That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (24 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 abdication speech, with its expression of heartfelt longing for a woman and desperation to appear courageous in her eyes, was essentially Edward’s own creation, with some Churchillian improvements and flourishes. After a final lunch at Fort Belvedere, Churchill bade his own emotional farewell to the man who had ceased to be king while they were lunching; with tears in his eyes he began to recite two lines of poetry, tapping his stick the while: ‘He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene,’ words written by Andrew Marvell on the execution of King Charles I. Churchill was not alone in making the comparison with Charles I. The writer Virginia Woolf and the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, transfixed like most of the country by the dramatic events, had gone to the House of Commons to be as close as possible to unfolding history. Woolf wrote in her diary of how, as the women walked along Whitehall, Ottoline, pointing to the great lit-up windows of the Banqueting House in their frame of white stone, remarked: ‘That’s the window out of which Charles the First stepped when he had his head cut off.’ Woolf said she felt she was ‘walking in the seventeenth century with one of the courtiers; and she was lamenting not the abdication of Edward, but the execution of Charles. “It’s dreadful, dreadful,” she kept saying. Poor silly little boy. No one could ever tell him a thing he disliked.’
Today, the abdication speech has achieved iconic status and become shorthand for those who wish to make clear what is meant by a sacrifice for love. It was also a big nod to the modernity for which he had hoped to be remembered, given that broadcasting, especially royal broadcasting, was in its infancy. The ex-King sat in front of a single microphone in the tower room of Windsor Castle, set up as a temporary studio, introduced by the Director General of the BBC, Sir John Reith, and started by declaring his allegiance to the new King, his brother. After a reminder of his twenty-five years of service to the country, he explained:
… 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.
And I want you to know that the decision I have made has been mine and mine alone. This was a thing I had to ju [g I1emdge entirely for myself. The other person most nearly concerned has tried up to the last to persuade me to take a different course.
I have made this, the most serious decision of my life, only upon the single thought of what would, in the end, be best for all.
This decision has been made less difficult to me by the sure knowledge that my brother, with his long training in the public affairs of this country and with his fine qualities, will be able to take my place forthwith without interruption or injury to the life and progress of the empire. And he has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you, and not bestowed on me – a happy home with his wife and children.
I now quit altogether public affairs and I lay down my burden. It may be some time before I return to my native land, but I shall always follow the fortunes of the British race and empire with profound interest, and if at any time in the future I can be found of service to his majesty in a private station, I shall not fail.
 
Wallis listened to the broadcast on a crackly radio at Lou Viei with Perry Brownlow, she lying on the sofa, Herman and Katherine Rogers and all the domestic staff gathered around to hear. ‘David’s voice came out of the loudspeaker calmly, movingly … After he finished, the others quietly went away and left me alone. I lay there a long time before I could control myself enough to walk through the house and go upstairs to my room,’ she wrote dramatically. She explained that she listened with her hands over her eyes ‘trying to hide my tears’. They were tears of rage, pity, fear and bafflement.
Queen Mary flinched when her son, now known as the Duke of Windsor, said he had been ‘denied’ the happiness of his brother in having a wife and children, ‘as if he might not at any time have honestly possessed this happiness if he had chosen’, while Nancy Dugdale found the conclusion ‘God bless you all’ rather jarring ‘as everyone knows his belief in God is rather a faint reality’.
Monckton drove the new Duke to Portsmouth and then tactfully – if not entirely accurately – wrote to Queen Mary that:
during the journey he talked quietly of old times and places well remembered by us both but above all he talked of you, how grand you were and how sweet to him especially at the last. I left him on the destroyer. He was still full of the same gay courage and spirit which has amazed us all this week. There is and always will be a greatness and glory about him. Given his faults and his follies [in an unsent draft the word ‘madness’ is here crossed out] are great … I will go on trying to help him when he needs.
 
Ulick Alexander and Piers (Joey) Legh, whose birthday it was, agreed to accompany their former sovereign in the early hours of that foggy December morning as they left England on HMS
Fury
. The captain, having been given his sailing orders at the very last minute, was obliged to borrow from the royal yacht some bed linen, crockery and glass as well as an experienced steward who knew the ex-King and would serve him during the crossing. For one of the most tragic aspects of the departure was the decision of his staff, including his valet Crisp, not to accompany their royal master into exile. The Duke carried his small Cairn bitch up the gangway himself and the dog later disgraced herself in the private quarters of the Captain, Cecil Howe. As Legh’s s [As thtepson Freddy Shaughnessy was to recount:
The exiled king was, not surprisingly, in a state of high nervous tension and restlessness that night. He sat up in the wardroom until four in the morning drinking brandy and going over the events of the last few weeks. Legh and Alexander, already exhausted by the strain of the whole abdication trauma … longed for HRH to retire to his cabin so they themselves could turn in.
 
Duty was the watchword of the moment or, as the Duke said in the television account of his departure,
A King’s Story
, created more than thirty years later, by which time his American accent was even more pronounced: ‘The path of dooty was clear.’ Others saw his duty very differently. Lucy Baldwin wrote: ‘But in the background there is that ache of which I spoke, the ache for the man who took the wrong path and chose inclination and desire instead of duty and responsibility. One just aches for his future, regrets his want of background and anchorage and prays for him with all one’s heart.’
And the former Duchess of York, now Queen of England, who had been in bed with a high temperature on the day of the abdication, decided that the first letter of her new reign should be to her friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, assuring him not just of how deeply she and the new King felt their responsibilities and duty at this difficult time, but of how miserable they were, ‘as you know, over his change of heart and character during the last few years and it is alarming how little in touch he was with ordinary human feeling – Alas! He had lost the “common touch”,’ she wrote and signed her letter for the first time ‘Elizabeth R’.
Queen Mary, in a post-abdication letter largely written for her by Lang and published in the next day’s newspapers, also spoke of ‘the distress in a mother’s heart’ when she contemplated how ‘my dear son has deemed it his duty to lay down his charge’. But she begged the British people, ‘realizing what it has cost him to come to this decision, and remembering the years in which he tried so eagerly to serve, [to] keep a grateful remembrance of him in your hearts’. Lang himself observed that when he went to see Queen Mary ‘she was much moved and distressed but wonderfully self controlled’.
Did Wallis want to be queen of England? Some of those who witnessed her confidently greeting her sister-in-law, the Duchess of York, at Balmoral on the ill-fated night of 26 September believed that there was the evidence that she did, that it was ‘a deliberate and calculated display of power’. But that makes no allowance for her natural American brashness, which for example allowed her to comment on that same visit, when taken to see the beach at Loch Muick by the King, ‘Just like Dubrovnik’ – a comparison, according to Helen Hardinge, ‘which did not go down any better than the casual careless way of referring to a voyage [on the
Nahlin
] which had not been popular in many respects’. Nor did it make any allowance for her state of mind at the time. Chips Channon among others had consistently reported her as ‘looking unhappy’ (7 July) or ‘worn out and on a fish diet’ (27 July) and, by the end of November, he recorded ‘that she had had a sort of breakdown and must be kept quite quiet and away from visitors’ (29 November).
Perhaps the realization that she was now desperately trapped was most clearly visible in her unvarnished letters to Ernest and in her increasingly evident physical fear. Ernest’s attempts to visit Baldwin, telling h [in,varim he could help with ‘the psychological aspect of the matter’ were based on the probably correct belief that he understood his wife; he did not, however, have the same understanding of the King. But his message to the Prime Minister, explaining that he was convinced she was not as much in love with the King as the King was with her and therefore, if she was seen by ‘somebody in authority’, might be persuaded to leave him, was not followed up. According to Wigram, Ernest was even prepared in early December to turn King’s evidence and ‘come forward and say that the divorce was entirely a collusion between HM, himself and Mrs S’. Not only would this have prevented the divorce going through, it would have been hugely embarrassing. As Cecil Beaton recognised, ‘she loves him, though I fear she is not in love with him …’ . Ministers were advised not to meet Ernest.
Today it seems clear that becoming queen was far from what she wanted. ‘I who had sought no place in history would now be assured of one – an appalling one, carved out by blind prejudice,’ she wrote in
The Heart Has its Reasons
. The self-pity may grate. But while it is easy with hindsight to see why ‘Queen Wallis’ would never have been acceptable as consort to a monarch of the British Empire, it is also important to remember that when Edward VIII came to the throne in 1936 he was hailed as the most widely travelled man of his time, with so much excitement and hope based on his perceived glamour and youthful charm, his daredevil smile, his apparent ability to connect with ordinary people, that anyone not familiar with Britain might easily have assumed he would win through. Lloyd George had declared in 1922 after his 41,000-mile tour as Prince of Wales: ‘Whatever the Empire owed him before, it owes to him a debt which it can never repay today.’ Wallis may not have known the speech but she was aware of the sentiment. She had grown up with it. What she totally failed to understand, as she frankly admitted later, was the King’s true position in the constitutional system. For not only had she lived in Washington and London circles where divorce was acceptable at the highest echelons, she had never thought her relationship with Edward would last longer than a few years. When it did, and she suddenly found herself the King’s adored favourite, s
he believed that:
the apparent deference to his every wish, the adulation of the populace, the universal desire even of the most exalted of his subjects to be accorded marks of his esteem – all this had persuaded me to take literally the maxim that ‘the King can do no wrong’. Nothing that I had seen had made me appreciate how vulnerable the King really was, how little his wishes really counted for against those of his ministers and parliament.
 
And the British constitution is, after all, famously unwritten.
By December 1936, when she realized that the King was going to forfeit the throne in order to possess her – the only British monarch to have voluntarily renounced the throne since the Anglo-Saxon period
14
– she knew that the cost for her was the total destruction of her reputation. Hardly comparable sacrifices, some might think. But Wallis, who owned little, did make that comparison and made sure the ex-King did too. She remained convinced that she had been used by the politicians. As she wrote to one of her closest London friends two weeks after the abdication: ‘The pitiful tragedy of it all is that England still remains in the hands of the men that caused the tragedy – using a woman as their means.’ She was not alone in such views. Lloyd [vie thGeorge, away in Jamaica throughout the crisis writing his memoirs, was furious at the way Baldwin and his allies had ‘got rid of a king who was making himself obnoxious by calling attention to conditions which it was to their interest to cover up. Baldwin has succeeded by methods which time and again take in the gullible British public. He has taken the high line in order to achieve the lowest of aims.’ Lloyd George did not hold ‘the woman Simpson’ personally in high regard, considering that she ‘is not worth the price the poor infatuated King was prepared to pay’. Nor was he without bitter personal prejudice against the Conservative leader. But he had a natural sympathy with a man whose love life was unorthodox, believing ‘all the same if he wished to marry her it could have been arranged, quietly, after the coronation … if the King wants to marry his American friend – Why not? I cannot help thinking the Govt. would not have dealt so brusquely with him had it not been for his popular sympathies. The Tories never really cared for the little man.’

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