Wallis Simpson is remembered as the American who took the crown. The reason a king walked away from an empire. The papers tell a longer story. In May 1945, the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt was sent to occupy Germany on a personal warrant from King George VI. In 1957, Churchill, Eisenhower, and the palace lost a 12-year fight to suppress 60 Nazi files.
In 1976, a Paris butler was handed a box of letters by the Duchess of Windsor and told to burn it. In 1980, she lost the power of speech. In 1986, her French lawyer began publishing what she had ordered destroyed. This is the woman the monarchy never forgave. And the paper trail they could not, in the end, keep buried.
She was born in a Pennsylvania resort hotel on 19th June 1896 in a room rented for the summer because her parents could not afford a house. Teackle Wallis Warfield, her father, was a Baltimore banker’s son dying of tuberculosis. He held his daughter once. He was dead before her first birthday. Her mother, Alice, was 26 and a widow.
Her uncle, Solomon Davies Warfield, the Baltimore railroad executive who controlled the Seaboard Airline, paid for the small things. Her aunt Bessie Merryman paid for the larger ones. By the time Wallis was old enough to understand what her family had been, the family money had moved sideways to cousins, to her uncle’s bachelor household, to anywhere that was not her mother’s account.
Wallis learned early what poverty looks like in the parlor of a Baltimore drawing room. The shoes resoled twice. The hand-me-down dresses recut to look new. The careful management of a name with no income behind it. Her education ran from Arundel School to Oldfields, a Maryland boarding school where the daughters of the South’s better families went to learn to write a thank you note.
She was not beautiful, and she knew it. The biographer Anne Sebba’s reading of her early letters finds a girl who decided, before the age of 20, that she would compensate with study. She read the political pages. She memorized names. She watched the women around her, the senators’ wives, the diplomats’ hostesses, and learned that conversation was a kind of currency.
At 20, in November 1916, she married Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., a naval aviator she had met in Pensacola 4 months earlier. He was a charming drunk. He posted to bases in Florida and California and the Far East, and she followed him. And then, she did not. By the time the marriage was formally dissolved in December 1927, she had been separated from him for 8 years, had lived through a divorce that her family considered scandalous, and had taught herself to navigate a world her mother could not have imagined. The
foreign service circuits of Hong Kong, the diplomatic salons of Washington, the gambling rooms of the Riviera. Some accounts hold that her time in China included a period of paid companionship to wealthy men in Shanghai, a story that has circulated since the 1930s under the name The China Dossier, and that no historian has confirmed.
Sebba treats it as anti-Wallace propaganda manufactured in the year of the abdication. What is documented is that by 1928, she was in London, married to Ernest Aldrich Simpson, an Anglo-American shipping executive who took her into the city’s American expatriate set. She kept his name for the rest of her life, and the rest of British history.
Ernest had a townhouse in Bryanston Court. He had a club. Through his social connections, Wallace was introduced into the circle of Thelma, Lady Furness, who was the mistress of the Prince of Wales. The first invitation came in January 1931, a weekend in the country. The other guest would be the Furness sister, Gloria Vanderbilt, and a slim, fair-haired man of 36, who had recently returned from a tour of the colonies and was the heir to the British throne.
She had 2 days to prepare. She brought one good dress and a notebook of questions she had written down so that she would not be caught with nothing to say. She was, by the standards of her own family, finished. She was about to become the most famous private citizen in the world. The Prince of Wales was, in January 1931, the most photographed man on Earth.
He had toured Canada in 1919, and India in 1921, and Australia twice. He spoke better French than his father, better German than his brothers, and danced past 2:00 in the morning at the Embassy Club with a regularity that the household disapproved of, and that the public adored. He was also, by the long-standing assessment of his private secretaries, unhappy in a way that did not fit the post he had been born to.
He drank. He smoked through several packs of cigarettes a day. He had a thin, restless body and the bedroom standards of a man who knew he could not be refused. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, kept a file. So did the king. Both men understood that the Prince of Wales preferred American women and married women, and they understood that as long as he kept to those categories, the matter could be managed.
Wallace was both. The progression from country weekend acquaintance to weekend regular was slow. Frances Donaldson, whose 1974 biography remains the most measured account of Edward’s pre-abdication life, traces the shift to the early months of 1934, when Thelma Furness left for the United States and asked Wallis to look after the little man while she was away.
Wallis looked after him. >> [clears throat] >> Thelma came back to find she had been replaced. What Wallis offered him, >> [clears throat] >> by every account that survives, was a kind of authority. She told him to stand up straight. She rearranged his rooms. She corrected his French at dinner parties. The biographer, Philip Ziegler, who had full access to the royal archives for his 1990 official life, concluded that Edward’s attachment to Wallis was the dependent attachment of a man who had been raised by indifferent parents and
emotionally insulated household staff, and who had found, at 39, the first person in his adult life willing to give him an instruction. Hugo Vickers has written of the same dynamic in shorter form, that the Prince of Wales did not love Mrs. Simpson the way men love women. He loved her the way patients love a therapist who has restored the function of a missing limb.
By the summer of 1934, she was the official mistress in everything but the name. Fort Belvedere, the Prince’s grace and favor house at the edge of Windsor Great Park, became her weekend residence. She wrote her aunt that the Prince’s staff treat me beautifully, which her aunt understood at once as the report of a woman who had begun to be afraid of how the staff treated her.
King George V died on 20th of January 1936 after months of decline at Sandringham. His doctor, Lord Dawson, later admitted in a private diary to having hastened the end with morphine and cocaine to ensure that the death made the morning editions of the times rather than the evening papers. Edward inherited the throne that afternoon.
He inherited with it a constitutional problem that Stanley Baldwin had been studying for 19 months. The Foreign Office had a file on Wallace. The American Embassy had a file on her. The Special Branch had a file on her. They tracked her movements between London, Paris, and the South of France. They knew when she had her hair done.
They knew the name of the family she dined with on Tuesdays. They knew from a German source that Joachim von Ribbentrop, then the Nazi ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, was sending her flowers. The number of flowers and what they meant would later become one of the most argued over details in the entire literature of the abdication.
Andrew Morton built a book around the claim that Ribbentrop sent 17 carnations to Bryanston Court. One for each night the two had spent together. Anne Sebba, working from the same sources, found no contemporary witness who could place the affair and notes that even the number 17 and the flower, carnations or roses, cannot be confirmed across the surviving correspondence.
What can be confirmed is that the British government in 1936 believed the rumor was substantial enough to write down. By the autumn of that year, Wallace had filed for divorce from Ernest Simpson at Ipswich Assizes. The king had told his prime minister he intended to marry her. The papers the palace would later spend 40 years trying to control had already begun to accumulate.
And the woman at the center of them was about to become, by a constitutional accident the cabinet could not believe was actually happening, the only thing standing between Edward VIII and the throne of England. The abdication was not announced in a letter. It was announced in a radio broadcast on the evening of 11th December 1936 from the Augusta Tower at Windsor Castle.
The microphone was set on a desk. Edward read from a type script that had been redrafted three times by his lawyer Walter Monckton and once by Winston Churchill, who had urged the King not to do it. The estimated audience was 60 million people across the British Empire and the United States. Many of them, by the published memoirs of those who were there, were weeping by the time he reached the final paragraph.
“I have found it impossible,” he said, “to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.” The sentence has been quoted in every account of the Windsor marriage that has been published since. It has not, in any of them, been corrected for one important point.
Wallace did not want him to abdicate. She had told him so in November. She had told him so again by telephone from the South of France in early December when she had fled the British press and was reading the London papers a day late at the Villa Lou Vie. Anne Sebba, drawing on the transcripts of those calls preserved by the British government, reconstructs her side of them as a sustained argument that he should remain King and let her disappear.
He refused. What no contemporary listener understood, what most listeners would still not understand 50 years later, was that the broadcast was the first artifact of the marriage that Wallace had personally helped to draft. The phrase about the woman I love had been worked on. The passages about her had been softened.
The British constitutional language had been left in. The personal pain, which Edward had wanted in the speech in greater quantities, had been paired back. Wallace had understood, even in the south of France, even by telephone, even with three reporters camped outside her gate, that the broadcast would be the only document about her marriage that the entire literate world would receive at the same moment.
The Marburg files were still 9 years from being discovered. The wartime telegrams were still 4 years from being written. The 1976 box of letters did not yet exist. There was only this, a short typescript and a microphone. And she had insisted on a hand in it. He finished the broadcast and was driven to Portsmouth.
He sailed on the destroyer HMS Fury for France that night, and would not be permitted to take up residence in Britain again. Wallace remained at the Villa Louviei in Cannes with Herman and Katherine Rogers, the American friends who had taken her in. The British and American press laid siege to the gates.
She did not give a single interview. She kept her telephone calls to the new Duke of Windsor short to avoid the listening operators at the local exchange. There is documentation in the British government files released to the National Archives in 2003 that her line was monitored throughout that winter. She had been a married woman in Maryland in 1916.
She had been the mistress of a prince in 1934. She had been the woman a constitutional crisis was named for in 1936. She was now in early 1937 something the British state had no precedent for, a private American citizen whose every letter, every cable, every dinner guest was a matter of intelligence interest to two governments and by April to a third.
The third government was waiting for her in Berlin. They were married on 3rd of June, 1937 in the music room of the Château de Candé, a Loire Valley estate lent to them by Charles Bedaux, an American industrialist with a portfolio of business interests in Nazi Germany that the Duke’s staff had not been encouraged to look into closely.
No member of the British royal family attended. The Church of England declined to bless the union. The officiant was Robert Anderson Jardine, the Vicar of St. Paul’s, Darlington, who had offered his services in defiance of his bishop and would never receive another preferment in England again. Wallace wore Mainbocher in a blue so pale the dressmaker called it Wallace blue.
The ring was inscribed with the words, “We are ours now.” There were 16 guests. The honeymoon was in Austria. The first state visit they made as Duke and Duchess of Windsor was not. In October 1937, 4 months after the wedding, the Windsors arrived in Berlin as the personal guests of Adolf Hitler. The official purpose, as the Duke’s office briefed it to the British press, was a study tour of German housing and industrial conditions, a long-standing interest of the former king’s.
The British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, had been instructed by his government to have nothing whatever to do with the visit. The American chargé d’affaires was instructed the same. The Windsors made the tour as private citizens of nowhere. They were greeted with full state honors.
They met Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, and on 20 Satingen October at the Berghof above Berchtesgaden, the Chancellor of the German Reich himself. The Duke gave at least one full Nazi salute on camera, a fact documented in Francis Donaldson’s biography from the German newsreel record. The Duchess gave none, although she shook Hitler’s hand and was photographed in his presence in a manner the Foreign Office in London found extremely difficult to explain to the morning papers a week later. Hitler is reported
by the interpreter Paul Schmidt to have said after they left that Wallace would have made a good queen. The story of the carnations belongs to this period, although it had been circulating in London for 2 years before the Berlin trip. Andrew Morton, whose 2015 book 17 Carnations takes its title from the rumor, argues that Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s ambassador to London in 1936, his foreign minister from 1938, had conducted an affair with Wallace during her London years, and that the 17 flowers he was said to
have sent her at Bryanston Court each represented one night together. Morton acknowledges that the count varies in the sources. Some accounts say 17, some say a daily delivery, some say roses rather than carnations. Anne Sebba, who reviewed the same material, found no contemporary correspondence that could place the affair beyond gossip, and observes that the rumor, regardless of its truth, had already done its work by the time Wallace married the Duke.
The British and American intelligence services had been writing it down for 2 years. What the German Foreign Ministry had been writing down separately was something the rumor did not capture. German diplomats had been filing reports on the Duke of Windsor’s private political views since the early 1930s. They had recorded his admiration for the new German state.
They had recorded his complaints about British socialism, about the press, about his brother. They had recorded, and this would matter in 1945 in a way nobody in 1937 could have anticipated, that he had spoken to them about what might happen if Britain ever found itself, in his phrase, in difficulties. The Windsors left Berlin in late October 1937 and returned to France.
The German Foreign Ministry filed the trip reports in a series of folders that were transferred at the outbreak of war to a metal canister, and then in 1945 to an abandoned vehicle in the woods near Degener’s Hausen. The American troops who found that canister would not understand immediately what they had. In May 1940, the Germans crossed into France.
The Duke, who had been serving as a liaison officer with the British military mission to the French High Command, drove south through the disintegrating French army with Wallace in the passenger seat and a chauffeur who had not slept in 3 days. They reached Biarritz. They crossed into Spain. They reached Madrid by the third week of June. They were greeted in Madrid by a Spanish Foreign Minister who had been instructed by Berlin to detain them.
The instruction was specific and personal. It had been sent by Joachim von Ribbentrop. The operation that followed has been known in the German files since 1945 and in the British public discourse since 1957 as Operation Willy. The plan, in outline, was simple. The Duke and Duchess were to be persuaded by Spanish friends to remain on the Iberian Peninsula for the duration of the war.
They would be told that British Secret Service agents had been instructed to assassinate the Duke on his arrival in the Bahamas. They would be offered a substantial financial settlement to remain in continental Europe in a position of influence. And then, if Britain fell, the Duke would be returned to the throne as a Nazi supervised king.
What the surviving German cable show, what volume X of documents on German foreign policy shows in detail when it was forced into print in 1957, is that the Duke and Duchess did not, on hearing this proposal, walk out of the room. They listened. The German ambassador in Madrid, Eberhard von Stohrer, telegraphed Berlin on 2nd July that the Duke had complained about his treatment by his family and had criticized Churchill’s wartime policies.
The German minister in Lisbon, Baron Oswald von Hoyningen-Huene, wrote on 11th July that the Duke intended to postpone his departure as long as possible in hope of a turn of events favorable to him. A [clears throat] separate cable, sent later that month, reports the Duke and Duchess’s response to the proposal that the British constitution might be set aside to restore him.
That they replied, “According to the British constitution, this was not possible after abdication.” A constitutional objection, not a moral one. This is the cable, more than any other, that the British government would spend the next 60 years trying to keep out of public view. Churchill, who had been the king’s most loyal defender during the abdication crisis 4 years earlier, sent the Duke a telegram in Lisbon on 1st August 1940, ordering him to the Bahamas under threat of court-martial. The Duke obeyed.
The Windsors sailed on the SS Excalibur from Lisbon to Bermuda the same day, and then by Canadian Pacific steamer to Nassau. And the Duke took the oath as governor of the Bahamas on 17th August 1940. He held the office for 4 and a half years. By every contemporaneous account, he hated it. He described the Bahamas in private correspondence as a third-class British colony. Wallace hated it more.
She wrote her aunt that the posting felt less like an appointment and more like an exile administered by people who would have preferred that the Atlantic do its job during the crossing. Both Windsors made public statements during 1941 to American journalists, to American politicians, to an interviewer from Liberty Magazine that the Foreign Office in London later had to publicly walk back twice on the basis that the Duke of Windsor’s view that the war should be settled by negotiation was not the view of His Majesty’s government. What none
of those journalists yet knew, what Churchill did not yet know, what the King did not yet know, was that in a vault at Schloss Friedrichshof, 12 miles from Frankfurt, the Hesse family was storing approximately 4,000 letters between the British and Prussian royal families dating back to Queen Victoria.
And in another part of Germany, in the document rooms of the Foreign Ministry on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, Ribbentrop’s office was beginning to compile a separate file marked for retention on the Duke of Windsor and Operation Willy. Both archives would survive the war. Both would be discovered in the same month by Allied troops who did not know what they were holding.
The first lieutenant who found the canister did not know what he had found. His name was David D. Silberberg. He was a junior officer with the US 9th Infantry Division advancing through the outskirts of a hamlet called Degener’s Hausen in the Harz Mountains of central Germany in the second week of May, 1945, the Reich had been dead for 6 days.
The roads were lined with abandoned German military vehicles, most of them stripped, some of them still smoldering. Silberberg’s company moved past dozens of them. He stopped because one of the trucks had spilled papers into the ditch. He picked up a single sheet. It was signed by Joachim von Ribbentrop. The find escalated within 48 hours.
The ninth infantry division’s intelligence officers traced the papers back to the Schloss Tegernsee Hausen estate, where the staff of the German Foreign Ministry had been moving archives out of Berlin since 1943 to keep them from Allied bombing. The total volume eventually cataloged by American, British, French, and Soviet officers working from May 1945 onward was approximately 400 tons of diplomatic correspondence.
The material was consolidated at Marburg Castle in Hesse for sorting. Hence, the name by which the entire archive would later be known. Inside that 400 tons was a smaller folder. The historians who eventually cataloged it counted approximately 60 individual documents, telegrams, dispatches, reports, drafts of intelligence summaries, covering the period from 1936 to 1943, all of them concerning the Duke of Windsor and his contacts with German diplomats, intelligence officers, and ministers of state.
The folder was given an internal name. In British government correspondence from late 1945 onward, the file is referenced as the Windsor file. In published scholarship, it is more often called the Marburg files. The British discovery of its significance was made by Foreign Office historians working with the Allied editorial team.
A summary memorandum was prepared and read at the highest levels of three governments within weeks. What followed has been documented in detail by Andrew Morton, who reviewed the British, American, and French diplomatic correspondence of the suppression effort for 17 coronations. Churchill, Attlee, Eisenhower, and George VI all became personally involved.
Churchill wrote to President Truman. He wrote later to President Eisenhower. He argued that publication of the Windsor file would be deeply distressing to the royal family and would serve no legitimate historical purpose. Attlee, his labor successor, took the same view and signed letters to the same effect. King George VI, the brother whose accession Wallace Simpson was held to have caused, wrote personally to the American president.
The American historians who had been hired to edit the German Foreign Ministry archives for publication refused to be moved. The lead American editor was Paul Sweet of the State Department’s Historical Office. He wrote in 1953 in an internal memorandum that has since been released that to suppress the Windsor file would be to falsify history at the request of one of the parties to it.
Sweet’s British counterpart, Margaret Lambert, agreed. They held the line for almost 12 years. A first batch of the documents on German foreign policy was released in 1954 with the Windsor material redacted. Volume X, containing the 60 documents in full, was forced into publication in 1957. The release was reported on the front pages of every major British newspaper.
The Duke of Windsor, then 63 and living at the villa in the Bois de Boulogne, issued a statement through his solicitor calling the documents complete fabrications and in part gross distortions of the truth. The Windsor file was now public. It had been 12 years between its discovery and its appearance on the desks of the Times and the New York Times and Le Monde.
That was the file the Foreign Office had not been able to keep. There was another file the Foreign Office had been able to keep and the man who had retrieved it in April and May 1945 was at that moment beginning his 13th year as the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. Anthony Blunt was 37 years old in the spring of 1945.
He was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, a serving officer in MI5, a published authority on French and Italian 17th century painting and although the British government would not officially learn this for another 19 years and would not announce it publicly for another 34, a fully recruited agent of Soviet intelligence.
He had been passing material to Moscow since 1937. He would continue to pass it until at least 1951. In April 1945, King George VI summoned him to Buckingham Palace. The official record of the meeting as transcribed for the Royal Archives and confirmed in a 1995 written answer to Parliament from the Prime Minister’s Office was straightforward.
Blunt, who spoke fluent German, was being asked to accompany the King’s Librarian, Sir Owen Morshead, on a mission to Schloss Friedrichshof, the Hesse family castle 12 miles northwest of Frankfurt. The purpose, as recorded, was to recover approximately 4,000 letters written by Queen Victoria to her eldest daughter, the Empress Victoria of Germany.
The letters were of family interest. The castle was by April 1945 in the American occupation zone. >> [clears throat] >> There was a concern the king wrote that the letters might be exposed to risks owing to unsettled conditions after the war. That is the record. It has been treated by most British royal historians, including Hugo Vickers, as broadly accurate as far as it goes.
What it leaves out is the question of what else was at Schloss Friedrichshof. The castle had been built by Empress Victoria, Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, who had married the future Kaiser Frederick III of Germany. It had passed through her family, the Hesse castle line, for three generations.
By 1945 it was the property of Prince Philip of Hesse, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, the husband of the King of Italy’s daughter, and an early and personal Nazi. Philip had served as a courier between Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s. He had been an SA Obergruppenführer, and he had been since 1932 in continuous personal correspondence with two members of the British royal family, his cousin, the Duke of Kent, who would die in a flying boat crash off Scotland in 1942, and his more famous cousin, the Duke of Windsor.
The Friedrichshof correspondence has never been publicly cataloged. What is known is this. Blunt and Morreshed arrived at the castle in early May 1945 carrying a personally signed warrant from King George VI. The American officer in charge of the site who attempted to halt the removal was overruled. The two men spent three days at the castle.
They left with a large quantity of documents, which were flown back to Britain and deposited at the Royal Archives in Windsor. In a parliamentary written answer of 26th of October 1995, the Prime Minister’s office stated that the papers removed from Schloss Friedrichshof in 1945 had been returned to Schloss Friedrichshof in 1951. The answer was technically full.
It did not address what was photographed, transcribed, or copied in any other form between 1945 and 1951. It did not address what may have been retained by the Royal Archives separately from the originals. It addressed, in nine lines, a question that has been asked in the House of Commons three times in the last 40 years and answered in the same nine lines each time.
The biographer, Miranda Carter, who reviewed the Blunt papers for her 2001 life of him, has argued that the official explanation that the mission was about Queen Victoria’s 19th century correspondence is not credible on its own terms. The Royal Archives already held duplicates of much of the Victoria-to-Vicky correspondence in transcribed form.
The risk that 4,000 letters might be damaged by a post-war coal shortage in central Germany was small. The risk that the Duke of Windsor’s wartime correspondence with a Nazi general might find its way to American occupation officers or to American historians or to American newspapers was, by April 1945, not small at all.
And there is one further fact, reported by the Australian historian Roland Perry, on the basis of an extended interview with the former Soviet intelligence officer Yuri Modin. Modin, who was Blunt’s Soviet handler from 1948 to 1951, told Perry that Blunt had, while at Friedrichshof, photographed the documents he was sent to retrieve.
The photographs were passed to Moscow. Modin’s claim is that the KGB held copies of the Windsor-Hesse correspondence in its files for the duration of the Cold War. And that the option to use them was discussed at the highest level and declined. What Moscow had, Moscow has not said. What the public had, what the Marburg files would briefly threaten to provide, and what Wallis Simpson, by 1956, was already preparing her own version of, was about to arrive in bookshops.
The memoir was published in October 1956. McKay in New York, Michael Joseph in London. Translations into eight other languages within 18 months. The title was The Heart Has Its Reasons. The cover bore a single name, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor. The ghostwriter was the American journalist Charles J. V. Murphy, who had already written the Duke’s own 1951 memoir, A King’s Story, and who had been paid for his work and credited only in the small print.
The book covered her childhood, her two marriages before Edward, the abdication, the wedding at Candé, the war years in Spain and Portugal and the Bahamas, and the postwar settlement in France. It ran to over 400 pages. It is the most quoted, the most cited, the most printed by itself document of her life. It is also, by the agreement of every biographer who has worked from it, the most carefully composed piece of paper Wallis Simpson ever put her name to.
The Portuguese summer of 1940 receives nine pages. The German telegrams of that summer are not mentioned. The October 1937 visit to Hitler receives four pages, in which the Duke is presented as having gone to Berchtesgaden out of a passion for social conditions in industrial democracies, and in which Joachim von Ribbentrop is not named.
The carnations are not named. Charles Bedaux is not named. The Mosleys are not named. What is named is the love story, the early dinners, the Fort Belvedere weekends, the terrible months at the Villa Louvigny after the abdication, the grief at being kept from her husband during the 7 months when her divorce decree had to be made absolute, the relief of the wedding, the slow recovery of a private life.
The book was an enormous commercial success. It was reviewed sympathetically in the British press, which was already inclined by 20 years of distance to treat the Windsors as faintly ridiculous figures from a former age. It was reviewed even more sympathetically in the United States, where Wallace had always had a constituency.
It was reviewed less sympathetically in the small circle of British wartime officials who had read the Marburg files in summary and who knew in a way the public reviewers did not yet know what the book had been written to forestall. Volume X of Documents on German Foreign Policy was published 9 months after Wallace’s memoir in July 1957.
The British press response to Volume X was, by the standards of British royal coverage in any other decade, ferocious. The Times devoted three full pages to the contents of the Windsor file on 30th July. The Daily Express ran a week of front page extracts. The New York Times described the cables as the most damaging diplomatic disclosure about a member of a reigning Western royal house in living memory.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were at La Croë on the Riviera. The Duke’s statement, drafted by his lawyer and released 2 days later, called the German documents complete fabrications, in part gross distortions of the truth, and in part inventions. A phrase he had drafted in three versions, the earlier of which were preserved by his secretary and would surface in the household papers 30 years later.
Wallace did not issue a public statement. She had 12 months earlier already given her version of every episode the German documents covered. The version of her marriage and her wartime that the English-reading world had been holding in its hands since the previous Christmas was Wallis Simpson’s in over 400 pages with the German telegrams omitted.
This was the closest she would ever come to controlling the record. She was 60 years old. The Duke was 63. They had three working houses, an Atlantic crossing every 6 months, a household staff that ran to 14 full-time servants, and no children. They had survived the war. They had survived the Marburg release.
They had survived in the small and private sense in which the British royal family used the word what their own family considered survivable. They had not survived enough to be allowed back. The Duke would not be received at court. The Duchess would not be addressed as her royal highness. They would not be invited to coronations, to weddings, or to funerals.
They would be, as Wallace had begun to write to her aunt in a phrase that would recur in her late letters, a separate kind of British subject. That kind would in another 15 years run its full course at a villa in the Bois de Boulogne. The villa was lent to them in 1953 by the city of Paris in lieu of rent in recognition of the Duke’s status as a former head of state and the French Republic’s commitment to its tradition of receiving exiled royalty.
Route du Champ d’Entraînement on the western edge of the Bois de Boulogne, just inside the line of Neuilly-sur-Seine. 18 rooms, a garden, a staff entrance from the side road. The Windsors moved in that autumn and remained for the next 19 years. The decoration was Wallace’s. The dining room walls were painted in a banana cream yellow she had specified to the decorator Stéphane Boudin in 1953.
The Duke had a study where his red dispatch boxes from his years as king were displayed on the desk. The boxes were empty. He had carried them with him out of England in December 1936 and refused to return them. Their closest political confidants in Paris, by the unanimous account of the household staff who would later speak, were Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana, born Mitford, who lived at La Temple de la Gloire, 15 miles away in Orsay.
Diana Mosley wrote in a 1979 letter to her sister, the Duchess of Devonshire, that Wallace and Edward shared her view that Hitler should have been given a free hand to destroy communism. Hugo Vickers, who has interviewed members of both households, treats Mosley’s claim as substantively accurate. Other visitors, Lady Diana Cooper, Elsa Maxwell, the British politicians who could be persuaded to call, kept a more respectable distance.
The Mosleys did not. The Duke’s last public role was at his mother’s funeral. Queen Mary, who had refused to receive Wallace for 35 years, died on 24th March 1953. The Duke crossed to London for the service. The Duchess remained in Paris. The Duke wrote her that week a letter that Anne Sebba quotes at length in That Woman.
“Cookie,” the family nickname for the then Queen Mother, “looked sadder and dowdier than ever, and I think she will be glad when this is all over. The letter was preserved among Wallace’s papers in the Bois de Boulogne. It would later be among those she instructed her butler to burn. He developed an aortic aneurysm in 1964.
He underwent retinal surgery in London in 1965. The Queen visited him in his hospital room. The first formal contact between a serving British monarch and her exiled uncle in three decades. In 1971, he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat, the result of 60 years of cigarettes. He underwent radiotherapy. By the spring of 1972, he had lost most of his body weight.
The Queen made a state visit to France in May 1972. On 18th of May, after a day at the Longchamp races, she came with the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales to the villa in the Bois de Boulogne. According to Johanna Schutts, the Windsor’s Swiss private secretary, who first described the visit publicly in a 2020 interview with Anna Pasternak, the Duke insisted on rising from his sick bed, dressing, and receiving his niece in the upstairs sitting room, rather than the bedroom.
The visit lasted 15 minutes. Schutts disputes the dramatized version of the meeting that appeared in The Crown, in which the Duke is shown discussing Prince Charles’s marriage prospects with Camilla Shand. Her account is the only first-person testimony of the meeting that has been published.
He died 10 days later at 2:25 in the morning of 28th of May, 1972, in the upstairs bedroom, in his sleep. Nurse Oonagh Shanley went to wake the Duchess from her separate room across the corridor. Wallace came in, kissed his forehead, cupped his face, and said the words Schutts heard from the doorway, “My David, my David. You look so lovely.
” She was 75. He was 77. They had been married for 34 years and 360 days. The papers in the villa on the morning of 28th dollar of May 1972 ran to several thousand items. Wallace owned every one of them. She had 14 years to decide what to do with them. Suzanne Blum was 73 years old in 1972. She had been a Paris lawyer for nearly 50 years, for Charlie Chaplin, for Rita Hayworth, for the estates of Darryl Zanuck and Merle Oberon, and since 1948 for the Windsors.
In the year of the Duke’s death, she became, by stages, Hugo Vickers documented in Behind Closed Doors, the sole legal authority over Wallace Simpson’s person, household, and estate. The process was incremental. Within 18 months, Blum had dismissed the Duke’s English solicitor, By 1975, she had removed every member of the Paris staff who had served the Duke personally, with the exception of the butler George, and the Swiss private secretary Johanna Schuts, who refused to be moved.
In 1976, the butler came to Schuts’s office carrying a large cardboard box. He had been instructed by the Duchess to burn what was inside. He had opened it first. It contained, by his estimate, several hundred letters. The entire private correspondence between the Duke and Duchess across 40 years. He could not bring himself to burn them.
Schuts did not return them. She kept the box in her closet, and told the Duchess the letters had been destroyed. “I said,” Schuts told Anna Pasternak in 2020, speaking publicly for the first time after 44 years, “We can’t burn this. This is history.” The other papers in the villa were less fortunate.
According to Caroline Blackwood, who interviewed Blum at length in 1980 for a book held to a non-publication agreement until after Blum’s death in 1995, several boxes of the Duke’s wartime papers were burned in the upstairs study during the mid-1970s by household staff acting on instructions Blackwood could not definitively attribute.
Hugo Vickers later corroborated the destruction while acknowledging that the inventory was lost with the fire. Wallace suffered her first major stroke in 1976. By 1979, she could not walk. By the autumn of 1980, she had lost the power of speech. Schutz had been dismissed 2 years earlier for refusing to sign a contract that would have made her Blum’s employee rather than the Duchess’s.
After her departure, the household contracted to a single nurse, a single doctor approved by Blum, and a series of locked rooms. She lay in the upstairs bedroom of the villa behind those doors for 5 and 1/2 years. She did not see visitors. The contents of the villa were sold in private transactions to Blum’s friends. The Duke’s gold Cyma watch was found years later in a Paris auction lot with a handwritten note in French recording it as the personal property of Maitre Suzanne Blum.
Wallace died on 24th of April 1986. She was 89. Her body was flown by an aircraft of the Queen’s flight from Paris to RAF Benson. The funeral at St. George’s Chapel on 29th April was attended by 175 people and lasted 28 minutes. No eulogy was given. Her name was spoken once in a single prayer by the Canon of Westminster, who referred to her as our sister.
She was buried at Frogmore beside the Duke of Windsor. The Queen, the Princess of Wales said afterwards, wept at the graveside. It was the only time the Princess had ever seen her cry. Suzanne Blum had the love letters published two months later. They were serialized in the Daily Mail. The jewelry was sold at Sotheby’s in Geneva on 2nd April 1987 for $45 million.
Seven times the pre-sale estimate. The proceeds went to the Pasteur Institute on Blum’s instructions and against every express preference of either of the Windsors during either of their lifetimes. The papers at Schloss Friedrichshof, returned by order of George VI in 1951, have not been cataloged for the public.
The Marburg files of 1957 remain in print. The 1976 letters kept by Johanna Schutz were eventually transferred to a private archive. The Duke’s wartime papers burned in the upstairs fireplace of four route de Chant d’Entrainement are gone. In the royal burial ground at Frogmore, the Duke of Windsor’s gravestone is inscribed with the four letters HRH.
The Duchess of Windsor’s, set into the ground beside his, is not. It is the one document about her that she did not edit, did not order destroyed, and did not survive to read.
