Once upon a time there was a charming, handsome prince. Whenever he visited even the farthest reaches of his kingdom, his people flocked to see him. He was adored the world over. Everyone expected him to marry a pretty, well-bred English virgin who would one day become Queen of England and its vast empire. But, when the prince was thirty-seven years old – having previously shown no sign of wanting to get married – he fell in love with an odd-looking, twice-divorced American. No one thought that the affair would last, so everyone close to him kept quiet about it. When the prince’s father, the king, died five years later, the prince inherited the Crown. Courtiers assumed that the new king would find a suitable young bride. To their horror he said that he could not continue to be king without the American woman he loved by his side and that he intended to marry her. Everyone in the royal palaces, the prime minister, the government, the Church, were shocked. They accused the wicked witch-divorcee of being a sorceress who had cast a spell over their poor, gentle prince in order to become queen. The king’s ministers told him that if he married this terrible woman, he would have to surrender the Crown.
But instead of renouncing his love, the king sacrificed his whole realm – an empire of over five hundred million people – to be with her. He only ruled for 326 days, making his reign one of the shortest in his country’s history. His devoted subjects were heartbroken. They blamed the ugly witch for taking their beloved sovereign away from them. His family banished him from the land, leaving him free to marry the woman he loved. Denied royal status, the couple spent the rest of their lives in exile, roaming the world aimlessly, sad that they could not return to the king’s homeland and to the little castle that he adored. The world, meanwhile, imagined that this was the Greatest Love Story Ever Told and that husband and wife went on to live Happily Ever After.
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The story of the abdication of King Edward VIII and his marriage to Wallis Simpson has been told so many times that it has taken on the character of a fairy tale. Like fairy tales, much of what we are repeatedly told is in fact make-believe. The most scandalous love affair of the twentieth century may have softened into a romantic legend with time, but dark myths still endure. The dashing young prince, whose charisma and glamour ensured him the status of a movie star, gave up ‘the greatest throne in history’, as Churchill called it, to marry his one true love, an American divorcee. Surely, there can be no greater act of sacrifice than to give up such power, privilege and adoration for love? And for a woman whose appeal was such a mystery to most.
Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Windsor was considered the world’s most eligible bachelor. Society hostess Elsa Maxwell first met the Prince of Wales in the early 1920s ‘at Mrs Cuckoo Belleville’s house in Manchester Square. He was a gay, golden-haired, blue-eyed, debonair Prince Charming, the most famous celebrity in the world, who seemed a Raphael angel grown up. He projected an aura of glamour that was as unmistakeable as it was authentic.’ To the fashion editor Diana Vreeland ‘he was the Golden Prince. You must understand that to be a woman of my generation in London – any woman – was to be in love with the Prince of Wales.’
Men were equally beguiled. Even the senior Palace courtier, Alan Lascelles, known in royal circles as ‘Tommy’ and later a fierce critic of the former king, gushed in 1921 that the heir to the throne was ‘the most attractive man I ever met’. Piers ‘Joey’ Legh, an equerry who remained in the prince’s service for twenty years, accompanying him into exile, said of Edward a decade after the abdication: his ‘charm was so great that he would thrill with emotion if the duke entered the room just now’.
When news of Wallis Simpson’s affair with Edward broke from under a media blackout in 1936, what seemed unfathomable was why, when the Prince of Wales could have had any beauty he desired, he was smitten with an unconventional, severe-looking American, two years his junior with two living husbands. So much gossip and innuendo has been levelled at Wallis that it has become near impossible to discern the real woman or to hear her authentic voice amid the cacophony of condemnation. As her friend Herman Rogers said of her in 1936, ‘much of what is being said concerns a woman who does not exist and never did exist’. Lady Monckton, a close friend of the Windsors, later concurred: ‘People were always being nasty about Wallis. You must remember how jealous people felt when the Prince of Wales fell in love with her.’
Ever since, we have been overfed a diet of fantastical slander: that Wallis was really a man; that she had a perverse psycho-sexual hold over the prince; that she used manipulation and feminine wiles to lure him into abdicating; that she was a ruthless, cold, ambitious bitch, who schemed from the outset to be Queen of England. The well-worn view is that she alone was responsible for almost bringing down the British monarchy, triggering a constitutional crisis caused by her determination to marry the heir apparent. We have experienced her so fully as Machiavellian through others’ projections and prejudice, through misogynistic memoirs, biographies and unflattering portrayals, that she has become a caricature of villainous womanhood. Devoid of warmth, emotional complexity and a beating heart, she remains the brittle victim of salacious chatter and brutal character assassination many decades after her pitiful death.
Instead of simply belittling Wallis and defaming her reputation, we might try to understand this modern, intelligent, remarkable woman and the impossible situation she was placed in. She was, in fact, very warm, funny, irresistibly charming, loyal and dignified to the end. Adored by her many friends, she was written off by a cunning, powerful British establishment who sought to destroy and diminish her; men like Tommy Lascelles – who famously dismissed Wallis as ‘shop-soiled’ with ‘a voice like a rusty saw’ – the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin, and Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
However, far from being the villain of the abdication, Wallis was the victim. Instead of pushing for Edward to leave the throne, she had tried to prevent it. What most of her detractors fail to acknowledge is that she never wanted to marry Edward. Naturally she was initially flattered by his attention; as an American woman, living in London surrounded by society hostesses and social climbers, she felt giddy to be included in His Royal Highness’s elegant and rarefied circle. What woman would not have been beguiled by the prince’s ‘unmistakable aura of power and authority?’ According to Wallis: ‘His slightest wish seemed always to be translated instantly into the most impressive kind of reality. Trains were held; yachts materialised; the best suites in the finest hotels were flung open; aeroplanes stood waiting.’ Wallis made no secret of her open-mouthed delight, but she also believed Edward’s interest in her was transitory. She never expected his infatuation to last. In 1935 she wrote to her beloved aunt, Bessie Merryman, in Wallis’s hometown of Baltimore: ‘What a bump I’ll get when a young beauty appears and plucks the Prince from me. Anyway, I am prepared.’
The real tragedy for Wallis is that she could never have been prepared for what was to come, for the speed with which events spun so quickly out of her control. Though worldly, she would find herself painfully out of her depth. Unable to juggle her settled, second marriage to Ernest Simpson with the overwhelming and incessant demands of a besotted prince – whom she and Ernest nicknamed ‘Peter Pan’ – Wallis became the perfect pawn. She did not bargain for Edward’s self-absorbed, possessive and stubborn love for her and his absolute refusal to give her up. Although she valiantly tried to break off the relationship prior to the abdication, it would become impossible for Wallis to ever leave his side.
Probably the biggest lie in this fable is that Wallis lured Edward from his destiny. Her detractors claim that if she had never divorced Ernest Simpson, the abdication would not have occurred. Yet the truth is that she had had no intention of divorcing Ernest. It was Edward, then king, who forced her into this untenable position. In the name of his needy love, Wallis paid the ultimate price: entrapment by a childish narcissist who threw the largest tantrum in history when he could not have the two things he wanted most in the world: Wallis and the throne.
When I began my research, keen to strip away decades of grotesque caricature in an attempt to find the real Wallis, I feared that doors might close. The opposite happened; people were keen to talk with me and I found that those close to the story did not hold Wallis in contempt. Many powerful, key players