Wallis was feted by the Londonderrys (the 7th Marquess was a Cabinet minister and his wife, Edith, Lady Londonderry, held sought-after political receptions); Mrs Evelyn Fitzgerald, sister-in-law of the press baron, Lord Beaverbrook; the Guinnesses; the Cholmondeleys (the 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley would become Lord Chamberlain at the court of Edward VIII); Mrs Laura Corrigan (a society hostess from Colorado); Daphne, Countess of Weymouth; Lady Sibyl Colefax; and Lady Emerald Cunard.
‘Though nothing about Mrs Simpson appears in the English papers,’ the society photographer Cecil Beaton noted in his diary that autumn, ‘her name seems never to be off people’s lips. For those who enjoy gossip she is a particular treat. The sound of her name implies secrecy, royalty, and being in the know. As a topic she has become a mania, so much so that her name is banned in many houses to allow breathing space for other topics …’
There was something touchingly childlike about Wallis’s excitement at her recognised status in society as Edward’s ‘One and Only’. Instead of always feeling an outsider, as she had done since childhood, she began to embrace the (faux) warmth of acceptance. Lady Cunard, the society figurehead always adorned with ropes of pearls who championed Wallis, memorably said: ‘Little Mrs Simpson knows her Balzac,’ suggesting that Wallis was better read and better bred than people imagined. Emerald Cunard’s lunch parties were legendary due to her ‘throwaway shockers’; invitations to her Grosvenor Square home were coveted. Wallis, who became a regular around her lapis lazuli-topped circular table, was sufficiently savvy to recognise that the fawning society figures were there solely because of the prince. Her glittering position would extinguish the minute Edward lost interest in her. This she accepted and awaited.
Ernest, too, knew that all the attention had nothing to do with him. According to Diana Mosley: ‘He absented himself more and more, and in fact behaved with dignity. Mrs Simpson saw only the prince. If she had seen others, everyone would have known, even if there was nothing in the newspapers.’
In late January 1935, Chips Channon recorded his first meeting with Wallis. ‘Lunched with Emerald to meet Mrs Simpson … She is a nice, quiet, well-bred mouse of a woman with large startled eyes and a huge mole. I think that she is surprised and rather conscience-stricken by her present position and the limelight which consequently falls upon her.’ Those in the know were abuzz with chatter as to what exactly the prince saw in Wallis Simpson. As she herself said later: ‘I could find no good reason why this most glamorous of men should be so seriously attracted to me. I was certainly no beauty, and he had the pick of the beautiful women of the world.’ It was her American independence of spirit, she concluded, along with her breezy sense of fun, that he was drawn to.
Although Wallis valiantly told herself and her aunt that Ernest was completely compliant with her situation, the truth was that Ernest, for all his reverence of royalty, was finding his wife’s ever-growing attachment to another man increasingly hard to tolerate. For all her protestations to Aunt Bessie that her relationship with Ernest was solid, the marriage was starting to disintegrate. ‘Until now, I had taken for granted that Ernest’s interest in the prince was keeping pace with mine,’ she later wrote, ‘but about this time I began to sense a change in his attitude. His work seemed to make more and more demands on his time in the evening. Often he would not return in time for dinner, or when the prince suggested dropping in at Sartori’s or the Dorchester for an hour or so of amusement, Ernest would ask to be excused on the plea that he had an early appointment or that papers from the office needed his attention. He also seemed less and less interested in what I had to say about the prince’s latest news and interest.’
It was the prince’s invitation to a two-week skiing holiday in Austria in February 1935 which highlighted the growing frictions between the Simpsons. Wallis relished the chance to get away; when the prince invited them to join him in Kitzbühel, Wallis ‘naturally accepted for both of us’. When she told Ernest, it precipitated their first ever door slamming row. Ernest, who had business in New York and was no fan of winter sports, wanted Wallis to accompany him on his business trip. Wallis made her choice; the prince over Ernest, and this, unsurprisingly, created the first irreparable fissure in their marriage.
The prince’s staff began to feel alarmed when Edward set off for another holiday with Wallis in the party, yet again without her husband. Accompanying them were Bruce Ogilvy (the prince’s equerry), his wife Primrose and his sister-in-law Olive. Wallis, who did not take to skiing, discovered a fear of the sport, preferring the less demanding après-ski. She looked forward to the afternoon rendezvous of the whole party in the village inn, sipping hot chocolate before the fire. The prince’s entourage stayed in the Grand Hotel and every evening ate at a mountain restaurant where a band played folk music, the prince heartily singing along to the local songs. Edward, loath to return to London, announced after two weeks that he felt like waltzing, ‘and Vienna’s the place for that’. So off the royal party swept, to the Bristol Hotel in Vienna, crossing the Alps by train. His aides were understandably frantic when, after delightful evenings devoted to Strauss, the prince asserted that ‘while these Viennese waltzes are wonderfully tender, there is nothing to match the fire of gypsy violins’. The next morning, on yet another royal whim, they were on their way to Budapest. Edward’s insatiable need to indulge every fleeting impulse was more akin to that of a jaded jetsetter, rather than the heir to the throne, with duties and responsibilities to consider.
It was in a dingy local tavern in Budapest, on the Pest side of the river, where they had been guaranteed to hear the best gypsy music in Hungary, that Wallis had a piercing moment of realisation about the impossibility of her situation. As the violins swelled with melancholy tunes, amid the flickering candles and rough-hewn wooden tables, she ‘had the feeling of being torn apart, of being caught up in the inescapable sadness and sorrow of human suffering; and the look in David’s eyes told me that he was in the grip of the same flow of feeling’. She later wrote that she was ‘scarcely in a condition to differentiate these two worlds between which I giddily swung, hoping to have the best of both, but not quite sure whether I could maintain my footing in either’.
On Wallis’s return to London, it became clear that her sense of foreboding was justified. Her marital footing could no longer be guaranteed. Ernest, now cold and distant, had ‘undergone a change’. He showed no interest in her trip and was uncommunicative about his own visit to New York. For the first time their evenings together were strained, punctuated by arctic silences. Still Wallis did not act on the warning bells, so enraptured was she to be swept up in the prince’s orbit. ‘My concern was no more than a tiny cloud in the growing radiance that the prince’s favour cast over my life,’ she wrote with insouciance. ‘I became aware of a rising curiosity concerning me, of new doors opening, and a heightened interest even in my casual remarks. I was stimulated; I was excited; I felt as if I were borne upon a rising wave that seemed to be carrying me ever more rapidly and even higher.’
It was the Kitzbühel skiing holiday that convinced royal aides that the prince had gone too far. Sir Clive Wigram, George V’s private secretary, visited Edward at Fort Belvedere and told him how concerned the king was about his personal life. In a memo afterwards, he wrote: ‘The prince said that he was astonished that anyone could take offence about his personal friends. Mrs Simpson was a charming, cultivated woman.’ John Aird, meanwhile, could see that putting any pressure on the prince had negligible effect. If anything, he felt that after Sir Clive’s visit ‘the devotion of HRH if possible greater’. Godfrey Thomas, the prince’s equerry, said that he believed the prince knew ‘in his inmost heart’ he was behaving badly. Thomas reassured the courtiers that patience was key. ‘I am sure his eyes will be opened to the folly he is making of himself, and when he does come for help and sympathy, I am sure you will respond as I know I shall.’
The rumour mill amongst the staff at the two royal households, York House and Buckingham Palace, was rife with tales of the prince’s nocturnal habits. It was said that two bedrooms at the Fort had been turned into one for the couple’s benefit, presumably to avoid the risk that,
