate friend, the one person in whom she could confide with utter frankness sure of a sympathetic and und Khetllierstanding listener. Or so she thought.
It rapidly became clear to Wallis that while Mary may have started by taking pity on Ernest, as well as genuinely enjoying his historical explanations as they toured ancient buildings, she had now fallen in love with him. Wallis felt deeply hurt by the new relationship between her husband and Mary but cannot have been surprised. It was a situation of her own contriving which she had believed she could control. Mary understood later that she had been manipulated, such as ‘the night she tricked me into going to the opera and then at the last minute failed to appear because she told everyone Ernest’s mistress was there … She thought she could use me as a scapegoat and did,’ wrote Mary, ‘that Ernest would turn to me in his great unhappiness as he did. Even though she loathed and despised having me there, it served her purpose as then she could say that Ernest was having an affair with me and so she would have to get a divorce.’
‘Mary’s first letters to me’, her sister Buckie recalled of 1936, ‘were in sharp contrast to those I had had the previous year,’ although she still wrote of occasional small dinners at York House and of weekends at the Fort. In one of these Mary described how the King had the entire house party, which included Ernest, driven over to Windsor Castle to see movies of the Grand National and how thrilled she felt at being able to walk casually around at least part of the castle, admiring some of the magnificent paintings. ‘Wallis is in the very thick of things, received and toadied to by everyone,’ Mary wrote.
Very soon, though, Wallis had had enough of her old schoolfriend. ‘Within a few days I received a note from Mary on unfamiliar paper bearing the letterhead of a London hotel,’ her sister recalled. ‘It was brief and to the point. Yesterday, Mary wrote me, Wallis had accused her of having seduced Ernest. Mary had left the room where they were talking, gone to her own, thrown all her possessions into suitcases, phoned for a taxi and then walked out of Bryanston Court and Wallis’ life forever.’
Wallis fed her aunt little of this drama, explaining only that she had gone to great lengths to amuse Mary. But, she added ominously, ‘
I am afraid
.’ She then wrote to her aunt with remarkable self-knowledge of how people of her age, nearly forty, must make their own lives. ‘As I wasn’t in a position to have it arranged for me by money or position and though I have had many hard times, disappointments etc I’ve managed not to go under as yet – and never having known security until I married Ernest, perhaps I don’t get along well with it, knowing and understanding the thrill of its opposite much better – the old bromide, nothing ventured nothing gained.’ Bessie Merryman decided that it was time to come over to England again and support her niece more actively, but she could not do so immediately.
On 2 April the Simpsons hosted a black-tie, black-waistcoat dinner in the King’s honour at Bryanston Court where Ernest, bizarrely, made a grand entrance into the drawing room of his own home escorting his sovereign. Harold Nicolson, a guest that evening, found ‘Mrs Simpson a perfectly harmless type of American but the whole setting is slightly second rate’. After this there was to be only one more occasion when Ernest accompanied his wife in public, but the society jokes about him did not abate. The Duchess of Devonshire suggested that while other staff were being sacked a job might be found for him such as ‘“Guardian of the Bedchamber” or “Master of the Mistress”’.
In May, the Prime Mini Khe ter ster and his wife, Lucy, were invited to dine at York House, where the King still lived. Until recently Lucy Baldwin had been completely unaware of Mrs Simpson’s existence – and her discovery was the cause of much mirth in smart London gatherings. But this was not her milieu. The Baldwins had been married for more than forty years and had six surviving children, and, although their roots were in the country, in Worcestershire, they were not part of the Tory landed gentry who spent weekends hunting and shooting. Lucy was first and foremost a homemaker, a formidable woman dedicated to a life of service. She was the founder of the Anaesthetics Appeal Fund, associated with a machine, which was named after her, for self-administration of oxygen analgesia in obstetrics, the aim of which was to address the high incidence of maternal mortality. She was involved in the Young Women’s Christian Association and various other charitable bodies for women, especially those concerned with improving maternity care, after having herself suffered difficult pregnancies and lost her first child in a stillbirth. She was also a member of the White Heather Club, the first women’s cricket club founded in Yorkshire in 1887, and she created a small theatre at Astley Hall in Worcestershire where her children with cousins and friends often put on small productions. It is hard to imagine which of these topics would have resulted in congenial conversation with Wallis Simpson.
The King had warned Wallis weeks beforehand that he wanted her at this dinner. ‘He paused, and after a moment, with his most Prince Charming smile, added: “It’s got to be done. Sooner or later my Prime Minister must meet my future wife.”’ Wallis, recounting this story, maintains that it was the first time he had proposed marriage. They planned the evening together and, on the surface, the dinner passed off uneventfully. The other guests included the Mountbattens, the Wigrams, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Ernle Chatfield and Lady Chatfield and the American aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne. Baldwin had no prior knowledge of the significance of the occasion and, although surprised to see Mrs Simpson at one end of the table and Lady Cunard at the other, neither disliked Wallis nor took offence at his own wife’s placement, which was on the King’s right. In fact he was one of those who believed that ‘Mrs Simpson’s influence was not without its good side’. Neither was he out of touch with modern morals nor without sympathy for her predicament, having recently seen his own daughter go through a painful divorce. But others were more distressed, especially when the names of Mr and Mrs Ernest Simpson were announced in the Court Circular. Sir John (later Lord) Reith, a minister’s son and strict Presbyterian who rose to become director general of the BBC, was deeply disapproving of ‘the Simpson woman’ and described the affair as ‘too horrible and … serious and sad beyond calculation’.
As Harold Nicolson had observed in calling the group surrounding Wallis and the new King second rate, and as the guest books from the Fort reveal, most of those invited to inform or stimulate the King came from their existing small circle of friends in London (the Hunters, Prendergasts, Buists, Lawson-Johnstons), those who took a broad-minded view of divorce, with a sprinkling of courtiers and diplomats every now and again but a marked absence of artists, writers, politicians or statesmen or those who might have challenged them to think differently about a wide range of issues. Fred Bate, the British representative for America’s National Broadcasting Company (NBC) who had lived in Britain for some twenty years, was an exception in that he was better informed than most of their friends. But he too was divorced, in 1929, and remarried. When Wallis and Edward were exposed to the world of culture it was often a disaster, never more Kr, d, so than on 10 June when Sibyl Colefax invited them as guests of honour and persuaded Artur Rubinstein to play after dinner, a rare honour granted by the Polish maestro. Several after-dinner guests swelled the numbers at this point, including Winston and Clementine Churchill, and there was a considerable hubbub about politics which Sibyl did her best to hush as Rubinstein was ready to play. After three Chopin pieces during which the King, seated on a stool close to the piano, had chatted intermittently, openly displaying his boredom, Rubinstein prepared himself for a fourth. But before he could do so the King got up and walked over to him saying, ‘We enjoyed that very much, Mr Rubinstein,’ which, as everyone knew, was a clear command to stop. Rubinstein made a barely audible reply, ‘I am afraid that you do not like my playing, Your Majesty,’ and, accompanied by Kenneth Clark, the influential Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and director of the National Gallery, left the party angered by the humiliation. One of the guests was the Princesse de Polignac, the former sewing-machine heiress Winnaretta Singer and a noted musician herself, who said later how shocked she had been by the rudeness shown to Rubinstein. Such philistinism could never happen in Paris where she hosted musical salons, she declared.

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