King Edward VIII

The 5th Earl of Leicester told Frances Donaldson that his father had once warned the Prince of Wales not to see so much of his wife.13 Certainly if Lady Coke had fallen in with the Prince’s lunatic scheme to join him and Claud Hamilton in Paris, her husband would have had good cause to complain. She was far too sensible, however. Twelve years older than the Prince, she knew that her role was principally that of confidante and comforter.

When he visited Bombay some years later his equerry, Bruce Ogilvy, noted his failure to flirt with any of the half dozen attractive girls provided to entertain him, and wrote in his diary, ‘I think that what he liked was being “Mothered”.’14 ‘Liked’ is too weak a word, he craved for it, could hardly live without it. That a young man unable to establish a warm relationship with his own mother should seek a substitute elsewhere is so much a psychological cliché as to deserve to be treated with grave suspicion. At the end of the war he had in fact grown close to the Queen. But whether because of deprivation as a child or for some other reason, it was not enough. He looked for maternal qualities in every woman he knew well, and Marion Coke dutifully mothered him. She remained a prominent figure in his life until the advent of Freda Dudley Ward in the spring of 1918 drove all other women temporarily from his mind.

She did not reign alone, however. The Prince of Wales, in the last years of war, came closer to marriage than he was to for another fifteen years. Even with the memory of his Parisian idyll fresh in his mind he wrote in his diary, ‘How I long for some leave to see Marion again and P!!!!’ Before he left London in May 1917 he bade ‘tender farewells’ to Lady Coke, and ‘fond farewells’ to P.15 P was Portia – Lady Sybil – Cadogan, one of the five daughters of Earl Cadogan. She was unlike most of the women he loved in that she was a large and clumsy girl; handsome rather than pretty, a powerful personality, as enthusiastic a dancer as Marion Coke but with less of her charm and spontaneous gaiety. She was a close friend of and later a maid of honour to Princess Mary and the Prince first got to know her at Windsor in the spring of 1915. They played golf together and talked endlessly; within a few days he was writing in his diary, ‘She was looking more lovely and attractive than ever and we had a delightful talk; I am really smitten now!!’16 They began to correspond (Portia Cadogan was one of those who seems to have heeded his injunction to burn his letters) and Princess Mary, who was delighted to act as go-between, sent her brother a signed photograph of his beloved. Prince Albert, who seems also to have been attracted by her,17 lent a hand in the romance as well. ‘I am enclosing a letter from the “Angel” Portia … ’ he wrote. ‘I am always going to forward her letters on to you now.’18

The romance came to a peak early in 1916. While in London in January he contrived to see her most days and nights. On 5 January, after driving half a dozen times round St James’s Park and enjoying a protracted farewell at her house, he recorded that he had had ‘the best night I have had since the war began’. A fortnight later it was, without qualification, ‘the best night I have ever had’. They dined at the Carlton, went to a musical at the Gaiety, and then danced for two hours to the gramophone. ‘It was divine, particularly as I’m madly in love with her!! Oh, if only – But I must be careful even in a diary.’ A fortnight later again they ‘fixed up certain things’ and the following night the Prince returned surreptitiously to Portia’s house after formally dropping her off at the front door. ‘She let me in and we sat talking till after 1.30. What a joyous 2 hours alone with my “angel”. How the time did fly; we talked about every sort of thing; better not to mention what!! … What it is to be in love!!’19

That matrimony was one of the ‘things’ discussed cannot be proved but seems more than likely. What happened then is hard to establish. The romance continued in full fury and even at the beginning of 1917 he could still remark that ‘it was wonderful to see HER again’. But on that same wonderful night he and Claud Hamilton dropped Portia off at her home at 12.30 and then went on to a party where Marion Coke was awaiting them: ‘I took sweet little Marion home and she bid me a tender farewell.’20 Whether Portia Cadogan took offence at having to share her admirer’s affections, whether she despaired of bringing him to the point, or whether she just got bored of him: in June 1917 she abruptly became engaged to the Prince’s old friend from Oxford days, Edward Stanley. The news came as a surprise to everyone, not least her parents, who received a telegram reading ‘Engaged to Edward’ and at once assumed that they would eventually have a daughter on the throne.21 The Prince had discussed Portia Cadogan and the possibility of marriage with his mother only a few days before, but nothing had been concluded. The Queen, however, made it clear that nobody was going to bring pressure on him to make an early marriage, still less to someone he did not love. This did something to relieve his disappointment, but: ‘How depressed I am,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I suppose it’s Portia having gone West, for of course that talk with Mama has cheered me up and taken a big weight off my mind.’22

The affair had been conducted with remarkable discretion. Godfrey Thomas, who always felt the Prince should not marry a commoner, welcomed Portia’s engagement, ‘if only for the reason that a lot of people in London were beginning to talk about her and the Prince himself, people I mean who might have been thought to know, not just the usual gossipers’.23 The ‘usual gossipers’ never seem to have mentioned Portia Cadogan’s name, and the survivors among those ‘who might have been thought to know’ were often equally in the dark. Many other names, however, were mentioned in connection with the Prince: Claud Hamilton’s sister Cynthia; Irene Lawley; Diana Manners; Rachel Cavendish – ‘a very pretty girl, and sensible too,’ noted George V approvingly;24 and, most frequently of all, Rosemary Leveson-Gower. There was ‘wild excitement’ during the Prince of Wales’s leave in March 1918, recorded Cynthia Asquith. ‘No girl is allowed to leave London … and every mother’s heart beats high. So far, he dances most with Rosemary and also motors with her in the daytime.’25

Rosemary Leveson-Gower was indeed a natural subject for such gossip. Her father had been the 4th Duke of Sutherland; her mother, born Lady Millicent St Clair-Erskine, was one of the great beauties of her generation; she herself was strikingly attractive, charming and, by all accounts, generous and kind as well. There is, however, no evidence in the Prince’s diaries or correspondence that he ever thought of her as more than pleasant company. To Lady Coke, perhaps unsurprisingly, he described her without great enthusiasm as ‘quite attractive and pretty … tho’ she is rather spoilt’.26 In September 1917 he had mentioned to his mother that he had seen her when visiting the Duchess of Sutherland’s hospital and had thought her ‘attractive tho’ very cold’.27 The Queen took mild alarm, presumably lest her son might view the coldness as a challenge. ‘I agree Rosemary is attractive,’ she wrote, ‘but pray don’t think of her, there is a taint in the blood of her mother’s family.’28 Her comment related, presumably, to an alleged strain of madness in the St Clair-Erskine family which was much gossiped about at the time, rather than to the somewhat chequered career of Rosemary’s uncle, Lord Rosslyn. ‘I didn’t mean I was really struck,’ the Prince hurriedly protested. ‘You need have no fear of my having any designs on her!!’29 Probably he protested a little too much; he certainly paid Rosemary marked attentions during the first months of 1918. Lady Rosemary does not seem to have been overwhelmed by these enticing prospects. ‘What a good thing I never contemplated marrying the Prince of Wales merely for the sake of the glamour,’ she wrote to her mother after her own marriage to the future Lord Dudley. Now she had ‘got all that as well as Eric’.30 At all events, any incipient romance was checked when that February he met the first of the two great loves of his life, Freda Dudley Ward.

They met by chance some time in February 1918, when the Prince was at a dance in Belgrave Square and Mrs Dudley Ward, with her escort of the evening, took shelter in the doorway when an air raid warning sounded. The couple were invited in, the Prince was immediately attracted to the interloper and danced with her for the rest of the evening. Next day he wrote to ‘Mrs Dudley Ward’ to suggest a further meeting. Freda’s mother-in-law, with whom she was staying, first assumed that the letter must be for her, then that it referred to her unmarried daughter. She invited the Prince to tea and tried to send Freda out for the occasion, but her well-meaning efforts were thwarted and the happy couple were soon reunited. The association was to last some fifteen years.

Freda – Winifred, to give her the full name by which she was never known – Dudley Ward was small, elegant and exceptionally pretty. Some people underestimated her, but no one seems to have disliked her. She was intelligent and no worse educated than most British ladies of the time, funny, lively, a passionate and accomplished dancer, a good golfer and tennis player. A strong personality, she contrived to appear feminine and frail; Cynthia Asquith’s somewhat contemptuous description, ‘a pretty little fluff’,31 was a complete misjudgment of a woman whose independence of mind was no less striking than her tact and discretion.

A few weeks younger than the Prince of Wales, she was of bourgeois stock; her father, Colonel Charles Birkin, was a prosperous lace-manufacturer from Nottingham. When only nineteen she married William Dudley Ward, ‘Duddie’, a Liberal member of parliament and kinsman of the Earl of Dudley. Dudley Ward was sixteen years older than his wife; no doubt he had loved Freda when he married her but by 1918 the couple led largely separate lives. An affair between his wife and the heir to the throne, provided it was conducted with due decorum, would have seemed to him acceptable, even commendable. He could be confident that, with Freda in charge of the liaison, it would never be less than decorous.

Though the Prince quickly made it obvious that he was over-whelmingly attracted by Freda, the relationship had little chance to burgeon until he came back to London early in 1919. For the next four years or so it was all-consuming. No letters survive from this early period but the Prince had a compulsive need to pour out his heart on paper and in 1921 and 1922 he was writing to her at least once a day whenever they were separated, and often when they were not. One day in August 1922 he wrote to her at 9 a.m., noon, 6 p.m. and 11.30 p.m., also fitting in a long telephone call just before dinner. The first surviving letter is dated 18 November 1920. ‘Fredie darling, beloved à moi,’ it read, ‘I feel ever, ever so much better since our little talk on the phone this evening, sweetheart; you just can’t think what a huge comfort it was to your little David just to hear your divine little voice again which I wanted to hear so much this morning. I’m terribly lonely tonight my Fredie darling and it maddens me to be away from TOI; it seems all wrong somehow when we love each other as we do.’ At 2 a.m., before he went to bed, he dashed off another brief note: ‘I must tell you once again how far more crazily and madly and overwhelmingly I love you love you my Fredie darling, and how utterly down and out I am tonight at the thought of not seeing you for 12 bloody days.’32

These letters strike the notes which would become familiar to anyone who studied the correspondence in full: genuine and passionate devotion marred by a strident self-pity that bores and sometimes repels. In almost every letter he bemoans his uniquely unhappy lot: the miseries of being Prince of Wales, trapped in a routine that was wearisome and futile, surrounded by hostile relations and treacherous servants, starved of the company of the one person who could have made him happy. It is indeed an unhappy condition to be in love with a married woman, and still more so when there seems no possible way by which the situation can be improved; but it must have taken all Freda Dudley Ward’s resolution to provide the constant consolation and reassurance that was demanded by her lover. Endlessly he poured out to her his fears and woes. ‘Fredie darling, I love you love you now beyond all understanding and all I can say is bless you, bless you, for being so sweet and divine and tender and sympathique to your David last night and for saving him, mon amour. And you know that the truth is I was on the verge of a mental disaster or whatever you like to call it … that might have been permanent.’33 He knew that his insatiable demands for reassurance were unreasonably taxing and apologized constantly for his weakness – ‘You have made me feel so terribly badly as regards my foul grousing and unpardonable glooms’34 – but he could no more have cut off the flow of desolation than he could have ended the relationship.

Freda Dudley Ward, as nobody else was able to do before the advent of Mrs Simpson, gave him the strength he needed. She alone could cheer him up when he was in the blackest depression, could cajole or bully him back to the path of duty. Without her he could manage, but at a fearful cost to his nerves and to conspicuously less good effect. When on his foreign tours, he constantly inveighed against the cruel fate that separated them and agonized over the strain of keeping going without her support. His tone was sometimes hysterical, but essentially he wrote no more than the truth.

She was an excellent influence on him. She made him drink and smoke less – though herself a chain smoker; she encouraged him to do what he was best at; she laughed him out of his occasional absurdities. She fostered his genuine concern for the injustices of society and tried, to less good effect, to broaden his intellectual horizons. Once she gave him a copy of Wuthering Heights to read. ‘Who is this woman Bront?’ he asked dubiously.’35 She told him home truths in a way nobody else did, yet never forfeited his total confidence. ‘Self-pity is a most degrading thing,’ he wrote, ‘and you’ve driven all mine right away and about time too. I know I’m hopelessly spoilt and therefore discontented … I’m so grateful to you for showing me myself … and it’s the first time I had a look at “the brute” for months!! But now I can see how utterly ridiculous and futile he is, and I’ll try and reform him a bit in Canada.’ And then a cry of pain: ‘If only I didn’t feel so lonely nowadays.’36

Great though her influence was, she was reticent in using it and never did so to her own advantage. The Prince’s Comptroller, Sydney Greville, once reported a scare over the Prince ‘rushing off to appoint a nominee of Mrs Dudley Ward’ as equerry,’37 but there is no other suggestion that she interfered in the running of the royal household. On the contrary, all the Prince’s staff liked her and welcomed her; ‘one of the best friends he ever had in his life,’ Bruce Ogilvy described her.38

As she was to discover herself in due course, there was only room for one great love in the Prince’s life. Any previous claimant to the title was ruthlessly discarded. Portia Stanley appeared at a shooting party at Sandringham. ‘I stood no rot from her,’ reported the Prince. ‘She only stood with me at one drive and that was because she asked to and it was tricky to say NO. I loathe that woman, and it maddens me her showing herself in here like this.’39 He was fiercely jealous of any rival. Freda’s admirer of long standing was Lord Pembroke’s younger brother, Michael Herbert. The Prince was in torment whenever he knew that the two were likely to meet. She wrote to him from Lady Desborough’s home to report that, though Herbert was in the house party, she had seen little of him. ‘Good! good! and more! more!’ applauded the Prince. ‘I do love to hear that and I bet he tried hard enough to get you alone and he must have been furious too!! I’m so so glad and happy darling.’40 In return he constantly assured her that he found all other women dull and unattractive, and she professed to be upset if he seemed to favour one or other of them. She wrote crossly when he was seen at the Grafton Galleries with Edwina Mountbatten. ‘I’m sorry if I annoyed you …’ he wrote penitently, ‘though I hate your putting it that Edwina took me. Darling, no bloody woman takes me anywhere and it was Dickie who suggested it and I couldn’t see any harm … But I’m sorry my sweetheart, though please don’t think that I’m led around by other women.’41 In these first hectic years, indeed, to all effects there was no other woman. His intimates continued to hope otherwise. In Canada at the end of 1919 Claud Hamilton believed he might propose to the lady who was subsequently to marry Joey Legh – ‘if only “it” would happen, it would be the most wonderful thing in the world and save the British Empire’.42 But such hopes were illusory. When he visited Kyoto during his tour of Japan the geishas wanted to take the rings off his hand. He let them remove the signet ring ‘but naturally not yours my sweetheart and it took me quite a time to assure them that I wasn’t engaged!! If only they knew how very heavily married I am, darling angel.’43

He found in Freda Dudley Ward’s home the family life that was lacking – or that he convinced himself was lacking – at court. He loved her two daughters, and would call in to see them even when their mother was away. ‘The babies were in marvellous shape,’ he wrote after one such visit, ‘and I can never tell you what they didn’t do to me, from binding me up on the floor with ribbands and pulling my hair etc etc. I do adore those divine little girls of yours, sweetheart, and love playing with 2 wee editions of Fredie!!’44 They for their part treated him as a much-loved uncle and pined for his visits. Towards the end of the Second World War the elder daughter, Angela Laycock, wrote to him: ‘It is so many years since I last saw you that I suppose I can no longer start my letters “Darling Little Prince” though that is how I should like to begin … You can’t imagine how much I miss you still, after all this time. You see, my childhood is so full of happy, happy memories and you are bound up in all of them.’45

His own siblings abetted the romance. Princess Mary forwarded the letters which he wrote to Freda almost every day from France, slipping out to post them when her French governess had her back turned.46 Prince Albert kept the home fires burning when his brother was on tour: ‘She is miserable now without you and feels quite lost … I will look after Freda for you to the best of my ability.’47

Not surprisingly, the King and Queen were less enthusiastic about their son’s liaison. The King had never met Mrs Dudley Ward and considered her social background made her inappropriate as a friend for his eldest son, let alone anything more intimate. Though time modified his attitude, his first assumption was that she was a pernicious influence and should be cut out of the Prince’s life. ‘Papa seems to think that anything you do which he doesn’t like has been influenced by Fredie,’ warned Prince Albert. ‘This of course is due to the great popularity which you have everywhere, and Papa is merely jealous.’48 The Queen was quick to indignation if she thought that her son was allowing his mistress to distract him from the course of duty. On one occasion he asked if he might miss a court function. Queen Mary knew that he wanted instead to go to a dance which Freda Dudley Ward was attending. ‘I was aghast when I read your letter,’ she wrote. ‘It would be very rude to us were you not to come tonight.’ ‘A pretty hot letter!!’ was the Prince’s rueful comment when he passed it on to Mrs Dudley Ward.49 Such rebukes did not shake his affection for the Queen. ‘My mother is sweet to me and so sensible,’ he told Freda; ‘there’s really no rot about her although she is a martinette. But that is her upbringing and no fault of hers, and she really is a wonderful woman.’50 But inevitably this new, all-important association eroded the relationship which had been built up between mother and son. ‘Curious David does not confide in you any more,’ commented the King in 1922. ‘I suppose he only does so to her.’51

What evidence there is suggests that, for the first eighteen months or so of their affair, Freda Dudley Ward cared as deeply for the Prince as he for her. It could not endure at such intensity. Mrs Dudley Ward needed someone who was more regularly in her life than the itinerant Prince, whose friendship posed less social problems, who was more sophisticated and less doting. He was made miserable when, in the summer of 1920, Freda tried to cool down his ardour and to put the relationship on to a new, more platonic basis. ‘So you have heard from Fredie at last,’ the recently created Duke of York wrote to him. ‘It must have depressed you and worried you a good deal, I know, but whatever she says I know you will listen to.’52

Michael Herbert remained a threat. For a time Mrs Dudley Ward kept her two admirers in uneasy balance; each grudgingly acquiescing in the claims of the other. Then in 1922, when the Prince was in the Far East, there was talk of divorce. ‘What I can’t get at is when you intend to divorce Duddie, my beloved,’ wrote the puzzled Prince. ‘Will it all be going on when I return or do you intend to wait till we can discuss it all, or what? Also, are you going to divorce him or is he going to divorce you?’ The thought that disturbed him most was that, once free, Freda might marry Herbert or somebody else. ‘I can’t bear the thought that our lives should have to be in any way different to what they’ve been for the last 4 years.’ If the divorce was to go through, then it would obviously be essential that he keep well out of the limelight: ‘… if I’m in the way for the present you will tell me, won’t you? … I’m making the very biggest sacrifice that I’ll ever make in my whole life by writing to you what I am tonight my sweet Freda, and I’m crying a bit, though as I love you love you I do want so to help you too. It is so so terribly hard and cruel to be away from you at a time of crisis.’53

Talk of a divorce blew over and by the time he had reached Japan he had reassured himself that their love affair would survive unimpaired. He wrote from Kyoto to tell her ‘how I’ve missed you and pined for TOI my precious beloved, and how I’m always wanting TOI and yearning for you!! And I know from your letters that you’ve felt the same, Fredie, and the fact that both still feel as mad as we ever did is a real test, isn’t it, darling angel?’54 He deluded himself. She was devoted to him, loyal to him, but she no longer loved him madly. When he got back to England later that year, it was to find that the reputation of her children was advanced as a reason for their seeing less of each other. Reluctantly he accepted the excuse: ‘We are indeed a hunted and pathetic little couple, aren’t we, Fredie, but nobody can stop us loving each other.’55

The unhappiness and frustration caused by Freda Dudley Ward’s coolness towards him drove him to seek solace in drink, night clubs and the ostentatious pursuit of other women. Many of the accounts of the Prince of Wales misbehaving in public stem from this period. In the spring of 1923 it seems to have come to a head. Freda must have stated bluntly that their relationship could never be what it had been and that he would have to content himself with friendship. ‘I’m at last beginning to realize what I’ve lost through going quite quite mad … in April,’ he wrote despairingly, ‘though I suppose it’s too late now … Oh! Fredie – I just don’t understand a thing about life except that it’s all d—d hard and foul and cruel, and I’m so depressed and puzzled about it all.’56

To solace his woes he indulged in a brief fling with Audrey Coats, a girl who as Audrey James had played havoc with a wide swathe of London society. Mr Coats, however, was evidently less complaisant than Mr Dudley Ward. ‘Never have I had such an exciting week as this,’ the Prince told Freda from a house party at Drummond Castle, in which the Coatses were among the guests, ‘and the air is electric and it’s all too tricky for words. I’m quite exhausted and shall be lucky if I escape without the hell of a row …’ But though he found Mrs Coats attractive and enjoyed his affair with her, he was being entirely sincere when he told his true love: ‘I’m not madly in love and never will be again, and she’ll never mean a fraction to me of what you do.’57 There were to be many such meaner beauties of the night but the moon of Freda Dudley Ward reigned supreme, and was to continue to do so until all other luminaries were dimmed by the solar splendour of Mrs Simpson.