‘Darling, you know the little man loves you very much. The little man was just lost without you.’
‘Empty as these sentences were, they were a kind of emotional bulwark,’ recalled Thelma. Reassured, she invited Wallis and Ernest to the Fort for Easter weekend. However, ‘that weekend was negatively memorable’, said Thelma. ‘I do not remember who was there, other than the Simpsons, there were about eight of us in all. I had a bad cold when we arrived … Most of Saturday passed without incident. At dinner, however, I noticed that the prince and Wallis seemed to have little private jokes. Once he picked up a piece of salad with his fingers; Wallis playfully slapped his hand.’ Thelma caught Wallis’s eye and shook her head at her. ‘She knew as well as everybody else that the prince could be very friendly, but no matter how friendly, he never permitted familiarity. His image of himself, shy, genial and democratic, was always framed by the royal three feathers … Wallis looked straight at me. And then and there I knew. That one cold, defiant glance had told the entire story.’
Thelma left the Fort, and the prince’s life, the following morning. Wallis confirmed that her reign was over in a letter to her aunt on 15 April 1934, sent tellingly from the Fort; she writes: ‘Thelma is still in Paris. I’m afraid her rule is over and I’m trying to keep an even keel with my relations with him by avoiding seeing him alone as he is very attentive at the moment. And of course I’m flattered.’
Wallis took to her new role as chatelaine of Fort Belvedere with verve. A footman brought in by Thelma Furness was quickly dismissed, the cook soon followed. Osborne, the butler, was more threatened by Wallis’s presence than those of her predecessors, Lady Furness or Mrs Dudley Ward. When Wallis presented the prince with a small tray on a folding stand, which she thought would simplify the serving of tea, Osborne was reluctant to use it. When the prince insisted that he bring it in for the afternoon tea, the butler snapped the tray into position with a vicious jerk and announced contemptuously: ‘Your Royal Highness, this thing won’t last twenty-four hours.’
Wallis’s status was further sealed when the prince arrived at Bryanston Court with a cairn terrier pup under his arm. He presented the dog to Wallis, announcing that it was called Slipper and was now hers. In her letters, Wallis tried to reassure Aunt Bessie that Ernest was fully aware of what was happening and, in fact, colluded with the new order. ‘Ernest is flattered with it all and lets me dine once or twice a week with him alone,’ she wrote, adding: ‘If Ernest raises any objections to the situation I shall give the prince up at once.’
Even at the height of the prince’s affair with Thelma Furness, Freda Dudley Ward was in the background as the maternal figure the prince could always rely on. On 25 April, when Wallis wrote to Bessie that the royal affair with Thelma was ‘very much on the wane’, she continued: ‘I shall doubtless be blamed as for the moment he is rather attentive though sees equally as much of Mrs Dudley Ward his old flame.’
This is the only mention Wallis ever makes of Freda in her correspondence, yet ever since the prince’s affair with Freda cooled in 1924, and Thelma came on the scene, he had continued to visit the Dudley Ward family. That month, her elder daughter, Penelope, suffered complications after an operation for appendicitis. Freda, who spent anxious days beside her daughter’s bedside, was too distraught to realise that all was suspiciously quiet from royal quarters. As soon as her daughter recovered, she rang York House to speak to the prince. The telephone operator, whom she had known for years, made a strange choking sound when he discovered Mrs Dudley Ward was on the line. ‘He didn’t seem able to speak. I suddenly realised to my horror that he was crying,’ said Freda. ‘“Everybody seems to have gone mad around here,” he said. The prince had given orders that none of my phone calls be put through. I never heard from him again.’
In that one act of cowardice, the prince coldly dispensed with Mrs Freda Dudley Ward. From that moment on, Wallis was to be his ‘one and only’.
* Cain was Wallis’s maid.
† The Prince of Wales’s brother, Albert (Bertie) and his wife, Elizabeth.
‡ King George VI, her father-in-law.
§ Wallis Simpson.
¶ Only Edward’s family ever referred to him as David.
3
By the spring of 1934, Wallis and Ernest’s life was almost ‘completely caught up and submerged in the prince’s private world’. The Simpsons received the ultimate invitation of society’s summer season: to join the prince’s party for Ascot week. The royal procession from Windsor Castle to the racecourse was a brilliant piece of pageantry – the king, queen, their family in open landaus, with bewigged postilions astride the grey horses. ‘That year, as I watched from the Royal Enclosure,’ Wallis recalled, ‘I felt an odd surge of pride and admiration when I saw that fleeting, boyish smile directed at us from under his grey topper.’
When the prince invited Wallis and Ernest as his guests on his summer holiday to Biarritz, Wallis initially declined. Ernest was due to go to America on business and she had invited Aunt Bessie to stay with her in his absence. Not to be deterred, the prince reassured Wallis that he would welcome Bessie. Her seventy-year-old aunt, would, of course, make the perfect chaperone.
It was a small party that set off for France on 1 August. The prince, his assistant private secretary, Hugh Lloyd-Thomas, his equerries, ‘G’ Trotter and John Aird, and his old friends, Lieutenant-Commander Buist and his wife Gladys, and Wallis and Aunt Bessie. Edward had rented a sprawling villa called Meretmont, overlooking the ocean. The holiday did not get off to a promising start. There were two days of continuous rain, then their regal host suffered from a surfeit of langoustines and was sick at his table in the Café de Paris. Fortunately, they soon settled into a happier routine. ‘As at the Fort, life was simple – swimming and sunbathing, golf, sometimes a little bridge,’ said Wallis. Once a week, Edward and Wallis would leave the rest of the party and dine alone at local bistros. This was their first opportunity to be together as a couple. John Aird wrote in his diary of the prince at this time: ‘Behaviour in public excellent, in private awful and most embarrassing for others. The prince has lost all confidence in himself and follows W around like a dog.’
The prince soon tired of Biarritz. When Mrs Kenelm Guinness, known as ‘Posy’, joined the party, she invited them to extend their holiday. Her cousin, Lord Moyne, an heir of the Guinness brewing family and Conservative politician, was sailing his yacht, Rosaura, nearby. Edward jumped at the chance to spend more time with Wallis. Bessie, who had planned a motoring trip in Italy, refused to be diverted and left Wallis with the royal party. John Aird, who was responsible for organising the logistics of joining the cruise, later wrote of Wallis: ‘I feel that she is not basically a bad sort of tough girl out to get what she can, but unless she is much cleverer than I think, she does not know how to work it so as to cash in best.’
The yacht was a converted channel steamer. Lord Moyne, a distinguished-looking Irishman, made a point of boasting to his guests that he was an accomplished seaman and the Rosaura could override any Atlantic gale. In spite of a furious storm in the Bay of Biscay as the royal party went aboard,
