That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (23 page)

Read That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor Online

Authors: Anne Sebba

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

BOOK: That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
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As Zetland pointed out: ‘She did
NOT
say she was ready to withdraw her petition for divorce.’ But she did send the King a long and rambling letter urging him not to abdicate. ‘Don’t be silenced and leave under a cloud, I beseech you and in abdication no matter in what form unless you can let the public know that the Cabinet has virtually kicked you out … I must have any action of yours understood by the world [or] we would have no happiness and I think the world would turn against me.’
Reading this, along with her earlier note to Sibyl Colefax, it is clear she was finally trying to extricate herself, painfully aware now how history would view her as the woman who forced a man to give up his throne. Wallis was utterly genuine in her desire to disappear from the King’s life, if only to preserve her own sanity rather than from motives of altruism or to protect the King let alone the institution of monarchy. She, not the King, retained a keen awareness of the world beyond. But she also knew better than anyone, other than Monckton perhaps, how difficult it was going to be to leave him. ‘With the King’s straightness and directness,’ he wrote, ‘there went a remarkable determination and courage and confidence in his own opinions and decisions. Once his mind was made up one felt that he was like the deaf adder that stoppeth his ears … for myself … I thought that if and when the stark choice faced them between their love and his obligations as King Emperor they would in the end make the sacrifice, devastating though it would be.’ Nancy Dugdale was perhaps right in claiming that Wallis’s renunciation statement ‘came many, many weeks if not years too late and was despised by everyone except the vacuous women of society whom she had vamped and who were touched by her magnanimous gesture’, but wrong in failing to recognize how sincerely Wallis wanted to get out of a predicament she now loathed, even without any clear plans as to how she would fend for herself if she had to.
Theodore Goddard also understood, through awkward conversations on ‘a very bad phone line with much shouting and confusion’, that his client was completely ‘ready to do anything that would ease the situation but that the other end of the wicket was determined’. Since Wallis, not the King, was his client, Goddard faced another [acebutproblem. He had information which made him seriously concerned that, following the Francis Stephenson intervention with the King’s Proctor, the divorce might not be granted after all. This potentially disastrous situation made it imperative for him to meet with his client for her sake, even though the King, a semi-prisoner himself at the Fort, was strongly opposed to his going or to any action which might put pressure on Wallis to withdraw. Nonetheless, Goddard ignored royal opposition and bravely flew, for the first time in his life, in a small government plane to the South of France. It was a terrifying flight as one of engines broke down, forcing him to land at Marseilles, and he eventually arrived at two o’clock on the morning of Tuesday 8 December. Also in the party was a doctor – Goddard had a weak heart. But since Dr Kirkwood was a gynaecologist, rumours immediately spread that Wallis was pregnant. Brownlow was infuriated by this further annoyance and had to issue a statement that Dr Kirkwood was there only as Goddard’s personal physician.
At nine the next morning Goddard had a long talk with Wallis ‘and asked if she was sure that what she was doing was wise? Two things stand out,’ Goddard stated later. ‘She was definitely prepared to give up the King and he was definitely not prepared to give her up … he intended to abdicate and eventually marry her.’ Nonetheless, after increasingly tense phone calls between Cannes and Fort Belvedere, Wallis signed a further, much stronger statement which, according to Goddard, the King agreed to only in order to protect her from criticism. Goddard returned, by train this time, with a document in which Mrs Simpson unambiguously expressed her readiness to withdraw from her entanglement. But nothing was done with this statement: ‘It was not available until the afternoon of Wednesday the 9th and, as you know,’ the Downing Street adviser Sir Horace Wilson explained to Monckton, ‘you and others had been at the Fort the previous evening on what proved to be the final attempt. During Wednesday morning’s cabinet, decisions were taken which with Tuesday’s proceedings made it clear that nothing would come of the statement nor of Goddard’s efforts. I see that after hearing his account on Wednesday afternoon I noted that I did not think that G’s client had fully taken him into her confidence!’ There also exists in the Bodleian Library in Oxford what Alan Lascelles in depositing it there called ‘a curious little document’, found among Baldwin’s political papers. It was a half-sheet of grey notepaper bearing the heading ‘Lou Viei, Cannes’ but with no date. On it is written in pencil, in what is believed to be Brownlow’s handwriting, ‘With the deepest personal sorrow, Mrs Simpson wishes to announce that she has abandoned any intention of marrying his Majesty.’ It is signed (in ink) ‘Wallis Simpson’. This statement is unequivocal.
But it, too, presumably also arrived among Baldwin’s papers via Goddard and never saw the light of day. For, as Goddard relayed to Dugdale, he had found his client ‘in a most terrified state of nerves, complete capitulation and willingness to do anything’. The atmosphere at the Rogers villa was appallingly tense for all. The King had given orders that Wallis should have police protection, but Inspector Evans and his colleague begged to be allowed to return to England, complaining in particular of Brownlow and his high-handed ways. They particularly resented being told to take their hands out of their pockets when speaking to him. Goddard believed Wallis’s desire to disappear from Europe was genuine – she had contemplated going to the Far East – but by 9 December neither plans nor statements were of any use, as Wallis probably feared all along. Although the King now was resolute in his decision to abdicate, with Wallis gone he had no friends with whom to discuss the mat [scuughter. Churchill, out of sympathy and pragmatism, continued to beg him not to rush. He even wrote to Baldwin saying how cruel and wrong it would be to extort a decision from the man in his present state. He had visited the King and believed that he should see a doctor as ‘the personal strain he had been so long under and which was not at its climax had exhausted him to a most painful degree’.
But none of this washed with the House of Commons and by Tuesday 8 December Baldwin, who paid his last visit to the Fort that day, knew it was all over. There were still many unresolved questions about the King’s future status and finances but nothing could persuade him to remain. American newspapers were already reporting the abdication. Baldwin had found all his conversations with the King difficult, partly because it was:
like talking to a child of 10 years old. He did not seem to grasp the issues at stake, he seems
bewitched
… He has no religious sense. I have never in my life met anyone so completely lacking in any sense of the – the – what is
beyond
… And he kept on repeating over and over again: ‘I can’t do my job without her … I am going to marry her, and I will
go
’ … There simply was no moral struggle and it appalled me.
 
Even when the Prime Minister warned the King that he risked the destruction of the monarchy he ‘would keep on throwing his arms out with a curious gesture repeating: “SHE is beside me … the most wonderful woman in the world.”’ But on the night of the 8th the King was in ‘what I can only describe as a perfectly exalted condition. He would spend nearly the whole day telephoning to that woman and would come in from the telephone box with the most beautiful look I have ever seen on his face, like a young knight who has just seen the Holy Grail and say: “I’ve just been talking to Her: talking to the most wonderful woman in the world.” It was hopeless to reason with him.’
Baldwin told his Cabinet that he had then, as a last resort, said to the King: ‘Suppose if an archangel asked you to give up Mrs Simpson would it have any effect?’ ‘Not the least,’ replied the King. And the Prime Minister told his wife on his return home that he felt ‘as though he had been in Bedlam’. Dugdale asked the Duke of Kent at this time, ‘Do you think the King will be happy?’ and received the reply: ‘Happy? Good heavens no, not with That Woman.’
The King, as he tried in those vital last hours to negotiate his future, was desperately alone. He had abandoned the support of his family months previously and now, at his lowest point, was almost without advisers he trusted. ‘He was’, as his biographer Philip Ziegler acknowledged, ‘agonised by the fear that he would let Wallis down, secure for her less than she deserved, earn her contempt.’ At the final dinner before the abdication, where the King spoke to each of his brothers in turn and tried to explain, there was yet another telephone conversation with Wallis in Cannes, partially overheard by Dugdale, in which the King ‘was heard to tell her he would get less than he hoped for, which caused a harsh voiced twang of rich American invective from Cannes’. Under such pressure he clutched at any straw which he thought might help him improve his bargaining position. But then, as Ziegler puts it, ‘he told for reasons of self-interest, a foolish and suicidal lie … He was to suffer the consequences until the day he died.’
The precise size of Edward VIII’s fortune before abdicating is a mat [tinheiter of historical debate. Sir Edward Peacock, a man of immense experience as a former governor of the Bank of England as well as adviser to George V and Edward when Prince of Wales, later put it at around £1.1 million, excluding his Canadian ranch. A year before he became king, the Prince had asked Peacock to put his money in securities outside England, setting up a trust with provision for Mrs Simpson. When Peacock warned the Prince that if this became known it would reflect badly on him the Prince insisted he still wanted it done. ‘Peacock told me this to show that Wales had in mind to get out of England long before the abdication,’ Joseph Kennedy, the US Ambassador, wrote in his diary following a lunch with Peacock. ‘This was all invested and very wisely,’ Kennedy continued; ‘with cash and other interests he had about £1,000,000. This figure confirmed later by Sir Horace Wilson …’ Nevertheless when the King met his family for the last time at the Fort he ‘distinctly told his brother [the Duke of York] that … he did not think he had £5,000 a year’ and made an impassioned speech about how badly off he was, citing his father’s will, which still rankled, giving him a life interest in Sandringham and Balmoral. He told Churchill a similar sob story about how poor he was and about his need for a subsidy if he was going to survive in a suitable manner for an ex-king of Britain. In the abdication settlement there was a proposal for a grant from the government of approximately £25,000 a year free of tax. But Baldwin was worried that, if debated in Parliament, this would lead to a heated discussion. Nancy Dugdale was probably correct in her belief that most people think ‘public money should not be voted for the ex King in the Civil List … the Royal family, who all inherited the late King’s private fortune, should give their brother enough to live on’. She also reported hearing ‘considerable public annoyance because the King has given Mrs Simpson Queen Alexandra’s jewels … Lawyers have discovered that they were left to King Edward as head of House of Windsor … a position he subsequently relinquished therefore the jewels go to his successor. The King has given Mrs Simpson vast sums of money placed in banks all over world.’ The legend of Queen Alexandra’s emeralds, said for years to have been spirited away by the King and given to Mrs Simpson, persisted throughout their lives in spite of vehement denunciations from their lawyers and by Wallis herself as Duchess of Windsor. In reality, the likely sources of the jewels the Duke gave to Wallis, both loose and set, were his private family heirlooms, therefore genuinely personal property, as well as gifts given to him while he was travelling the Empire as Prince of Wales, especially during his tour of India in 1921 and 1922.
But in order to avoid an unpopular public discussion about how much the ex-King would need, the future King agreed to underwrite this amount to his brother out of the Privy Purse. According to Ambassador Kennedy: ‘Peacock advised Edward that he thought Baldwin had done the best he could and agreed with Baldwin that it should be given up in Parliament.’ When King George VI later learned the truth about his exiled brother’s sizeable fortune he wrote to him in subdued shock to say ‘that I was completely misled’.
Until that time he – if not Wallis – had retained the underlying affection of his sister-in-law the Duchess of York, who wrote one of the most moving letters of the whole drama just before the abdication, begging her brother-in-law to be kind to Bertie, who finds it ‘awfully difficult to say what he thinks, you know how shy he is – so do help him’. She went on: ‘I wish that you could realize how hard it has been for him lately. I
know
that he is fonder of you than anybody else and as his wife I must write to tell you this. I am terrified f [m tknoor him – so DO help him, and
for God’s sake
don’t tell him that I have written.’
On 10 December, less than six weeks after Wallis Simpson had appeared at Ipswich assizes pleading for a divorce, the King signed the Instrument of Abdication at Fort Belvedere with his three brothers present. Once Parliament had endorsed this, he would become a private individual and his most pressing obligation was to speak directly to the nation and earn Wallis’s respect by making plain to posterity how hard she had tried to dissuade him from abdicating. He had been working on such a speech for days but felt goaded into action by what he perceived as Baldwin’s unforgivable failure when speaking to the House of Commons about these events to explain the nobility of Wallis’s behaviour. Most people in Britain had first learned of the drama and heard mention of the American woman he loved only in the previous few days. ‘We Londoners, with our insatiable thirst for scandalous gossip,’ wrote Lieutenant Colonel Tweed to the former Prime Minister David Lloyd George, ‘tended to assume that everybody knew all about Mrs Simpson and I was rather staggered on visiting Birmingham and Manchester a week prior to the crisis breaking to find that not a single soul I talked to had even heard of Mrs Simpson.’

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