The Château de Cand sits in a quiet patch of the French Loire surrounded by woodland and the silence of old money. On the 3rd of June, 1937, the gravel drive carries one motor car after another, but the audience is small. 16 guests have been invited. A handful of journalists wait at the gates, kept far enough away that they cannot photograph the bride.
Inside, an organist plays Schumann. The room has been arranged with white peonies and pink roses, the kind of restrained luxury that suggests the hostess is trying very hard to look unbothered. The bride has reached 40 years of age. She wears a pale blue gown by Mainbocher, a color later adopted by department stores and given a name in her honor.
Her groom, a former king and emperor, has spent the morning fussing over the seating, having waited 5 months for this day. Ever since his abdication in December, and having been forced to wait in France while the British government argued about whether his fiance’s second husband had divorced her properly, none of his family has come.
Queen Mary, his mother, has refused outright. His brothers have been ordered to stay home. The Anglican bishop who agreed to perform the ceremony has done so against the explicit instructions of the Church of England and will be reprimanded for it within the week. There was just one problem. The woman walking up the aisle had not, by any reasonable historical reckoning, set out to marry a king.
She had once tried, in a panic-stricken letter from a hotel in Cannes, to cancel the entire affair. The man she was about to marry threatened taking his life if she did. So, she stayed, the flowers stayed, the bishop stayed, and the British Empire, having shed its monarch with an embarrassed cough 7 months earlier, was decidedly absent.
This is the story of how a twice divorced woman from Baltimore became the most hated person in the British Empire, and how the British Empire then proceeded to photograph her at every opportunity for the next 40 years. It is also a story about what people prefer to believe and what the archives actually contain. The two are very rarely the same.
The girl who would one day be photographed shaking hands with Adolf Hitler was born on the 19th of June, 1896, in a summer cottage in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Teackle Wallace Warfield and Alice Montague, had married 7 months earlier. This was the kind of arithmetic that mattered in 1896, and the Warfields, an old Maryland family of considerable name and modest income, were not pleased.
Decades later, in 1988, the American biographer Charles Higham would write that Wallace was illegitimate, born outside wedlock to a humiliated mother. Baltimore parish records say otherwise. Teackle and Alice married on the 19th of November, 1895. Wallace was conceived before that wedding and born 7 months after it.
The British and American press, when they later wanted ammunition against her, never seemed terribly interested in the difference. Teackle Warfield died of tuberculosis 5 months after his daughter arrived. Alice was 26, a widow, and broke. The Warfields took her in, but only just.
Mother and baby were shuttled between rented rooms and the homes of relatives, dependent on the goodwill of Solomon Davies Warfield, Tackles brother, a wealthy Baltimore railroad executive who had never married and had no patience for sentiment. Uncle Sol paid for the schools, the dresses, and the gloves. He never paid for was emotional warmth, which he seemed to regard as an indulgence on par with French champagne.
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Wallis was raised by her mother to understand a single, urgent fact. A woman without money was a woman without options. By the time she was sent to Oldfields School, an expensive girls boarding establishment in Maryland, she had absorbed the lesson completely. The other girls came from real money with ponies and country houses and fathers attached to them.
Wallis arrived with an uncle and an attitude. She was not pretty in the conventional Edwardian sense, possessing a square jaw, a slightly hooked nose, and eyes set a touch too wide apart. So, she made herself something else. The girl from the rented room taught herself to dress with an austerity that read as elegance, to listen to men without seeming to flatter, and to deliver opinions with the kind of dry confidence that left dinner tables temporarily silent.
By 18, Wallis had decided that the only acceptable way out of Baltimore ran through a wedding ring, preferably one attached to an officer with a pension. She found her officer in 1916. His name was Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., a United States Navy aviator stationed at Pensacola, Florida, who was tall, dashing, and thoroughly drunk most evenings.
The marriage took place in November of that year, 3 weeks before Wallis turned 20. Within a year, she had discovered, in roughly this order, that her husband was a sadist when sober and a monster when drunk, that aviators of his generation were dying at extraordinary rates, and that the United States Navy had no intention of granting her a divorce or even much sympathy.
Win Spencer drank, locked her in a bathroom for an entire afternoon, tied her to the bed once, and left her to think about her behavior, punched holes in walls, and on one celebrated occasion produced a pistol at a Pensacola dinner party. The marriage staggered on for 11 years before she finally divorced him in Washington, Virginia, in December 1927 on the grounds of desertion.
In the middle of all this, in 1924, Wallis tried to save her marriage by joining her husband in China, where he had been posted with the Yangtze Patrol. The marriage did not survive the trip, but Wallis did. She spent the better part of a year traveling the country, including a long stay in the Italian Embassy compound in Peking, where she befriended Katherine Bigelow Rogers, an American socialite who would become a lifelong ally.
The trip back to the United States in 1926 produced stories about the temples, the food, and the heat. Wallis returned, in other words, with the experience of someone who had taken a long, expensive holiday in a country in the middle of a civil war. This is where the Chinese rumors begin. Some years later, when British courtiers wanted to explain to themselves how an apparently ordinary American woman had reduced their king to a state of submissive devotion, they turned to a folder allegedly compiled by British intelligence. They
called it the China Dossier. According to the legend that grew around it, the folder contained eyewitness reports from informants in Shanghai brothels who claimed Wallace had spent her year in China learning what the courtiers with that particular blend of Edwardian prudery and unexamined racism called Shanghai techniques.
The dossier supposedly described in detail how she had bewitched the Prince of Wales using these acquired skills. It was supposedly placed before King George V himself, but the China Dossier does not exist. No researcher has ever produced a copy from the Royal Archives, MI5 holdings, Special Branch records, the Foreign Office, or anywhere else where genuine intelligence material is preserved.
Historians who have spent the most time looking, including Hugo Vickers, Michael Bloch, and Anne Sebba, agree on one boring fact. It was an invention. Charles Higham popularized the story in his lurid 1988 biography citing as his source a former American intelligence officer named Carl A. Becker, Becker, whose specific allegations have never been corroborated by anyone with access to actual records.
The whole tale offered a way of explaining by means of orientalist fantasy a relationship that the British establishment found psychologically unbearable. Edward did not need to be drugged by Shanghai sorcery. He was, as we will see, perfectly capable of humiliating himself without supernatural assistance.
The same can be said of the related rumors that Wallace suffered a botched abortion in China that left her infertile, or that she had a child by Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian count and future son-in-law of Benito Mussolini. Both stories are repeated in pop biographies. They trace back to the same fevered Mayfair gossip mills as the dossier itself.
Neither story is supported by a single contemporary record. She married Ernest Simpson, an Anglo-American shipping broker, in July 1928, 6 months after divorcing Win. Ernest was the kind of man Wallace had been told to want and possibly never quite wanted. He was Harvard-educated, a former Coldstream Guards officer, fluent in French, courteous to everyone, and so quiet at parties that guests sometimes forgot he had arrived.
His firm, Simpson, Spence and Young, was solvent rather than spectacular. The Simpsons settled into a flat at Bryanston Court, a respectable but undistinguished building near Marble Arch, and Wallace set about something she had been preparing for since her uncle first sent her to Oldfields. She would build a Mayfair salon.
Building a London salon in 1929 required two assets: a knack for running a household with German efficiency, and a willingness to spend money one did not entirely have. Wallace had both. She drilled her cook on soufflés, redrew the floor plan of the flat to accommodate a serious dining table, and studied the social columns of the Tatler and the Bystander with the gravity of an Oxford undergraduate cramming for a viva.
The result, by 1931, was a small but genuinely fashionable household. The Simpsons were not aristocrats and not even rich. What they had instead was an immaculate dinner, an American hostess who could entertain six different conversations across a table, and the social ambition to invite the right people to it. The right people, eventually, came through a friend of a friend.
Wallace’s sister-in-law, Consuelo Thaw, was the sister of Thelma, Lady Furness, the current mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales. London’s interwar mistress system worked like a closed club with very specific rules. The prince needed a married woman of suitable discretion. He kept her in jewelry and weekend invitations to Fort Belvedere, his retreat near Windsor, and she kept his evenings filled until he tired of her and moved on.
Through Thelma, the Simpsons were introduced into this circle. On the 10th of January, 1931, at Barrow Court, the Furness country house in Leicestershire, Wallis Simpson and the future King Edward the VIII met for the first time. The meeting amounted to nothing memorable. Wallace later blamed a head cold. The prince exchanged small talk about American central heating, and there was no thunderclap, no second glance, no Hollywood music sting.
They saw each other again now and then over the following 3 years, at parties and weekends, while Edward continued his affair with Thelma and his other long-running relationship with Freda Dudley Ward, the woman he had been visiting almost daily since the early ’20s. The shift came in early 1934. Thelma Furness sailed to America to support her sister, Gloria Vanderbilt, who was about to lose a custody case in one of the most covered courtroom dramas of the decade.
As she left, Thelma asked Wallis a small social favor. “Keep an eye on the little man while I’m away.” Wallis kept more than an eye. By the time Thelma returned, the Simpson woman had eased into the chair Thelma believed to be hers and had no intention of giving it up. Freda Dudley Ward, sensing the new wind, found that the prince’s daily phone calls had stopped without explanation.
The royal mistress system had a new occupant, and the new occupant ran the place very differently from her predecessors. By the spring of 1935, Edward was no longer functioning as a Prince of Wales in any recognizable sense. The diaries of the men closest to him, Sir Alan Lascelles and Sir John Aird in particular, describe something that crosses out of devotion and into pathology.
He could not concentrate on official business. The red boxes went unread. Phone calls to Wallis ran two and three hours, while government dispatches piled up on his desk. He bought her jewels by the case from Cartier and Van Cleef, gave her, by some accounts, more than a million pounds worth in roughly 2 years, at a time when a country house with full staff could be had for 10,000.
In her presence, he behaved like a small boy hoping for a smile. Out of her presence, he sulked. Everyone who saw them together remarked openly on the pattern. She dictated the schedule, chose the menu, and told him in front of guests when he had been boring, stupid, or had said something untrue.
The famous claim that she physically slapped his hand if he picked at food at a dinner table is, to be honest about it, harder to prove than to repeat. That story comes from second-hand society memoirs written years later. The general pattern of public dominance and private submission, however, is documented beyond reasonable dispute.
What was Wallis herself feeling about all this? Her own correspondence, much of it preserved in letters to Ernest and to her aunt Bessie Merryman, gives a more complicated picture than the gold digger legend suggests. By 1935, she was already telling Ernest, in writing, that she expected the affair with Edward to end soon and that she intended to remain Mrs. Simpson.
By early 1936, when George V died and Edward acceded to the throne, Wallis began to grasp that the man at her dinner table was no longer a prince with whom she was having a discreet affair, but a king who expected her to become queen of England regardless of the inconvenient fact that she was already the wife of someone else.
The letters from this period, particularly those reproduced in Anne Sebba’s 2011 biography, That Woman, suggest Wallis tried to find a graceful exit and was prevented from doing so by a man who had begun to threaten his own life if she left. George V died at Sandringham on the 20th of January 1936. Edward acceded the same day.
The new king, then 41, had spent a quarter century preparing for the throne and managed to make a hash of the job within his first month. He read his red boxes carelessly and left them lying around at country houses where weekend guests could and did peek inside at confidential documents. Brought Wallace to functions where her presence was diplomatically awkward and cut royal staff numbers and salaries while continuing to spend extravagantly on her.
By autumn, he had shed the affection of every minister, archbishop, and senior courtier in London while remaining apparently convinced that everyone would simply have to accept his marriage plan because he was the king. Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister, was a slow-moving Worcestershire man with a fondness for pipes and a cunning that none of his enemies ever quite recognized in time.
Through the spring and summer of 1936, Baldwin watched his king decline. By October, when Wallace filed for divorce from Ernest Simpson at Ipswich Assizes, a venue chosen specifically because the local press was thin, Baldwin understood that the constitutional collision could no longer be avoided.
The British press, by an unwritten agreement among the major editors, had refused to print anything about the king’s relationship with Mrs. Simpson. American and continental newspapers had no such agreement. By the autumn of 1936, the only people in Britain who did not know the king intended to marry a twice divorced American woman were the people who never read foreign newspapers, which is to say most of the country.
The proposed solution, when it came, was not Edward’s idea. It came from Esmond Harmsworth, the son of the press baron Lord Rothermere. Over lunch at Claridge’s in late October, Harmsworth pitched the concept of a morganatic marriage to Wallace. The king could marry her, but she would not become queen, and any children would not inherit the throne.
The continental compromise, used by Habsburg and Hohenzollern princes for centuries, had never once been used in British constitutional practice. Wallace liked the idea. She convinced Edward to take it to Baldwin, who took it to the cabinet, which took it to the dominion governments. Australia and South Africa replied that they would not pass legislation to permit any such thing, and the proposal collapsed in the third week of November.
The press silence finally broke on the 1st of December, 1936, in a small chapel address by Alfred Blunt, the Bishop of Bradford, who criticized the king’s lack of religious humility. Blunt later insisted he had not been speaking about Wallace at all, but the provincial papers, hungry for any excuse, ran the story the next morning.
National newspapers, freed from their embargo, broke on the 3rd of December. Within 72 hours, the entire British public knew everything that the establishment had spent 6 months pretending it could keep quiet. Wallace fled to France on the 3rd of December, driven through the night to Newhaven by Edward’s loyal friend Lord Brownlow. From a villa in Cannes belonging to the Rogerses, she wrote to Edward begging him to reconsider, offering to disappear, suggesting she could vanish quietly and let him go on as king.
He responded by telephone, sometimes screaming, sometimes weeping, with the line tapped by both British and French intelligence services. He told her that if she went through with her plan to disappear, he would kill himself. The threat was almost certainly hollow, but impossible to ignore. Wallace surrendered.
Edward signed the instrument of abdication on the morning of the 10th of December, 1936, at Fort Belvedere, in the company of his three brothers. The instrument took effect the following day. He spoke to the nation by radio that evening, in one of the most famous broadcasts of the 20th century, telling his subjects that he could not carry the heavy burden of responsibility without the help and support of the woman he loved.
The speech was largely written for him by Winston Churchill. Listeners across the empire wept, raged, or rolled their eyes, depending on their politics. Then he sailed for Austria, where he would wait 6 months for Wallace’s divorce to be finalized before they could marry at Candé. Queen Mary, the new king’s mother, recorded in her diary that she would never forgive her eldest son.
She kept her word. Until her death in 1953, she refused to receive Wallace at any royal residence, refused to acknowledge her existence in correspondence, and treated Edward’s choice as a moral failure of catastrophic proportions. The new king, George VI, agreed. In May 1937, he issued letters patent granting Edward the style of His Royal Highness while specifically denying it to his wife and any children of the marriage.
It was a calculated insult of dubious legal foundation and Edward considered it the defining grievance of his life. Wallace, though she rarely complained publicly, considered it an injury that had been engineered specifically to humiliate her. She was correct. The new Duke and Duchess of Windsor, having married in June 1937 with 16 guests and one disgraced bishop, were now exiles.
Edward expected to be welcomed back to Britain to perform some kind of unspecified ceremonial role. The royal family had no intention of allowing it. Cut off from the British court, with no clear function and a great deal of free time, the Windsors did what bored, vain, freshly humiliated celebrities have always done.
They went where the press would still take their picture. In October 1937, they accepted an invitation from Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labor Front, to tour Germany on a fact-finding visit to study workers’ housing and welfare programs. The invitation was a piece of obvious propaganda. The Windsors took it anyway.
For 12 days, they were paraded through factories and model villages, photographed beside German children, and generally treated with the kind of pageantry the British government had pointedly withheld. On the 22nd of October, they traveled to Berchtesgaden and met Adolf Hitler at his Alpine retreat. Photographs from the meeting show Edward giving what later observers have described as a modified Nazi salute and Wallace curtsying.
Hitler, according to his interpreter Paul Schmidt’s later account, found Wallace intelligent and Edward disappointingly shallow. What were the Windsors thinking? The historiographical fight on this point has been running for the better part of a century. Frances Donaldson, in her 1974 biography, treated the trip as the proof of Edward’s inherent fascist sympathies.
Philip Ziegler, in his authorized 1990 biography, took a softer line. Edward was politically illiterate, naively flattered by the Nazi reception, and using the trip to show off Wallace as the queen the British had refused to make her. Michael Bloch agreed. More recent historians, working with archive material that was not available in the ’70s and ’80s, have shifted the balance back toward the harder reading.
The trip was not, in their view, an innocent error. It was an act of dynastic vanity by a former king who did not understand what he was lending his face to, conducted at a moment when any clear-eyed observer should have understood what Hitler was preparing. Two years later, the war began. The Windsors, then living in France, fled south as the German army drove west in May 1940.
By June, they were in neutral Spain. By July, they had moved to neutral Portugal, where they spent five extraordinary weeks in a villa near Cascais, while the British government tried to work out what to do with them. What they did during those five weeks is the subject of the most damaging set of documents ever produced about a member of the British royal family.
The Marburg files were a cache of German diplomatic cables captured by Allied troops at the end of the war and stored in a castle near the town of Marburg. Among them sat a series of telegrams between Berlin and the German Embassy in Madrid and Lisbon during the summer of 1940. They came from two men.
The Madrid ambassador Eberhard von Stohrer and Walter Schellenberg, an SS intelligence officer dispatched to Iberia for the express purpose, reported back to Berlin on a series of conversations with the Duke of Windsor and his entourage. According to the cables, Edward expressed a willingness to return to Britain as a peacemaker once Germany had won, spoke contemptuously of Winston Churchill, and seemed to believe that his return as a kind of constitutional figurehead under German auspices was both possible and desirable. The British
government, which captured the cables in 1945 and read them with dawning horror, did everything in its power to suppress them. Files were quietly removed. Publication was blocked. By the time the documents finally appeared in print in 1957, the Windsors had succeeded in establishing a version of the war years in which they had been loyal, if unhappy, exiles posted to the Bahamas at Churchill’s discretion with no German entanglements worth discussing.
The argument over how to read the Marburg files has split historians for two generations. Philip Ziegler, given access to the royal archives in the 1980s, argued that the German agents exaggerated the Windsors’ enthusiasm to please Berlin and that Edward was a defeatist fool rather than an active conspirator.
Hugo Vickers took a similar view. Andrew Lownie’s 2021 book, Traitor King, represented the sharpest break with the older consensus. Working with newly opened material from the Royal Archives, the FBI files, and continental sources, Lownie argued that the Duke and Duchess were not merely indiscreet, but actively willing to collaborate with the Third Reich, and that the British government’s decision to send them to the Bahamas in August 1940 was an emergency containment operation rather than a routine appointment.
What about Wallis specifically? Was she, as the FBI files compiled under J. Edgar Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt suggested, a Nazi sympathizer passing intelligence to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to London during her affair with the King? On this question, almost every serious historian agrees that the answer is no, but with caveats.
The FBI files contain a great deal of memoranda from informants alleging that Wallis was a German agent and was sleeping with Ribbentrop. The most colorful version of the story, in which Ribbentrop sent her 17 carnations every day to commemorate the number of times they had slept together, has been traced by Anne Sebba and Michael Bloch to malicious Mayfair gossip first circulated by people who wanted Wallis socially destroyed and was later printed as fact by Charles Higham in his 1988 biography.
Ribbentrop sent flowers, but he sent flowers to a great many society hostesses. He was that kind of ambassador. There is no evidence she was ever recruited as an agent by anyone. What is documented, beyond polite dispute, is that Wallis Simpson held loud, defeatist, and at times pro-German opinions at dinner parties between 1936 and 1940.
She believed that British foreign policy had been mishandled and that Hitler had legitimate grievances, and she made no attempt to hide either belief from people who would later report her remarks to British and American intelligence. The line between an indiscreet fascist sympathizer and an active spy is a clear one in law and a porous one in popular memory.
Wallis crossed the first line many times. Evidence that she crossed the second has, after eight decades of investigation, never appeared. In August 1940, with the Battle of Britain about to begin, Winston Churchill reached a decision he later described with rare bluntness as the only solution.
He appointed the Duke of Windsor governor of the Bahamas. The job was a colonial backwater, far from Europe, far from the press, far from anyone the Windsors might inadvertently inform. Edward was furious. Wallis was distraught. They sailed for Nassau in late August, accompanied by an enormous quantity of luggage and a number of Cairn terriers.
For five years, they served out the war on the island. The Duke complained to anyone who would listen that the heat was intolerable, the staff inadequate, and the natives, by which he meant the black Bohemian population that made up roughly 85% of the colony. Exhausting, the Duchess redecorated Government House at extravagant expense.
They both, on more than one occasion, used colonial postal channels to move money and personal property in ways that the British Treasury found difficult to investigate at long range. Their wartime correspondence, when it was finally released, displayed an obliviousness to global events so total that historians have spent decades arguing over whether it was genuine or affected.
In July 1943, the wealthy gold mining magnate, Sir Harry Oakes, then the richest man in the British Empire, was murdered in his Nassau bedroom in circumstances that nobody has ever explained. Edward, as governor, took the unusual step of personally summoning two Miami detectives rather than calling in Scotland Yard.
A decision that seemed designed to keep the investigation provincial and quiet. Their case against Oakes’s son-in-law, Count Alfred de Marigny, fell apart at trial after the prosecution’s main fingerprint evidence was demonstrated to have been fabricated. The murder remains unsolved. Tabloid versions of the story have implicated everyone from the Mafia to the Duchess of Windsor herself.
Serious historians regard the Duke’s interference as evidence of staggering incompetence rather than complicity. After the war, the Windsors returned to Europe where they would spend the rest of their lives moving between rented houses in France, hotel suites in New York, and the occasional country weekend with whoever would still have them.
They had no jobs and no public role. What they did have was a great deal of jewelry, a great deal of luggage, and a great deal of time. The couple filled the time by getting photographed at restaurants and writing memoirs. Edward’s A King’s Story, published in 1951, was largely ghostwritten by the journalist Charles J. V. Murphy.
It met financial necessity and performed a careful exercise in retrospective image management. The book earned a fortune. Wallis followed in 1956 with The Heart Has Its Reasons, also ghosted by Murphy, and earned another fortune of her own. Together, the two volumes told a sanitized version of the romance that allowed the Windsors to live comfortably while burying every politically inconvenient detail of the previous 20 years.
Both were translated into a dozen languages and became best sellers in markets where the actual archival evidence was unavailable, which was to say everywhere. In the early 1950s, Wallis began an affair so public that the only person who seemed not to notice was the man she was married to. Jimmy Donahue was the homosexual heir to the Woolworth fortune.
He was 20 years younger than Wallis, witty, cruel, and openly used by his cousin Barbara Hutton as a weapon for embarrassing the family. Their relationship ran from roughly 1950 to 1954, reported in the gossip columns of Manhattan and Paris, discussed at dinner tables in Newport, and conducted, by the testimony of everyone involved, in front of Edward, who appears to have been too besotted, too confused, or too thoroughly broken to do anything about it.
Anne Sebba and Andrew Morton both treat the affair as evidence of how deep Wallace’s boredom and resentment had become by the time she had been the Duchess of Windsor for 15 years. The two books, The Affair and The Parade of Dinner Parties, continued through the ’50s and ’60s. Edward grew thin and drank too much. Wallace grew thin and supervised every aspect of his diet, his medication, and his social engagements with the same fanatical attention she had once brought to the Bryanston Court soufflés.
He was diagnosed with throat cancer in late 1971. The Queen, his niece Elizabeth II, paid him a personal visit at the Windsors’ Paris house in May 1972. He died 10 days later. Wallace, by then 75, attended the funeral at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, and stayed for several days at Buckingham Palace as the Queen’s guest.
Photographs from that visit show a small, frail, immaculately dressed woman in black walking alongside the family that had spent 35 years pretending she did not exist. Wallace returned to Paris and entered a long, terrible decline. Her health collapsed and her dementia advanced. By 1975, she was bedridden and by 1980, she could no longer speak.
The story of her last decade is one of the strangest and most disturbing chapters of the entire Windsor saga and it has very little to do with the king who married her or the empire that hated her. It has to do with a French lawyer named Suzanne Blum. Maître Blum, a respected Parisian advocate then in her 70s, had been the Windsors’ lawyer for years.
After Edward’s death, she gradually took complete control of Wallace’s affairs. The Duchess’s loyal personal staff were fired one by one, replaced with employees who reported to Blum, and access to the bedridden Duchess was restricted to a single guarded room. Property and personal effects began to disappear from inventories.
Hugo Vickers’ 2011 book, Behind Closed Doors, based on extensive interviews with the staff and friends Blum had banished, documents the operation in painful detail. By the early 1980s, Wallis Simpson, formerly the most discussed woman of her generation, had been reduced to a silent figure in a hospital bed in a Paris townhouse, fed through a tube, attended by paid nurses, with all of her remaining wealth slowly migrating into accounts and arrangements that benefited her lawyer rather than her. She died on
the 24th of April, 1986, aged 89. Her funeral was attended by the Queen, the Queen Mother, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and most of the senior royal family gathered at the same Windsor chapels that had refused to host her wedding half a century earlier. She was buried beside Edward at Frogmore Gardens in Windsor.
The Queen Mother, who had spent 50 years refusing to acknowledge her sister-in-law’s existence, was one of the chief mourners. What is left when the legends are stripped away? Not very much that is flattering. Wallis Simpson was a clever, frightened, financially anxious American woman who built herself, by sustained effort, into a Mayfair hostess of some reputation, and who then accidentally seduced a man who turned out to be incapable of letting her go.
She was probably not a Nazi spy, and almost certainly not the witch with the Shanghai techniques. Contrary to a hundred years of tabloid speculation, she was not intersex or a hermaphrodite or any of the other things that biographers from Michael Block onward have entertained as a way of explaining a marriage with no children, which is a question that cannot be answered without medical records that nobody has and that very probably never existed.
What she was, by the end, was a woman who got what she had asked for in the most disastrous possible way. She had wanted security. She had also wanted a name and to be more than the niece of a Baltimore Railroad executive who never warmed to her. In exchange, she got a husband who could not function without her, a court that would not receive her, an FBI file that would never close, and a place in the popular imagination as the American adventuress who reached up and stole a king.
The king had reached down first. The British establishment, eager to blame her, never quite forgave him. Anne Sebba’s biography ends with a line that holds up well a decade later. “Wallis was demonized for surviving a system that had been designed with considerable malice to crush her.” That is not the whole story.
It is, however, more of the story than the men who wrote her obituaries in 1986 ever bothered to learn. She was buried in a plot at Frogmore that the Queen had personally approved. The headstone reads, “Only Wallis, the of Windsor.” Her husband’s grave, 3 ft away, reads “Her Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor” with the title that the British government had refused her in 1937 still attached to him for the rest of eternity.
Whether that final small inequality was an oversight, an insult, or simply the last piece of evidence that the British state never lost an argument it had decided to win is a question like so much else in this story, of interpretation.
