Behind the Palace Doors (38 page)

Edward VIII came to the throne as a beloved prince in 1936, having succeeded his father, George V. Before the year was through, however, Edward abdicated to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Warfield Simpson—a woman considered by the government to be thoroughly unsuitable as queen. Edward was never crowned, and the throne passed to his younger brother, who became King George VI
.

He was Britain’s fair-haired prince, heir to an empire and adored by the masses dazzled by his youth and charm. Yet beneath that brilliant exterior lurked the heart of a lightweight. “If only the British public knew what a weak, powerless misery their press-made national hero was,” the future king Edward VIII said of himself, “they would have a nasty shock and be not only disappointed but damned angry too.” After he ascended the throne in 1936, Edward’s staggering self-absorption would nearly destroy the monarchy and lead to a life of utter vacuity. Still, some call his the love story of the twentieth century.

Duty was always an afterthought to Edward, something to be considered only when it didn’t interfere with his personal
desires and indulgences. A sense of responsibility requires a solid core, and that Edward always lacked. He was “like the child in the fairy story who was given everything in the world but they forgot his soul,” said Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, who served as Edward’s assistant private secretary when he was Prince of Wales. “He had no spiritual or aesthetic side at all. He did not know beauty when he saw it and even the beauty of women was only apparent to him when they were the sort of women who excited his particular passions.… He was not really interested in anything at all.” Except, perhaps, sex.

“I can’t raise much enthusiasm over … anything except women!!” the prince recorded in his diary. It was a perfectly normal preoccupation for a young man, but Edward’s fixation had an unsavory twist. He was possessed by “the sexual perversion of self-abasement,” according to Ulick Alexander, a courtier close to him. Freda Dudley Ward, one of Edward’s married mistresses, agreed. “I could have dominated him if I had wanted to. I could have done
anything
with him! Love bewitched him. He made himself the slave of whomever he loved and became totally dependent on her. It was his nature; he was a masochist. He
liked
being humbled, degraded. He
begged
for it!”

Edward found the perfect dominatrix in Wallis Warfield Simpson, a grasping social climber and something of a shrew. “God, that woman’s a bitch,” exclaimed the prince’s friend Edward “Fruity” Metcalfe. “She’ll play hell with him before long.” It was an inferno Edward entered gladly. Unfortunately, being abused and degraded by Mrs. Simpson left little room for his royal responsibilities, and people in the palace began to question if he was really fit to inherit the crown. Not the least of these was Edward’s own father, George V. “After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in twelve months,” the king reportedly said to his prime minister. It was a pronouncement that proved sadly prescient.

“My heart goes out to the Prince of Wales tonight as he will mind so terribly being King,” wrote the diarist Henry “Chips”
Channon as King George V labored with his last breaths. “His loneliness, his seclusion, his isolation will be almost more than his highly strung and unimaginative nature can bear.” Edward’s solution was to simply ignore his duties as king and focus instead entirely on Mrs. Simpson. Yes, she was married, but her husband, awed by royalty, graciously stepped aside. It was a lucrative exchange for Wallis, dripping in the diamonds Edward lavished upon her. “For her, money and material possessions were of inestimable importance,” wrote Edward’s biographer Philip Ziegler; “she hungered for them and greeted every new acquisition as an incentive to grasp for more.” And all she had to offer in return was the contempt and domination the king seemed to crave. His equerry John Aird noted Wallis’s effect on Edward early in their relationship: He “has lost all confidence in himself and follows W around like a dog.”

Like any good pet, the king immediately stopped whatever he was doing to respond to Wallis’s call. “If he cancelled a dinner at the last moment the chances were that she had expressed a wish to see him,” wrote Ziegler; “if he was two hours late for Lord Cromer it was almost certain he had been visiting her. Nothing mattered to him so much as the gratification of her wishes and the performance of her instructions.” Naturally this all-consuming devotion to his mistress caused grave concerns among those closest to Edward. “I did not think the King was normal,” recalled his private secretary, Clive Wigram, “and this view was shared by my colleagues at Buckingham Palace. He might any day develop into a George III, and it was imperative to pass the Regency Bill as soon as possible, so that if necessary he could be certified.”

Disconcertment quickly gave way to horror when King Edward made it clear that he wanted to marry his mistress.
Queen Wallis!
It was an unthinkable prospect; the people would never stand for a twice-divorced American in such a role. Edward was insistent, however. His chronic unwillingness to sacrifice his personal desires for the public role he was born to fulfill
now resulted in an unprecedented crisis for the monarchy. In the end, the king chose to abandon the crown rather than serve, as he put it in his abdication speech, “without the help and support of the woman I love.”

It seemed so romantic on the surface—the gallant king sacrificing everything for his one true love. But Tommy Lascelles, who knew Edward all too well, dismissed such sentiment as “moonshine.” The truth was that Edward never really wanted to be king and resented the many impositions of the role. Furthermore, Wallis was hardly the first woman with whom he fell madly in love. “There was always a
grande affaire
and, coincidentally, as I know to my cost, an unbroken series of
petites affaires
, contracted and consummated in whatever highways and byways of the Empire he was traversing at the moment,” wrote Lascelles. “Mrs S. was no isolated phenomenon, but merely the current figure in an arithmetical progression that had been robustly maintained for nearly 20 years.”

Far from a fairy-tale ending, the years following Edward’s abdication were passed in a life of excessive indolence and frivolity, interrupted only by a series of embarrassing gaffes and petty squabbles with his family. King George VI, who succeeded his brother, once remarked in frustration that other British monarchs came to the throne after their predecessors were dead. “Mine is not only alive,” he said, “but very much so!”

The abdication had caused extreme stress within the royal family, particularly for King George, a painfully shy man who had been forced to fill the void left by his brother (see
Chapter 32
). Edward, who was titled the Duke of Windsor after stepping down, was far too selfish to recognize the agony his actions had caused. He spent considerable energy harassing the new king about his finances and, even more fervently, about official recognition of his wife with the title “Her Royal Highness.”

Edward had blatantly lied about his wealth, pleading near poverty during the negotiations that preceded his abdication,
while he was really worth many millions. Now he insisted that his brother honor the terms of the settlement, in which the new king promised to pay him twenty-five thousand [pounds] a year. Wallis, after all, expected to live in grand style. “You were under great strain [at the time of the settlement] and I am not seeking to reproach you or anyone,” George wrote after discovering that he had been duped. “But the fact remains that I was completely misled.” Though Edward got his money in the end, the title for his wife was another matter indeed.

Wallis wanted “the extra chic,” as she called it, of the HRH designation, and badgered Edward incessantly to fight for it. “I loathe being undignified,” she complained, “and also of joining the countless titles that roam around Europe meaning nothing.” When Wallis was unhappy, the duke was miserable. Thus the HRH issue became an obsession that drove a permanent wedge between him and his family. George VI was adamant on the issue, as was his mother, Queen Mary. It was a simple equation in their view. If Wallis was deemed unsuitable to be queen, prompting the abdication, then surely she was no more suited to be a member of the royal family. “Is she a fit and proper person to become a Royal Highness after what she had done in this country; and would the country understand it if she became one automatically on marriage?” the king asked. “I and my family and Queen Mary all feel that it would be a great mistake to acknowledge Mrs. Simpson as a suitable person to become Royal. The Monarchy has been degraded quite enough already.”

It was for this reason that the family also refused to attend the wedding, or even to receive Wallis. To do so, they believed, would send the wrong message. “I simply hate having to tell you this,” the king wrote his brother, explaining why no members of the family would be present at the wedding; “but you must realize that in spite of the affection which of course there still is towards you personally, the vast majority of people in this country are undoubtedly as strongly as ever opposed to a marriage which
caused a King of England to renounce the throne. You know that none of us in the family liked it, and were any of them now, after a few months’ interval, to come out and, so to speak, help you get married, I know that it would be regarded by everybody as condoning all that has happened; it would place us all in an impossibly false position and would be harmful to the Monarchy.”

As far as Edward was concerned, however, it was an unforgivable snub. “I was bitterly hurt and disappointed that you virtually ignored the most important event of my life,” he wrote to his mother, Queen Mary, after the wedding. “You must realize by this time, that as there is a limit to what one’s feelings can endure, this most unjust and uncalled for treatment can have had but one important result; my complete estrangement from you all.”

Estrangement, alas, did not mean silence. Edward continued to bombard his brother with demands that Wallis be accorded the dignities he felt she deserved, especially the HRH title, and that he be given a prominent place of honor on the world’s stage.

While relieved to be rid of his duties as king, Edward wanted to retain the prestige—and the spotlight. An unsanctioned tour of Nazi Germany in 1937 seemed the perfect way to grab it. The duke had a ball, chatting up the führer at his Berchtesgaden lair and playing happily with a model railroad set Göring had assembled for his nephew. Best of all, he got to show off his duchess, and was gratified when the Nazi elite dignified her with the “Royal Highness” title his own relatives denied. Rudolf Hess’s wife, Ilse, seemed to adore Wallis, describing her as “a lovely, charming, warm and clever woman with a heart of gold and an affection for her husband that she made not the slightest attempt to conceal.” The abdication, Frau Hess concluded, had been brought about by Edward’s “own sound attitudes on social issues and his pro-German inclinations.” While not exactly treasonous, the tour did prove to be a tremendous propaganda vehicle for Hitler’s regime, while causing great consternation to
King George. “The world is in a very troubled state,” he said to his mother before the duke’s tour, “and [Edward] seems to loom ever larger on the horizon.”

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were sunning themselves in the South of France when the news came that Britain had declared war on Germany after Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. “I’m afraid in the end this may open the way for world Communism,” Edward lamented before diving into the swimming pool. King George graciously offered to send a plane to bring them back to England, but Edward was still smarting from his family’s refusal to receive Wallis, and, as Walter Monckton reported in a government memo, he petulantly announced “that unless his brother was ready to have him and his wife to one of their houses they would not return to England.” He still wanted the plane, however, to pick up his friend Fruity Metcalfe and his private secretary.

Metcalfe was appalled when the duke and duchess told him what they had done. “You have just behaved as two spoiled children,” he told them. “You only think of yourselves. You don’t realize that there is at this moment a war going on, that women and children are being bombed and killed while you talk of your PRIDE!”

The war was a wonderful opportunity for the duke to strut around in uniform, but when he started accepting royal salutes while visiting the front, the government insisted that such ostentatious behavior had to stop. Edward viewed the restriction as “being merely fresh evidence of my brother’s continued efforts to humiliate me by every means in his and his courtiers’ power.” He complained loudly to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose response was withering: “Having voluntarily resigned the finest Throne in the world … it would be natural to treat all minor questions of ceremony and precedence as entirely beneath your interest and your dignity.”

Eventually it was determined that the best place for Edward
to serve his country would be in the Bahamas, as royal governor. But that assignment proved a bit too taxing for the duke and duchess. They wanted to reclaim some of their servants from active duty in the war and bring them to the islands, because, Edward insisted, it would be a “serious handicap starting with a new valet.” But Churchill thought not. “Such a step would be viewed with general disapprobation in times like these,” he wrote with remarkable restraint, “and I should ill serve Your Royal Highness by countenancing it.” Then there was the tropical weather. It was August and therefore quite hot when Edward and Wallis arrived at their new post, so the duke immediately put in for a leave. Once again, Churchill demurred. He was “very grieved to hear that you are entertaining such an idea,” Walter Monckton wrote Edward. The prime minister hoped that, when the people of Britain were suffering so much, the duke “would be willing to put up with the discomfort and remain at your post until weather conditions made things less unpleasant.”