Wallis, The Duchess of Windsor
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Wallis, The Duchess of Windsor (Bessie Wallis Windsor, née Warfield; later Spencer and Simpson) June 19, 1896 – April 24, 1986) was the wife of Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor. The desire of the Duke, as King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, to marry the then Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée, caused a constitutional crisis in the United Kingdom and the British Empire which ultimately led to his abdication in order to marry "the woman I love".
The Duchess of Windsor remains a controversial figure in British history. She was seen as the woman who took a highly popular king from his people. Her private life has remained a source of much speculation. Both the Duke and Duchess of Windsor have also been accused by some critics of being Nazi sympathisers.
Following her marriage to the former king, she was formally known as The Duchess of Windsor, without the style "Her Royal Highness".
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[edit] Birth and childhood
Bessie Wallis (sometimes written "Bessiewallis") Warfield was born in Square Cottage at Monterey Inn, a hotel at the resort of Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. She was the only child of Teackle Wallis Warfield and his wife, the former Alice M. Montague.[1] She was born either in 1895 (according to the 1900 census returns)[2] or in 1896 (according to the Duchess herself). Either way, she was born before her parents' marriage, which took place on 19 November 1896.[2] The family later deliberately obscured the birth and marriage dates in order to avoid the social stigma of illegitimacy. She was christened Bessie Wallis, in honour of her father and her mother's sister, Mrs. D. Buchanan Merryman of Washington, D.C., but was generally known as Wallis. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was five (or seventeen) months old. She was raised in Baltimore, Maryland.
[edit] Previous marriages
On November 8, 1916, Wallis Warfield married Earl Winfield Spencer, Jr., a hard-drinking, reportedly abusive US Navy pilot. She accompanied him to the Far East and they separated in 1925. They divorced two years later.
After her marriage to Spencer was dissolved, she became involved with Ernest Aldrich Simpson, a mild-mannered half-English, half-American shipping executive and former captain in the Coldstream Guards. He divorced his first wife, the former Dorothea Parsons Dechert (by whom he had a daughter, Audrey) to marry Wallis Spencer on July 21, 1928 at the Chelsea Register Office, Surrey. Their union lasted until their divorce in May, 1937.
[edit] Relationship with Edward, Prince of Wales
During her second marriage, Wallis was living in Britain and had been introduced to Edward, Prince of Wales. The Prince was the eldest son and heir of King George V and Queen Mary. Wallis allegedly became his mistress, although Edward denied to his death that she was his mistress before they married. Wallis soon ousted the Prince's previous companion, Chilean-American Thelma, Viscountess Furness, and distanced him from a former lover and confidante, the Anglo-American textile heiress Freda Dudley Ward.
By 1934, Edward was irretrievably besotted with Wallis, finding her domineering manner and abrasive irreverence toward his position appealing. The relationship infuriated his parents because of Wallis's unsuitability as a consort for a Prince of Wales, primarily on account of her marital history but also because of her evident obliviousness to the proprieties of her situation. Although the pre-war media in the UK remained deferential to the monarchy, and no stories of the affair were reported in domestic press, foreign and Commonwealth media reported Edward and Wallis's relationship widely.
[edit] Abdication Crisis
On January 20, 1936, King George V died and Edward ascended the throne as King Edward VIII. The next day, he broke royal protocol by watching the proclamation of his accession from a window of St. James's Palace, in the company of the still-married Wallis. The King’s behaviour and his relationship with Wallis made him unpopular with the 'Conservative' National British government, as well as horrifying his mother and brother.
The King of the United Kingdom is Supreme Governor of the Church of England. At the time of the proposed marriage, and indeed to this date, the Church of England did not recognise divorce nor the marriage of divorced people. Accordingly, while there was no civil law barrier to King Edward marrying Wallis, and she would have automatically become Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India, the Constitutional position was that the King could not marry a divorcee and remain as King (for to do so would conflict with his role as Supreme Governor).
Further the British government and the governments of the dominions (except the Irish Free State) were against the idea of marriage between the King and an American divorcee. The British Royal Family and the Churches of England and Scotland were also opposed to the union.
After Wallis filed for divorce from her second husband on October 27, her relationship with the King began to become public knowledge in the UK by early December. Wallis was forced to flee the country as the scandal broke, owing mostly to death threats, being driven to the south of France in a dramatic race to outrun the press. For the next three months, she would practically be under siege at the Villa Lou Viei, the home of her close friends Herman and Katherine Rogers.
Back in the United Kingdom, the King consulted with both the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Stanley Baldwin, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, on a way to marry Wallis and keep the throne. A suggested morganatic marriage was rejected by Baldwin and the other Commonwealth Prime Ministers, and Baldwin advised that if the King were to marry Wallis against his advice, he would be required to resign, causing a constitutional crisis. The Walter Monckton papers recently made available reveal that Wallis was willing to be cooperative with the both the government and the palace. As the issue of abdication gathered strength, John Theodore Goddard, Wallis's solicitor stated: "[his] client was ready to do anything to ease the situation but the other end of the wicket [Edward VIII] was determined." This seemingly indicated the King had made up his mind on the basis he had no option but to abdicate if he wished to marry Wallis [3]. The King signed the Instrument of Abdication on December 10, 1936, in the presence of his three surviving brothers, the Duke of York (who would ascend the throne the following day as King George VI), and Dukes of Gloucester and Kent. Special laws passed by the British Parliament, His Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act 1936 brought Edward's 325-day reign to an end at 1:52 p.m. GMT on 11 December. That day, HRH Prince Edward made a broadcast to the British people, saying of Wallis, "I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility, and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love".
Afterwards, Prince Edward left the UK and went to Austria, staying at Schloss Enzesfeld, the home of Baron Eugene and Baroness Kitty de Rothschild. Due to what seem to modern minds to be the antiquated divorce laws of the time, Edward had to remain apart from Wallis until there was no danger of compromising the granting of a decree absolute in her divorce proceedings. Upon her divorce being made final, she resumed her maiden name of Wallis Warfield. The couple were reunited at the Château de Candé on 4 May 1937.
[edit] Duchess of Windsor
Free to marry, Wallis and Edward married on June 3, 1937 at Château de Candé, Monts, France. No member of the British Royal Family attended the wedding.
Edward had previously been created Duke of Windsor by his brother, the new King George VI. However, letters patent, passed by the new King, prevented Wallis from using the style of Her Royal Highness, in keeping with his own firm views (consistent with those of Queen Mary and the Queen) that Wallis was "unfit to be a member of the Royal Family". As such Wallis was now styled Wallis, Duchess of Windsor. Edward and Wallis lived in France in the pre-war years. However within the household of the Duke and Duchess she was still addressed as "Her Royal Highess " by those who were close to the couple.
In 1937, the Duke and Duchess visited Germany as personal guests of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, a visit much publicised by the German media, and which tended to corroborate the strong suspicions of many in government and society that Wallis was a German agent.
[edit] World War II
When the Germans invaded the north of France in May 1940, the Duke and Duchess fled south, first to Biarritz, then in June to Spain. In July the pair moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where they lived at first in the home of a banker with close German Embassy contacts. The British Foreign Office strenuously objected when the pair planned to tour aboard a yacht belonging to a Swedish magnate, Axel Wenner-Gren, whom American intelligence considered to be a close friend of Hermann Goering, one of Hitler's top lieutenants. A "defeatist" interview with the Duke that received wide distribution may have served as the last straw for the British government: in August a British warship dispatched the pair to the Bahamas and the Duke was installed as Governor, a role in which he and the Duchess as the Governor's lady appear to have performed with adequate competence for five years, returning to France and retirement after the war.
[edit] Later life
At first, the British Royal Family did not accept the Duchess and would not receive her formally, although the former king sometimes met his mother and a brother after his abdication, and both the Queen and Prince Charles paid visits to the Windsors in the Duke's later years. The Queen Mother also tried to visit the Duchess, though by then the Duchess was too frail and mentally absent to receive her. Queen Mary remained obdurate in her disapproval of Wallis and her refusal to receive her; the King always referred to Wallis in correspondence as "her", in inverted commas. It has been suggested that Queen Elizabeth, Edward’s sister-in-law, remained bitter towards Wallis for her role in bringing her husband to the throne and for inappropriate behaviour during the period when Mrs. Simpson was Edward's mistress, when she had prematurely behaved as his consort at Fort Belvedere and Balmoral, and had behaved with extreme hauteur towards the Yorks. On the other hand, Mrs Simpson invariably referred to Princess Elizabeth as "Shirley", as in Shirley Temple, and to the Duchess of York alternatively as Mrs Temple or as Cookie, alluding to the Duchess's solid figure and forthright cheerfulness; after the Abdication she continued to refer to the Queen as the Duchess of York.
Alone among the Royal Family, the Duke's sister, Mary, Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood, expressed continued loyalty to the Duke, boycotting Princess Elizabeth's wedding to The Duke of Edinburgh in 1947 in protest against Edward not being invited.
The couple lived in Neuilly near Paris for most of the remainder of their lives, essentially living a life of easeful retirement. The Duchess published her ghost-written memoirs, The Heart Has Its Reasons, in 1956. They soon became close friends of their neighbors Oswald and Diana Mosley. They had no children, though the Duchess had been briefly a stepmother by her marriage to Ernest Simpson, who had a daughter by his first wife.
In 1965 the Duke and Duchess visited London. They were visited by the Queen, Princess Marina and also the Princess Royal. Later, they joined the Royal Family in 1967 for the centenary of Queen Mary's birth. The last occasion they were in England together was the funeral of Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent in 1968.
Upon the Duke's death from cancer in 1972, the increasingly senile and frail Duchess travelled to England to attend his funeral, staying at Buckingham Palace during her visit. The Duchess lived the remainder of her life as a recluse. In October 1976 she was due to receive the Queen Mother; her condition made it necessary to refuse the visit and instead, she received flowers from her. On the card, in the Queen Mother's handwriting, were the words "IN FRIENDSHIP, ELIZABETH." After her husband's death, the Duchess gave her legal authority to her French lawyer, Suzanne Blum. She was under her care until her death. Towards the end, she was bed-ridden and did not receive any visitors, apart from her doctor and nurses.
The Duchess of Windsor died on 24 April 1986 in Paris. Her funeral was held at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle attended by her surviving sisters-in-law Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and Princess Alice. The Prince and Princess of Wales attended both the funeral ceremony and the burial with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. She is buried next to Edward behind the Royal Mausoleum in Windsor Castle's Home Park. Her tombstone simply reads "Wallis, Duchess of Windsor".
The bulk of Wallis Simpson's estate, valued at £40m, went to the Pasteur Institute medical research foundation, recognising the help of France in providing her with a home. There were no major bequests to the Royal Family. Many of the Duke and Duchess's possessions, including the Paris mansion, were bought after her death by Mohammed Al Fayed, owner of Harrods department store. He sold much of the collection in 1998, raising more than £13m for charity.
The Duke and Duchess's correspondence was published after the death of the Duchess and provoked little public interest – in part no doubt because of the long past topicality of their brief public importance but also because of the extreme banality of both parties' letters. Of passing curiosity were the depth of the Duke's uxoriousness, his invariable term of endearment for the Duchess, "Eanum Pig", the consistent contempt and vitriolic scorn of the Duchess for George VI and Queen Elizabeth and that her concern with the HRH which was withheld from her was in terms of its "chic".
[edit] Historical speculation
FBI files compiled in the 1930s, released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act in 2003, portray Wallis Simpson as a possible Nazi sympathiser. It has been suggested that this may have been the real motivation for the abdication crisis, although officially released British documents do not appear to confirm this. British documents released on January 30, 2003 also stated that in 1935 Wallis Simpson was being followed by Special Branch detectives and was secretly conducting a love affair with Guy Marcus Trundle, an engineer and salesman for Ford, who was an upper-middle-class Englishman and son of a respected Anglican canon. However, a lengthy September 2003 article in the U.S. magazine Vanity Fair casts considerable doubt on the veracity of the Simpson-Trundle affair, based on comments from a man whose mother was Trundle's mistress for nearly two decades. According to the book "Dancing With the Devil" by Christopher Wilson, the duchess had a liaison in the 1950s with the otherwise homosexual American playboy Jimmy Donahue, an heir to the Woolworth fortune.
There have been rumours of pregnancy and abortion, but no hard evidence that the Duchess became pregnant by any of her lovers or her three husbands. The aforementioned Vanity Fair article included the comments of a doctor who, after examining X-rays of the duchess, stated that she likely suffered from androgen insensitivity syndrome, also known as testicular feminisation. Rumors of abnormal genitalia date to a dossier compiled at the start of her relationship with Edward VIII.
[edit] Trivia
The punts at King's College, Cambridge are grouped into pairs of monarchs and their consorts, each punt displaying a name on the side. The partner to the 'Edward VIII' punt is labelled 'Mrs Simpson'.
[edit] Titles from birth to death
- Miss Bessie Wallis Warfield (birth - 1916)
- Mrs. Earl Winfield Spencer (1916 - 1927)
- Mrs. Warfield Spencer (1927 - 1928) (American social custom for divorcées traditionally links the maiden and married surnames)
- Mrs. Ernest Aldrich Simpson (1928 - 1937)
- Mrs. Wallis Simpson (1937)
- Mrs. Wallis Warfield (1937) (she resumed her maiden name by deed poll prior to the wedding)
- The Duchess of Windsor (1937 - death)
- during Edward's term as Governor of the Bahamas (18 August 1940 - 28 July 1945), she was entitled to be known as Her Excellency. However, this was subsumed by the superior appellation Her Grace to which she was entitled as a Duchess.
- Edward could not accept that his wife had been denied the style Her Royal Highness, and she was unofficially styled within their own household as Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Windsor.
[edit] Footnotes and sources
- ^ Alison Weir, Britain's Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy Revised edition (Random House, 1995) p.328
- ^ a b Charles Higham, Mrs Simpson (Pan Books, 2005) p.4
- ^ The Monckton Papers
[edit] Further reading
- Bloch, Edward (ed.). Wallis and Edward: Letters 1931-1937 (Summit Books, 1986). ISBN 0-671-61209-3
- Bradford, Sarah, The Reluctant King: The life and reign of George VI 1895-1952 (London: St Martins, 1989)
- Ziegler, Philip, King Edward VIII: The official biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). ISBN 0-394-57730-2
- Ziegler, Philip, Mountbatten: the official biography (Collins, 1985)
- Windsor, HRH the Duke of, A King's Story: The Memoirs of HRH the Duke of Windsor (NY: G.P. Putnam's, 1951)
- Windsor, The Duchess of, The Heart has its Reasons: The Memoirs of the Duchess of Windsor (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1956)
[edit] External links
- BBC news story: Simple funeral rites for Duchess
- BBC news story: Simpson's 'Nazi past' led to abdication
- BBC news story: Mrs Simpson's secret lover revealed
- Guardian story: Fear that Windsors would 'flit' to Germany
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wallis, The Duchess of Windsor |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Windsor, Bessie Wallis; Warfield, Bessie Wallis |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Wife of Edward VIII of the United Kingdom |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 19, 1896 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 24, 1986 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Paris, France |
