The Peoples King Page 6
she had a delightful way of bossing him around without being boring or coy about it. 'Don't eat that, Sir!' she would say smiling and taking a caviar canape out of his hand. 'Have this instead?' and she would give him a bit of cream cheese on toast. . .
Wales, who had never been looked after except officially, blossomed and beamed under this fond supervision ... all of Mrs Simpson's menus were planned with a view to his nervous stomach, which became less and less nervous as one calm meal after another vanished within it.7'
‘I have learned to make that gooey stuff Mrs Bristol puts on the top of her ham. It's made of peaches,' reported Wallis to her aunt. 'I will send the apple recipe on separate cover,' she added, 'as I'm writing from the Fort where there has been a pompous week-end including the King's secretary and wife.'76 She did not feel comfortable with Alec Hardinge and his wife, Helen, whose extreme formality exemplified the manners of the royal court.
Wallis helped Edward with royal entertaining. 'Have the table moved back as far as possible', she wrote before a dinner party in 1935. She offered advice on the menu: I would also have two sorts of cocktails and white wine offered as well as the vin rose, the servants to service the wine. Also I didn't see a green vegetable on the menu. Sorry to bother you but I like everyone to think you do things well.' She added playfully, 'Perhaps I'm quite fond of you.' When he finally managed to get away from his royal duties for a summer holiday, she wrote fondly to her aunt, 'At last this poor tired King got off.'78 Edward was equally solicitous about her and found it difficult to separate his own well-being from hers. 'But I do long long to see you even for a few minutes my Wallis it would help so much', he wrote during the days when his father lay dying.
'Please take care of yourself and don't get a cold. You are all and everything I have in life and WE must hold each other so tight. It will all work out right for us. God bless WE.'79
Standing by Edward's side, Wallis watched from a window in St James's Palace as he was proclaimed King Edward VIII on 22 January 1936. She tried hard to support him in his work. 'God bless you and above all make you strong where you have been weak', she wrote in a letter, adding that soon she would be happy because 'you would be holding me and I would be looking "up" into your eyes.'80 Since Wallis was slightly taller than Edward, who was only five feet seven inches, it is difficult to see how she could have looked 'up' into his eyes. But comments like these must have helped him to feel vigorous and manly. Wallis also helped him with those parts of his job that he found wearisome, and many people recognized her usefulness in this respect. At a party, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia went up to Wallis and begged her to persuade the King to telephone his sympathy to the Infanta, Beatrice of Spain, whose second son had just been killed. When the King pleaded, 'Couldn't I do it in the morning?', she intervened firmly - 'No, now, to please me, sir.' He obediently made the call.81
Some of the King's friends tried to exploit Mrs Simpson's influence on him. For example, Lady Oxford and Asquith (Margot Asquith) wrote to her at the start of Edward's reign about his churchgoing - or rather his lack of it. 'Actually, he goes quite often to the simple little chapel in Windsor Park,' replied Wallis in his defence,
but I am afraid this does not appear in the 'Court Circular'. As you know he has been going to his country house for weekends since he has been King - this form of relaxation I think he finds essential as he is so accustomed to air and exercise it would be difficult for him to give it up entirely and I personally feel it makes him more fit for his great task.
But she would urge him, she promised, to show his religious feeling more publicly:
I think however that perhaps if he went to St George's Chapel there would be more publicity - and I heartily agree with you that though he may be deeply religious within himself, the outward expression of this is very necessary to his subjects. I shall try to suggest this to him tactfully - and I am sure he will be only too glad to change his church - for no one is trying harder than he to do all he can for us all.82
Lady Oxford was 'full of Mrs S's good sense and good influence on HM', noted one observer.83 Winston Churchill saw the same benefits. Since the King had met Mrs Simpson, he commented, he looked 'older and harder - a little stiffer perhaps since he became King, definitely more confidence in himself.'84 Monckton thought so too: 'She insisted that he should be at his best and do his best at all times, and he regarded her as an inspiration.'85
But Edward's father, George V, had been horrified by the unsuitability of Mrs Simpson. Edward and two of his brothers - Albert, known in the family as 'Bertie' (and who later became King George VI), and George - had already distressed their father by indulging in relationships with married women. Mrs Freda Dudley Ward, who was married to William Dudley Ward, Liberal MP for Southampton, had been Edward's 'own beloved Angel'86 from 1918 to 1934. Her place in Edward's affections was then taken by Thelma, Lady Furness. Prince Albert, too, had been involved with a married woman. In 1919, he fell in love with Sheila Loughborough, an Australian-born London Society beauty who was married to Lord Loughborough, by whom she had had a baby boy the previous winter. At this time, Edward and Albert more or less shared the same social circle, and Albert prevailed upon his brother to spirit Sheila away from her husband so that they could spend some time together.87 George V objected strongly. 'Christ! how I loathe & despise my bloody family' expostulated Edward to Freda Dudley Ward from a sea voyage on 24 May 1920,
as Bertie has written me 3 long sad letters in which he tells me he's been getting it in the neck about his friendship with poor little Sheilie & that TOI et MOI came in for it too!! But if HM thinks he's going to alter me by insulting you he's making just about the biggest mistake of his silly useless life ... God! damn him!88
King George decided to tempt Albert away from Sheila with the carrot of a dukedom. 'Now as regards old Bertie & Sheilie,' Edward told Freda,
B talks a lot of hot air about HM making him a duke on condition that his name ceases to be more or less coupled with Sheilie's. . . Bertie may be a Duke now for all I know, as I think that his rather pompous nature makes him want to be one.89
On 5 June 1920, Albert was made Duke of York. The next year he transferred his attentions to Helen ('Poppy') Baring, who had the reputation of being 'fast' and fun-loving. He proposed marriage to her while staying with her parents during Cowes week. She accepted, but his mother, Queen Mary, swiftly made it clear that the match was impossible. Six years later, Prince George also fell for Poppy and proposed, but this marriage was not allowed either.90
Prince George had numerous affairs and one-night stands with both men and women. 'I was told no one - of either sex - was safe with him in a taxi', said one person who knew him well.91 One of his lovers was Noel Coward. In 1932 there was 'a scandal about Prince George - letters to a young man in Paris. A large sum had to be paid for their recovery.'92 He also became addicted to cocaine after an affair with Kiki Whitney Preston, an American woman who belonged to the decadent group of white settlers in Kenya known as the Happy Valley set. To rescue George from Kiki, Edward forced her to leave England in the summer of 1929. He then cancelled a holiday with Freda Dudley Ward so that he could devote himself to the task of curing George of his cocaine addiction, with the help of doctors. He told Freda that he was forced to act as George's 'doctor, gaoler and detective combined'. By the end of the year the worst was over: Kiki was safely abroad, and the Prince was weaned off the drug.93
The 'fast' life of these princes was by no means at odds with the customs of the English elite. Despite the strait-laced nature of George V's court, it was perfectly normal for many of the upper classes - married and unmarried - to enjoy sexual relationships with any number of others - again, married and unmarried. Edwina Mount- batten had a number of passionate affairs; but the only time this became a scandal was when a magazine called The People insinuated (mistakenly, it appeared) that she was having an affair with Paul Robeson. Edwina's husband, Louis, also had many affairs, with both men and women. Lord Londonderry ha
d affairs with one woman after another. Many of these women were American, including Consuelo Vanderbilt, the heiress who had married his second cousin, the ninth Duke of Marlborough. By another American, a married actress, he had a child who was born just six weeks after his wedding; and his most lasting affair was with yet another American woman, the wife of the Earl of Ancaster.
Bertie settled down finally when he married Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 192.3. Technically she was a commoner until her marriage to a royal, but as the daughter of the Earl of Strathmore she belonged to one of the oldest upper-class families of Britain. George settled down when he married Princess Marina of Greece in 1934. And in his own way Edward settled down too, when he fell irrevocably in love with Wallis Simpson. But while everybody in Society could understand why Albert had chosen Elizabeth and George had chosen Marina, they were utterly baffled by Edward's choice. 'He is, I believe,' said Robert Bruce Lockhart, a former diplomat who was the editor of the 'Londoner's Diary' in the Evening Standard, 'suffering from dementia erotica.'™ Theories abounded of special sexual skills used by Wallis to satisfy the King. It was said that she appealed to a latent homosexuality in Edward, because of her slim, boyish figure. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary on 27 November that Kingsley Martin, the editor of the socialist magazine New Statesman and Nation, had earlier been 'approached by one of the King's circle, was asked to write an article, revealing the facts from the King's side. Then he was told to wait. . . The King's men told him in strict secrecy about the sexual difficulty.'95 Whatever this 'sexual difficulty' was, she did not explain; most probably she had no idea and was simply repeating some of the gossip that was doing the rounds.
Wallis was seen as simply too lower-class and too poor to qualify for special attention - or, indeed, any attention - from royalty. Edward's adoration only made sense if it was seen as an obsession - as a pathology rather than love. The editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, recorded in his private diary on 2 November a conversation about this with Lord Dawson of Penn, the royal doctor who had attended King George V on his deathbed. Lord Dawson, he wrote, 'was interesting on the subject of HM's obsession from the medical point of view. The Literary Society, with whom I dined that evening, was also absorbed in the same subject (to the complete exclusion of literature!).'96
An added difficulty for Wallis was her nationality, because the upper class of Britain tended to look down on arrivals from America. 'The Americans are funny,' said Jean, Lady Hamilton, 'titles go to their heads - Society turns them into mere social machines - sort of climbing tanks - funicular tanks . . ,'97 Nancy Dugdale, the newly married wife of Thomas Dugdale, Baldwin's Parliamentary Private Secretary and MP for Richmond in Yorkshire, was dismayed by Edward's 'marked preference for American women as opposed to English women'.98 Wallis decided that the British seemed to cherish a sentiment of settled disapproval towards anything American. She commented in her memoirs later that 'The only contemporary Americans, outside Hollywood, of whom British women appeared to have heard were named Vanderbilt, Astor, or Morgan. By and large they seemed mildly regretful that the continent had ever passed from the control of the Indians.'99 Nancy Astor made fun of this attitude towards Americans. She was the first woman to sit as an MP in Parliament and was herself an American, from Virginia. Playing charades during Christmas festivities at Cliveden, her family home, she invented 'an upper-crust British woman with prejudices against Abroad and "Emmericans".'100 Nonetheless, she objected to Wallis on the grounds of her social inferiority. When Edward invited Wallis and Ernest Simpson to dine at York House in May 1936, Lady Astor was indignant. She told Harold Nicolson that only the best Virginia families should be received at court, and that the effect in Canada and the USA would be deplorable. (Nicolson commented in a letter to his wife that he refrained from the retort that, 'after all, every American is more or less as vulgar as any other American'.)101
As well as lacking both title and wealth, and being American, what made Wallis objectionable to the English upper class was that she was divorced. In fact, civil divorce had been legal in Britain since 1858: divorced persons had the right to remarry, and the legally innocent party of a divorce could remarry with the sanction of the Church of England. Some attitudes to divorce in Society circles were enlightened: in 1906 Waldorf Astor had married Nancy Langhorne - the future Lady Astor - who was then a twenty-six-year-old American divorcee with a six-year-old son. Waldorf's father, William Waldorf, had trusted his son's judgement and assured Nancy that, 'If you are good enough for Waldorf, then you will be good enough for me."02 But overwhelmingly, divorce was a barrier in public life and court circles.
Wallis had been presented at court in June 1931, but this was allowed only because she had been the innocent party in her divorce. Because of this interdict, 'which rightly or wrongly I regarded as hypocritical,' observed Edward in his memoirs, 'an ever-increasing number of otherwise worthy and blameless men and women were forced to stand apart in a permanent state of obloquy.'
There were mutterings of horror and indignation when in the summer of 1936 Edward took Wallis on a cruise through the Adriatic aboard the Nahlin. She was one of several select guests, including Lord Sefton, Helen Fitzgerald, Duff Cooper and Lady Diana Cooper, and Lord and Lady Brownlow, as well as Katherine and Herman Rogers, the friends with whom Wallis had stayed in Peking. The Captain of the ship found Mrs Simpson 'a most charming lady'. This view was shared by a bedroom steward on the ship, who remembered when Mrs Simpson joined the ship in Poland, and her stay on board until leaving at Constantinople three weeks later. 'I have had to deal with a great many ladies in my time,' he said, 'but I never met a more charming lady than she was.' It was a very happy party, he thought. As on the Rosaura two years earlier, Wallis's bedroom and Edward's bedroom were in the fore part of the ship, while the rest of the guests had rooms in the aft. After the King and his guests had left the Nablin, said the steward, the crew 'naturally spoke about them'; they had all liked Mrs Simpson. A dining room steward noticed that Wallis addressed Edward as 'Sir', but was not submissive - 'I mean that if His Majesty was speaking to other guests Mrs Simpson would butt in with some witty remark. When at the table I have noticed His Majesty leave off talking to others to answer Mrs Simpson.'101
Lady Diana Cooper seemed to resent Wallis's presence. 'It's impossible to enjoy antiquities with people who won't land for them and who call Delphi Delhi', she wrote, snobbishly. 'Wallis is wearing very very badly. Her commonness and Becky Sharpishness irritate', she added, likening Wallis to the social climber in Thackeray's Vanity Fair.105 Diana's hostility may have been fed by annoyance that the King was not paying her much attention on the cruise. As the daughter of the Duke of Rutland and someone who was generally regarded as one of the most beautiful women in London, she was usually at the centre of anything that was going on.
Although the Nahlin voyage had been planned as a holiday, Edward also visited the battlefields of Gallipoli and performed a number of royal duties. He visited the King of Greece and the King of Yugoslavia, helping to cement friendly ties between these nations and Britain. While they were in Greece, Sir Sydney Waterlow, the British Ambassador in Athens, was impressed by the bond between Wallis and Edward. He wondered 'whether this union, however queer and generally unsuitable and embarrassing for the state, may not in the long run turn out to be more in harmony with the spirit of the new age than anything that wisdom could have contrived.'106 Edward also met with Kemal Ataturk, the ruler of Turkey. This was the first time a British king had ever been to Turkey, and the occasion was a great success. On his way home Edward visited Vienna, where he made a point of looking at housing estates for the poor. An Austrian living in London later wrote to a member of Edward's staff to tell him of the King's immense popularity in her country, for which he has done such a lot. We have the greatest trust in him to prevent another war at all costs and admire his genuine concern for the people and their problems. It really made an impression in Vienna when the King visited the Workmen's blocks of flats with such in
terest.107
Despite her divorced status, her nationality and her lack of the kind of social status that counted in Britain, Wallis had many friends, among them journalists, politicians, diplomats and artists of all kinds. Elsie de Wolfe, a Parisian hostess, instructed her on entertaining and introduced her to fashion designers such as Schiaparelli and Mainbocher. One lively friend was 'Foxy' Gwynne, whom Wallis had got to know in Paris during her stay there years before. Foxy had once been a fashion model and owed her nickname to her red hair. She was later to marry the Earl of Sefton, who was a good friend of Edward's.
An especially close and loyal friend in London was Sybil, Lady Colefax, a pretty and popular social hostess in her early sixties. Many people shared Charles Lambe's view that 'Lady Colefax was nice, intelligent and sympathetic. I felt at ease with her.'108 Like Wallis, she was a remarkably resourceful woman. After losing her wealth in the crash of 1929, she set up a very successful business in interior decoration, which popularized the vogue for English chintz. When her husband died in February 1936, she had to move out of her grand home, Argyll House, to a much smaller home on Lord North Street in Westminster. But despite the relative shortage of space, money and time, she continued to be an influential hostess. The number of her acquaintances was vast. 'I would so like to ask someone to meet you,' wrote the novelist E. M. Forster to Lady Colefax, 'whom you don't know, but whom do I know whom you don't know, I don't know.'109 Unusually for a social hostess, Lady Colefax was politically left of centre and usually voted Labour; she invited Labour politicians and their wives to her soirees and was a great admirer of the radical economist John Maynard Keynes.110