The Duchess Of Windsor (36 page)

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Authors: Greg King

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David asked Lord Perry Brownlow to accompany Wallis to Cannes. Brownlow, a former officer in the Grenadier Guards and lord-in-waiting to the King, and his wife, Kitty, had spent a great deal of time with Wallis, and both liked her. In turn, she trusted Brownlow completely. Since the roads around the Fort were now under continual press surveillance, the King and Brownlow determined that George Ladbrook, the chauffeur, would drive Wallis’s Buick to Newhaven on the coast, where he would lodge it aboard an overnight ferry to Dieppe. Ladbrook would be accompanied by Inspector Evans from Scotland Yard to ensure that there were no difficulties. Brownlow, meanwhile, would collect Wallis in his car at the Fort and drive her to the ferry, where they could then switch cars.
28
Mary Burke, who had accompanied Wallis from London to the Fort, quickly packed her things. Wallis, meanwhile, spent the afternoon engaged in a less than pleasant task: Uncertain as to her future and well aware that threats were being made against her life, she drew up a new will on Fort Belvedere stationery. While Wallis packed, David continued to work on the speech he proposed to give to the nation; as soon as she left, he would return to London and meet with Baldwin at Buckingham Palace to formally seek his permission to broadcast to the country and empire?
29
Late that afternoon, Walter Monckton arrived with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Valerie, and, together with David and Wallis, sat down to a late lunch at the Fort. Valerie would remember that Wallis, despite her earth-shattering troubles, had been immensely kind to her, making great efforts to include her in the conversation and asking questions about her life. Wallis, she remembered, carefully addressed the King as “sir” in her presence. From a previous visit, Valerie noted, the King had also remembered that she liked a particular kind of beverage and had himself made certain that it was placed on the dining table at Valerie’s place.
30
Perry Brownlow arrived late that afternoon, and Wallis’s suitcases were quickly loaded in the two cars. “Hurried as were my last moments at the Fort,” she later wrote, “they were nonetheless poignant. I think we all had a sense of tragedy, of irretrievable finality. As for me, this was the last hour of what had been for me the enchanted years. I was sure I would never see David again.” Shortly after seven, Wallis walked through the octagonal hall and stood at the front door of the Fort. She hugged Aunt Bessie, then turned to David, who took her in his arms. “I don’t know how it’s all going to end,” he said. “It will be some time before we can be together again. You must wait for me no matter how long it takes. I shall never give you up.”
31
Slowly, Wallis climbed into the waiting car. With tears running down his cheeks, David reached through the open window to touch her hand and whispered, “Bless you, my darling!”
32
As Ladbrooke eased the car down the gravel drive, Wallis turned to look back on the turrets of the Fort, the yellow lights of its windows burning against the dark sky.
33
Wallis and Brownlow drove in silence through the thick fog for many minutes. Finally, however, Brownlow told Wallis that the previous evening he had been to Stornoway House, where he dined with Beaverbrook, Walter Monckton, George Allen, and Esmond Harmsworth. They had discussed the crisis at length and come to the conclusion that the only way to keep the King on his throne was for Wallis to publicly renounce him and disappear forever from his life.
34
Now, as they drove through the quiet countryside, Brownlow went further. He explained to Wallis that if she left the country he felt certain that the King would almost assuredly abdicate the throne so that he could be at her side. Wallis was not entirely convinced, but Brownlow continued to argue persuasively until she finally asked what he thought she should do. He suggested that she come to his country house, Belton, at Grantham; by remaining in England, he hoped, Wallis would be able to influence the King not to abdicate. Ladbrooke pulled the car over to the side of the road while Wallis and Brownlow discussed the situation for several minutes.
35
Wallis was quiet as she considered her options. She was convinced that David would be furious at this subterfuge. Brownlow agreed, but said he was willing to sacrifice his friendship with the King for the sake of keeping him on the throne.
36
Finally, Wallis made up her mind. “Knowing David as I did,” she wrote, “I was more than doubtful that anyone, including me, could change his mind. If I stayed and my pleas failed, I should always be accused of secretly urging him to give up the Throne.” She saw no option but to completely remove herself from the situation. “I am far from certain that I did the right thing in leaving Great Britain,” she later wrote; “indeed, today, in the long view of hindsight, I am ready to concede that, in all likelihood, Perry was right and I was wrong. The instant I started across the Channel, I had ceased to exist, so far as my being able to influence the King’s mind was concerned.”
37
At Newhaven, Wallis and Brownlow quickly boarded the ferry, where they took adjoining cabins under the name Mr. and Mrs. Harris. When they docked, they climbed into Wallis’s Buick and left the ferry. However, they had neglected to change the paperwork, and customs’ officials quickly learned that Mrs. Ernest Simpson was entering the country. “You’ve been found out, Mrs. Harris,” Brownlow whispered to Wallis as they cleared customs. Within a matter of hours, word had reached the French press, and the hunt began.
38
Thus began a drawn-out game of cat and mouse between Wallis and the press, played out across the 650 miles separating Dieppe and Cannes. At two in the morning, they stopped at Rouen, where they booked adjoining rooms under the name of Harris at the nearly deserted Hotel de la Poste. Wallis was too tired even to change out of her traveling clothes and simply collapsed on her bed.
39
“Perry, will you please leave the door open between your room and mine?” she begged quietly. “I’m so frightened. I’m so nervous.”
Brownlow heard her through the darkness, sobbing, an uncontrollable wail. Then she cried out, “Perry, will you please sleep in the bed next to me? I cannot be alone.” “Sounds came out of her,” Brownlow recalled, “that were absolutely without top, bottom . . . that were
primeval
. There was nothing I could do but lie down beside her, hold her hand, and make her feel that she was not alone.”
40
Eventually, Wallis stopped crying and fell asleep. The next morning, Brownlow woke her and said quickly that they had overslept and must leave at once. Wallis did not even have time to bathe or change clothes; she quickly ate a roll and downed a cup of tea before she joined Brownlow below. The hotel lobby was now filled with people, who, recognizing her, pointed and whispered loudly. She and Brownlow made a run for the car, but just as she entered, an altercation broke out, and Inspector Evans smashed a camera held by a girl trying to take Wallis’s photograph. Once in the car, Wallis, visibly upset at the mob scene, asked Evans why he had taken the camera. He quickly explained that he was under strict orders from the King and had no way of knowing whether the girl had a concealed gun.
41
They stopped at Evreux in Normandy so that Wallis could telephone the King. The connection was bad, and she had to shout through the receiver. Again, she begged David to do nothing rash, pleaded with him not to abdicate, and insisted that he meet with members of the government. There was little she could do, however, since David was even more distant and uncommunicative than ever before. Wallis left the booth in such a hurry that she forgot the rough notes on which she had scribbled her pleas and left them lying beside the telephone.
42
During these conversations, and in the ones which followed once Wallis reached Cannes, she complained of a clicking noise. Perry Brownlow later discovered that the King’s telephone lines were being tapped by the MI-5 British security force.
43
Brownlow recalled these conversations as agonized pleas: “You will never ever see me again,” Wallis cried to David. “I will be lost in South America.
Never
leave your country! You
cannot
give in! You can
not!
You were
born
to this, it is your
heritage
, it is
demanded
of you by your country, by the traditions of nine hundred years.”
44
The incessant rain and fog made the drive difficult, and on the second night, the group stopped at Blois in the Loire Valley. Almost as soon as they had checked in to the local hotel, however, the lobby was filled with a mob of reporters. Brownlow appeared before them and in a loud voice informed Inspector Evans that they would be leaving at nine the following morning. He then ran upstairs and explained to Wallis that they must be ready to leave at dawn to avoid the press. Brownlow woke Wallis at three; she quickly dressed, took coffee, and silently crept out of the hotel, past the dozing reporters in the lobby.
45
It was snowing as they continued their drive south. They stopped several times along the route, and Wallis was spotted by townspeople, who pointed at her and exclaimed,
“Voilà la dame!”
“This, I reflected bitterly, was what I had finally been brought to—no longer Wallis Simpson, no longer just another woman, but
the
woman. I was marked.”
46
By now, Wallis’s Buick was being trailed by a long line of cars filled with members of the press. They stopped at a small cafe so that Wallis might ring the King, but the connection was bad, and she had to shout her pleas before the inquisitive eyes and ears of the gathered newsmen. To escape, she and Brownlow begged the restaurant manager to let them out by way of the kitchen. They had to climb from a first-floor window and drop onto the ground below. “It was a feat,” Wallis recalled, “that would, I am sure, have brought a nod of approval from Miss Charlotte Noland, my girlhood gym instructor of Arundel days.” As they drove away, Brownlow whispered with a smile, “Too bad Stanley Baldwin missed that little scene.”
47
Finally, at half-past two in the morning on December 6, the car reached Cannes. Wallis lay on the floor of the Buick, covered with a lap rug, as they passed through an immense mob of reporters, their cameras flashing as it drove through the gates of the Villa Lou Viei. Herman and Katherine Rogers waited at the door and quickly pulled Wallis inside. She had finally reached her safe haven.
48
21
 
The Struggle for the Throne
 
F
OR WALLIS, LIFE HAD BECOME
intolerable. The press was encamped, “like a besieging army,” all around the thick walls of the twelfth-century villa. Reporters crawled over the gates, tried to look into windows, and somehow, managed to tap the telephone lines. Finally, the French police had to be called in to clear the mob away.
1
As soon as she had safely ensconced herself at Lou Viei, Wallis sat down and wrote an anguished plea to David: “I am so anxious for you not to
abdicate
and I think the fact that you do is going to put me in the wrong light to the entire world because they will say that I could have prevented it.... I feel so terrified of what the world will say. . . .”
2
The storm had broken with a fury in America. Newspaper headlines screamed Wallis’s name across their banners; reporters hinted that it was only a matter of days before the crisis reached its zenith. In Baltimore, crowds gathered on the sidewalk before her former house, staring at its blank windows. Souvenir hunters stormed Blue Ridge Summit and literally began ripping pieces of siding off the house where she had been born.
On December 3, the same day on which Wallis had left the country, Winston Churchill made a planned speech at Albert Hall in which he repeated his plea for rearmament and his defense of the League of Nations. He ended: “There is another grave matter that overshadows our minds tonight. In a few minutes we are going to sing ‘God Save the King.’ I shall sing it with more heartfelt fervour than I have ever sung it in my life. I hope and pray that no irrevocable decision will be taken in haste, but that time and public opinion will be allowed to play their part and that a cherished and unique personality may not be incontinently severed from the people he loves so well.”
3
When Churchill sat down, the audience erupted into loud applause and shouted a resounding “Three cheers for the King.”
As soon as Wallis left the Fort, David returned to London for a nine o’clock meeting with Baldwin at Buckingham Palace. The King raised the idea of possibly speaking to the country—something for which he needed to obtain the government’s permission. Baldwin replied that he would consult his colleagues but that he thought the idea of the broadcast was itself unconstitutional.
“You want me to go, don’t you?” David asked him bluntly. “And before I go, I think it is right, for her sake and mine, that I should speak.”
“What I want, Sir,” Baldwin replied, “is what you told me you wanted: to go with dignity, not dividing the country, and making things as smooth as possible for your successor. To broadcast would go over the heads of your Ministers and speak to the people. You will be telling millions throughout the world—among them a vast number of women—that you are determined to marry one who has a husband living. They will want to know all about her, and the press will ring with gossip, the very thing you want to avoid. . . .”
4
As soon as the prime minister left Buckingham Palace, David drove down the Mall to visit his mother at Marlborough House. There he found that Queen Mary had also asked the Duke and Duchess of York and his sister Mary, the Princess Royal.
It is often repeated that the Duke and Duchess of York, who would inherit the throne should the King abdicate, were deliberately kept in the dark by Edward VIII during these crucial weeks. The Yorks certainly believed that David was avoiding them, and Elizabeth is said to have exclaimed in frustration, “Everyone knows more than we do; we know nothing. Nothing!”
5
But the abdication did not come without warning. On Monday, November 23, the Yorks had both written letters to David in which they indicated their support. “When you told me of your decision to marry Wallis the other evening,” Bertie wrote, “I do hope you did not think that I was unsympathetic about it. Since then I have been thinking a great deal about you, as I do so long for you to be happy with the one person you adore. I, of all people, should understand your own personal feelings at this time, which I do indeed. I do realize all your great difficulties, & I feel sure that whatever you decide to do will be in the best interests of the Country & Empire.” And the Duchess, aware of her husband’s nervous disposition, implored David to treat Bertie with kindness, adding, “We want you to be happy more than anything else.”
6
Such letters were to cause great misunderstanding. David read them at their surface value: His brother and sister-in-law, knowing of his intention to marry Wallis or abdicate, had expressed their full support. They were aware of the consequences, and Bertie had even assured his brother that in following his heart, he was certain he would do what, in the end, was best for the country and the empire. On the very day after these letters were written, David again met with Bertie and told him that he would likely abdicate the throne. The Yorks were therefore as well informed as the King himself in the weeks preceding the crisis.
The Duchess of York was so angry at her brother-in-law that she declined to take part in the family discussions at Marlborough House that evening; she only learned the details later from her husband and from Queen Mary. David explained that he had refrained from seeing his family for the last week because he had been waiting for word from Baldwin and had been anxious to avoid any pain. “I have no desire to bring you and the family into all this,” David declared. “This is something I must handle alone.”
7
Bertie, in an account of the abdication crisis written later, recalled: “Later [in Mary’s and my presence] David said to Queen Mary that he could not live alone as King and must marry Mrs.___.”
8
He could not even bring himself to write Wallis’s name. After this, David asked his brother to come to the Fort on the following morning to meet with him.
On Friday, December 4, Baldwin was to speak in the House of Commons. Chips Channon recalled the anticipation as Baldwin entered the chamber: “The Cabinet, looking like a picture by Franz Hals, a lot of grim Elders of the Kirk, squirmed nervously. Then he rose, and in a stentorian voice, unsmiling and ungracious, I thought, announced flatly that there was no middle course. . . .”
9
Baldwin declared:
Suggestions have appeared in certain organs of the Press yesterday, and again today, that if the King decided to marry, his wife need not become Queen. These ideas are without foundation. There is no such thing as what is called morganatic marriage known to our law.
The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 has no application to the Sovereign himself. Its only effect is that the marriage of any other member of the Royal Family is null and void unless the Sovereign’s consent, declared under the Great Seal, is first obtained. The Act, therefore, has nothing to do with the present case. The King himself requires no consent from any other authority to make his marriage legal.
But, as I have said, the lady whom he marries, by the fact of her marriage to the King, necessarily becomes Queen. She herself therefore enjoys all the status, rights and privileges which both by positive law and by custom attach to that position, and with which we are familiar in the case of her late Majesty Queen Alexandra, and her Majesty Queen Mary, and her children would be in the direct succession to the Throne.
The only way in which this result could be avoided would be by legislation dealing with a particular case. His Majesty’s Government are not prepared to introduce such legislation.
Moreover, the matters to be dealt with are of so common concern to the Commonwealth as a whole, and such a change could not be effected without the assent of all the Dominions. I am satisfied, from enquiries I have made, that this assent would not be forthcoming.
10
 
Hearing this, Churchill stood up and shouted at Baldwin, “You won’t be satisfied until you’ve broken him, will you?”
11
That Friday evening, Baldwin was expected at the Fort for another meeting with the King. David, who had learned of the scene in the House of Commons, feared that a confrontation was inevitable. He knew that it was only the question of marriage that had caused the crisis: According to Perry Brownlow, the King told him “that the Archbishop of Canterbury had said to him, almost in so many words, that he should keep Wallis as his mistress, and in the background.”
12
This somewhat hypocritical view is backed up by a letter written by Beaverbrook to his friend Roy Howard on December 8, 1936: “The opposition to the King’s project of marriage to Mrs. Simpson is essentially religious in character. He is lay head of the Church of England, and the chief priests and the Sanhedrin say, in effect, that he may live in sin with her, but must not marry a woman who has been married twice before.”
13
This option is almost certainly what Wallis herself would have preferred in light of the crisis. Although she may have harbored a desire to become his wife, she was more than willing to remain in the background as a mistress and stay at his side. Then, with the passage of time, her gradual introduction to society and the public through charity involvements and other appearances, and eventual acceptance, they might marry.
14
When David had informed Monckton that he would likely be forced to abdicate, the latter was determined to do all he could to ensure that the King could marry Mrs. Simpson. “I was desperately afraid that the King might give up his Throne and yet be deprived of his chance to marry Mrs. Simpson.” Until the decree was final, the King’s proctor could claim collusion or illegalities in the Simpson divorce and stop the proceedings. The proctor could not cite David in the case, but once he ceased being King, he was as vulnerable to court action as any other subject. Monckton suggested that a special bill be coupled to the abdication which would make the decree nisi final immediately. “This would have cleared up a grave constitutional position affecting the whole world and left no ragged ends or possibilities for further scandal,” he explained.
15
David readily agreed, since he did not want to wait until April to be with Wallis.
Baldwin arrived at the Fort and immediately delivered bad news: the cabinet would not allow the King to broadcast to the nation and Dominions. David was distressed at this, but he said nothing. The prime minister, realizing that he held the upper hand, then pushed the King to make a declaration of his intentions. When David put him off, Baldwin replied, “There is still time for you to change your mind, Sir. That is indeed the prayer of Your Majesty’s servants.”
“I studied the Prime Minister some time before answering. . . .” David later wrote. “For me to do what he asked would have meant my abandoning, in the full view of the watching world, the woman whom I had asked to marry me. If it were indeed Mr. Baldwin’s prayer that I should save my Crown by so base a surrender, that noble ornament would have been laid upon a head forever bent in shame.”
16
The King then raised a sensitive political issue: Were he to abdicate, would it be possible to attach a special bill, as Monckton had suggested, to the abdication which immediately granted Mrs. Simpson’s decree
nisi?
Hearing this, Baldwin must have realized that there would be no fight. David was more concerned with ensuring his eventual marriage to Mrs. Simpson than with keeping the throne. Knowing that the end was in sight, Baldwin told David that he would support the special bill, and if the House of Commons refused to pass the measure, he and the cabinet would resign.
David seemed relieved; he told Baldwin that he needed several days in which to sort through his affairs but that the prime minister would have a formal decision shortly. There was no doubt in Baldwin’s mind that the King would leave. “Well, Sir,” Baldwin is said to have declared, somewhat improbably, “whatever happens, my Mrs. and I wish you happiness from the depths of our souls.” Hearing this, David was overwhelmed and began to cry; Baldwin soon joined him. “What a strange conversation piece, those two blubbering together on a sofa,” wrote Harold Nicolson.
17
An hour after Baldwin left, Churchill arrived at the Fort. Knowing that the King had previously pondered a decision to go abroad for the duration of the crisis, Churchill now advised David to remain in the country and drop the entire question of marriage until the decree absolute had been granted. If the government would not agree to the marriage after the coronation, the King could then accept their resignation rather than they his. But David said nothing, and Churchill left the Fort uncertain of his intentions.
18
That night, pacing up and down his bedroom floor, David decided to abdicate. In truth, he now had little choice. If he persisted and attempted to marry Wallis before the coronation, as was his wish, the government would resign. David would then be forced to form a new government whose sole
raison d’être
would be justification and support of his controversial marriage. The two choices that might have allowed the King to remain on the throne, a morganatic marriage and a direct appeal to the people, had now both fallen through.

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