Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor

The woman who is best known as Wallis Simpson, and then the Duchess of Windsor, was born as Bessie Wallis Warfield on 19^th June 1896 at Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. She was the only child of a businessman, Teackle Wallis Warfield, and his wife Alice Montague. However, her father had not made a success of his business and both her parents were the poor relations of their respective families. Her father died when Wallis was only five months old, so she had no memories of him.

Wallis’s early life was therefore one of poverty and deprivation, and Wallis had no prospects in life unless she could make a good marriage. Her first attempt was a disaster. She fell in love, at the age of 19, with Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer, a naval aviator, and married him on 8^th November 1916. However, he drank too much and Wallis came to despise him. A two-year separation was followed by three unhappy years of troubled reunion and they eventually divorced in 1927.

Wallis had already been seeing Ernest Aldrich Simpson, who had a British father and American mother and who was managing the London office of the family’s shipping firm. They married on 2^nd July 1928 and Wallis became introduced to London’s “colony” of American socialites. These included Thelma, Viscountess Furness, who, although married, was having an affair with Edward, Prince of Wales. It was at Lady Furness’s house in Leicestershire that Wallis Simpson met the Prince in January 1931. Three years later, Wallis had taken over from Thelma Furness as the woman in the Prince of Wales’s life.

In their personal relationships, both Wallis and the Prince had, up to this point in their lives, never taken them seriously enough to make a lifetime commitment. Both of them had been happy to move in and out of relationships as the fancy took them. In Wallis’s case, being married was no impediment to having full-blown affairs with other men. The Prince had been notorious for his short-lived “flings” that had appeared serious at the time but eventually blew over.

However, Prince Edward became completely infatuated with Wallis Simpson and was determined that nothing would get in the way of his marrying her. This driving motivation continued after he succeeded to the throne, as King Edward VIII, on 20^th January 1936.

The scandal of the King being involved with a married woman, who could only become his wife after undergoing a second divorce, was one that could not be ignored. For one thing, the King was head of the Church of England, and the Church at the time (and indeed until quite recently) did not allow the re-marriage of divorced people while the former partner was still living. In Wallis’s case she would soon have two living ex-husbands.

Wallis Simpson was seen by many people in Britain as a fortune-hunter who had ensnared the Prince’s affections with only one end in view, namely becoming the Queen. Being American did not help either. Clearly, this was something that could not be tolerated.

However, Wallis herself demonstrated little desire for this outcome as such. She was happy to live with the Prince, and to divorce Ernest Simpson to make this possible, but that would appear to have been the limit of her ambition. When push came to shove, and she realised the consequences of her affair, she was happy to offer to withdraw from the proposed marriage if that was what it took for Edward to stay as King. However, when Edward was faced with the stark choice between giving Wallis up or abdicating in favour of his younger brother, he was in no doubt that he could not do the former and must do the latter.

Edward abdicated on 10^th December 1936, having been King for less than a year. Wallis Simpson’s divorce only became absolute on 3^rd May 1937, and the couple stayed apart until they married in France on 3^rd June 1937. They were thereafter granted the titles of Duke and Duchess of Windsor and lived in exile in Austria and France until the outbreak of war in 1939.

There has been much speculation about the attitude of the Windsors to Hitler and the Nazis, especially concerning whether they were closet Nazis themselves. These thoughts were engendered by a visit that they made to Germany in 1937, during which they were pictured laughing and joking with Hitler and the Duke made the Nazi salute. There is certainly evidence that the Nazis saw Edward as being sympathetic to them, and it is possible that, had they succeeded in conquering Britain, they would have wanted to install him as a puppet monarch. On the other hand, Edward never endorsed Nazism and regarded Hitler with suspicion as well as a degree of admiration.

Wallis never expressed any strong political views one way or the other, and appears to have been content to support her husband, whichever way the wind blew. There had been suspicions, before the war, that Wallis had had an affair with Joachim von Ribbbentrop, the German ambassador to London, and had passed state secrets to the Nazis via this liaison, but these allegations have never been substantiated.

The Windsors were in France when the Germans invaded in 1939 and had to escape to Spain and then Portugal. Winston Churchill was concerned that they could be used by the Nazis for propaganda purposes and suggested that the Duke be given the post of Governor of the Bahamas for the duration of the War. They both hated this time stuck on an archipelago in the Atlantic, but Wallis did her duty ably enough and was able to relieve the monotony by undertaking shopping trips to the United States from time to time. However, reports of this extravagance did nothing to rescue her reputation when they were heard in war-deprived Britain.

After the war the Windsors returned to France and lived a privileged aristocratic life doing the rounds of the places where the rich and famous tend to congregate. Wallis established a reputation as one of the best-dressed women of her generation, and for entertaining lavishly. Although such a life might appear barren and unproductive to many people, it suited Wallis and her husband.

Wallis had never been happy with the antagonism that her marriage to Edward had excited within the British royal family and nation, but she had enough common sense to appreciate that she would never change their minds and her best course was to accept things as they were. Given her background, they could of course have been a lot worse. She wrote her memoirs in 1956, under the title “The Heart has its Reasons”, and there is no bitterness in her words and only a modicum of regret.

After Edward died in 1972 Wallis was invited to Buckingham Palace in a gesture of reconciliation, but it was really too late as she was now in her mid-seventies. She lived for another 14 years, gradually losing her faculties. For the last five years of her life she was a virtual recluse who rarely left her home in Paris. She died on 24^th April 1986 at the age of 89 and was buried next to Edward in the royal burial ground at Frogmore, near Windsor.

Wallis Simpson is blamed by some as the “scarlet woman” who stole the heart of a future king and forced him to give up his throne. Others view the affair as a romantic story of love overcoming all, and therefore as something beautiful and wholesome. The truth is surely more complicated than either of these scenarios.

For one thing, Edward’s abdication forced his brother the Duke of York to take the throne in his place (as King George VI), a task for which he was unprepared and, to a degree, unsuited. Edward did not consider his brother’s feelings in this matter, and Wallis was therefore seen as the instrument through which Edward’s selfishness was expressed. Queen Elizabeth (the present Queen’s mother) certainly took this line and was implacable in her dislike of Wallis Simpson for this reason.

Wallis was clearly a highly-sexed woman who would not have fitted in well with the British royal family. Her long series of affairs was evidence of her unsuitability as a Queen, although there is a whiff of hypocrisy in this argument as royal men have long been notorious for their extra-marital dalliances.

There is also the question of Wallis’s own selfishness. She had no children with any of her husbands or partners, which suggests that parental responsibilities played no part in her thinking. However, there are all sorts of rumours on this score, including stories of a botched abortion, a stolen child and a rare abnormality that made her barren. The jury is still out on this issue.

On the other side of the case is the evidence that Wallis was willing to withdraw from a potential marriage to Edward to save his throne, which suggests either that she saw where her duty lay, or that the passion in the liaison was more on his side than hers.

The story of Wallis Simpson will doubtless give rise to many more debates in future as to her motives and whether her life was a fulfilled or unfulfilled one.

© John Welford

King James II flees the country, 1688

On 11^th December 1688 King James II of Great Britain fled the country in a bloodless coup known as the “Glorious Revolution” inspired by the supporters of his usurping son-in-law, William of Orange. His reign had only lasted for three years.

The people of Britain had made clear their views about absolute monarchs several decades earlier, when James’s father King Charles I had lost his head in 1649 and Britain became a republic under Oliver Cromwell. James’s brother, Charles II, had understood the lessons of that time and, on the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, had been careful to govern with the sentiments of the people very much in mind, whatever his personal ambitions may have been.

However, James had no such qualms, being far more like his father in character than his brother had been. James believed unashamedly in the “divine right of kings” which held that it was the people’s duty to obey their king because God had put him there. Charles II may have thought this, but he would never have been so stupid as to say it.

James was also openly Catholic, at a time when the people of England were, in the main, happily Protestant. He took many actions that favoured Catholics and had married, after the death in 1671 of his first wife Anne Hyde, Mary of Modena who was a staunch Catholic and who looked certain to produce heirs who would also be Catholic – indeed, she gave birth to a healthy son in June 1688.

Parliament therefore saw the need to remove a Catholic king and replace him with a Protestant one, hence the invitation to James’s daughter Mary, by his first wife, and her husband William of Orange. They would reign jointly as Queen Mary II and King William III.

James had no choice but to flee London when news reached him that William had landed in Devon and was on his way to force him off the throne if need be. He therefore took a barge down the Thames and, in his anger, dropped the Great Seal of England overboard so that no-one else should have it. Even this act of defiance did not work, because it was later fished out of the river and handed to King William.

Incidentally, King James II did leave at least one indelible mark on the world. Before becoming king he had had the title Duke of York, and when British forces captured the city of New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664 it was renamed New York in his honour. The state capital city of Albany owes its name to James’s Scottish title of Duke of Albany.

© John Welford

Princess Alice of Battenburg, mother of the Duke of Edinburgh

Some people consider Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, Consort of Queen Elizabeth II, to be ever so slightly eccentric in his remarks and behaviour, but he is nothing in comparison to his late mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, who married his father, Prince Andrew of Greece, in 1903. Many would say that Prince Philip looks remarkably like his late father but gets at least some of his personal characteristics from his mother.

It did not help that Alice, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, was born with a serious hearing impediment that got steadily worse as she got older. She was certainly intelligent, and she was able, on occasion, to use her deafness to her advantage.

However, her interest in spiritualism and religion led her to indulge in increasingly bizarre behaviour. It was one thing to play the Ouija board and believe that packs of cards were conveying messages from the dead, but quite another to say that she was going out to dinner with Jesus, with whom she was apparently having an extra-marital affair, or to believe that she had her own group of disciples in Bedfordshire.

In 1930, when her son Philip was only nine years old, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and removed from her family to be lodged in a series of psychiatric institutions. Philip was sent to England to live with his uncles, Louis and George Mountbatten (the name change from Battenberg had been done to make the name sound less German during World War I).

Contact between Alice and her family only resumed in 1937 when they met at the funeral of one of her daughters, Cecilie, who had been killed, together with her husband and two of her three children, in a plane crash. After the funeral Alice returned to Athens to work among the poor.

It is understandable that she would have been confused by the war that broke out in 1939, given that all her four daughters had married into German nobility, who fought on the German side and at least one of whom was a member of the SS, whereas her son was fighting on the British side as a member of the Royal Navy (which was where he met Princess Elizabeth).  When Philip married Elizabeth in 1947 none of the surviving daughters were invited to the wedding, due to the German connections.

Alice’s husband, Prince Andrew, had died in 1944, after which she devoted herself to founding an order of nuns, although she was never ordained as one herself. She took to dressing in a nun’s habit, including at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953.

She lived out her final years in Buckingham Palace, still dressed as a nun. The Palace staff described her as “strange but likeable”. She died in 1969, have declared her wish to be buried in Jerusalem. When one of her daughters objected that her family would find it difficult to visit her grave, her reply was that there was “a perfectly good bus service”.

There does not appear to have been an ounce of ill-will in her, except to the German army that occupied Greece. There is plenty of evidence that she endured many personal hardships during the war years and performed many good deeds at personal risk, including sheltering Jews and distributing rations during the curfew.

It is hardly surprising, though, that her son, having had such a disturbed upbringing, has been notable for trying to instil the values of self-discipline in his own family, with varying degrees of success. It is also notable that he has always had a strong independent streak that has got him into trouble at various times. This would seem to have been inherited from his mother.

© John Welford