That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (19 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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The Yorks nonetheless agreed to attend a dinner at Balmoral three days later, where further friction ensued. They arrived late but when Wallis stepped forward to greet them, smiling and extending her hand in a friendly way, the Duchess walked past Wallis and, according to author Michael Thornton, who has vividly reconstructed this scene based on personal information given in confidence by a descendant of one of those present on the night, said in a loud voice, ‘I came to dine with the King.’ As Churchill had feared, by inviting his mistress to preside in Queen Victoria’s favourite house, sleeping in the bedroom where once she and Queen Mary had slept, the King had ensured not only the royal family but society was painfully divided. Philip Ziegler points out that the King ‘could not forget how rudely his sister-in-law had treated the woman he loved’. Wallis after all had been asked to act as hostess and had offered a friendly greeting. In addition the King viewed the invitation to the Archbishop, an intensely close friend of his parents, as undermining his attempts to create informality and modernity at Balmoral.
William Shawcross, the Duchess of York’s official biographer, by way of defence quotes Elizabeth’s distraught letter to her mother-in-law written some days later. ‘I feel that the whole difficulty is a certain person,’ the Duchess wrote. ‘I do not feel that I
can
make advances to her & ask her to our house, as I imagine would be liked, and this fact is bound to make relations a little difficult … the whole situation is complicated and
horrible
and I feel so unhappy about it sometimes.’
Not long afterwards, the Duchess of York wrote a kind and gentle letter to ‘Darling David’ thanking him for lending them Brickhall. But from now on her sweetness was derided as cloying. The relationship between the two brothers as well as that between the two women was irreparably damaged. In Aberdeen itself someone daubed a wall with graffiti: ‘Down with the American harlot.’ Six weeks later the Balmoral debacle had become such an issue that a joke went the rounds stating that when Wallis took a taxi and asked for King’s Cross, the driver answered: ‘I’m sorry, lady.’ Chips Channon believed the weekend was a turning point. ‘Aberdeen will never forgive him,’ he reported six weeks later.
On their return from Scotland the King, somewhat reluctantly as he considered it oppressive and gloomy, finally took up residence at Buckingham Palace. He disliked eating meals there so would escape lunch and manage with just an orange all day; this became a lifelong habit. He rented a house for Wallis in Regent’s Park at 16 Cumberland Terrace, one of the fine Nash terrace houses topped with magnificent ionic statuary on the outer circle of the Park. But it was being redecorated and not yet ready. So, after a brief spell at Claridge’s, in early October she took up residence in Felixstowe, as required in order to establish residency (just as it had been in Warrenton nine years earlier), before her case could be heard at the local court. Her friends George and Kitty Hunter gallantly came to keep her company in the depressingly faded rented house and the King ordered a Scotland Yard detective to guard against intruders. From there she wrote to Ernest, stayi SErntedng with some Kerr-Smiley cousins who had taken pity on him. It was Sunday evening, two days before the case was heard. Wallis was feeling lower than she had for years. ‘I really can’t concentrate on … anything at the moment my dear,’ she told him, the only man she could still turn to.
I have had so MUCH trouble and complications
with everyone
. Also I am terrified of the court etc – and the US press has done
untold harm
in every direction besides printing wicked lies – I feel small and licked by it all. I shall come back Wednesday afternoon but remain in seclusion as last time I went out I was followed everywhere by cameramen, so horrible I can’t think what sort of mess … I am leaving for. I am sorry about the club ghosts, I am sorry about Mary – I am sorry for myself. I am sorry for the King. I hate the U.S. press, I hate stuffy British minds and last but not least I don’t understand myself, which is the cause of all the misery.
Give me courage
2.15 Tuesday
Love Wallis
I am so lonely.
 
Although the British press was still heavily self-censored (with the exception of
Cavalcade
, a magazine unafraid of publishing pictures of Wallis and the King), American magazines were sold in Britain but with whole pages scissored out. It was easy enough for those with access to international news to read expansive accounts of the affair. The coverage was, Nancy Dugdale confided to her diary, ‘vulgar in the extreme’. The American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst had weeks beforehand sent over one of his top reporters, Adela Rogers St Johns, who worked on the story for months interviewing anyone close to the couple. One enterprising reporter in New York had traced Ernest’s first wife Dorothea, who issued a statement saying: ‘If what the newspapers say of my former husband’s present financial standing is true, Audrey and I wish he could find it possible to provide adequately for her education and maintenance …’ Wallis decided that she now needed to have some society photographs taken, so she arranged to sit for the fashionable photographer Cecil Beaton.
If Wallis had any lingering doubts about how excited the American and international press was by her story, the arrival of hundreds of clamouring journalists at Ipswich dispelled them. Policemen outside the court smashed two press cameras with their truncheons as Wallis, wearing a simple and carefully chosen navy-blue double-breasted coat, with a matching skirt and navy-blue felt hat with veil, had to be hustled through the throng to enter the courtroom. Once inside she sat, immobile, in the barristers’ well with a lawyer either side of her surrounded by seven policemen and four plainclothes detectives. The judge, described by
Time
magazine as ‘the jovial, golfing Sir John Anthony Hawke, who was for five years attached to the present King in the capacity of Attorney General to the Prince of Wales’, opened by asking why the case had come to Ipswich. After some hurried whispering and nodding he carried on.
Wallis was led through her questions by her assured barrister, Norman Birkett KC , and rarely had to say anything other than answer in the affirmative. Asked if, from the autumn of 1934 she had complained about her husband’s indifference and the way he often went away for weekends alone, she answered, ‘Yes, I did.’
st="0">
But the essential piece of evidence – that Ernest Simpson had been served brea
kfast in bed at the Hotel de Paris with a woman who was not his wife – was not in doubt. Ernest, who did not defend the case and was thus spared taking the witness stand, had hoped that his companion could remain nameless, and indeed the first petition did not name her. But within a day of lodging his statement, having been told that the absence of any name might lead to worse problems as the press ferrete
d one out, he agreed to name the woman as Mrs Elizabeth Kennedy, known as Buttercup. She was almost certainly Mary Raffray, the name probably deriving from a hat she once wore, and the mild subterfuge is typical of Ernest trying to act the gentleman. He would have hated the idea of taking a paid stranger to bed for this purpose and yet equally he could not possibly allow Mary to be publicly named.
10
It was all over in fourteen minutes and Birkett asked for a decree nisi to be granted with costs. Hawke hesitated at first, apparently puzzled by the request, but concluded: ‘I suppose I must in these unusual circumstances. So you have it with costs.’
11
‘King’s Moll Reno’d in Wolsey’s Home Town’ was one of the less lurid headlines that appeared in the American press. ‘Cutie Simpson cuts out bloodless British women in royal choice’ was another. Others announced that the King, who as long as he remained on the throne was immune from investigation himself, was to ‘Wed Wally’ and some even gave a date for the forthcoming nuptials.
Wallis returned immediately to London and dined that night with the King. Only now did he tell her of the visit he had had one week previously from Prime Minister Baldwin. His deliberate shielding of this fact from her until after the hearing reveals his awareness of Wallis’s nervous and volatile state. On 20 October Baldwin had been summoned from Downing Street ‘and made aware of the King’s firm intention of marrying Mrs Simpson. As can well be imagined,’ wrote Nancy Dugdale, ‘the shock was severe. This twice divorced woman of low birth with an intermittent career of coquetry behind her, whose first marriage was dissolved in America; whose second marriage took place in England where it is doubtful if her first divorce would be acknowledged as legal, whom the king now proposed should take Queen Mary’s place.’ Nancy Dugdale, of all those close to events, might have been expected to be sympathetic towards Wallis since she was divorced herself, following a painful and abusive first marriage. That even she so bitterly opposed the idea of Wallis Simpson marrying the King is indicative of the widespread reverence for the institution of the monarchy and of the views of most who met Wallis at this fraught time that she was ‘a third class kind of woman … but no heart’ or ‘a hard bitten bitch’.
In the autumn of 1936 Stanley Baldwin was sixty-nine, hard of hearing and, as he had told close colleagues, ready to retire. He had only recently returned to active politics after three months’ rest following exhaustion and felt that his duty was to remain at the helm in a crisis, if at all possible. His private view of Wallis was relatively broad-minded; he ‘wouldn’t mind if she were a respectable whore … kept out of the public view’. But he did not relish the prospect of discussing with the King his personal life and had declined earlier suggestions from Palace officials and government ministers that he should do so. ‘Poor Stan how he hated the idea,’ his wife recorded in her diary. Nonetheless he u Sethernment minderstood the necessity of facing the King and so on 20 October he went to Fort Belvedere and did his duty. He urged the King, who was ‘at his most courteous and nicest’, to call off the divorce. Later, recounting the events of that day to the influential Australian High Commissioner, Stanley Bruce, Baldwin told how the the King had insisted that he could not possibly interfere in a private decision taken by Mrs Simpson which he had nothing to do with whatever. ‘This statement, the PM said quite bluntly, was a lie.’ ‘Poor S’, wrote Lucy immediately afterwards, ‘asked for a whisky and soda in the middle of the confab for he felt the strain of it all intensely.’ There are various accounts of this first meeting, which the Prime Minister kept secret ‘except for 3 or 4 of his elder colleagues’. According to his
niece Monica Baldwin, recounting the conversation as told to her by her uncle:
I said to him, was it absolutely necessary that he should
marry
her? In their peculiar circumstances certain things are sometimes permitted to Royalty which are not allowed to the ordinary man.
To this he replied immediately: ‘Oh there’s no question of that. I am going to marry her …’
 
Baldwin’s suggestion to the King that he could keep Mrs Simpson as his lover, just not marry her, may not have been made on this occasion.
12
But it was certainly what he felt. He had even discussed it with Archbishop Lang, who responded, not unreasonably, that this would be a difficult line for a man of the cloth to advocate. The King himself affected, somewhat disingenuously, to be shocked by the hypocrisy of the suggestion. But in fact the exchange reveals a deep-seated belief in the 1930s in the importance of maintaining public standards, just as it indicates the distance between private mores and public values, a distinction that was considered virtuous until the 1960s. Thus Violet Bonham-Carter, daughter of the former Prime Minister H. H. Asquith and an active Liberal politician herself in the 1930s, was echoing the views of many in 1936 Britain when she admitted to Churchill that the King faced ‘a dilemma that many human beings have had to face and meet with less at stake. Many after all have died for this country not so long ago. The sacrifice now demanded falls far short of life.’
If the King’s Proctor were to be involved in investigating that the decree had not been obtained by agreement or even by faked evidence, that the wife had not herself committed adultery and that there was no omission of material facts, it would be now, once the first stage of the divorce had been granted. Any private citizen could (on the payment of half-a-crown) intervene to ‘show cause’ why any decree nisi should not be made absolute. It was not long before Mr Francis Stephenson, an elderly gentleman described as a solicitor’s clerk, did exactly that, writing to object on the grounds that he believed this was a collusive divorce and that the petitioner had committed adultery with King Edward VIII. And so Sir Thomas Barnes, the King’s Proctor, had the unenviable responsibility of investigating whether or not Wallis Simpson was ‘innocent’. If Barnes found that anything was suspicious, he could intervene to put the facts he had discovered before the court. The court then had the power to rescind the decree nisi, thus leaving Wallis in a permanent state of limbo, separated from one husband but not free to marry another. It was a ghastly prospect and Wallis had good reason to be terrified, for although only a tiny proportion of divorces overall were blocked at the second stage S seother, the overwhelming majority of cases where there were proctorial interventions did indeed result in cancellation of the divorce. For example, in 1935 Barnes intervened in twenty-three cases, twenty-one of which were rescinded, and in 1936 he acted in twenty-six, leaving twenty-five individuals without their final decree.

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