The Peoples King (6 page)

The King and Mrs S entered the front door first, and he at once went on his knees to take off her galoshes. As the passage was thus blocked, the rest of us stood contemplating the spectacle, she tickled to death and mildly remonstrative, he, earnest and intent, muttering slightly to himself but oblivious of us.
⁵

As the year 1936 neared its end, few people in Britain had even heard of Wallis Simpson; those who
had
heard of her belonged to the tiny social circle surrounding the royal family. She was carefully excluded from the newsreels and from the pages of the press. The only exception was the magazine
Cavalcade,
which in the summer of 1936 defiantly printed photographs of Edward and Wallis on holiday together and made veiled references to their relationship. 'The plain truth', wrote Bill Deedes, later to be editor of the
Daily Telegraph
but then a young journalist, 'is that newspapers showed more deference to the Royal Family in those days . . . There was also a far greater distance kept between Royalty's close circle of friends and the rest of us. Gossip was harder to obtain.'
⁶
H. A. Gwynne, editor of the
Morning Post,
which he described as 'the staunchest supporter of monarchical institutions', sent a letter to the Prime Minister warning that any break in '"The Great Silence'" would deal 'a deadly blow to Monarchy'.

On such 'a delicate matter as this,' he said, 'the Press should follow the Government and not dictate to it.' He warned, however, that some sections of the press, especially the 'sensational newspapers', were getting very restive.
⁷

But it was only in Britain, as well as most of the Empire, that the affair between Edward and Wallis was a closely guarded secret. The American and European media were under far fewer constraints than British journalists were. So while the people of Britain remained quite unaware of the King's private life, many Europeans and most Americans were fed endless (if not always accurate) snippets of news. So were Canadians, as many American newspapers were distributed across the border.

In August 1936, readers of American newspapers (and of the British
Cavalcade)
gasped when they saw a photograph of the King and Wallis together on a little boat while on holiday in Yugoslavia. Wallis was tenderly touching Edward's left arm and he, in an open-necked sports shirt, leant towards her attentively. This was just one of many photographs suggesting an intimate friendship between Edward and Wallis. A woman from Edmonton in Canada told King Edward in a letter that 'When looking over the different portraits in the papers of you and your friend Mrs Simpson' she had been delighted by 'your million dollar
smile
with your friend on your Holiday.'
⁸

The mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, who in 1936 was a twenty-four-year-old student at Princeton University, New Jersey, sent his mother in England some newspaper cuttings about Mrs Simpson. 'I don't suppose you have even heard of her,' he wrote, 'but some days it has been "front page stuff" here.'
⁹
Such reports never appeared in publications available in Britain. Wholesale distributors of foreign newspapers and magazines, said Deedes, were apprehensive of libel, because Mrs Simpson was still the wife of Ernest Simpson - 'They therefore cut or blacked out passages in overseas publications which could give offence.'
¹⁰
References to Wallis were so thoroughly censored that the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson rose in the House of Commons to ask why American papers and magazines arriving in England had so many paragraphs and pages clipped out.

Wallis's background was markedly different from Edward's. She was born Bessie Wallis Warfield in 1896 in Blue Ridge Summit, Penn­sylvania, and grew up in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. The War-fields belonged to one of the oldest families in the state and were proud of being a Southern family - Wallis's grandmother was said to have possessed an undying hatred for anybody born north of the Mason- Dixon line.
¹¹
Wallis was a striking Southern belle, with dark hair, a smooth creamy skin and huge brown eyes. She was of average height but very slim, which earned her the nickname 'Skinny'.
¹²
Her child­hood was a loving one, but it was made difficult by financial hardship. Her father had died just months before she was born, leaving her mother, Alice, struggling to make ends meet. Her uncle Saul, a well-off banker, often helped the family out, but her mother and her mother's sister, Mrs Bessie Merryman, found it necessary for a time to take paying guests into their home - a three-storey brownstone with a weather-beaten facade on Biddle Street in Baltimore. Wallis 'spent her youth in a boarding-house', reported the
Los Angeles Times.
'Two men of lean pocketbooks rented rooms there by the week and had their meals at the family dinner table."
³

When Alice married a man with some money, Wallis was sent in 1912 to an exclusive boarding school; but when her stepfather died the family fell once again on hard times, and she was brought home. Mrs Merryman - whom Wallis called 'Aunt Bessie' - was a constant and loving figure from Wallis's earliest years, and Edward was to describe her later as 'the wise and gentle woman who had raised her from childhood."
⁴

In 1916 Wallis married Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer, Jr, a pilot in the US Navy who was known as 'Win'. She soon discovered that Win was prone to bouts of heavy drinking which led to brutal behaviour. Whole days might pass with him speaking barely a word to her, except to accuse her of being a flirt and ignoring him. He started to lock her up in a room while he went out. One afternoon, Wallis recounted,

Win locked me in the bathroom of our apartment. For hours, I heard no sound from beyond the door. Whether Win had gone out or whether he was still in the apartment ... I could not tell. I tried to unscrew the lock with a nail file, but I had to give up when I found I could not stir the screws. As the afternoon wore on and evening came, I was seized with panic at the thought that Win might mean to keep me a prisoner all night
.

Eventually she heard the sound of a key turning in the lock:

But the door did not open, and I was afraid to try the handle myself. When I finally got up enough courage to do so, the apartment was in darkness. I could hear Win's breathing from the bed. The rest of the night I spent on the sofa in the living-room, endlessly reviewing the events that had led to my personal catastrophe.''

By morning, Wallis knew that she had to leave Win, and she went to live with her mother. She gave Win one more chance, sailing to the Far East to join him at a naval posting, but realized that he would never stop drinking. She despaired of the marriage, and obtained a divorce in 1927.

While living on her own, she had grown to like Ernest Aldrich Simpson, a shipbroker she had met in New York. Rather tall and with a slight dark moustache, he was much attracted - being himself a serious and prosaic sort of man - by Wallis's fresh and lively spirit. Although a New Yorker who had been born in America, Ernest Simpson was of British parentage and had enlisted in the Coldstream Guards for the duration of the war. In 1928 he moved to London to take over his family's shipping business, and asked Wallis, now thirty-two, to join him. She crossed the Atlantic, and they were married in July. At first they were quite well off, but like many others they were hit by the Depression of 1929, which was a disaster for Ernest's shipping firm and slashed the value of some shares Wallis had been given by her uncle.

She found it difficult to settle down to British ways. American slang, she wrote in her memoirs, was practically never heard in Mayfair drawing rooms - and it was not welcomed. 'When with characteristic impulsiveness I agreed to something with a cheery "O.K.",' she wrote, 'my sister-in-law stared at me with an expression of shock and dis­appointment that could not have been more in evidence had I dropped an "h".'
¹⁶
She was astonished by the deference to titles, which seemed to her 'almost irrational in a country otherwise so democratic. If one was a Lady Vere de Vere there was never any difficulty about opening charge accounts, and salespeople fell over themselves for the privilege of serving a title.' Reading the Court Circular, the daily list of the monarch's official engagements, she was surprised that an entire nation should follow 'with such rapt attention the purely formal goings and comings of a single family'. But her greatest difficulty, she found, was her habit of speaking her mind. By contrast with American women, she thought, English women 'were still accepting the status ... of a second sex. If they had strong opinions they kept them safely buttoned up, confidences were seldom given or encouraged.'
¹⁷
Despite these obstacles, Wallis settled down cheerfully to life in London. She enjoyed organizing their home, especially when they moved to 5 Bryanston Court, in the Marylebone area. Unlike Win, Ernest was steady and dependable, and the couple got on well with each other. In any case, Wallis felt now that she had to recognize the limits of middle age. Sailing back to London from a holiday in the USA in 1933, she wondered with dismay if this would be the last time she would be able to enjoy the feeling of youth. 'I know it really was my swan song,' she wrote to her aunt, 'unless I can hang onto my figure and take a trip before I'm 40 which is only 3 years off.'
¹⁸

It was just a couple of years after her arrival in London and her second wedding, that Wallis first met the Prince of Wales - Prince Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, known to his immediate family and friends simply as David. In the autumn of 1930, Wallis and Ernest were invited to a dinner party at the home of the sister of Thelma, Lady Furness, who was Edward's lover at the time. Shortly afterwards the Prince left for a tour of South America, but on his return in 1931, the Simpsons saw the Prince twice, at the home of Lady Furness. In January 1932 the Prince invited them to stay for the weekend at his home, Fort Belvedere, an eighteenth-century folly that was half-castle, half-house, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. By the middle of 1933, the Simpsons were regular visitors at the Fort.

In early 1934, Thelma Furness asked Wallis to 'look after' the Prince for a while, as she wanted to go to the USA with her twin sister Gloria Vanderbilt. While Lady Furness was away (and caught up in a passionate affair with the wealthy playboy Aly Khan), Edward would call at the Simpsons' flat early in the evening, and Wallis welcomed him with cocktails. Frequently, he stayed on for dinner.
¹⁹
Everything was in exquisite taste at Bryanston Court, wrote Edward later, 'and the food, in my judgement, unrivalled in London'. There he met young British and American men of affairs, foreign diplomats and 'intelligent women'. The talk, he said, was 'witty and crackling with the new ideas that were bubbling up furiously in the world of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, the New Deal, and Chiang Kai-shek.'
²
" When Thelma returned to Britain, she realized with a shock that she had been replaced. From now on, Wallis was Edward's chief companion, with Ernest usually in attendance too. This was the best-known threesome in London, wrote an American journalist, adding dryly that, 'They went everywhere together, and Mr Simpson's deadpan demeanour on these outings inspired the inevitable sad gags about the Importance of Being Ernest.'
²¹

A woman who worked as a housemaid at Bryanston Court remembered that just before Princess Marina's wedding in the autumn of 1934, the Prince called for cocktails with Wallis and Ernest before leaving to attend a reception at Buckingham Palace. He left at about 8 p.m. and returned later and dined with Mr and Mrs Simpson. He left alone at about 9 p.m. and went to the Palace and his car returned to take Mr and Mrs Simpson to the Palace. When the Prince arrived that evening for dinner he was in full Court dress. He wore a sash across his breast and he was wearing a gold garter around his knee."

But increasingly, the Prince and Wallis were alone together. He called upon her during the daytime, recalled the housemaid. 'Sometimes he remained for half an hour, and on other occasions he remained for an hour; they would be alone in the drawing room.' On one occasion 'he dined alone with Mrs Simpson and they both left the flat together in the Prince's car at about 10.00 p.m.' When Ernest returned from a ten-day trip abroad, 'Mrs Simpson had already gone to Fort Belvedere for the weekend ... I was with her and Miss Burke her maid went with her.' Wallis always addressed the Prince as 'Sir', she added, but on one occasion when the Prince was dining at Bryanston Court, 'I heard Mrs Simpson address the Prince as David.'
²³

One day, wrote Edward in his memoirs, Wallis 'began to mean more to me in a way that she did not perhaps comprehend. My impression is that for a long time she remained unaffected by my interest.'
²⁴
For Wallis, it was not until a cruise with Edward through the Mediter­ranean in the summer of 1934 on the
Rosaura,
that she knew that she and Edward were in love:

Often the Prince and I found ourselves sitting alone on deck, enjoying the soft evening air, and that unspoken but shared feeling of closeness generated by the immensity of the sea and the sky. Perhaps it was during these evenings off the Spanish coast that we crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love. Perhaps it was one evening strolling on the beach at Fomenter in Majorca.

'How can a woman ever really know?' wondered Wallis in her memoirs,
The Heart Has Its Reasons.
'How can she ever really tell?' But she realized that a line had been crossed, and there was no going back.
²⁵

Other guests on the
Rosaura
were Mr and Mrs Lee Guinness, Lord Hamilton and Sir John Aird. The Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson occupied two separate bedrooms in the fore part of the ship, while all the other guests slept in the aft or on the lower deck. One of the stewards later stated that he thought it strange that Mrs Simpson should be occupying a bedroom close to the Prince's 'and I was a little nosy':

I mean I made her bed on most occasions and I changed her bed linen about every other day. I watched the sheets but I never saw a mark upon them. Sometimes when I went to Mrs Simpson's bed her maid had already made it. I never knew she was going to make the bed and I don't know what reason she had for making it.

The Prince always had breakfast on deck at about xo a.m., while Wallis had breakfast in her bedroom, which was always taken to her by her maid. The steward never noticed any endearment between Wallis and the Prince, such as walking arm in arm together, but he often saw them 'sitting alone together and laughing'.
²⁶

So intimate did they become that they developed a private language in which to communicate their feelings to each other. The most important word in this language was 'WE', which joined the first letters of the names Wallis and Edward. One weekend in 1935, when they were staying as guests of Lord Brownlow at Belton House in Lincolnshire, Wallis sent Edward a gardenia with a note which said, 'God bless WE. Good-night, From Her to Him.'
²⁷
Another important word was 'eanum', meaning something like 'dearest little thing'. In a letter Edward sent to Wallis in Spring 1935, he used both these special words:

My
Eanum -
My
Wallis

This is not the kind of Easter WE want but it will be all right next year . . . I love you more & more 8c more each & every minute & miss you
so
terribly here. You do too don't you my sweetheart. God bless WE.
Always your
DAVID.
²⁸

According to Walter Monckton, a friend of Edward's from Oxford days, it was a

great mistake to assume that he was merely in love with her in the ordinary physical sense of the term. There was an intellectual companionship, and there is no doubt that his lonely nature found in her a spiritual comradeship . . . No one will ever really understand the story of the King's life, who does not appreciate . . . the intensity and depth of his devotion to Mrs Simpson.
²⁹