There is a photograph of Wallis Simpson, taken in the summer of 1937, just weeks after her wedding. She is standing in the gardens of a chateau in the French countryside, dressed in a pale blue gown that would become so closely associated with her, it was eventually named after her. She looks composed, unreadable, not happy, exactly, but not unhappy, either.
Just very, very still. The man beside her had given up the British throne to be with her. An empire, a crown, a destiny. All of it, gone. Most people know that part. What most people don’t know is that this was Wallis Simpson’s third attempt at building a life with someone, and that the two that came before it were darker, stranger, and more complicated than almost anything the abdication story ever managed to capture.
Three marriages, three completely different men, three completely different versions of what it means to be trapped by the choices you’ve made. Segment seven. The girl from Baltimore. Bessie Wallis Warfield was born on June 19th, 1896, in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, a small resort town straddling the Maryland border where her parents had retreated for the summer.
Her father, Teackle Wallis Warfield, was from a prominent Baltimore family. Her mother, Alice Montague, came from an old Virginia line. Neither family had approved of the match. Neither family had money, exactly. They had the appearance of money, which in certain social circles amounts to the same thing, until it doesn’t.
Her father died of tuberculosis when Wallis was just 5 months old. He left almost nothing behind. Alice was young, widowed, and entirely dependent on the charity of her late husband’s wealthy bachelor brother, Solomon Davies Warfield, a man who had risen to become president of the Continental Trust Company in Baltimore, and who managed the family’s financial survival with the slightly austere manner of someone who expected gratitude in return for his generosity.
The family moved to Baltimore, and Wallis grew up in that particular condition familiar to many families of that era, socially prominent, financially precarious, always aware of the gap between the life that was expected and the life that was actually available. Solomon paid for Wallis to attend Oldfields School, the most expensive girls school in Maryland, where she was known for two things, her immaculate dress sense and her relentless drive to be at the front of everything.
A classmate later recalled that Wallis had simply decided she was going to be at the top of the class, and then made it happen. She made friends with the daughters of genuinely wealthy families, heiresses, socialites, girls whose fathers owned railroads and chemical companies, and she learned to move in those circles with a naturalness that belied the fact that she did not actually belong to them.
She was not considered conventionally beautiful. She had strong features, a jaw that biographers tended to describe with careful tact, and violet blue eyes that people remembered long after they had forgotten everything else about her. What she had, more than beauty, was presence, a sharp, unsoftened wit, an ability to make whoever she was talking to feel, for the duration of the conversation, like the most interesting person in the room.
Combined with a fashion sense that was always precise and never accidental, this made her magnetic in ways that photographs could only partially convey. By 1916, Wallis was 20 years old and had been through the social rituals of a Baltimore debutante season without finding a husband. Her Uncle Solomon had already made it clear, in the way that wealthy Baltimore uncles of that era tended to make things clear, that she needed to secure herself a marriage.
The family’s finances did not allow for extended periods of a young woman simply existing. Her mother had remarried, but the second marriage had not substantially changed the financial picture. Wallis had inherited nothing and was likely to inherit nothing. What she had, was herself, which, by any measure, was considerable, but was not the same as money.
She had been developing, through those debutante years, the skills that would define her for the rest of her life, the art of the dinner party, the management of social hierarchies, the particular discipline of never appearing to want anything too visibly. She observed which rooms mattered and which people controlled access to them.
She dressed with a precision that other young women in Baltimore found both admirable and faintly alarming. She had none of the passive softness that the conventions of the era suggested a marriageable young woman should project, and she seems to have understood fairly early on that her path forward would depend not on playing by the rules, but on understanding them well enough to work around them.
It was in April 1916 that everything changed, when a visit to her cousin Corinne in Pensacola, Florida, put her in the path of a man who would spend the next decade making her life very difficult, and who would teach her things about herself that she had not particularly wanted to learn. His name was Earl Winfield Spencer, Jr.
He was handsome, dashing, and flew airplanes at a time when flying airplanes was still the most glamorous thing a man could do. He was also, as she would discover, a man with a problem that no amount of glamour could fix. Segment six. Win Spencer, the first disaster. Earl Winfield Spencer, Jr.
was born in 1888 in Kinsley, Kansas, to a Chicago stockbroker family. He had graduated from the United States Naval Academy, and by 1916 was a naval aviator stationed at the Pensacola airbase, which in those years was one of the most exciting places a young pilot could be. The Navy was still working out what to do with its planes, and the men who flew them carried with them the particular glamour that belongs to anyone willing to do something that most people regard as insane.
Wallis encountered him through her cousin’s husband, and wrote to her mother the same day. She described him as the most fascinating aviator she had ever met. By the end of the evening, she had met him, she later wrote, she knew she was in love. Win proposed after just 2 months of courtship. Wallis hesitated.
Her mother was skeptical. The life of a naval wife was unglamorous and itinerant, but ultimately said yes. The wedding took place on November 8th, 1916, at Christ Episcopal Church in Baltimore, the same church where Wallis had been confirmed 6 years earlier. The bridesmaids wore orchid-colored gowns. Wallis wore white. The reception was full of the kind of people that Wallis had spent her whole life carefully cultivating.
What followed was a slow, grinding unraveling. Win Spencer was an alcoholic. This was not a secret, exactly. He drank before she married him, but the full weight of it only became clear once they were living together in the succession of rented houses and government accommodations that came with a naval career.
He was stationed first in San Diego, then in Washington, then back in California. Wallis followed him from base to base, inhabiting what she later described as rented bungalows and tasteless government housing, a particular cruelty for someone who had grown up understanding that the way a home looked was a direct statement about the person who lived in it.
When Win drank, he was not simply difficult. He was, by multiple accounts, actively cruel, directing at Wallis a running series of subtle insults and veiled humiliations that were precise enough to wound without being obvious enough to complain about in public. He played practical jokes that had long since stopped being funny.
He locked her in rooms and left for hours. He once crashed his plane into the sea after drinking before a flight, and emerged almost unharmed, which must have felt to Wallis like an arrangement that suited no one. The marriage became, in her own words, a succession of bitter quarrels, each triggered by something trivial, each drawing from a root cause that had nothing to do with the surface argument.
In 1920, Win was posted to Washington, and then given command of the USS Pampanga, a gunboat stationed in the Far East. Rather than follow him immediately, Wallis stayed behind, enjoying what amounted to a period of freedom from the marriage without the inconvenience of actually ending it. She had begun what she later described carefully as friendships, among them an Argentine diplomat named Felipe de Espil, with whom she had a long and, by most accounts, genuinely felt relationship, one that her biographers have described
as among the most emotionally significant of her early life. De Espil did not want to marry her. He was a career diplomat who needed a wife who fit a very specific social profile, and Wallis, twice removed from the financial security she needed, and increasingly known as someone with a troubled marriage, did not fit it.
In January 1924, hoping to salvage something of her marriage, Wallis sailed to the Far East to join Win in China. The attempt failed almost immediately. She fell ill. She returned to Hong Kong and then traveled through China in what she later called her lotus year, that strange, floating period of living outside the obligations of either her marriage or her regular life, appears to have been the moment at which something in Wallis Simpson’s understanding of herself fundamentally changed. She returned to the United
States by September 1925, and from that point, she and Win were living completely apart. Their divorce was finalized on December 10th, 1927. She was 31 years old, twice separated, once divorced, and almost completely without financial resources. Solomon Warfield, her uncle and reliable source of support, had died in 1927 and had excluded her from his will precisely because she had divorced.
Her mother had remarried and was not wealthy. Wallis had nothing particularly concrete to offer in the marriage market except her intelligence, her social skill, and the determination that had been visible since her days at Oldfields School, when she had simply decided she was going to be at the top of the class and made it happen.
What she did next was find Ernest Simpson. Ernest Aldrich Simpson was not the most exciting man Wallis had ever met. He was not the most glamorous or the most dangerous, but he offered something that Win Spencer had never been able to provide, a stable platform from which to build the life she had always intended to have.
And for a while, at least on the surface, it worked beautifully, until a weekend house party in January 1931 changed everything. Segment five. Ernest Simpson, the comfortable trap. Ernest Aldrich Simpson was Anglo-American, born in New York in 1897 to a British father and an American mother, educated at Harvard, and by the mid-1920s running his family’s shipping business in London.
He had served in the Coldstream Guards during the First World War and had taken on British citizenship. He was cultured, well-read, steady, and gentlemanly in the particular English mode that Wallis, with her Baltimore background and her years of improvising her way through social situations, found both appealing and useful.
He was also, at the time Wallis met him, in the process of extracting himself from his first marriage, which had produced a daughter named Audrey. Wallis met Ernest while her divorce from Win was still being finalized, and their courtship was quiet and practical. He was not a passionate choice. Biographers have noted that Wallis accepted his proposal by telegram from Cannes, where she was staying with friends, a detail that says something about the emotional register of the arrangement.
She telegraphed, “Yes.” He made the preparations. They married on July 21st, 1928, at the register office in Chelsea, London. The life they built together was genuinely comfortable, and Wallis was good at it. The Simpsons moved into a well-staffed flat in Mayfair, and eventually settled into a larger apartment at Bryanston Court, where Wallis established herself as a hostess of some skill.
She had a talent for the dinner party, for assembling the right combination of people, for keeping conversation moving, for creating an atmosphere in which guests felt simultaneously entertained and envied for being there. She was known for her scathing wit, for a conversational style that could make even powerful men feel slightly off-balance in the most enjoyable possible way.
It was through the social world she was building that she encountered Lady Thelma Furness, an American-born socialite who was, at the time, the acknowledged mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales. Lady Furness introduced Wallis and Ernest to her circle, which included weekends at Edward’s country estate, dinners at the Embassy Club, private evenings that blurred the line between the upper reaches of London society and the most informal edges of the royal household.
On January 10th, 1931, at a weekend house party at Burrough Court, near Melton Mowbray, hosted by Lady Furness, Wallis was formally introduced to the Prince of Wales. He remembered her later as unremarkable at their first meeting. She had a cold that evening and was not at her best. She remembered him as charming in the specific way that very powerful men learn to be charming, attentive, focused, disarming.
He was 46 years old in the image the world had of him. He was more uncertain, more restless, and more emotionally dependent than anyone outside his close circle understood. Between 1931 and 1934, the Simpsons encountered the Prince at various social occasions. Wallis was eventually presented at court. Ernest began to have financial difficulties.
The Depression had strained the shipping business, and the couple had to let some of their staff go. By early 1934, while Lady Furness was visiting America to assist her sister in a custody trial, Wallis had quietly become the Prince’s mistress. He had cast aside both Lady Furness and his previous long-term companion, Freda Dudley Ward, without any direct farewell to either of them.
He simply stopped returning their calls. By 1935, the affair was visible to anyone who looked. The Prince gave Wallis expensive gifts. They took public holidays together in Europe. He relied on her judgment in ways he had never relied on anyone else’s. He consulted her on matters of taste, of conversation, of how to handle situations that his upbringing had left him surprisingly ill-equipped for.
She organized his life with the same efficient elegance she had brought to the dinner parties at Bryanston Court. Ernest Simpson understood what was happening. He had always understood it better than he let on. He was, by multiple accounts, a man who genuinely liked Wallis and who recognized that the person she was becoming in the orbit of the Prince of Wales was a person whose domestic companionship he could no longer adequately provide.
He stepped back. He took himself to dinner parties and excused himself from others. He gave Wallis room to be wherever she needed to be. On January 20th, 1936, King George V died. Edward became King Edward VIII. His coronation was scheduled for the following spring, and the question of what to do about Wallis Simpson became, almost overnight, the most pressing constitutional problem in the British Empire, because Wallis had filed for divorce from Ernest on the grounds that he had committed adultery with her own childhood friend, Mary
Kirk, an arrangement that some biographers have suggested was deliberately orchestrated to smooth the path toward the marriage everyone could see coming. The decree nisi was granted on October 27th, 1936, and from that moment, nothing in Wallis Simpson’s life would ever be entirely ordinary again. Segment four.
The abdication. The crisis nobody wanted. The British press had been maintaining, through a gentleman’s agreement with the government, a careful silence about the King’s relationship with Mrs. Simpson. The American and European press had no such agreement and had been covering the affair with considerable enthusiasm for months.
British readers who traveled abroad or who had American friends returned home knowing things that their own newspapers would not print. The result was a peculiar kind of open secret, one of the most significant political situations in the country’s modern history being discussed everywhere except in the publications that were supposed to inform the public.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin met with the King in October 1936 to make clear what the government’s position was. The King’s position was equally clear. He intended to marry Wallis once her divorce became final. Baldwin told him this was not possible, that a twice-divorced woman with two living former husbands was unacceptable as Queen Consort and that the Church of England, of which the king was the nominal head, did not permit the remarriage of divorced persons whose former spouses were still living.
The king proposed a morganatic marriage, an arrangement in which Wallace would become his wife, but not his queen, receiving a lesser title and no rights of succession. Baldwin took this proposal to the Dominions and reported it back that they rejected it. On December 3rd, 1936, the story finally broke on the front pages of British newspapers and was openly discussed in Parliament.
What had been an open secret became a public crisis within hours. Wallace, who had escaped to the South of France to avoid the press storm that had been building around her for weeks, heard the news from a distance. According to accounts from those close to her at the time, when she heard that Edward intended to abdicate, her reaction was not the one that the romance of the situation might suggest.
She reportedly screamed at the news and called Edward a fool. She had not wanted him to give up the throne. Whatever she may or may not have felt for Edward personally, the abdication made her future considerably more complicated than it needed to be. On December 10th, 1936, Edward signed the instrument of abdication in the presence of his three surviving brothers, the Dukes of York, Gloucester, and Kent.
The following day, Parliament confirmed it. On the evening of December 11th, Edward gave a radio broadcast on the BBC in which he explained, in his own measured words, that he had found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of royal responsibility without the help and support of the woman he loved.
His reign had lasted 325 days. He left for Austria the following morning. His brother Albert was proclaimed King George VI and Wallis Simpson, who had not wanted any of this to happen quite this way, found herself the most hated woman in Britain and arguably the world. The hatred was real and immediate. The mail she received at the villa in the South of France included letters wishing her dead.
The British press, released from its agreement of silence, did not hold back. She was described as a scheming adventuress, a social climber, a woman of limitless ambition who had manipulated a weak man into destroying the most powerful institution in the world. Her American origins were used against her. Her divorces were used against her.
The fact that both of her former husbands were still alive was used against her. It was the technical ground on which the Church of England considered her prospective marriage to Edward potentially invalid. And it was repeated so often, it became a kind of shorthand for everything the establishment found disqualifying about her.
Wallace was aware of all of it. She was staying at the villa of friends in the South of France, a place called Lou Vieil, and from there she followed the crisis through newspapers, radio broadcasts, and urgent telephone calls from Edward. She repeatedly offered to withdraw, to step back from the relationship entirely, to release Edward from whatever obligation he felt toward her.
He refused each time. He had decided what he wanted and he was not a man who had been trained to accept being told no by anyone, including the woman he intended to marry. None of those descriptions of Wallace were entirely fair. None of them were entirely wrong, either. Edward remained in Austria, separated from Wallace, until her divorce became absolute in May 1937.
The Church of England would not sanction the wedding. The royal family would not attend. George VI forbade any member of the family from going. Edward had particularly wanted his brothers and his cousin Lord Mountbatten to be there. None of them came. The wedding took place anyway. On June 3rd, 1937, at the Château de Candé in the Loire Valley, a property lent to them by a French millionaire, Wallis Warfield married the man who had given up an empire for her.
There were about 16 guests. She wore a pale blue dress. And whatever Wallace had imagined her third marriage might be, what it became was something much more ambiguous and much harder to look at clearly. Segment three. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, a marriage in exile. The title was the first wound. George VI, under advice from his ministers and with the firm support of his mother Queen Mary and his wife Queen Elizabeth, denied Wallace the style of Her Royal Highness.
Edward was styled His Royal Highness the Duke of Windsor. Wallace was styled simply the Duchess of Windsor, the title with the rank visibly stripped from it. She would be referred to as Duchess. His servants and household staff were instructed to refer to her as Her Royal Highness informally within the walls of their own home.
Everywhere else, she was not. Edward found this deeply humiliating and spent years attempting to have it overturned. He appealed to his brother, to his mother, to successive governments. The answer was always no. Decades later, when Queen Elizabeth II visited Edward in Paris in 1972, as he was dying from throat cancer, barely weighing 80 lb, unable to eat, his reported last wish was for Wallace to finally be given the title.
According to accounts from those present, the Queen declined. The title went with him to his grave. This slight was not incidental to their marriage. It shaped the texture of their exile in ways that were difficult to separate from everything else. Wallace had known, when she married Edward, that the British royal family would not welcome her.
She had not fully reckoned with the permanence of it, the way that every social occasion, every official event, every gathering at which the distinction between Her Royal Highness and a woman who was merely a Duchess would be felt, would require her to absorb the insult with a composure she had been training herself toward her entire life.
Their life in the years immediately following the wedding was a complicated mixture of genuine affection, restlessness, and political misjudgment. In October 1937, without government approval, they visited Germany and met Adolf Hitler at his retreat in Berchtesgaden. The visit was a catastrophe in terms of the impression it created.
Photographs of the Duke of Windsor shaking hands with Nazi officials circulated globally. Hitler reportedly said of Wallace afterward that she would have made a good queen. American FBI files compiled in the 1930s described her as a possible Nazi sympathizer and included claims, difficult to substantiate, about a relationship between Wallace and Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany’s ambassador to Britain during those years.
Neither Wallace nor Edward was ever charged with anything and historians continue to debate the extent of their sympathy versus their naivety. What is not debatable is that the visit damaged them permanently in the eyes of the British government. When France fell to Germany in June 1940, the Windsors fled south from their Paris home, moving through Spain and Portugal before eventually being offered the governorship of the Bahamas, a posting that most who watched it noted bore a certain resemblance to a very comfortable exile.
Churchill was among those who had pushed the appointment and private correspondence from the period suggests it was at least partly motivated by a desire to get the Duke and his wife as far as possible from the European mainland, where their connections to certain German officials were a source of ongoing anxiety.
They lived in the Bahamas from 1940 to 1945. Wallace performed her role as the governor’s consort with more competence than she was generally given credit for. She worked actively for the Red Cross, oversaw improvements to infant welfare programs, and supervised substantial renovations of Government House. She also referred to Nassau in private correspondence as their Saint Helena, a reference to Napoleon’s final place of exile that captured something of how the Windsors understood their own position.
After Edward resigned the governorship in 1945, they returned to France and to the kind of social life that had always been their natural habitat, traveling between Paris, New York, Biarritz, the South of France, shuttling between the houses of the very wealthy and the very fashionable, hosting and being hosted with an elegance that their actual financial situation did not entirely support.
Edward received an allowance paid personally by George VI, who had taken over the arrangement after the government declined to put either the Duke or Duchess on the civil list. They lived well on this, but not as grandly as appearances suggested. From 1952, they divided their time between two French properties, a mill house outside Paris called Le Moulin de la Tuilerie, and the Villa Windsor in the Bois de Boulogne.
Both houses were maintained to the precise standard that Wallace required of every physical space she inhabited. The gardens at the mill house were particularly admired. They received visitors from every level of international society, film stars, politicians, journalists, fellow exiles of various kinds, and maintained the performance of a grand social life with extraordinary discipline.
Wallace was always aware in these years of the fragility of the whole arrangement. Edward’s allowance was not guaranteed indefinitely. Their position depended on the continued goodwill of a royal family that had never formally welcomed them. And the HRH question remained open. An unhealed wound that Edward in particular could never quite stop pressing.
In 1956, Wallace published her autobiography, The Heart Has Its Reasons. It presented the marriage as a great love story, the romance for which an empire had been set aside. Whether Wallace believed this version of events is a question that her later remarks did not entirely settle. She once told a close friend that Herman Rogers, the American diplomat who had sheltered her in the south of France during the abdication crisis, had been the love of her life.
She married Edward anyway, whether out of obligation, out of the impossibility of doing otherwise, or out of some version of genuine feeling that she found difficult to name. The marriage held for 35 years. Edward died on May 28th, 1972, at their home in Paris of throat cancer. He was 77 years old. Wallace traveled to Britain for his funeral, staying at Buckingham Palace.
A rare permission from the family that had spent decades declining to formally receive her. She stood at the funeral with the composure that had been the signature of her public life since she was a girl in Baltimore trying to hold herself equal to people who had more money and more security than she had ever possessed.
And then she went back to Paris, and she stayed there. For 14 years, she stayed there as the world she had shared with Edward gradually dissolved around her. And as the life that replaced it became something she could not have imagined and would not have chosen. Segment two, the final years, alone in the house on the Bois de Boulogne.
After Edward’s death, Wallace’s life contracted rapidly and almost completely. She lived at 4 Route du Champ d’Entraînement, a large house at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, the same house she and Edward had lived in for years. It had been decorated with the meticulous care that Wallace brought to every physical environment she inhabited.
Fine furniture, carefully curated objects, the kind of interior that announced its occupant without needing to say a word. She was 89 at the end, and the house that had once been a gathering point for some of the most celebrated figures of the mid-20th century had become by then entirely silent. She had placed her legal affairs in the hands of a French lawyer named Suzanne Blum, a formidable woman who had spent decades representing major Hollywood studios and film stars, and who had, at some point after Edward’s death,
taken over power of attorney for the Duchess. The extent of Blum’s influence became a matter of controversy in the years that followed. A journalist commissioned to write about Wallace discovered that none of her old friends had been permitted to see her. The Duchess’s closest companions from the Windsor years, women who had known her for decades, who had been her intimates through the exile and the parties, and the long, complicated middle portion of her life, had been turned away from the door.
Blum controlled access completely, providing conflicting information to those who inquired and resisting all attempts at independent contact. Wallace had been suffering from arteriosclerosis around the time of Edward’s death. And as the years passed, her condition deteriorated into dementia. By 1980, she had lost the ability to speak.
She was bedridden. Her only visitors in the final years were her doctors and her nurses. The woman who had made her way through life on the strength of her wit, her conversation, and her total concentrated attention on whoever she was talking to could no longer speak, could no longer receive company, could no longer be the person she had spent seven decades building herself into being.
She received an allowance from Queen Elizabeth II and was supported by Edward’s estate. She had access in theory to resources. What she no longer had access to was her own life. Wallace died on April 24th, 1986, in the house on the Bois de Boulogne of bronchial pneumonia. She was 89 years old.
Her funeral was held at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, the same chapel where she had been denied entry to the royal family for almost five decades. Queen Elizabeth II attended. The Duke of Edinburgh was there. The Prince and Princess of Wales, the Queen Mother, Princess Anne, Margaret Thatcher and her husband. The coffin was English oak, draped in a single wreath of white, orange, and yellow lilies picked from Windsor Castle’s own gardens.
The silver plaque read, Wallace, Duchess of Windsor. No HRH prefix. The same distinction that had been made on the day of her wedding was maintained in the same polished metal on the day of her burial. She was buried at Frogmore at Windsor beside Edward. In accordance with her wish, she had converted to Roman Catholicism before her death, so that her remains could lie in the same tomb with his.
After her death, Blum auctioned Wallace’s jewelry collection, one of the most significant private collections in the world, assembled over decades of gifts from Edward and the considerable creative effort that Wallace had devoted to her appearance throughout her life. The auction raised approximately $45 million.
The proceeds went, as Wallace had instructed, to the Pasteur Institute Medical Research Foundation in Paris. Segment one, What three marriages left behind. Three marriages, three men who represented three entirely different things. Adventure and danger, comfort and stability, sacrifice and exile. And through all three, the same woman, sharp, controlled, never quite comfortable enough to stop performing the version of herself she had been constructing since Baltimore.
Win Spencer taught Wallace what it felt like to be trapped by someone else’s weakness. Ernest Simpson showed her what a comfortable life looked like from the inside, and she chose to leave it for something she thought she wanted. Edward gave up everything for her, and she spent 35 years living inside the weight of that gift, carrying it through France, through the Bahamas, through decades of party going and exile, and the particular of being officially less than the man you had married.
The HRH question is the one that hangs over all of it, not because the title itself mattered in any practical sense, but because of what its denial represented. The official position of the institution she had disrupted, maintained, and enforced over decades, never softened, never revised. She had cost the crown something it considered irreplaceable, and the crown had not forgiven her.
The plaque on the coffin was the final statement of that position, clear, permanent, and written in silver. What Wallace herself felt about all of it is difficult to know with certainty. She was not a woman who found self-disclosure easy, or perhaps even possible. The autobiography presented the life she wanted remembered.
The private remarks her friends recorded after her death suggest something more complicated. A woman who had played the hand she was dealt with extraordinary skill, and who understood, possibly more clearly than anyone else, exactly what she had and had not chosen. She had gone from a borrowed education in Maryland to the most photographed woman in the world.
She had sat in in same chateau where Napoleon had plotted and had her wedding to an abdecated king. She had attended state funerals at Windsor Castle and been denied the three-letter courtesy that the institution considered her due. She had outlived everyone who had defined her story. Win Spencer died in 1950, Ernest Simpson in 1958, Edward in 1972, and spent her final years in silence in a house at the edge of a forest in Paris, unable to speak, tended by nurses, behind a door that her oldest friends could not open.
There is something that sits quietly at the center of all three of her marriages that is easy to miss if you are only looking at the glamour. Wallace Simpson never had children. She had almost no family by the end. No siblings, no children, no blood relatives close enough to matter practically. The people who had known her longest were not permitted to see her.
The woman whose greatest skill had been the management of human relationships, who had built her entire life on the ability to walk into a room and make everyone in it feel the better for her presence, died without being able to speak in a room that almost no one was allowed to enter. That is the story of Wallace Simpson’s three marriages.
Not a love story exactly. Not a tragedy in the simple sense of the word. Something more like a life. Complicated, driven, brilliant in places, and in the end, very quiet. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.
