The American Duchess

In 1907, twelve-year-old Edward was dispatched, in tears, to the Royal Naval College at Osborne on the Isle of Wight with the bizarre assurance from his father that: ‘I am your best friend.’ Edward quickly settled in as a cadet. His letters home were full of boyish excitement: he wrote to his parents of meeting the explorers Sir Ernest Shackleton and Captain Robert Falcon Scott and he performed in a pantomime. Instead of inheriting his father’s unassailable sense of duty, a duty that was ‘drilled into’ him, Edward, burdened by his regal inheritance, longed to break free. Even as a young boy he said that he ‘never had the sense that the days belonged to me alone’. Edward progressed to officer training at Dartmouth Royal Naval College, where he struggled academically – he came bottom of his year – but proudly reported to his parents that he was ‘top in German’. Perhaps the only thing he excelled in as a boy was German, learning first from his German nursemaid and then Professor Eugene Oswald, an elderly master who had previously taught his father the language. ‘I liked German and studied diligently,’ he said, ‘and profited from the hours I spent with the professor.’

The death of King Edward VII on 6 May 1910, after a reign of nine years, interrupted Edward’s summer term at Dartmouth for three weeks. Now heir apparent, he was called home to Windsor for his sixteenth birthday. His father informed him that he was going to make him Prince of Wales (the king’s eldest son does not automatically become Prince of Wales; he is anointed by the monarch when deemed appropriate). Edward returned to Dartmouth with a new title, the Duke of Cornwall, and considerable wealth from the Duchy of Cornwall estate. For the first time he had an independent income. ‘I do not recall that this new wealth gave rise to any particular satisfaction at the time,’ he said.

In his last term at Dartmouth, both Edward and Bertie (who had followed his brother’s trajectory from Osborne to Dartmouth, where Edward had ‘assumed an older brother’s responsibility for him’) caught a severe case of mumps, followed by measles. Two-thirds of cadets were hospitalised in this epidemic. It is believed that Edward then developed orchitis, a complication of mumps that left him sterile. The knowledge that Edward would not be able to produce an heir may have been significant later, in the establishment’s push to have brother Bertie (George VI) as king.

The coronation of George V in June 1911 thwarted Edward’s ‘first serious ambition’. He was forced to forgo the goal of his officer-cadet life and miss a training cruise in North American waters. After completing his naval training, Edward underwent a ‘finishing’ programme in preparation for his future full-time role as Prince of Wales. Assumed to be studying for Oxford, while his parents travelled to India for the coronation durbar, Edward instead opted to play cards with his grandmother, Queen Alexandra, and helped her with jigsaw puzzles. Nevertheless, Edward went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in October 1912. Befitting the future king, he had a special suite of rooms installed for him, including his own bath in the first private undergraduate bathroom.

Missing the camaraderie of his Royal Navy friends, he was ‘acutely lonely’ and ‘under the added disadvantage of being something of a celebrity’. He soon realised that the skills he had acquired in the navy, which included an ability to ‘box a compass, read naval signals, run a picket boat, and make cocoa for the officer of the watch’, held little sway with learned Oxford dons. The Prince was tutored by the most eminent scholars, including Magdalen’s esteemed president, Sir Herbert Warren, but Oxford did nothing academically for him. Personally, he seemed uncertain of himself; encouraging familiarity from fellow undergraduates, then swiftly acting with regal hauteur. He found himself happiest on the playing fields, discovering at Oxford a love of sport; he played football, cricket and squash. He beagled with the New College, Magdalen and Trinity packs, took riding lessons – progressing to become a fearless horseman. He punted, gambled, smoked, drank to excess and even smashed glasses and furniture as part of the high jinks of the Bullingdon Club – a club which, the New York Times explained to its readers, represented ‘the acme of exclusiveness at Oxford; it is the club of the sons of nobility, the sons of great wealth; its membership represents the “young bloods” of the university’.

Like Wallis, Edward displayed a strong early interest in fashion, developing his own flamboyant style. Rather than starchy formal garb, he preferred an eccentric mix of sports coats, loud ‘Prince of Wales checks’ (named after his grandfather, but popularised by Edward), bright tartans, baggy golfing plus fours and boyish Fair Isle sweaters. This was to become a source of conflict with his sartorial stickler of a father. When Edward entered the breakfast room at Buckingham Palace one morning, proudly sporting a suit with the new style of trouser turn-ups, the king bellowed: ‘Is it raining in here?’

‘Edward was completely different to any of the rest of the family,’ recalled John Julius Norwich, who, as a young man, knew both Edward and Wallis. ‘George V was very stiff and regal yet here was his son, a boy in a peaked cap, smoking and winking.’ The young prince ‘was dandyish and out to shock’, said David Maude-Roxby-Montalto di Fragnito. ‘He wanted to break tradition. He wore his signet ring in the continental way, just to be different. The British wear it facing inwards, to use on seals, whereas the Europeans wear it facing out. It was very arriviste of the prince to wear his continental style as no British gentleman would ever have done this.’

During his Easter and summer vacations in 1913, Edward went to visit his German relatives. ‘The purpose of these trips was to improve my German and to teach me something about these vigorous people whose blood flows so strongly in my veins. For I was related in one way or another to most of the many Royal houses that reigned in Germany in those days,’ Edward wrote. Later in life, ‘the duke loved to sit with my wife and speak perfect German (with a slight English accent) for hours with her’, recalled Count Rudolf von Schönburg, husband of Princess Marie Louise of Prussia, who was related to Edward through Queen Victoria. ‘Nothing made him happier than speaking at length about his German relations, to whom he was very close. He was very pro-German and would have liked to avoid a war between the two countries.’

‘Later in his life, the prince lived in France for over fifteen years, yet he never spoke a word of French,’ said John Julius Norwich. ‘He would start a conversation with a Frenchman in German. As you can imagine, his fluent German did not go down well in 1946 in France. To him, there was English and there was “foreign” and his “foreign” was German. The prince really was incredibly stupid.’

Edward left Oxford before taking his finals and seemingly without the slightest intellectual curiosity, claiming: ‘I have always preferred outdoor exercise to reading.’ He was now fully confirmed as the playboy bachelor prince. Painfully thin, he subjected himself to punishing physical regimes throughout his twenties and thirties. He liked to sweat a lot – he wore five layers to exercise – then party into the early hours, existing on minimal sleep and even less food. According to Lord Claud Hamilton, the Prince of Wales’s equerry from 1919–22, Edward took after his mother who, ‘frightened of becoming fat, ate almost nothing at all’. Her ladies-in-waiting regularly went hungry as meals consisted of tiny slivers of roast chicken, no potatoes, a morsel of vegetables, followed by a wafer.

Edward loathed Buckingham Palace so much, with its ‘curious musty odour’, that he refused to take meals there and only ate an orange for lunch. This became his daily routine. ‘His amazing energy makes him indulge frantically in exercise or stay up all night,’ observed Chips Channon. Boyish and hyper-energetic, Edward never had to shave and preferred nightclubs to formal society. Like a more sophisticated Bertie Wooster, he even took up the banjulele. His favourite question to courtiers was the decidedly un-royal, rebellious teenage riposte: ‘Can I get away with it?’

‘The late king and queen are not without blame,’ Chips Channon wrote at the time of Edward’s abdication in 1936. ‘For the twenty-six years of their reign, they practically saw no one except their old courtiers, and they made no social background whatever for any of their children. Naturally, their children had to find outlets and fun elsewhere, and the two most high-spirited, the late king (Edward) and the fascinating Duke of Kent (George) drank deeply from life.’ Edward partied his way through the last London season before the outbreak of the Great War with gusto. With his angelic looks, electric charm and personality dedicated to pleasure not pomp, he infuriated his parents with his dilettante behaviour.

Yet when Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, Edward was desperate to unveil his courage and serve his country. Commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, he was vexed to find himself denied a combat role. It was a bitter blow – ‘the worst in my life’ he said later. Sent to France in 1914, he was kept well behind enemy lines at general headquarters, reduced to conducting basic royal duties such as visits and meeting and greeting dignitaries. Complaining he was the one unemployed man in northern France, he did eventually manage to get into the battle zone where he observed the horrors of trench warfare. The fighting on the Somme, he wrote in a letter home, was ‘the nearest approach to hell imaginable’. In 1915, a shell killed his personal chauffeur.

‘Manifestly I was being kept, so to speak, on ice, against the day that death would claim my father,’ Edward wrote, expressing his mounting frustration. ‘I found it hard to accept this unique dispensation. My generation had a rendezvous with history, and my whole being insisted that I share the common destiny, whatever it might be.’ When he was promoted to captain and awarded the Military Cross, Edward’s feelings of unworthiness and self-loathing spiralled. He wrote to his father on 22 September 1915: ‘I feel so ashamed to wear medals which I only have because of my position, when there are so many thousands of gallant officers who lead a terrible existence in the trenches who have not been decorated.’

By the end of the war, which saw the collapse of the Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman dynasties, the Prince of Wales seemed ordained to protect the House of Windsor. It was during the Great War that King George decided that, due to anti-German sentiment in Britain (according to the popular press, even dachshunds were being pelted in the streets of London), the royal family must change their Germanic-sounding surname. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became Windsor.

From the war years onwards, throughout his twenties and early thirties, Edward did his duty, dazzling the world as the fairy-tale prince. He visited forty-five countries in six years, travelling 150,000 miles. On a trip to Canada, his right hand became so badly bruised and swollen from too many enthusiastic greetings (which he described as pump-handling), that he was forced to proffer his left hand for fear of permanent impairment. Adored and feted like a film star, Edward began to behave like one too. His mood swings became all too familiar amongst his equerries and advisors, as he oscillated between buoyed-up exhilaration and lacerating self-pity. He became irritated with official rigmarole and seemed unable to focus on diplomatic matters. On Christmas Day 1919, before embarking on a five-month trip to the Antipodes, he wrote to his private secretary, Godfrey Thomas: ‘Christ how I loathe my job now and all the press “puffed” empty “success”. I feel I’m through with it and long to die. For God’s sake don’t breathe a word of this to a soul. No one else must know how I feel about my life and everything … You probably think from this that I ought to be in the madhouse already … I do feel such a bloody little shit.’

Another cause of friction with his parents was Edward’s obsession with nightclubs and partying in the burgeoning Jazz Age. King George wrote to Queen Mary of his horror, having heard reports that Edward danced ‘every night & most of the night too’, fearing that ‘people who don’t know him will begin to think that he is either mad or the biggest rake in Europe’.

Edward found some solace in his romantic life, yet here too, he was irreverent. Instead of seeking a suitable single, eligible bride with whom to settle down, he quickly established a penchant for married women. The patience of his advisors was wearing thin. Tommy Lascelles wrote: ‘For the ten years before he met Mrs Simpson, the Prince of Wales was continuously in the throes of one shattering and absorbing love affair after another (not to mention a number of street-corner affairs).’ It was Lascelles’s contention that the prince never grew up; that he remained morally arrested. Stanley Baldwin agreed: ‘He is an abnormal being, half child, half genius … It is almost as though two or three cells in his brain had remained entirely undeveloped while the rest of him is a mature man.’

Perhaps this partly explains the prince’s preference for married women, and his desire that they play a bossy, maternal role. His first serious relationship was with the British-born socialite, Mrs Freda Dudley Ward, who was half American and had two teenage daughters, Penelope (Pempe) and Angela (Angie), on whom Edward doted. Between March 1918, when the prince first met Mrs Dudley Ward sheltering in the doorway of a house in Belgrave Square during an air raid, and January 1921, the prince wrote her 263 letters. In total, during their relationship, which lasted over a decade (surviving his affair with Thelma Furness but not his infatuation with Wallis), the prince penned over two thousand letters to Freda Dudley Ward, many addressing her as ‘my very own darling beloved little mummie’. ‘It is quite pathetic to see the prince and Freda,’ Winston Churchill observed, after travelling with them on a train. ‘His love is so obvious and undisguisable.’

‘Freda, whom I knew, was like Wallis in that physically, she was fairly boyish. As far as their relationship went, the prince was a masochist who liked harsh treatment,’ said Nicky Haslam. ‘Freda was lovely,’ recalled John Julius Norwich. ‘She was the prince’s mistress … and everybody liked her.’ Chips Channon described her in his diaries as ‘tiny, squeaky, wise and chic’. ‘Mrs Dudley Ward was the best friend he ever had, only he didn’t realise it,’ said his brother, Prince Henry. Later in life, Mrs Dudley Ward was asked if her first husband, William Dudley Ward, minded about her affair with the Prince of Wales. ‘Oh, no,’ she replied. ‘My husband knew all about my relationship with the prince. But he didn’t mind. If it’s the Prince of Wales – no husbands ever mind.’

A hint of Edward’s desire to be dominated in his relationships lies in a letter he wrote to Freda on 26 March 1918. ‘You know you ought to be really foul to me sometimes sweetie & curse & be cruel. It would do me the world of goods and bring me to my right senses!! I think I’m the kind of man who needs a certain amount of cruelty without which he gets abominably spoilt & soft!! I feel that’s what’s the matter with me.’

***

Wallis Warfield was twenty years old when, in November 1916, she married her first husband, Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. She had first met the US Navy pilot the previous April during a trip to Florida, when he was stationed at the Pensacola Air Station. The day after she arrived at Pensacola Wallis wrote to her mother: ‘I have just met the world’s most fascinating aviator.’ Ever since she left Oldfields, Wallis, like her contemporaries, aspired to marriage as the sine qua non of achievement. When ‘Win’, dark-haired with brooding looks, proposed eight weeks after their meeting, Wallis was excited to be one of the first debutantes of her coming-out year to get engaged. As much as Wallis thought that she loved Win, a man she barely knew, she later admitted: ‘There also lay in the back of my mind a realisation that my marriage would relieve my mother of the burden of my support.’

Despite her mother’s fears that a navy life, with no permanent home, constant postings, little money, as well as long and lonely waits for her husband to return from sea, would be too regulated for someone as spirited as her daughter, Alice eventually gave the union her blessing. If only she had not. Wallis discovered on her short, grim honeymoon with Win at a hotel in West Virginia that he was an alcoholic. Wallis – who had only ever had a small glass of champagne at Christmas, as her puritanical family extolled the evils of alcohol – had never tasted hard liquor. West Virginia was a dry state, which further incensed Win, who pulled a bottle of gin from his suitcase. Once inebriated he would become aggressive, cruel and violent.

Her new life as a navy wife, first in San Diego, and then when Win took a desk job in Washington DC, became unbearable. Win’s insecurity, frustration at his dwindling career and jealous rages were sadistically vented on his young bride. But when Wallis decided to leave and seek a divorce, her mother was aghast. No Montague had ever been divorced. It was unthinkable. Even her stalwart Aunt Bessie said that it was out of the question. Her Uncle Sol was apoplectic. ‘I won’t let you bring disgrace upon us,’ he shouted.

Wallis persevered with the marriage. Her mother cautioned her that ‘being a successful wife is an exercise in understanding’. Wallis retorted bitterly: ‘A point comes when one is at the end of one’s endurance. I’m at that point now.’ She moved in with her mother, who was also living in Washington. As Uncle Sol refused her any financial help towards a divorce, her prospects looked bleak. Wallis was suitably thrilled when, in 1924, her cousin Corinne Mustin invited her to go on her first trip to Europe, to Paris. Win continued to write to Wallis and told her that he had been stationed in the Far East. He begged her to join him in China. Perhaps because Wallis could not afford a divorce and was uncertain of her financial and domestic future, she decided to give the marriage yet another go. Win met her in Hong Kong and soon enough, the familiar patterns recommenced. He became jealous, moody, quarrelsome and offensive. When he began drinking before breakfast, Wallis finally had had enough. She drew their eight-year marriage to a close, seeking a divorce at the United States Court for China in Shanghai.

‘Wallis was now twenty-eight and her character was formed,’ according to Diana Mosley. ‘She was independent but not tough, rather easily hurt with a rare capacity for making friends wherever she went. She was intelligent and quick, amusing, good company; an addition to any party with her high-spirited gaiety.’

Wallis embarked on a year’s sojourn in Peking, staying with her good friends Katherine and Herman Rogers. She later described her Eastern sojourn as her ‘Lotus Year’. As a divorced woman travelling in the Far East on her own, she displayed a spirited independence ahead of her time. According to a friend of Duff Cooper’s in Paris, a French woman who knew Wallis as Mrs Spencer in Peking, Wallis was ‘always good-natured’. Unfortunately, when news of Wallis’s relationship with the Prince of Wales broke in 1936, her year in China was used against her. It was said that she had visited the ‘singing houses’ of Shanghai and Peking. Unsavoury gossip tut-tutted, suggesting that she had acquired ‘sophisticated sexual techniques’ which she then used to entrap and manipulate the Prince of Wales and she became the butt of cheap jokes: ‘Other girls picked up pennies but Wallis was so proficient that she picked up a sovereign.’

Wallis nursed a secret that hit at the very heart of her femininity. She was infertile and had never menstruated. As a young girl it is unlikely that Wallis would have known that anything was wrong. Perhaps the absence of periods would have been her first sign at puberty that all was not as expected. It has been speculated that Wallis may have had a ‘disorder of sexual development’ or DSD, a modern term encompassing a wide range of rare genetic conditions. Others have claimed Wallis may have had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome – that is, she was born genetically male, with the XY chromosome. If this had been the case, the male sexual organs would have been internal and barely noticeable and she would have had an extremely shallow vagina. Yet this is unlikely as Wallis lacked other physical traits associated with the syndrome. We also know that she would go on to have a hysterectomy in middle age.

Whatever the cause of Wallis’s infertility it was a source of profound sadness for her. Over three marriages she bore no children, but not out of choice. Though she and Edward seemed to adore children, their lack of parenthood united them as outsiders to a familial club. Instead, they lavished love on their dogs which became their child replacements. Wallis later wrote that she mourned never being part of the ‘miracle of creation’ and that her ‘one continuing regret’ was never having ‘known the joy of having children’. The secret inner pain of childlessness must have made the gossip and slurs against her so much harder to bear.

One of the reasons that Wallis kept herself skeletally thin was that she worried that if she put on any weight she would ‘bulk up in a masculine way’. Diana Mosley said that Wallis ‘loved and appreciated good food, but ate so little that she remained triumphantly thin at a time when slenderness was all important in fashion’. Elsa Maxwell agreed that Wallis ate very little at the dinner table. When she challenged Wallis about this, she always replied defensively: ‘I’m an ice-box raider.’ Clearly any snacking was confined to minuscule amounts. Wallis and Edward were similar in this respect; they both favoured starvation diets and punishing regimes, each obsessed with retaining an almost pre-pubescent slenderness.

Wallis expressed a traditional femininity through her clothes: her sartorial perfectionism – a love of Cartier and couture – served to create an exaggeratedly feminine outline that was more elegant than sexual. Always immaculately groomed, there was a delicacy about her appearance – from her skirts and dresses cinched-in at the waist with tiny belts, to neat little pairs of heels. Adorned as he was with exquisite statement jewels, there was nothing androgynous about Wallis’s style. She certainly was no ‘sex siren’ or ‘harlot’, as many made her out to be. Although Wallis often liked to be the centre of attention socially, in other ways she came across as old-fashioned and reserved; indeed, her upbringing in Baltimore had been ladylike to the point of prudish. Astonishingly she told Herman Rogers, who eventually gave her away at her wedding to Edward in 1937, that she ‘had never had sexual intercourse with either of her two husbands’. Nor had she ‘ever allowed anyone else to touch her below’ what she described as ‘her personal Mason–Dixon line’.†

Both Wallis and Edward shared insecurities about their sexual identities. Confiding this in one another may have helped forge a strong secret bond between them. Cynthia Jebb, Lady Gladwyn, whose husband was ambassador to France 1954–60, knew the Windsors in Paris and confided to Hugo Vickers that ‘the prince had sexual problems. He was unable to perform’ – she ‘called it a hairpin reaction. She said that the duchess coped with it. I commented: “She was meant to have learned special ways in China.” “There was nothing Chinese about it,” said Lady Gladwyn. “It was what they call oral sex.”’ Although she could be openly flirtatious in a social setting, Wallis was, as Nicky Haslam observed of her, sassy rather than sexy: her gaiety was more playful teasing than predatory or seriously seductive. ‘Wallis wasn’t obsessed by sex,’ says Haslam. ‘If anything, she was rigidly undressable in that she was prudish. Everybody made such a thing of her going to brothels in China but everyone did that in those days. It was the fashionable thing to do. To have a good look.’

‘It was just the sort of thing that the press would say, that she was a twice-divorced American adventuress out for what she could get,’ said John Julius Norwich. ‘Everything was a bid to discredit her but she was the furthest thing from kinky. You never got the feeling that she was particularly sexually motivated. She was a perfectly normal American woman but not in the least bit depraved. And there was nothing more normal than Ernest Simpson and he fell in love with her.’