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.
Freda was sometimes painfully honest in her efforts to keep the Prince at bay. ‘I can’t help hating and loathing the fact that you are in love with somebody else and it was a big blow when you told me the other day,’ he wrote to her. ‘It’s a horrid thought for me that I really mean nothing whatever to you now, though you mean the hell of a lot to me, bless you.’58 He did, of course, mean a great deal to her, and was to do so for many years. He for his part continued to treat her as confidante and friend; she remained the lodestar of his life, he reported back to her faithfully after every new amatory or other escapade. To the outside world – or at least those parts of the outside world which were near enough to the inside to know of Mrs Dudley Ward’s existence – they remained inextricably linked. In 1927 Churchill travelled in the same train as they to Nottingham – ‘It was quite pathetic to see the Prince and Freda. His love is so obvious and undisguisable’; the following year Brian Howard refused to let his seaside house to the Prince – ‘He’d only break all the furniture to pieces playing Blind Man’s Buff with Mrs Dudley Ward’; a year later again the Prince’s equerry, John Aird, was relieved to find that his employer wanted to leave Epsom as soon as the Derby was over. Then Freda Dudley Ward appeared on the scene. ‘The result being that we now waited to see the next race and in consequence the car was blocked all the way back.’59
Though the Prince’s devotion to Mrs Dudley Ward continued unabated throughout the 1920s and well into the next decade, it was for him in some ways an unfulfilling, even sterile relationship. He craved total mutual devotion and dependence; deprived of it, he thrashed about aimlessly, causing pain to many in so doing and most notably to himself. The relationship was not close enough to satisfy him, yet it was too close to permit any more permanent liaison. While Mrs Dudley Ward reigned, there could be no Princess of Wales. In 1922 he described to Freda his feelings towards her younger sister Vera: ‘I love Verie a tiny bit for herself, though more because she is your sister and still more because you love her so!! You will remember our discussing her as a possible wife for me, darling, but each day longer that I live, the more certain I am that I’ll never never ever love anyone else again. And I would never marry any woman I liked unless I loved her!!’60 Seven years later nothing had changed. ‘I know our two lives aren’t absolutely satisfactory and I’m afraid they won’t ever be now, but I do know this, my angel: that I love you too much to ever be able to love anybody else ever again. I’m always comparing and they can’t any of them compare and I’m so glad. I lost my head once over a crazy physical attraction. Look at the result. Just made a fool of myself, that’s all. Nothing left of it but nausea.’61
One page survives from a reproachful letter written to him by one of the women with whom he tried to solace the pain of Freda Dudley Ward’s inaccessibility. ‘I only hope,’ the page concludes, ‘that as you love her so much, Freda will marry you and make you very happy.’62 The words were presumably ironic; the writer must have known that the idea of marriage with the Prince of Wales never entered the head of Mrs Dudley Ward. How far it entered the head of the Prince is harder to decide. He said often that Freda was the solitary woman whom he could marry; yet the only person who stated positively that he had proposed to her and been rejected was Lord Brownlow.63 Brownlow knew the Prince well but it is curious that there is no reference to any such démarche in the Prince’s many surviving letters. The implication in his correspondence, indeed, is that he had never contemplated any such possibility. His lament was always that he had not known her before 1913, the year of her marriage;64 once she had become Mrs Dudley Ward she had put herself for ever out of his reach.
If he had known her before 1913 he would have been too immature to pay her any serious attention. It is tempting to speculate, however, on what would have happened if Dudley Ward had died in battle and Freda, when he met her in 1918, had been not an estranged wife but a decorously merry widow. Could he and would he have married her, and if so, what difference would it have made?
The fact that she was a commoner would have created difficulties but would not have made the match impossible. As late as 1932 the Prince of Wales told his father that he had never realized he might be allowed to marry ‘a suitable well-born English girl’. No one had ever suggested the possibility to him before, he said, ‘There was only one lady he had ever wished to marry and that was Mrs Dudley Ward – and he would still like to marry her. But the King said he didn’t think that would do.’65 The Prince’s ignorance is extraordinary; the matter had constantly been debated over the previous fifteen years. All the evidence suggests that if he did not know that he might be allowed to marry a British commoner it was because he had not asked. And if he did not ask, it was because he did not wish to know; he was determined not to marry anyone except Freda and preferred to keep in his mind this half-imaginary barrier in the way of matrimony. In fact as early as 1917 George V recorded that he had told the Privy Council his children would be allowed to marry into British families: ‘It was quite a historical occasion.’66 The fact that Edward was Prince of Wales would have made the King more cautious about the suitability of any candidate, but nothing was said to indicate that the eldest son was to be treated differently from his siblings. The objection to Rosemary Leveson-Gower had been not that she was a commoner but that there was ‘a taint in the blood’. If the Prince did not know this then he wilfully blinded himself to reality.
A widowed Mrs Dudley Ward would certainly not have seemed suitable to the King and Queen. There would have been strong opposition, possibly too strong to overcome. For one thing the previous marriage, with the problems it would have posed, such as semi-royal stepchildren, would have been a serious obstacle. For another, a lace-manufacturer’s daughter, however respectable, would not have seemed the right sort of match for a British prince, let alone the heir to the throne. But beneath his testiness George V was a kindly and susceptible man, sincerely anxious that his son should find happiness and security. There was at least a chance that the obstinacy of the Prince and the charms of Mrs Dudley Ward would in the end have worn down his resistance. Queen Freda would have seemed a surprising concept to the British people, but so great was the popularity of the Prince of Wales in the years after the war that public opinion would