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