The Duchess of Windsor arrived in London for her husband’s funeral in May 1972, her mind clouded by the arteriosclerosis that had been advancing through his final months of illness. The press cameras were ready. What they showed was a woman in black, composed, at the head of a coffin in Westminster Hall.
What they also showed, days later, was the Queen Mother sitting beside her at Windsor, taking her hand, telling her, to the visible astonishment of the courtiers who witnessed it, “I know how you feel. I’ve been through it myself.” Kissing her farewell. To observers watching, it looked like the ice had finally broken. But the Queen Mother didn’t go to Frogmore for the burial.
While the Simpson had spent the funeral week at Buckingham Palace, brought there by an invitation that was, in form, a kindness, and in practice, a continuation of a policy that had been running since 1937. She was in the house. She wasn’t addressed in any official capacity by the style of Her Royal Highness. She had not been addressed that way since the letters patent of May 1937.
The Queen Mother was also under that roof. 36 years of this. She would do it for 14 more. She had never forgiven Wallace Simpson for what the abdication had done to her husband. She wouldn’t forgive her for dying, either. The abdication of Edward the VIII is usually told as a constitutional crisis, sometimes as a love story, depending on sympathies.
It was also a feud. And the woman who kept that feud alive across seven decades wasn’t a bishop, not a prime minister, and not the palace lawyers who drafted the relevant paperwork. It was the new queen consort who became the queen mother, who outlived everyone involved and got the last word. Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon was born on August 4th, 1900, the youngest daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore, Scottish landed gentry deeply rooted in the kind of order that treated duty as character and divorce as
catastrophe. She married Prince Albert, Duke of York, in 1923. By every biographical account, it was a marriage of genuine affection. He was shy, prone to a stammer he had been treating with speech therapist Lionel Logue for years, well before any coming crisis, a fact that will matter shortly.
She was warm, formidably capable, and entirely prepared to spend her life as the wife of a second son who would never sit on the throne. That arrangement depended on the first son behaving. By the end of 1934, Edward, the Prince of Wales, had become, in the words of his own official biographer, slavishly dependent on an American socialite named Wallis Simpson.
She had been born Bessie Wallis Warfield in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, in 1896. She had been married twice by the time she met him seriously, to a US Navy aviator she divorced in 1927, and to a shipping executive named Ernest Simpson, whose home in London she had occupied since 1928. On January 10th, 1931, Lady Thelma Furness had introduced her to Edward at a house party at Burrough Court near Melton Mowbray.
Within 4 years, the affair was serious enough to disturb the court and fracture his family. For the Duchess of York, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Wallis Simpson was a category violation. A divorced American, still married to her second husband by 1935, occupying the position of the most important woman in the future king’s life with apparent ease and zero apology.
William Shawcross, who wrote The Queen Mother’s official biography in 2009 with unrestricted access to her private papers at the Royal Archives at Windsor, described her writings from this period as showing a woman who had formed views about the abdication crisis that she would never substantially revise. One account, drawn from the book 17 Carnations, notes she had been writing to her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, denying that she had ever met the lady.
The alarm had been forming since at least 1935. On January 20th, 1936, George V died at Sandringham. Edward became king. By November 16th, he had told Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin he intended to marry Wallis. By December 5th, before dawn, Wallis had fled Fort Belvedere for France. On December 10th, Edward signed the instrument of abdication in the drawing room of Fort Belvedere, witnessed by his three brothers, among them Prince Albert, Duke of York.
He wrote his name 15 times across the documents. At the moment he finished signing, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon became queen consort. She had not wanted it. Her husband had not wanted it. George VI had never been prepared for the role. No intensive training as Prince of Wales, no 20 years of cultivation for the position he now held.
He would spend the next 16 years attempting to give the monarchy back the stability his brother had cost it. Shawcross’s biography, drawing from the royal archives correspondence, describes the Queen’s emerging private understanding of what had happened. No single December 1936 letter with a specific reference number is available in published form.
What Shawcross documented from that period is consistent with every secondary account that followed. She believed the crown, imposed on a man who had not been built for it, would shorten his life. She believed the woman who had consumed Edward’s judgment was responsible for that imposition. George VI underwent surgery on September 23rd, 1951 to remove his left lung, a malignant tumor having been found.
He died on February 6th, 1952, aged 56. The medical record is plain. 40 years of heavy cigarette smoking contributed primarily. Arteriosclerosis compounded it. His stammer had predated the abdication by decades. Lionel Logue had been treating it since the 1920s, not 1936. But the Queen Mother’s private understanding operated on different terms.
She had watched her husband give his health to a role delivered to him by a brother who chose an American divorcee over the crown. Nothing that came after would alter that account. In 1938, two years after the abdication, George VI wrote to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The letter stated that neither the Queen nor Queen Mary had any desire to meet the Duchess of Windsor.
That is a primary document. It places the Queen’s position precisely in her husband’s hand with no ambiguity about the year or the sentiment. The Windsors married on June 3rd, 1937 at the Château de Candé in France. No member of the royal family attended. Edward had been created Duke of Windsor. On May 27th, two weeks after the coronation of George VI, letters patent were issued.
The relevant text, held at the National Archives under reference HO 125/17, is specific. His wife and descendants, if any, shall not hold the said style, title, or attribute. The style in question was Her Royal Highness. The legal basis for this exclusion was, by most constitutional accounts, thin. Under established British practice, a wife takes the rank of her husband.
When Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had married the Duke of York in 1923, the palace statement had been explicit. In accordance with the settled general rule, a wife takes the status of her husband. Wallace Simpson was now married to a man styled His Royal Highness. The letters patent denied her the equivalent and made the exclusion permanent in writing.
The Royal Central analysis of the episode notes that the constitutional scholars view was that the denial had no active role in precedent. It was more royal prerogative than settled law, engineered to produce a specific outcome for a specific person. The Queen Mother backed the decision. Beyond the letters patent itself, what the documented record shows is specific and datable.
During the war years, when the Duke was serving as governor of the Bahamas, arriving in Nassau on August 18th, 1940, at a posting he privately compared to Napoleon’s St. Helena, the Queen Mother sent direct instructions to Bahamas officials not to use Wallace’s royal title in official correspondence. This is documented in Shawcross’s biography and corroborated by secondary accounts.
She didn’t simply decline to recognize the title. She intervened to prevent others from using it. On August 14th, 1940, she wrote a private letter to Colonial Secretary Lord Lloyd. In it, she described Wallis Simpson as the lowest of the low. This is a dated, attributed letter, not a reported remark, not a reconstructed quote, a document.
The Bahamas posting had removed the Windsors from Europe at the moment their presence there had become most problematic. In October 1937, without government approval, they had toured Nazi Germany and been photographed with Adolf Hitler at his Berchtesgaden retreat on October 22nd. British intelligence monitored their correspondence throughout the war period.
In July 1940, the SS mounted an operation code-named Willi to kidnap the Duke while he was in Portugal and use him as a political asset. One biographer, Charles Higham, went considerably further in his 1988 book, alleging a personal relationship between Wallace and the German ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop.
That claim is contested and should be understood as such. Michael Block, who also wrote extensively on the Windsors and had access to the relevant records, described the specific Ribbentrop affair allegation as perhaps stretching a point. German intelligence files mention someone being in love with Herr Ribbentrop through Mrs.
Simpson, a third-party observation in an enemy intelligence document, not confirmed evidence of an affair. The Hayem material carries a controversy the mainstream historical record hasn’t resolved in his favor. What can be stated without controversy? The Windsor’s wartime record handed the palace leverage it used carefully.
The Bahamas posting kept them out of Britain. The title freeze kept them diminished. The lowest of the low letter was sent while they were already at sea. The war ended in 1945. The Windsors didn’t return to England. They took up residence at 4 route du champ de entraînement, a Second Empire villa on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
The French government had eventually made the property available following post-war complications that had included sequestration and in the late 1940s occupation by Charles de Gaulle. The villa was 20 minutes from central Paris, surrounded by the Bois, gracious in every physical respect, and insistently far from home.
The staff who remained with them included Sydney Johnson, a Bohemian-born valet recruited during the island posting, who served the Duke for over 30 years. Hugo Vickers, who drew on Johnson’s testimony in Behind Closed Doors, his 2011 account of the Duchess, noted that Johnson spoke of the Windsors as living people, not historical figures.
The texture Johnson provided was of a household conducting itself with enormous dignity in circumstances of permanent social quarantine. The Duke wrote to Queen Elizabeth II in August 1968, asking directly whether the annual allowance, at that point £10,000, would cease after his death, leaving Wallace without support.
He was in his mid-70s, dying slowly, asking his niece whether his wife of 30 years would be provided for. The Queen replied on February 26th, 1969, guaranteeing £5,000 per annum after his death. This was a settlement negotiated in private correspondence, not a public recognition. The one documented face-to-face meeting between the Queen Mother and Wallis Simpson, across the entire Paris exile, was in 1967, at the unveiling of a plaque commemorating Queen Mary.
The Queen Mother had initially refused to attend. She relented. The two women shook hands. No curtsy from Wallis. It had been 31 years since December 1936. In late May 1972, with the Duke dying of throat cancer, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles made a private visit to the Paris villa. Edward’s nurse, Julie Alexander, later described the scene in documentary testimony.
He could barely have weighed 80 lb, yet he insisted on sitting upright in a chair, wearing clothes arranged to conceal his intravenous tubes for the visit from his family. He had a request. He asked the Queen to grant Wallis the style of Her Royal Highness. She said no. He died 8 days later, on May 28th, at approximately 20 minutes past 2:00 in the morning.
The events of the funeral are where the stories surface and its reality diverge most sharply. What was documented at the service? The Queen Mother sat beside Wallace at Windsor. She told her, to the visible astonishment of the courtiers present, “I know how you feel. I’ve been through it myself.” She kissed her goodbye.
For those watching, it appeared to be reconciliation. To observers who had followed the story for 36 years, it appeared to be the end of something. But the Queen Mother didn’t go to Frogmore for the burial. The Queen attended the graveside. The Queen Mother didn’t. One step short of the ground where the man was put, she stopped.
After the service, Wallace returned to Paris. She wouldn’t come back to England again. Her arteriosclerosis worsened through the early 1970s. By the late 1970s, the dementia had progressed beyond confusion into near total incapacity. She broke her hip twice, suffered a series of strokes.
By 1980, she could no longer speak at all. Records were played in her bedroom to try to reduce the dementia’s effects on her memory. By the end, she was confined to bed and received no visitors except her doctor and nurses. Matron Suzanne Blum, her French lawyer, had been managing documents from the Duke’s personal archive since 1975.
Wallace’s personal assistant, Johanna Schuts, later described the influence Blum exercised in deeply troubling terms, alleging that Blum’s nurses kept the Duchess sedated and unaware as her estate was managed around her. Hugo Vickers in Behind Closed Doors described the mechanics of this containment plainly, that the most effective way to keep as a prisoner is to surround them entirely.
Wallace Simpson died on April 24th, 1986 at 4 Route du Champ d’Entraînement of bronchial pneumonia. She was 89 years old. Her funeral was held 5 days later at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. 175 mourners attended, including the Queen, the Queen Mother, Margaret Thatcher, and Neil Kinnock. The service lasted 28 minutes.
Per Wallace’s wishes, there was no eulogy and no direct reference to the Duchess during the ceremony. The Canon of Westminster referred to her once in a prayer as “Our Sister.” The silver plaque on her polished English oak coffin read, “Wallace, Duchess of Windsor, 1896 to 1986. No H.R.H.” The Queen Mother attended the service.
She didn’t go to the graveside. The same choreography as 1972. The same step short of the grave. Most of Wallace’s estate, valued at 5 million pounds, went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris as a tribute to France, the country that had given her a home. The royal family received no major bequests.
Her possessions were eventually auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1998, where the royal family bought them back. Her gravestone, beside the Duke’s at Frogmore, does not carry the H.R.H. prefix, either. A note the record requires. The Queen Mother’s private correspondence is held at the Royal Archives at Windsor. William Shawcross, whose official biography runs to 1,096 pages and was published in 2009 with unrestricted access to her papers, quoted at length from her private letters, including her writings on the abdication.
Many letters remain restricted. What Shawcross extracted shows the shape of her views without always supplying exact published text. Some attributed remarks, including a widely reported comment about Wallace that circulated in social circles, can’t be traced to a specific dated letter with a reference number.
Where such quotes appear in the broader historical record, they are from secondary biographers, not primary documents. Biographer Ingrid Seward concluded that the Queen Mother’s attitude toward the Windsors bordered on a vendetta. Biographer Michael Thornton described the steely and implacable ostracism practiced for 50 years.
These are judgments formed by researchers with years of access to the period. Hugo Vickers, who wrote both the official biography of the Queen Mother and the account of Wallace’s final years, put it more carefully than most. The Queen Mother hardly knew the Duchess of Windsor, and she denied hating her on the grounds that you have to know someone to hate them.
But, Vickers added, “It’s fair to say she wasn’t in favor of her.” What primary documents exist? The 1937 letters patent at the National Archives, the 1938 George VI letter to Chamberlain, the August 14th, 1940 letter to Lord Lloyd, the 1968 to 1969 allowance correspondence, the 1986 funeral proceedings, the plaque without a title.
The documents prove the pattern the biographers name with the pattern adds up to. There is a reasonable argument that the Queen Mother wasn’t wrong about any of it. The abdication had shaken a monarchy already under pressure from every direction. George VI had given 20 years of his health and most of his life to restoring what his brother had damaged.
His daughter gave her entire reign to building on what he’d left. Viewed from inside the institution, the cold treatment of the Windsors was a political calculation, a way of drawing a clear line between what the crown accepted and what it didn’t. But a calculation and a personal vendetta aren’t mutually exclusive.
They can occupy the same act simultaneously. A woman can be right that the abdication was damaging and still conduct, across 50 years, the systematic exclusion of the person she blamed for it. One does not cancel the other. The Queen Mother died on March 30th, 2002. She was 101 years old. She outlived him by nearly 30 years.
She outlived Wallace by nearly 16. She buried both of them on her terms, with their titles diminished and their letters unanswered. The Queen Mother won the war. Whether her country thanks her for that is a different question. Subscribe for more stories like this one. this one.
