The story of a calculating social climber from Pennsylvania who managed to claim the title of “duchess” and cause England’s first abdication in the process has fascinated people for decades. Wallis Simpson, for her part, would have preferred to have been “queen.” This desire drove her to pursue Edward VIII in the first place, forging a relationship that appeared rich and romantic to onlookers but was fraught with deception and opportunism at its core.
“It was a total mess,” says Andrew Morton, author of “Wallis In Love: The Untold Life of the Duchess of Windsor, The Woman Who Changed the Monarchy” (Grand Central Publishing), out Tuesday. “He was utterly adoring, and she had to put on an act, realizing that he had given up the throne of the greatest empire in order to marry a twice-divorced American. If she kicked him to the curb, she’d be the most reviled woman in British history.”
Before 2002, the Church of England would not perform weddings of rulers to divorcées with living former spouses. Not only was her second husband, Ernest Simpson, alive and well, their divorce wasn’t finalized until a month before she married the future king in 1937, after a three year affair. Wallis’ first marriage, to Navy aviator Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., whom she wed at age 20 in 1916, lasted 11 years.
Constitutionally, nothing could prevent Edward from marrying Wallis, but he realized that doing so would set off a crisis, as members of government would resign. In November 1936, he asked the prime minister if there was a way he could remain king, suggesting a morganatic marriage in which Wallis would not be named queen. The request was turned down.
A few weeks later, at 42, Edward gave up the throne to be with Wallis, who was 40 and still married.
She had mistakenly believed that she could, somehow, ascend to the throne and had a simple comment for Edward: “You god-damned fool.”
Morton’s biography presents more than 300 pages of letters, diary passages and interviews describing Wallis’ incredible climb up the social ladder.
Wallis was born in Blue Ridge Summit, Pa., in 1896, and five months later lost her young father to tuberculosis. Her mother was left destitute, so her father’s brother Solomon Davies Warfield supported Wallis (then Bessie Wallis Warfield) from infancy. She attended Maryland’s most expensive girls school and hobnobbed with society’s elite, learning early how to cultivate acquaintances for her own advantage. Then, and in those circles, this meant marrying for standing and for money. She boasted that she was the first of her friends to marry, choosing the reckless pilot Spencer who drank too much and left for months on end, providing opportunity for affairs with an Argentine diplomat and, it is reported, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law.
Within a year of her first divorce, she was remarried to Simpson, a wealthy international shipping executive. In time, she honed her ability to navigate a route from one person to the next to the ultimate prize. By 1931, just three years after marrying Simpson, Wallis had met Edward at a party, through a friend whose sister happened to be his mistress. “She now knew a girl who knew a girl who danced — and more — with the Prince of Wales. It would soon be her turn to cut in,” Morton writes of her scheming, while married, to meet the future king. “Mission accomplished,” Wallis wrote to her Aunt Bessie.
After the first meeting, she latched on to the possibility and the chase, orchestrating opportunities to befriend Edward, even if it meant including her husband, Ernest, in the festivities. For several years, they attended dinner parties and weekend visits at Edward’s retreat, becoming entrenched in London society. Thelma, Edward’s mistress, even suggested that Wallis be presented at court. By 1934, when Thelma was out of town, Wallis visited Edward on her sixth wedding anniversary, taking a two-month holiday with him while her spouse sailed for New York on business. She seized upon what appeared to be “an emotional untangling between the prince and Thelma,” winning his heart and replacing her.
Divorces were difficult and expensive, so people made other arrangements.
- Andrew Morton
Afterwards, Edward visited often at the London home of Wallis and Ernest. “The prince became such a regular . . . that it was he, rather than Ernest, who fixed the drinks and handed around the canapes,” Morton writes.
Ernest, well aware of the bracelets and diamond hairpins that his wife had been given, simply “complained about the cost of insurance rather than what it said about his wife’s relationship.”
Such affairs were commonplace, and when royalty was involved so much the more exciting. “Everybody had a lover in that world of high society,” says Morton. “Divorces were difficult and expensive, so people made other arrangements.”
Before he met Wallis, Edward was known as a playboy. After, he believed that he had found the one woman who was enough for him, although no one really understood why.
Not a beauty, Wallis nonetheless had charisma, irreverence and an ability to listen well, some maintained. Other theories would “exercise powerful minds for years to come,” Morton writes. “She was a low-born sorceress who used her sexual abilities to seduce the prince, the future king in thrall to an obsession rather than love,” many thought. “Queen Mary . . . believed that her son was under some kind of malign spell that would, in time, be broken.”
That was not to be. The wedding, which the royal family avoided, took place in France. Edward’s brother George VI assumed the throne, and his daughter Queen Elizabeth followed. Edward and Wallis became the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, while forces raged against them. Queen Mary shunned her son, years later condemning the betrayal that she and the nation felt, writing, “It seemed inconceivable to those who had made sacrifices during the war that you, as their king, refused a lesser sacrifice.”
For two years, Wallis and Edward lived in France until the start of World War II in 1939. Soon after, the duke was installed as governor of the Bahamas; following the war, they returned to France, not permitted to ever live in England.
Wallis, incensed that she would never be queen, kept up appearances, pretending to cherish the smitten Edward when she really loved someone else. For years, she was drawn to the married American and dear friend Herman Rogers, though she never managed to make him a lover. (Two days before she wed Edward, she even offered to have Herman’s baby.)
Though Wallis and Edward remained married for the duration of their lives, privately their union deteriorated. Having been cut off from the royal family, Wallis (who received death threats in the mail and was harassed in public) and Edward were typically short on money, something that women of the day could not tolerate. Said one: “They will have no country and he no job. Can any love exist or be nourished on this slender fare?”
What wasn’t entirely clear to outsiders was that Wallis was not interested in nourishing any such affection with her husband.
Edward was viewed as an anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer and Wallis went along.
With Edward, her “cruel streak” was in full force, and he “now had a lifetime to experience . . . her sharp tongue, wild temper, wounding criticism and utter self-absorption.”
In addition to the money grubbing, distrust and outright degradation that characterized their isolated existence, Edward was viewed as an anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer and Wallis went along. Evidence first emerged in 1937, when they traveled to Germany, “taking tea with Hitler at his mountain lair . . . in Bavaria.” Trips to the US were subsequently cancelled, and what friends they had were horrified by their poor judgment. Edward was rendered a “coward, a poor little man,” and she, “wretched and egocentric.” Their beliefs in some of Hitler’s ideology, according to Morton’s sources, further isolated them as the years went on.
Later, when Herman remarried in 1950 after his first wife’s death, a jealous Wallis lost her self-restraint and caroused publicly in France with a young heir to the Woolworth fortune, whose mother had funded the Windsors’ lifestyle. “Once my ambition was to be Queen of England. Now it’s to get Jessie Donohue drunk,” said Wallis of her rich friend.
By the 1960s, no one much cared about the pair. Edward again asked the queen if Wallis could have the Royal Highness title and was shot down. She was, though, despite the scandal, buried next to Edward at Frogmore Estate in Windsor, as is customary.
He died in 1972 at age 77 and she in 1986 at 89, after suffering from dementia and living in seclusion.
Talk of Wallis these days is timely, with the series “The Crown” on Netflix and the impending May marriage of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. Markle is also an American divorcée, though that is where the similarities end, says Morton, noting that the two provide “bookends to an era.”
His next book, “Meghan: A Hollywood Princess,” is due to be published in late April. “I think that she is the heir to Diana and more. She is everything that Diana wanted to be — good on the podium, good on her feet, with a point of view and opinionated,” he says of Markle. “The royals are going to have to think very carefully how best to use someone who already has a following and charisma, not someone who will be molded.”