Why Everyone Who Worked For the Duke of Windsor Hated Him – HT

 

The story everyone knows is a love story, a king who loved a woman more than a crown, who stood before a microphone in 1936 and told the world he could not do his duty without the help and support of the woman I love. It is one of the great romances of the century. It is also, according to almost everyone who actually worked for him, a lie of omission because the man behind that beautiful broadcast was, in private, one of the most difficult employers in royal history. His valets dreaded him.

 His equerries despaired of him. His own private secretaries found him lazy, vain, and impossible. He haggled over wages and hoarded his wealth while playing the wronged exile. He kept the German ambassador’s company in the 1930s and gave the Nazi salute on a 1937 tour while his country prepared to fight for its life.

 And the most powerful courtier in England, the man who served four monarchs, summed him up in a single private verdict. The country, he wrote, was well rid of him. This is not the king who gave up everything for love. This is the Duke of Windsor his servants knew, and why, almost to a man, they could not stand him. Before we go further, one honest note about that last line because this whole story turns on getting the record right.

 The phrase well rid is the register of the verdict, not a sentence anyone has produced in his exact hand. The courtier in question, Sir Alan Lascelles, known as Tommy, kept diaries and the portions touching the monarchy remain largely closed in the archive at Churchill College, Cambridge. What is documented, and documented precisely, is the relief.

On the 14th of December, 1936, 3 days after the abdication, the diarist Harold Nicolson lunched with Lascelles and wrote that the man was so relieved at the fall of his master that he was almost indiscreet. That is the verified core. Well rid is the audience’s shorthand for it. Keep both in mind because this is going to be a story about the gap between the shorthand the world remembers and the colder thing the people in the room actually said.

The broadcast itself went out on the 11th of December 1936. By then he had been king for 326 days. Not even 11 months. And here is the part the romance leaves out. His own father had seen this coming. King George V in the last year of his life was reported to have said of his eldest son, “After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself in 12 months.

” The boy did it in 11. The father who said it was not a sentimental man, but he knew his son. He had watched him for 40 years. And what he had seen was not a romantic hero. What he had seen was a man his own family already half distrusted. To understand why the household turned, you have to go back to the prince before he was a king.

 As Prince of Wales in the 1920s, Edward, David to his family, was the most glamorous man in the empire. Crowds adored him. The press could not get enough of him, but the people who were closest to him learned something the crowds never did. And they learned it early. The truth was quieter and colder.

 The man who learned it first was Lascelles, appointed his assistant private secretary in 1920. At the start, Lascelles was charmed. He called him the most attractive man he had ever met. By 1929 he had resigned in something close to disgust. At the resignation interview, by his own later account, he spent an hour telling the prince exactly what I thought of him and his whole scheme of life.

 And predicted, with what he called an accuracy that might have surprised him at the time, that the prince would lose the throne of England. What had soured him? Not one scandal, a pattern. As far back as 1927, Lascelles reported that words like decency, honesty, duty, dignity meant, in his phrase, absolutely nothing to him. This is not a tabloid talking.

 This is the man whose entire profession was discretion, writing privately that the future king had no working relationship with duty at all. And he was not alone in it. He took the worry up the chain. He told the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, that the heir, in his unbridled pursuit of wine and women, and of whatever selfish whim occupied him at the moment, was going rapidly to the devil, and would soon become no fit wearer of the British crown.

He went further than that, further than a courtier is ever supposed to go. He told Baldwin that sometimes, waiting to hear the result of a steeplechase the prince was riding in, he could not help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him, and to the country, would be for him to break his neck.

 And Baldwin, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, did not rebuke him for saying it. That is the detail to sit with. The Prime Minister heard a senior courtier say it might be better for the nation if the heir to the throne died in a riding accident, and agreed it was a fair thing to think. But here is what the official record leaves out about that resignation.

 It was not abstract. The thing that broke Lascelles was Africa. In 1928, the prince was on tour in East Africa when word came that his father, the king, was gravely ill and might be dying. The correct response, the human response, was to come home at once. The prince’s response was to treat the summons as a political trick and carry on.

He was eventually persuaded to return, but the indifference, the sheer self-absorption of a son who could not interrupt a holiday for a dying father was the thing his private secretary could not forgive. Lascelles resigned not long after. He said, looking back, that he felt he had wasted the best years of his life.

The people closest to the man lost faith first. That is the shape of this whole story. The crowds loved the wave, the household watched the man, and the household stopped believing. And it is worth being precise about what the household actually objected to. Because they hated him is too lazy a phrase for what the records describe.

They did not hate him for one cruelty. They despaired of him for a hundred small ones. The same ones repeating. He was, by the consistent account, lazy. He disliked the paperwork, the boxes, the slow unglamorous machinery of constitutional duty that a sovereign exists to turn. He was vain, endlessly preoccupied with his clothes and his image while the actual work of the role went undone.

 He was impatient with anyone whose usefulness to him had run out. And he was, underneath the famous charm, profoundly selfish in a way that the people who arranged his diary and managed his moods could not help but notice because they were the ones who absorbed the cost of it. The crowds got the smile, the easy word, the prince who seemed to remember everyone.

 The staff got the man who could not be bothered, who treated their time as worthless, and their loyalty as owed. That is the asymmetry at the center of this whole story. The closer you stood to him, the less there was to admire. Charm, it turns out, is a thing you can run on empty, and the household watched the tank go dry.

Now, hold that pattern. The charm that worked at a distance and curdled up close because in December 1936, the crown came off, and the man the world began to pity as a romantic exile is the same man the household had already learned to dread. And in exile, the meanness got worse. The romance says he gave up everything.

The account books say otherwise. Far from giving up everything, the new Duke of Windsor spent the first years of his exile in a long grinding fight about money. And he fought dirty. There was a settlement to be worked out with his brother, now George VI, the reluctant king he had dropped the throne onto. The Duke reportedly secured something in the region of 25,000 pounds a year.

 But here is what soured even that. When the negotiation was underway, the Duke presented himself as a relatively poor man, declaring his private fortune at around 90,000 pounds to squeeze a better deal out of his brother. It was not true. He had a great deal more than that, quietly held. When the king’s side discovered the understatement, the agreement was revisited and the terms came down.

The man who told the world he was sacrificing a crown for love had in private lowballed his own brother over the housekeeping, and it did not stop at the settlement. In the early days of the new reign, the Duke telephoned the palace daily, importuning, the record says, for money and pressing relentlessly for one other thing, that his wife be granted the style of royal highness.

He kept it up until the harassed king finally ordered that the calls simply not be put through. Picture that. A reigning monarch, steadying a nervous country, instructing his staff to stop putting his own brother’s calls through because the brother would not stop ringing about cash and a title. The letters patent of the 27th of May, 1937, settled the title question against him.

The Duke kept his royal highness, but the document stated plainly that his wife and any descendants sh- shall not hold said title or attribute. He never forgave it. It became the great grievance of his life. A grievance he nursed for 36 years while the bills for his comfort were paid in the early years personally by the brother he had abandoned and then haggled with.

 And consider what that meant for the people around him. A household runs on the temper and the generosity of the man at the top of it. A master who is anxious about money, who watches the accounts, who resents every pound that leaves his hand is a master whose meanness flows downhill to the wages, to the conditions, to the small dignities that make a difficult job bearable.

 The Duke was not a poor man playing at hardship. He was a wealthy man performing it and performing it at the expense of the people who depended on him. He had walked away from one of the great fortunes in the world and then spent decades behaving as though every expense were an injury done to him. The grievance was not really about the money. He had plenty.

 The grievance was about status, about the HRH his wife was refused, about the family that would not bend, about the recognition he felt he was owed and would not be given. And a man consumed by that kind of grievance is exhausting to serve because nothing is ever enough and no loyalty is ever quite repaid.

 The secretaries, the record says, watched the money disappear and watch the resentment grow and they understood long before the public did that there was no satisfying him. This is the texture the romance scrubs out. Not a martyr, a man who took the grand gesture in public and counted the change in private.

 The biographer Frances Donaldson, whose 1974 life of him won the Wolfson History Prize and is still regarded as one of the most clear-eyed studies of the man, drew the Duke and Duchess as, in her words, “selfish, self-centered, and narcissistic to the end. Masters,” she wrote, “of their own misfortune. That is not a gossip’s verdict.

 That is the considered judgment of a serious historian who read the papers and did the work.” Now, before this tips too far, the record demands a correction because the title of this story makes a promise it cannot entirely keep. “Everyone who worked for him hated him” is the dominant testimony. It is not the unanimous testimony, and an honest account has to say so.

There were people downstairs who were genuinely fond of him. His valet, Sydney Johnson, served him for 32 years from 1940 until the Duke’s death and was treated and treated him almost as family. The Duke reportedly gave him property in the Bahamas. His butler in the 1950s, a man named Alan Fisher, said flatly in his own memoir that he liked the Duke enormously.

Fisher’s contempt, when he had it, was for the Duchess, not for the master of the house. So, the picture is not a household united in loathing. The picture is a dominant verdict from the secretaries, the equerries, the courtiers who saw the selfishness and the meanness up close, set against a quieter loyalty from a few personal servants who saw a softer, smaller man.

The hatred was the rule. It was not the whole roll call, and a channel that pretended otherwise would be doing exactly what the romance does, flattening the truth to fit the headline. But here is where the household’s private complaint became something the whole country had to worry about because the Duke of Windsor was not merely a difficult employer.

He was, by 1937, a political problem. And in October of that year, he handed his critics the photograph that has followed him ever since. In the autumn of 1937, the Duke and Duchess toured Nazi Germany. The trip was arranged by a French-American businessman named Charles Bedaux, the same man who had lent them his chateau for the wedding.

 Over 12 days, they were received like visiting royalty by the regime. They dined with Joseph Goebbels, with Hermann Göring, with Joachim von Ribbentrop, with Albert Speer, with Rudolf Hess, and at the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat above Berchtesgaden, they took tea with Adolf Hitler himself. The minutes of that private conversation were lost in the war.

 So, what exactly passed between them is not known. But the surrounding facts are not in doubt. They were regularly greeted with the Nazi salute, and they sometimes returned it. One observer recorded Hitler stiffening into a rigid Nazi salute, and the Duke returning it. Hitler, afterwards, is reported to have said that the Duchess would have made a good queen.

 And here is a detail that comes not from a hostile historian, but from inside his own household, from the equerry who stood beside him on that tour. Sir Dudley Forwood had become the Duke’s equerry after the abdication, and he was there in Germany at the Duke’s elbow, through the salutes and the dinners and the tea with Hitler.

 Years later, Forwood, defending his master, said the trip was not to support the National Socialists as many thought, that the real purpose was simply to let the Duchess, denied a state welcome at home, experience the pageantry of one abroad. But Forwood also remembered the things that no defense can soften. He recalled the Duke telling Hitler that the Germans and the British races are one, that they should always be one.

 And he admitted, with a candor that has aged terribly, that none of them, not the Duke, not the Duchess, not himself, were, in his words, “averse to Hitler politically.” That is the equerry talking, not a critic. The man whose job was to manage and protect him. When even the loyal servant’s defense amounts to, “He did not mean to endorse the regime, he only admired its politics and toasted its leader.

” You begin to see why London stopped trusting him. Now, this is the part where you have to slow down because this is exactly where the story is most often told badly. What does it mean? There are two readings, and they are genuinely far apart. And the honest thing is to give you both rather than pick the one that makes the better thumbnail.

 The dark reading belongs to the historian Andrew Lownie, whose 2021 book Traitor King is named with approval by viewers of this very channel. Lownie argues that the Windsors were not naive dupes of the Germans, but, in his phrase, actively intrigued against Britain in both war and peace. He points to 1940, when the Duke, en route to govern the Bahamas, was in neutral Portugal, and argues that he used a Portuguese banker, Ricardo Espírito Santo Silva, to signal to a German agent that he would return to Europe should the Germans successfully invade Britain.

Lownie reads the salutes, the tea with Hitler, and the wartime contacts as a continuous thread of disloyalty. And then there is the cautious reading, which is the mainstream one, and it belongs to his official biographer Philip Ziegler, who was given access to the royal archives that Lownie was not. In that reading, the Duke is not a traitor, but something smaller and sadder.

 Vain, naive, indiscreet, and consumed by grievance. A man who liked the flattery of a regime that treated him as the king England had thrown away, but who never crossed into actual betrayal. And the documents themselves are contested. The captured German papers that seem most damning, known as the Marburg files or the Windsor file, are real.

 But, the Duke called them complete fabrications when they surfaced, and even some intelligence assessments treated parts of them as German propaganda. There is, as historians keep noting, no firm evidence that he ever accepted any German terms. Accounts diverge on this point, and they have not been reconciled. So, this channel will not call him a traitor because the record does not let us.

 What we can say, and say plainly, is that he took the tea, returned the salute, and kept dangerous company while his country prepared to fight for its life. And that his own government found the risk real enough to act on it, because they did act on it. And the way they acted tells you exactly how London had come to see him.

When the war came, the British government did not want the Duke of Windsor anywhere near Europe. So, in the summer of 1940, they gave him a job designed, above all, to keep him out of the way. Governor of the Bahamas. It was a colonial backwater, a gilded sidelining, and everyone involved understood it as such.

 He took it badly, as he took most things. And when he dragged his feet about going, Winston Churchill, who had once been among his staunchest defenders, sent word that if the Duke did not take up his post, he could be court-martialed. That is how the wartime establishment handled the man the public still pictured as a wronged romantic.

 They shipped him to an island and threatened him with a court-martial to make him stay there. His time as governor did nothing to rebuild the reputation. The defining episode was the death, in July 1943, of one of his few real friends on the island, the gold mining tycoon Sir Harry Oakes. Oakes was found dead in his bed in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained.

 And the Duke’s response as governor was extraordinary. Rather than call in Scotland Yard as protocol demanded, he took personal charge of the investigation and brought in two policemen he happened to know from Miami. The case was a shambles. Oakes’ son-in-law was charged, tried, and acquitted. And the Duke arranged to be off the island during the trial so that he could not be called as a witness.

 To this day, historians cannot agree on what the Duke was doing. Protecting a friend’s memory, protecting himself, or simply, as so often, protecting his own comfort. What is not in dispute is that the most sensitive death in the colony he governed was handled under his hand in a way that closed questions rather than answered them. And then came the long, sour afterlife, which is the part the romance most wants you to forget.

The war ended. The governorship ended in 1945. And the Duke of Windsor settled into decades of exile in France in a grand house in the Bois de Boulogne lent to him by the city of Paris surrounded by the household staff who pressed his suits and managed his moods and watched the grievance ossify into a way of living. There was no second act.

 There was no rehabilitation. There was a man in his 50s, then his 60s, then his 70s, attended by servants telling anyone who would listen that he had been wronged. In letters he sneered at his own family. He once called his relatives a seedy bunch. While they, for their part, kept him at a frosty, controlled distance for the rest of his life.

 And the household, through all of it, stayed the constant audience to a performance that never changed. Think about what those decades were actually like from below stairs. A man who had been for 326 days the king-emperor of a quarter of the world, now filling his time with dinners and dogs and the careful maintenance of a wardrobe, narrating his own martyrdom to a captive staff who had heard the story a thousand times.

 The same complaints, the same wound reopened nightly. The same conviction that the fault lay everywhere but in the man himself. There is something almost unbearable in it, not tragic exactly, because tragedy requires a flaw the man cannot see. And this man had been told his flaw to his face by Lascelles in 1929 and had simply refused to believe it.

The valets and the secretaries who lived inside that house were the keepers of a grievance that produced nothing, no insight, no growth, no peace. They served a monument to self-pity. And the ones who lasted, who stayed loyal to the end, did so not because the master had earned it, but because servants of a certain kind keep faith with the post even when the man in it does not deserve it.

 That is its own quiet verdict on him. The loyalty that survived was a loyalty to the idea of service, not to the merits of the served. The family’s coldness held right to the end, and the end was carefully managed. By the spring of 1972, the duke was dying of throat cancer in the Paris house. On the 18th of May, Queen Elizabeth II, his niece, on a state visit to France, called at the house and saw him alone for about 15 minutes.

 He was too ill to appear for the official photograph. Only the duchess stood with the royal party. 10 days later, on the 28th of May, 1972, he died. He was 77. His body was flown home to the country he had walked away from, and on the 5th of June, he was given a funeral in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, and then buried quietly in the royal burial ground at Frogmore.

 The graveside attended by only a small handful of people. The most famous abdication in history ended in a small plot of Berkshire ground and a short list of mourners. So, what do we make of him in the end? Downstairs rather than up? Set the two stories side by side. Upstairs, the fairy tale, the king who loved too much to reign.

 The great romance of the century. The man who chose the heart over the throne. Downstairs, the working verdict of the people who actually served him. A vain, mean, reckless man. Charming at a distance and impossible up close. Who took everything and gave back grievance. Who flirted with his country’s enemies and haggled over his servants’ wages.

 And who spent 36 years insisting he was the one who had been wronged. His private secretary thought the nation would be better off if he broke his neck. His official biographer’s cautious version still leaves a portrait of a man without a working sense of duty. His most clear-eyed historian called him selfish to the end.

 The dominant testimony of his household is damning. And even the loyal exceptions, the valet and the butler who genuinely liked him, only soften the verdict. They do not overturn it. For 90 years, the world has told the Duke of Windsor’s story as a fairy tale, the king who loved too much to rule.

 But fairy tales are written upstairs. Down below, where the valets pressed his suits and the equerries managed his moods and the secretaries watched the money disappear, they told a different story. Of a vain, mean, reckless man who took everything and gave back grievance. Who flirted with his country’s enemies and haggled over his servants’ wages.

 And who spent 36 years in gilded exile insisting he was the one who’d been wronged. The most discreet courtier in England said the nation was well rid of him. The people who actually served him would only have added one word, finally.