On December 11, 1936, a former king sat before a microphone at Windsor Castle and told the largest radio audience the world had ever gathered that he could not carry his burden without the woman he loved. It was called the grandest sacrifice of the century, a throne and an empire given up for love, and the world has told it that way ever since. But the marriage that sacrifice bought ran on for another 35 years, most of them inside a rented house on the edge of a Paris wood. Those who watched it from close up saw something the legend never mentioned.
Two people had given up everything to be together and then found they had almost nothing to do. Edward VIII was born on June 23, 1894, at White Lodge in Richmond Park, the eldest son of the future George V and great-grandson of Queen Victoria. His family called him David, and from the nursery onward, his future was settled. He was the heir to the throne.
His upbringing was rigid and cold in the manner of royal households of the time. His father was bluff and short-tempered, his mother, Queen Mary, was magnificent and remote. He was sent to naval college and endured it, went up to Oxford and left without a degree. In 1911, at 17, he was invested as Prince of Wales.
The First World War gave him his first taste of real popularity. He wanted to fight but was kept from the front line for fear of capture. He visited the trenches and was seen among ordinary soldiers. When the war ended, he emerged as the bright hope of a country sick of slaughter.
Through the 1920s, he became something the monarchy had never produced before, a celebrity. He was slight, fair, boyish, and permanently young-looking, and the camera adored him. His tours carried him across the empire and to America, and crowds met him everywhere. To the public, he became the most popular man in the world.
The men who worked beside him saw a different man. He drank and gambled, kept late hours, and resented the dull ceremonial that was the actual substance of the job. He was brilliant at the surface of the role but had almost no appetite for what lay beneath it. He moved through those years from one married woman to the next.
As Prince of Wales, he held the Duchy of Cornwall, the vast landed estate that funds the heir to the throne. Year upon year, the surplus piled up. By the time of the abdication, he had amassed a private fortune of over a million pounds in the values of the 1930s, a fortune he would go to some trouble to hide from his own brother. Bessie Wallace Warfield was born on June 19, 1896, at Blue Ridge Summit into an impoverished branch of an old Maryland family.
Her father died within months of her birth, and she was raised largely on the charity of a wealthy uncle. That meant a childhood spent as the poor relation inside other people’s grand houses. She married twice before Edward. The first husband was an American naval aviator named Earl Winfield Spencer, a heavy drinker, and the marriage was unhappy.
The second was Ernest Simpson, an Anglo-American shipping executive whose comfortable London life carried her to the fringes of the society that circled the Prince of Wales. It was there in 1931 that she first met him. By 1934, she had done what none of the others had managed. She had become the single dominant presence in his life, while still married to Ernest Simpson.
The court watched with alarm as his need for her grew absolute. He deferred to her, reorganized his days around her, and grew visibly unable to do without her. It is only fair to Wallis to say plainly what the record shows. As the crisis gathered through 1936, she grew frightened rather than triumphant.
At one point she fled to France to put distance between herself and the gathering storm. She is on record as willing to withdraw and spare him the ruin everyone around them could see coming. The driving force toward the catastrophe was his own refusal to give her up. On January 20, 1936, George V died, and the golden prince became King Edward VIII.
The private scandal became a constitutional one. The king is supreme governor of the Church of England, a church that would not then remarry divorced people whose former partners still lived. Here was a king set on marrying a woman with two living former husbands. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the governments of the dominions were united and immovable.
The country, they told him, would not accept her as queen. He had reached the summit of the oldest monarchy in Europe and had already decided he would sooner leave it than hold it without her. For most of 1936, the British press held a strange and disciplined silence about the king and the married American so often at his side. On November 13, his private secretary, Alec Hardinge, wrote to him plainly that the silence was about to break.
Three days later, Baldwin told him to his face that the country and the Dominions would not accept a marriage to Wallis Simpson. A compromise was floated, a morganatic marriage that would deny her the rank of queen and bar any children from the throne. It satisfied no one. Baldwin’s government would not carry the legislation, the Dominion governments would not have it, and the king himself did not truly want a marriage stamped in advance as less than a real one.
Only two paths remained. He could give her up and keep his throne, or keep her and give up his throne. The whole constitutional crisis, from the first warning to the final signature, was the work of under a month. On December 10, 1936, at Fort Belvedere, he signed the instrument of abdication.
His three younger brothers stood as witnesses. Among them, the shy and stammering Bertie stood knowing the throne would land within hours on him. The following day, an act of Parliament gave the abdication the force of law, and that evening, the man who had that morning still been called His Majesty made the broadcast that would define him forever. His reign had lasted about 326 days, one of the shortest in the entire history of the English crown, and he was never crowned at all.
The coronation that had been planned for him was simply renamed and became his brother’s. On June 3, 1937, he married Wallis in a château in France, and not one member of his family came. A single clergyman, a Church of England vicar acting against the express wishes of his own church, performed the service. Her second divorce had been made absolute on May 3, one month to the day before the wedding.
On abdicating, he had been created Duke of Windsor, granted the style of His Royal Highness. On May 27, 1937, a further set of letters patent confirmed the style for him alone, expressly denying it to his wife and any children. Days before the wedding, the slight was fixed and public. The reasoning used to deny Wallis her husband’s style was thin and strained, resting on the claim that Edward had lost all royal rank at abdication and was now being granted it afresh as a personal gift.
Thin or not, the argument held because the people who wanted it to hold were the people who mattered. Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, the new queen consort, pressed the king hard to withhold the rank. The king’s own blunt private justification survives. He questioned whether Wallis was a fit and proper person to become a Royal Highness after what she had done in this country.
The Duke called the denial a nice wedding present. He insisted, “My brother promised me there would be no trouble over the title. He promised me. ” He swore he would never return to England to live unless she was granted the style.
For 35 years, he kept that vow. Inside his own household, he overruled the crown by decree. Staff were required to address the duchess as Son Altesse Royale, and guests were expected to bow and curtsy to her as they would to a royal princess. A whole domestic protocol was built to sustain within those walls a rank the crown had refused to grant beyond them.
The second great wound was money. In the days around the abdication, a financial settlement was discussed under which he would receive £25,000 a year. He represented himself to his family as a man of modest means, worth only about £90,000. It was untrue.
Careful investigation established he had built up a private fortune of well over a million pounds from the income of the Duchy of Cornwall. When the concealment came to light, the new king withdrew the promise of £25,000 a year. In its place, the king bought out his brother’s life interest in Balmoral and Sandringham for £289,853. Invested in war bonds, that sum produced roughly £10,000 a year free of tax, and the king added a further personal supplement of about £11,000 a year.
That supplement carried a sting. It was set to cease on George VI’s own death. The couple took up residence at number 4 Route du Champ d’Entraînement on the western fringe of the Bois de Boulogne in the early 1950s, formally leasing it in 1953. The city of Paris leased the 14-room mansion to a former king of England for a nominal, near-peppercorn rent.
The duchess refurbished it through the celebrated Paris house of Maison Jansen, arranging it room by room to a standard that came very close to royal. There was a second house as well, a converted watermill at Gif-sur-Yvette southwest of Paris that they called simply the Mill. There the Duke gardened, planting and digging over the borders with real care. It became the nearest thing he had to an occupation across 35 years.
The duchess ran the household completely. She planned the dinners down to the last fork, arranged the seating, chose the china and the flowers. The Duke attended to his clothes, his dogs, his golf, and his garden. He called her the cruise director and himself the purser.
It was a joke, and like most of their jokes about themselves, it was also the exact truth. The days had a terrible sameness. There was no office, no duty, no children. The management of leisure was raised painstakingly to the level of an art.
The couple entertained and traveled and dressed and observed their own anniversaries with solemn care, then did the whole round again. Observers who came close enough came away describing again and again the same single thing, which was boredom. In the spring of 1950, they sailed for France aboard the liner Queen Mary with a man 18 years her junior at her side. He was Jimmy Donahue, an American heir to a share of the enormous Woolworth fortune, a cousin of the celebrated socialite Barbara Hutton, and openly homosexual.
For several years afterward, he was a fixture of their circle. The story that grew up held that Wallis, by then in her mid-50s, was carrying on something very like an affair with a younger man beneath her own husband’s nose. Lady Pamela Hicks recalled the Duke being visibly and painfully distressed by his wife’s association with Donahue. The biographer Andrew Lownie presents the episode as the duchess openly humiliating the Duke.
Jimmy Donahue was, by very wide agreement, a notorious prankster and a compulsive spreader of rumors, and it is entirely possible that a great part of the supposed affair was his own invention. Whether anything physical ever passed is simply unknowable. What can fairly be said is that for several years an amusing younger man was constantly at the duchess’s side, that the Duke was distressed by it, and that biographers have argued the point ever since without settling it. While the exile nursed his grievance in a Paris drawing room, the brother who had taken up his throne was being worn down by it.
George VI stayed in London through the bombing of the Second World War, and across 15 hard years, he became the steady center his elder brother had refused to be. He died in 1952 at 56, having given the whole of himself to the duty his elder brother had set down. Edward lived on to 77 in comfort and idleness. Queen Mary never once received Wallis and died in 1953 without ever having met the woman her eldest boy had given up a throne to marry.
The two people whose forgiveness might have meant the most to the exile, his mother and his brother, both died without ever granting it. On May 18, 1972, ten days before he died, his niece, Queen Elizabeth II, came to the Paris house. She came with the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales to the mansion on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, where the Duke of Windsor lay dying of throat cancer. It was the reconciliation gesture that all the long years had refused to allow.
Edward, Duke of Windsor, once King Edward VIII, died on May 28, 1972, aged 77. His body was flown home to England and taken to Windsor. He lay in state in St. George’s Chapel for three days.
On June 5, the funeral was held, attended by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother, and the wider royal family. Wallis was brought to England for the funeral and lodged at Buckingham Palace. By 1972, she was already suffering the mental confusion of advancing arteriosclerosis. She dreaded coming face to face with the Queen Mother.
Lord Mountbatten reassured her, telling her the Queen Mother would receive her with open arms, being deeply sorry for her in her grief. The private committal at Frogmore was attended by only about 14 people. Wallis flew straight back to Paris and did not really leave the house again for 14 years. Her French lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum, took power of attorney over the failing duchess and something very near to total control of her person, fortune, and contact with the outside world.
Blum was accused of exploiting her helpless client and ruling the sick room like a jailer. Wallis suffered a series of strokes. She broke her hip and then broke it again. Arthritis twisted her hands so badly that her fingers could no longer close around the wedding ring the Duke had put there in 1937.
By about 1980, her speech had gone entirely. She lay bedridden, seeing no one but her doctor and her nurses. She died on April 24, 1986, in the same house on the edge of the wood, carried off by bronchial pneumonia about two months short of her 90th birthday. Her funeral was held at St.
George’s Chapel at Windsor, and she was buried at Frogmore beside the Duke. Her estate, valued at around £5 million, went largely to the Pasteur Institute. In February 1998, Sotheby’s dispersed the contents of the Paris house in New York. More than 40,000 objects were broken into some 3,200 lots and knocked down to strangers across a few days.
The jewels had already been sold at Geneva in 1987 for more than $50 million. The love had been real, but it had been forged entirely in obstacle, in secrecy and crisis and the long war against his church and his family. Once the obstacles were gone, the love had almost nothing left to be about. A king gave up the oldest throne in Europe, his family, his country, and his place in the only story he had ever been raised to play.
In exchange, he received a wife, a title he could not fully share, a hidden fortune, two beautiful houses, and 35 years with nothing whatever to do. The man at the microphone in December 1936 spoke the truest sentence he ever said, and it was also the beginning of the longest and emptiest chapter of two lives. He got the woman he loved.
He kept her for 35 years in Paris, in gilded and grievance-ridden idleness, until the cancer took him and left her alone in the dark for 14 years more.
