Baltimore. The Mauretania had barely left the Isle of Wight in its wake when a messenger came dashing up with a radiogram. It was a bon voyage message from the prince, signed ‘Edward P’, wishing Wallis a safe crossing and speedy return. Word spread on the ship that Mrs Simpson had received a personal message from the Prince of Wales. ‘The attention was flattering,’ Wallis recalled. ‘I enjoyed every minute of it.’
Wallis’s time in Washington coincided with the famous first ‘hundred days’ of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, when he presented a series of initiatives to Congress to counter the effects of the Great Depression, including the abandonment of the Gold Standard. Wallis’s mind was on other matters, however, and she made no reference in her letters to American politics. She returned to Europe in May aboard the RMS Olympic (Ernest met her at Cherbourg), and on the seventeenth wrote to Bessie, thanking her for her generosity. ‘Darling – What can I ever say to make you know how much I appreciate your giving me this marvellous trip and then a dress and coat besides? Maybe you realise that I am enough like my mother to be completely inadequate at expressing my feelings when I feel the most. I’m afraid I then generally joke the most. I love you better than anyone in the world and will always be on hand when you need me.’
On her return from America, Wallis’s relationship with the Prince of Wales entered a new phase, despite Wallis writing to her aunt that ‘Thelma is still the Princess of Wales’. She and Ernest were accepted into the inner circle of the prince’s friends, mixing with his brothers, Prince George and the Duke of York. The Simpsons were regulars at the Fort, they accompanied Edward to nightclubs in London – he was an habitué of the Embassy Club on Bond Street – and the prince dined often at Bryanston Court. Ernest, a staunch monarchist and social climber, was proud of Wallis and the way she had been accepted into this rarefied crowd. He believed in deferential reverence to the Prince of Wales, initially basking in reflected glory at his wife’s burgeoning closeness to the future monarch, as William Dudley Ward had once done. ‘Ernest was initially delighted with Wallis’s royal foray,’ recalled Ernest’s nephew, Alex Kerr-Smiley. ‘He benefited from the royal connection. The Prince of Wales had some tweed especially woven. It was made into an overcoat for him. My great uncle admired it and the Prince of Wales said: “My dear chap, there is some tweed left over. You may have it.” Ernest had an identical overcoat made up and there is a rude family story saying that he actually swapped his wife for an overcoat.’
Initially, though, Ernest refuted rumours that he was a cuckold. Ernest had applied for admission to a Masonic Lodge, presided over by Sir Maurice Jenks, a former Lord Mayor of London. His candidature was supported by the Prince of Wales. When Ernest was refused entry, Edward naturally demanded an explanation. The heir apparent was boldly told that it was against the Masonic law for the husband of his mistress to be admitted. The prince gave his word that this was not the situation and Ernest’s candidature was accepted. With Ernest’s entrée to the Masonic Lodge came introductions to a rich and influential coterie of friends.
‘The game of royal mistress, or the royal favourite, had its own set of rules and Ernest played his part,’ said John Julius Norwich. ‘Both Wallis and Ernest benefited from the arrangement.’ Of her association with the Prince of Wales – ‘a figure of popular legend and the quintessence of youthful charm’ – Wallis was ‘glad to be even a minor satellite in the company revolving around him’. Yet she, like her husband, misunderstood the prince’s growing admiration for her. ‘If the prince was in any way drawn to me I was unaware of his interest,’ she said. ‘Thelma was always there, and often Prince George, whom I found on closer acquaintance to be altogether as attractive as his brother. He played the piano very well, knew all the latest jazz, and loved to bang away at the keys while the rest of us danced after dinner in the octagonal hall.’
Prince George was closest to Edward of all his siblings and had worried the heir to the throne considerably. After he left the navy, George took up residence in York House. Artistic and impressionable, he succumbed easily to temptation. In 1928, he fell into the embrace of an attractive married American socialite called Kiki Preston, who introduced him to drugs. Known as ‘the girl with the silver syringe’, she was addicted to heroin, cocaine and morphine. In the summer of 1929, Edward tried to intervene and even drew closer to his parents, the three of them united in their concern for George. Eventually, Edward persuaded Mrs Preston to move abroad and more or less incarcerated George in the country. He took full responsibility for helping his brother beat his addictions, telling Freda Dudley Ward how exhausting it was to be ‘doctor, gaoler and detective combined’. Aiding Prince George come off drugs illustrated Edward’s capacity for kindness and commendable behaviour. Even King George was impressed. He wrote to his son: ‘Looking after him all those months must have been a great strain on you, and I think it was wonderful all you did for him.’
Sadly, Edward could not hold his father’s praise for long. Eschewing stuffy court life, he began to drop in on the Simpsons at Bryanston Court for tea or cocktails, enamoured with the ‘gay, lively and informed company’ Wallis liked to keep. Young British and American businessmen, foreign diplomats and Wallis’s girlfriends would gather. The prince found the conversation ‘witty and crackling with new ideas’. Edward later wrote: ‘Wallis had an intuitive understanding of the forces and ideas working in society. She was extraordinarily well informed about politics and current affairs. Her conversation was deft and amusing. But most of all I admired her forthrightness. If she disagreed with some point under discussion, she never failed to advance her own views with vigour and spirit. That side of her enchanted me.’
Where Wallis was not honest with the prince was concerning the financial strain that she and Ernest were under, constantly trying to keep up with the prince’s set. Entertaining lavishly was beyond their means. Although Ernest’s father, ‘Pa Simpson’, helped financially, from time to time he would withdraw his allowance, creating huge pressure on the couple. Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie that ‘Pa S – the most selfish old pig’ – had stopped their allowance. They could only afford to host one dinner party a month.
On 19 June, the Prince of Wales threw a surprise dinner party for Wallis’s thirty-seventh birthday at Quaglino’s, a restaurant off Jermyn Street. Edward gave Wallis an orchid plant as a gift. As it was the prince’s thirty-ninth birthday four days later, she gave him a present that she had put much thought and effort into. She had borrowed a royal spoon from Osborne, the butler at the Fort, and had the prince’s cipher copied and engraved onto a silver matchbox holder. The first letter the prince preserved from Wallis was the note she wrote accompanying the birthday present:
Sir – Many happy returns of the day.
This small ‘presy’ is to conceal Bryant and May’s (match) books on your dining table at the Fort. I am also enclosing your own spoon which I borrowed from Osborne for the marking.
Your obedient servant, Wallis
***
That summer, news of the Prince of Wales’s interest in Wallis reached his mother, Queen Mary. Elizabeth, Duchess of York wrote to her mother-in-law about the matter on 1 August 1933:
My darling Mama, when I was at Cowes with you, Papa‡ one day mentioned to me that he had heard that a certain person§ had been at the Fort when Bertie & I had been there, & he said that he had a good mind to speak to David¶ about it. I never had the chance to reopen the subject, but I do hope that he won’t do this, as I am sure that David would never forgive us into being drawn into something like that. I do hope that you do not mind my mentioning this Mama, but relations are already a little difficult when naughty ladies are brought in, and up to now we have not met the ‘lady’ at all, & I would like to remain outside the whole affair.
With
