The American Duchess

Winston Churchill summed up the controversial couple’s mutual attraction: ‘the association was psychical rather than sexual, and certainly not sensual except incidentally’. Churchill always believed that Wallis was good for Edward; he defended the couple to the last. ‘Although branded with the stigma of a guilty love, no companionship could have appeared more natural, more free from impropriety or grossness,’ he said.

***

Wallis met Ernest Simpson through Mary Kirk, who had now become Madame Raffray, on her marriage to the Frenchman, Jacques Raffray. Raffray, a veteran of the Great War, had originally come to America to train US troops to fight in France. Wallis, then living in Washington, enjoyed staying with the Raffrays at their New York apartment. She spent Christmas of 1926 with them awaiting her divorce from Win. Ernest, who was also in the process of getting divorced, from his American wife Dorothea, with whom he had a daughter, Audrey, was frequently asked for dinner or to make up a fourth for bridge. A friendship developed and when both were granted divorces, Ernest asked Wallis to marry him.

A graduate of Harvard, Ernest had been born in New York of an American mother and a British father. After brief service as a captain in the British Army, he began work in the family shipping business, Simpson, Spence & Young. Tall, with blue eyes and a neat moustache, he was a fastidious dresser. In the early 1920s he was much in demand on the London scene and a regular dance partner of Barbara Cartland. (She later described him as a ‘handsome young bachelor, who was to figure dramatically in the history of England seventeen years later’.) The letter Wallis wrote to her mother on 15 July 1928 regarding Ernest’s marriage proposal is revealing: ‘I’ve decided that the best and wisest thing for me to do is to marry Ernest. I am very fond of him and he is kind which will be a contrast … I can’t go wandering the rest of my life and I really feel so tired of fighting the world alone and with no money. Also 32 doesn’t seem so young when you see all the youthful faces one has to compete against. So I shall settle down to a fairly comfortable old age.’ After her peripatetic childhood, and abusive marriage to Win, Ernest represented financial and emotional stability, comfort and respectability. Wallis worried briefly that his wholesome ponderousness was the polar opposite to her Southern emotionalism. She was fun, spontaneous and extravagant. He was methodical and cautious. Later, he was dismissed amid the upper-class circles into which the Simpsons were propelled as ‘crashingly middle class’ and a bore.

Ernest was transferred to run the British offices of his shipping firm, and in May 1928, Wallis followed him to London. They married on 21 July at Chelsea Register Office. Wallis wore a yellow dress and blue coat that she had bought in Paris the previous summer. Although they considered the clinical nature of the register office ceremony ‘a cold little job’, she found their honeymoon ‘a blissful experience’. Driving through France, Wallis discovered that her husband was cultured, considerate and spoke French fluently. Ernest may not have been the most exciting or diverting company but he was a thoroughly decent gentleman. His great-nephew, Alex Kerr-Smiley, remembers: ‘Ernest was just a nice person. He was an extremely nice uncle. He was almost like our fairy godfather.’

After the harrowing uncertainties of the previous decade, Wallis, aged thirty-two, could finally relax. Looking forward to a new life in London, she ‘felt a security that I had never really experienced since early childhood’. Her domestic equilibrium was to prove short-lived. Three years later, the dull conformity of her marriage was shattered by the arrival in their steady realm of the dazzling Prince of Wales.

* Fulco di Verdura was an influential Italian jeweller who designed for the duchess. His career took off when he was introduced to Coco Chanel by Cole Porter.

† The Mason–Dixon line was the American Civil War partition between the slave states of the South and free states of the North.

2

Ich Dien

After their honeymoon, Wallis and Ernest moved into a small hotel in London while they searched for a suitable home. Ernest’s sister, Maud, helped them to find a furnished house in Upper Berkeley Street, which they rented for a year. Wallis, a natural and dedicated homemaker, was keen to secure an unfurnished property on which she could put her decorative stamp.

Initially, Mrs Simpson was lonely in London, knowing no other Americans. Unaccustomed and resistant to the formality of English mores, she felt like ‘a stranger in a strange land’. Her sense of isolation heightened in October 1929 when she learned that her mother was seriously ill. Alice had been diagnosed with a blood clot in her brain. As Ernest could not leave his business, Wallis crossed the Atlantic alone. She spent three weeks with her ailing mother, who died shortly after Wallis returned to London. The ‘sadness’ that Wallis carried inside was ‘a long time lifting’. She grieved bitterly for her adored mother, whom she felt was the only person who truly understood her.

Soon a welcome distraction presented itself. That winter, Wallis found a first-floor flat that both she and Ernest liked in a mansion block on George Street, near Marble Arch. She set about decorating the flat at Bryanston Court with her inimitable flair. She was influenced by two design legends: Syrie Maugham, wife of novelist Somerset Maugham, and her good friend Elsie de Wolfe. Professional rivalry simmered between these two eccentrics as to who was the greater visionary. Both were ‘ultra chic’, creating light avant-garde rooms – the antithesis of heavy, dark Victoriana. Wallis enlisted Syrie Maugham’s talents at Bryanston Court, while de Wolfe helped shape her later homes in France. Maugham, who pioneered white furniture and white walls against which were showcased Provençal antiques, stripped and painted everything with her secret craquelure technique. From Maugham’s workshops Wallis commissioned a dozen dining-room chairs with tall backs, upholstered in white leather and studded with nails. This was considered daringly modern. An Italian dining table, Adam sideboard and console received the Maugham treatment; they were painted blue-green and white. According to Wallis, ‘when the table was laid for the first time and the candles lighted, the effect was soft and charming’. Wallis always chose a mirror-topped table, the centre decorated with glass fruits and a silver candelabra at each end. The table service was pink china; one of her most prized possessions was the dinner service inherited from her grandmother. Unconventionally, she served her consommé piping hot in small cups of black Chinese lacquer, with tiny lids. To Wallis, design and presentation was nothing less than a moral issue. She adopted both Elsie de Wolfe’s streamlined aesthetic and her credo: ‘What surer guarantee can there be of a person’s character, natural and cultivated, inherent and inherited, than taste?’

Ernest, proud of his wife’s exceptional talents as a hostess, was pleased with both the style of their home and Wallis’s eye for detail. She was always moving furniture into new positions, changing things around in her efforts to perfect a room’s look. This continued throughout her life, to her last home, the regal villa she shared with the Duke of Windsor in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

In her early days in London, Wallis, far from being able to exhibit largesse in her entertaining, had to budget cautiously. Most of her correspondence to her Aunt Bessie at this time focuses on the trials of trying to find the right cook and of financial concerns. Ernest was meticulous in his housekeeping. One evening a week, he demanded that Wallis show him her weekly expenditures. He would run his finger down the list, scrutinising each purchase. Wallis ran the house and bought her clothes on a weekly stipend from Ernest. Accustomed to working to a fiscal limit, she discovered that life in Britain was cheap by American standards. If she found herself under budget, she would splurge at Fortnum & Mason on a jar of caviar, brandied peaches or, as a special treat, an avocado.

Wallis shared Elsie de Wolfe’s obsession with serving guests food that was the same size, driving her butcher and fishmonger to distraction sourcing six or eight identical trout or grouse; even vegetables were laid out on the plate with military precision. Like her mother, Wallis prided herself on serving only the most delicious food. The Prince of Wales said of his first visit to her ‘small but charming flat in Bryanston Square’, that ‘everything in it was in exquisite taste and the food, in my judgement, unrivalled in London’. Wallis ‘is the best housekeeper I know’, declared Elsa Maxwell. ‘She is as skilful as a Japanese professional in arranging flowers. She has perfect taste in food as well as furniture and in those little details of forethought and care that mark an imaginative hostess. For instance, last time I lunched with her I noticed that she had found the most enchanting little round porcelain pots with covers to contain the butter and at the bottom, there was ice to keep it firm.’ According to Lady Pamela Hicks: ‘She was the most marvellous hostess. Her houses were perfection. At giving parties and serving food, she was the best.’ When she was the Duchess of Windsor and could afford it, Wallis would spray floral centre pieces with Diorissimo perfume.

Wallis’s reputation as a skilled hostess spread around the Simpsons’ London set. Naturally, she and Ernest were suitably excited when, having bumped into the Prince of Wales a few times at Thelma Furness’s, he accepted their invitation to Bryanston Court in January 1932. Wallis decided to serve a typical American dinner: black bean soup, grilled lobster, fried chicken Maryland and a cold raspberry soufflé. As a concession to her English guests, she followed it with a savoury of marrow bones. Typical of Wallis’s dignity, she was ‘bursting to tell the fishmonger and green grocer’ whom she was hosting but ‘had acquired too much British restraint’.

Ten sat down to dinner that January evening, with the prince at the head of the table and Ernest at the foot. Wallis wrote to her Aunt Bessie afterwards, on Sunday 24 January, thanking her for sending butter pat moulds with the Prince of Wales’s feathers on them. ‘Darling – the candles arrived and are grand. I enclose cheque. I can’t accept everything from you. We (meaning Cain* and self) loved the butter pats, especially the one with HRH’s feathers on it. It was a shame it didn’t arrive for use the night he dined here which by the way passed off pleasantly the party breaking up at 4 a.m., so I think he enjoyed himself.’

The prince paid Wallis the compliment of asking her for the recipe of her raspberry soufflé. The following week, he repaid her hospitality with a prized invitation for the Simpsons to stay as his guests for the weekend at Fort Belvedere, his country residence in Surrey. In 1930 the king had given Edward a grace-and-favour property on Crown lands, bordering Windsor Great Park. This ‘castellated conglomeration’ had been built in the eighteenth century by William, Duke of Cumberland, third son of George II. Eighty years later, the architect, Sir Jeffry Wyatville, added a high tower which gave the impression of an ancient castle in a forest. From the moment he saw it, Edward adored this ‘pseudo-Gothic hodge-podge’, despite its wild, untended garden and excess of gloomy yew trees. Fort Belvedere became his first proper home; his only other residence, York House, was more like an office. Edward poured all his energies into doing up ‘The Fort’, as it became known.

‘It was a child’s idea of a fort,’ said Lady Diana Cooper. ‘The house is an enchanting folly and only needs fifty red soldiers stood between the battlements to make it into a Walt Disney coloured symphony toy.’ Of her host, she said: ‘The comfort could not be greater, nor the desire on his part for guests to be happy, free and unembarrassed. Surely a new atmosphere for Courts?’

Edward renovated the inside, modernising with gusto – creating spaces entirely different from the musty royal houses of his childhood which had made him feel so unwell he could not eat. Each bedroom had its own bathroom – unheard of then in British country houses – and he added showers, a steam bath in the basement, built-in cupboards and central heating. Outside, he felled the yew trees to let in light and air. A muddy lily pond below the battlements was transformed into a swimming pool and acres of dank laurel were cleared for rare rhododendrons. Winding paths cut through fir and birch trees adding to the attractive woodland setting. He also improved and developed the Cedar Walk, a sweeping avenue lined by ancient cedar trees stretching from below the terrace to the edge of his property, which became one of his favourite places to walk. Later he added a private aerodrome in the grounds (he was patron of the London Flying Club in 1935) and would ferry friends in and out of Belvedere in his de Havilland Dragon Rapide biplane, which he had painted in the colours of the Brigade of Guards.

‘The prince was himself’ at the Fort, Thelma, Lady Furness, wrote in her memoirs. ‘He was free from any obligation to maintain the formalities of his official position. He pottered in the garden, pruned his trees, blew on his bagpipes. We entertained a great deal, but our guests were always the people we liked to have around – there were no dignitaries, no representatives of State and Empire.’ Of the Fort, Edward said: ‘I came to love it as I loved no other material thing – perhaps because it was so much my own creation.’ Guests were pressed into arduous physical labour; hacking out undergrowth and pruning trees. Edward also discovered a love of Windsor Castle, six miles away, of which he had said as a boy ‘the ancient walls seemed to exude disapproval’. Now his reverence grew for the immense grey pile which Samuel Pepys once described as ‘the most romantic castle that is in the world’. Edward would take weekend guests to browse the library and show off the Rubens and Van Dycks in the state apartments on Sunday afternoons.

The Fort became the prince’s sanctuary, a place where he could dispense with private secretaries and equerries. He considerately refused to keep staff up late at night, despite the early hours that he often enjoyed and if he returned home at dawn, let himself into the property with his own latch key. Unthinkably modern for a future monarch.

Wallis and Ernest set out for the Fort late on the Saturday afternoon, timing their pace to arrive, as invited, at six. It was dark when the car crunched up the gravel driveway. Before they could come to a stop, the prince had opened the door and was supervising the unloading of the luggage, a habit he enjoyed. Unlike the grandeur of Knole, the Kent home of the Sackvilles to which the Simpsons had previously been invited as weekend guests, the Fort struck them as remarkably relaxed. The prince led them into the octagonal hall, which had a black and white marble floor and eight bright yellow leather chairs in the eight corners. The drawing room, also octagonal, was more traditional; pine panelling, yellow velvet curtains, Canalettos and Chippendale furniture. The prince insisted on showing his guests to their room on the second floor. Diana Cooper wrote of her bedroom when staying there: ‘The stationery is disappointingly humble – not so the conditions. I am in a pink bedroom, pink-sheeted, pink Venetian-blinded, pink soaped, white-telephoned and pink-and-white maided.’ She did not comment on the gaudy Prince of Wales’s feathers engraved into every bed’s headboard.

When Wallis and Ernest arrived downstairs for cocktails, they were surprised to see the prince sitting on a sofa, his head bent over a large flat screen. His right hand plied a needle from which trailed a long coloured thread. At his feet were his two cairn terriers, Cora and Jaggs. Catching Wallis’s look of incredulity at the sight of the Prince of Wales doing needlepoint, he laughed, rising to greet her. ‘This is my secret vice,’ he explained, ‘the only one, in any case, I am at any pains to conceal.’

He explained to Wallis that he had learned to crochet from his mother as a young boy. At half past six each evening at Sandringham, Edward and his siblings were called in from the school room and sent to their mother’s boudoir where they would sit at her knee, while she crocheted or embroidered. Queen Mary taught them gros point, which Edward kept up, and perfected while recovering from a riding accident. He returned to this hobby during his time on the Western front in France. On long car journeys he crocheted to kill time. He later said that he was ‘understandably discreet about my hobby at first. It would hardly have done for the story to get around that a major general in the British Army had been seen bowling along the roads behind the Maginot Line crocheting.’

While the women all wore simple evening dresses, Edward sported a kilt in Balmoral tartan and produced a small cigarette case from his silver sporran. After cocktails, the small party went through to the dining room – the wood-panelled room seating only ten – where they ate oysters from the Duchy of Cornwall oyster beds, followed by roast beef and salad, pudding and a savoury. After coffee in the drawing room, Edward taught Wallis to play a card game called Red Dog, while others attempted a complicated jigsaw puzzle that was laid out on a long table in front of the main window. Dancing followed in the hallway. Suddenly, the prince tired. Before going to bed, he announced the rules of the Fort: ‘There are none. Stay up as late as you want. Get up when you want. For me this is a place of rest and change, I go to bed early and get up early so that I can work in the garden.’

The following morning, when the maid bought Wallis breakfast to her room, she was informed that His Royal Highness had finished his an hour before and was in the garden. When the Simpsons entered the drawing room, they saw the prince on the terrace outside in baggy plus fours, a thick sweater, hair tousled, hacking at the wild undergrowth with a machete-like billhook, dogs at his heels. Ernest Simpson, not a natural athlete, was ill-equipped to respond to the prince’s insistence that all guests help him wage war against the dreaded laurel bushes. ‘It’s not exactly a command,’ a fellow guest informed Ernest, ‘but I’ve never known anybody to refuse.’ Crossing the lawn, brandishing murderous-looking weapons, the house party resembled more a band of revolutionaries ready to do battle than an elite group of guests staying with the Prince of Wales at his country retreat. After two wearying hours in the winter chill the guests returned for a fortifying hot and cold buffet lunch laid out in the dining room. That afternoon, the prince took Wallis and Ernest around his home, even showing them his bedroom, on the ground floor, off the hall. It was spacious and charming with red chintz curtains framing spectacular views of his beloved garden.

Later that afternoon, the prince went for a tour outside with his gardener. When he returned, he disappeared to the basement. Thelma explained to a perplexed Wallis that at the same time every day he liked to take a steam bath, and was as proud of having installed this as he was of his central heating. He later appeared wearing a bright yellow polo neck, his face flushed red, yet ‘radiating utter contentment’.

As an original thank-you note, Wallis and Ernest composed the prince a jaunty poem on their return to Bryanston Court. As etiquette demanded, it was signed by Wallis only.

Sir –

Bear with me and do not curse

This poor attempt at thanks in verse.

Our weekend at ‘Fort Belvedere’

Has left us both with memories dear

Of what in every sense must be

Princely hospitality.

Too soon the hours stole away,

And we, who would have had them stay,

Regretful o’er that fleeting slyness,

Do warmly thank Your Royal Highness.

But with your time I make too free –

I have the honour, Sir, to be

(Ere too long my poetic pencil limps on)

Your obedient Servant,

Wallis Simpson.

After their fairy-tale weekend, Wallis and Ernest returned to the real world. They did not see the prince for much of the rest of that year, 1932 – a year Wallis pronounced ‘dismal’. Ever preoccupied with worsening money worries, she wrote to her Aunt Bessie that Ernest’s shipping business was struggling as the world lay in the trough of the Depression.

Britain had also been suffering from the severe economic downturn. Hardest hit were the industrial and mining areas of the north of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, where unemployment reached 70 per cent. Over the previous few years the Prince of Wales had made extensive tours of Tyneside, the Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales. He visited hundreds of working men’s clubs and schemes for the unemployed, seeking out the areas of rawest poverty. Although he was sometimes met with sullen apathy, which perturbed him, the prince persevered, inviting himself into slums, eager that the people would not think the monarchy had forsaken them in their misfortune. In 1929 in Winlanton, Durham, he visited the house of Mr Frank McKay, a seventy-four-year-old miner, whose wife had just died. The prince offered his sympathies to the family and ‘expressed a wish to go upstairs to the room where Mrs McKay lay dead’. As he left, the miners cheered him on the way back to his car. George Haynes, General Secretary of the National Council, remembered the Prince of Wales’s ‘way of approach; his transparent interest and concern, and the immense regard people had for him. He had a charisma in those days which was unique.’ However, the prince was quickly marked down by the establishment as a ‘dangerous subversive’.

The prince would return from his public duties painfully aware that ‘there was always something lacking’. In spring 1932, King George V had what was for him, an uncharacteristically intimate conversation with his son. He told Edward that while he was still worshipped by the public, he could not expect to survive the erosion of his reputation caused by the increasingly damaging revelations surrounding his private life. The king cited Edward’s liaison with Lady Furness and asked his son if he had ever thought of marrying ‘a suitable well-born English girl?’ Strangely, the prince replied that he had never supposed it would be possible.

‘What he meant by this was that he liked these married women and he loved Americans,’ explained Hugo Vickers. ‘The prince loved golfing pros and tycoons. According to his Private Secretary he became like a little boy in their presence. He thought that English girls were boring and thought that zinging cocktail girls were what he liked. There was never any question in his mind that he would marry an eligible British girl.’

There were suggestions that Princess Ingrid of Sweden might make a suitable bride, but it was never seriously contemplated at York House or Buckingham Palace. Earl Mountbatten of Burma prepared a list of seventeen European princesses who were ‘theoretically possible’, ranging from the fifteen-year-old Thyra of Mecklenburg-Schwerin to twenty-two-year-old Princess Ingrid, but these were made with little conviction. No one who knew the Prince of Wales now believed that he would ever marry. The despairing king said to Stanley Baldwin: ‘After I am dead the boy will ruin himself within twelve months.’ He apparently later confided to the courtier, Ulick Alexander: ‘My eldest son will never succeed me. He will abdicate.’

This was a view shared by the king’s third son, Prince Henry, who became the Duke of Gloucester. ‘My brother and I never got on, I’m afraid,’ Gloucester later said of his relationship with Edward. ‘We had a hell of a row in 1927. I’d said to someone I didn’t think he’d ever be king and it was repeated. He said to me: “Did you say that or didn’t you?” So I said: “Well I’ve either got to tell you a lie or tell you the truth and I’m going to tell you the truth. I did say it and I still think it.”’