Where Did Walls Simpson Live After Her Husband Died
DUCHESS OF WINDSOR, 89, DIES IN FRANCE
DUCHESS OF WINDSOR, 89, DIES IN FRANCE; WOMAN WHO WON A KING
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April 25, 1986
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On Dec. 11, 1936, after dinner with his immediate family, King Edward VIII climbed the Gothic staircase to his old rooms at Windsor Castle, sat down at a table with a microphone and began one of the most famous radio broadcasts of the century.
''I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King, as I wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love,'' the popular young King told an anxiously waiting nation. The woman, whose name was never mentioned in the speech, was Bessie Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson. After their marriage six months later, she was to be known throughout the world for almost 50 years until her death yesterday as the Duchess of Windsor.
Mrs. Simpson was neither a great beauty nor an aristocrat when she met the Prince of Wales in the fall of 1930. She was an American woman from Baltimore who had been divorced from her first husband, was still married to her second husband and was a lively and popular member of the fast-paced, international social set that flitted in and out of London in the period between World War I and World War II.
The attachment between the twice-married woman in her 30's and the Prince, who was two years her senior, was slow to be taken seriously by the few who knew about it.
At the time of her second divorce, which had cleared the legal obstacle to their marriage, she and the King were forced to recognize that the British Government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the royal family and the Church of England, of which the King was the nominal head, were not prepared to accept as Queen a divorced woman whose two former husbands were still alive.
For years afterward, the question persisted whether she herself had ever felt during the turbulent six-year period of their romance that she might one day become Queen. Twenty years later, when the couple was living in France and she was writing her memoirs, the Duchess was asked the question again. Her answer was a wistful ''yes.''
Wed in a Chateau In Loire Valley Long before the wedding of the famous couple in a borrowed chateau in the Loire Valley on June 3, 1937, the slim, blue-eyed, dark-haired woman had come to be regarded as a complex, often difficult, absorbing and controversial personality.
Interest in her continued throughout her life, despite the almost purely social existence to which she and the Duke devoted themselves. Some of the mystery was dissolved, however, after the publication in 1956 of the memoirs, ''The Heart Has Its Reasons.''
In addition to relating that she had thought she might become Queen, she wrote that when that dream was shattered, both she and the Duke thought that they would at least be able to live in Britain permanently and that she would be given royal rank.
Bessie Wallis Warfield was born on June 19, 1896, at Monterey Inn, in the resort village of Blue Ridge Summit, Pa. Her parents, Teackle Wallis Warfield and Alice - later spelled Alys -Montagu Warfield, both of long-established American families, had come from Baltimore for Mr. Warfield's health. He died five months after his daughter's birth.
Wallis spent her earliest years with her mother in a kind of genteel poverty. At one point her mother took in paying guests and, according to the daughter, fed them so well that expenses outran income.
Wallis went to Arundell, a girls' school in Baltimore, with the bills paid by her prosperous bachelor uncle, Solomon Davies Warfield. In 1912 she entered Oldfields, a finishing school.
She was presented to society in 1914 at the fashionable the Bachelors Cotillion in Baltimore.
Two years later, at 20, she was married to a 27-year-old naval aviator, Lieut. (j.g.) Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. of Chicago. The marriage lasted until Dec. 10, 1927, when Mrs. Spencer was granted a divorce in Warrenton, Va., on grounds of desertion. The couple had separated in 1921.
After her divorce, Wallis Warfield Spencer tried writing fashion copy and, failing in that, sought to become a saleswoman for tubular scaffolding.
About that time she was seeing a good deal of Ernest Simpson, a Briton who was living in New York. He decided to return to England, where he would run the London office of his family's shipping business and where he held a reserve commission in the Coldstream Guards.
An Introduction To London Society Mr. Simpson and his American wife were divorced, and he and Wallis Spencer were married in London on July 21, 1928. His sister introduced the new Mrs. Simpson to London society.
In this period the Simpsons became friends of Benjamin Thaw, First Secretary of the American Embassy in London, and his wife, the former Consuelo Morgan, whose twin sisters were Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, widow of Reginald Vanderbilt, and Thelma Morgan, Lady Furness. The latter was at that time the most frequent female companion of the Prince of Wales.
One day in November 1930 Mrs. Thaw asked Mrs. Simpson if she and her husband would go up to Burrough Court, a country house at Melton Mowbray, and substitute for her as chaperons at a weekend house party that was to include the Prince.
The day after she was presented to the Prince, Mrs. Simpson sat next to him at lunch. She did not see him again until Lady Furness gave a reception in the spring of 1931 to welcome him back from a trip.
In June, despite the divorce in her background, Mrs. Simpson, with the help of friends, was presented at court. Lady Furness gave a reception after the presentation, and when the Simpsons left they found the Prince waiting with his car to drive them home.
Soon the Simpsons were being invited to Fort Belvedere, the Prince's country residence at Windsor Great Park.
In the summer of 1934 the Prince took Mrs. Simpson to Biarritz and on a yachting trip, with her aunt, Mrs. D. Buchanan Merryman, as chaperon. Mr. Simpson was not present. ''Often,'' the Duchess wrote in her memoirs, ''the Prince and I found ourselves sitting alone on deck. Perhaps it was during one of these evenings off the Spanish coast that we crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love. Perhaps it was one evening strolling on the beach at Formentor in Majorca.''
In early 1935 Mrs. Simpson accompanied the Prince's party to the Austrian ski resort of Kitzbuhel and then to Vienna and Budapest. But on her return Mr. Simpson continued to accompany her to dinners given by the Prince, known as David, at his town residence, York House.
'I Felt the King's Eyes' At Palace Dance
On May 14, 1935, the Simpsons went to a ball at Buckingham Palace, and she noted that ''as David and I danced past, I thought I felt the King's eyes resting searchingly on me.'' And then, prophetically, ''In that moment I knew that between David's world and mine lay an abyss I could never cross, one he could never bridge for me.''
In January 1936 King George V died, and the Prince of Wales, forgetting caution and protocol, came to stand by Mrs. Simpson to hear himself proclaimed Edward VIII. She continued to go to Fort Belvedere for weekends, and the uncrowned King continued to stop by her apartment almost every evening. She was to see his lawyer about a divorce; the grounds were to be adultery, then the only ones acceptable in England.
The divorce proceedings, instituted in late July, were equivalent to the ringing of an alarm bell. To the Government, Mrs. Simpson's determination to achieve legal eligibility made her intentions and those of the King indisputably clear. It was the signal to Prime Minister Baldwin that the question must be addressed once and for all so that the problem could be settled before the coronation of Edward VIII.
A week before Mrs. Simpson's divorce petition was to be heard, Baldwin tried to persuade the King to withdraw it. Edward refused.
The preliminary decree was granted in Ipswich on Oct. 27, 1936, and the King arranged for the British press to report it in the most routine way. In the meantime, the King's mother, Queen Mary, who was more grieved and outraged than Baldwin at the turn events were taking, was talking frequently with her son.
On Nov. 13 Edward received a letter from his private secretary saying that unless Mrs. Simpson left the country at once the press would break its silence, the Government would almost certainly resign and the King might find it impossible to form a new one.
King Expresses Readiness to Go The King then told Mrs. Simpson that he intended to inform Baldwin that if the country would not approve of the marriage, he, the King, was ready to go.
In her memoirs, she wrote that she reproached herself afterward for not leaving England at that point. Her excuse was that she had no true conception of the King's vulnerability. Instead of leaving, she suggested to the King that he lay their case before his people in a fireside chat.
When he was unable to do so, the King, speaking for both of them, asked Baldwin to consider a morganatic marriage. The Prime Minister said no.
On Dec. 2 Edward told Mrs. Simpson after another talk with the Prime Minister: ''It now comes to this: Either I must give you up or abdicate. And I don't intend to give you up.'' As events heated up, rumors about the royal romance abounded. The handsome, blond King was a kind of idol to young women in England and America, who for years had clipped his photographs from newspapers and followed his every move in society. A popular song at the time jauntily declared, ''I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales.''
But as the crisis in the monarchy neared, the British press was strangely silent. Throughout his friendship with Britain's powerful newspaper magnates, the King had managed to secure a gentleman's agreement that Mrs. Simpson's divorce would be reported only briefly and without sensation. But the agreement did not cover the American press, which by this time was in full cry.
By Dec. 3 all press restraint had been abandoned, and Mrs. Simpson was on her way to the Cannes villa of Herman and Katherine Rogers, accompanied by one of the King's lords-in-waiting and driven by the King's chauffeur. Photographers and reporters pursued them across France, and the future Duchess of Windsor entered the grounds of the villa hunched on the bottom of the car with a lap robe over her head.
From her sanctuary she tried to get Edward VIII to move slowly, to wait. Baldwin, on the other hand, was pressing for a settlement.
Winston Churchill, at the time a virtual outcast in the Conservative Party, also advised the King to wait. Churchill viewed the situation as a threat to the Constitution and felt that Baldwin was forcing a constitutional issue for political reasons.
Churchill issued a statement calling for ''time and patience,'' pointing out that there could really be no constitutional issue until Mrs. Simpson's decree became absolute some four months hence.
Finally, Mrs. Simpson issued a statement saying she was willing to withdraw from ''a situation that has been rendered both unhappy and untenable'' if that would solve the problem. Lord Brownlow, the King's lord-in-waiting, told her that the language was not strong enough and that she should say forthrightly that she had no intention of marrying Edward. She felt, however, that this would be too cruel a blow.
On Dec. 10 the Speaker of the House of Commons, Capt. Edward Algernon Fitzroy, read to the assembled members of the house the text of the abdication letter of the King. The letter, signed in the King's hand, described his decision to renounce the throne and pass it on to his brother, the Duke of York.
The King made his abdication speech the next day and slipped quietly out of England.
On June 3, 1937, when Mrs. Simpson's divorce became final, the couple was married in the chateau near Tours. The bride wore a long dress by Mainbocher of crepe satin the shade of forget-me-nots - known for a time as Wallis blue.
George VI Is Crowned And Confers a Title The former King had come to the chateau in early May, and on May 12 he and the woman for whom he had renounced the throne sat silently listening to the broadcast of the coronation of his brother, George VI.
Among the new King's first acts was to confer on the former King the title of His Royal Highness the Duke of Windsor and to inform him that his wife would be simply the Duchess of Windsor.
The Duke and the Duchess went to live in Paris, hoping that before too long they could return to England.
After World War II began, Churchill, who had supported Edward VIII in the struggle with Baldwin, became Prime Minister. The Duke told Churchill that he was ready to serve anywhere overseas.
In 1940 he was given the governorship of the Bahamas, where he and the Duchess stayed five years. She worked for the Red Cross, looked after torpedoed seamen and raised money for charities. In 1961 the Duchess said that sending the Duke to the Bahamas had been a scheme to get rid of him.
This appraisal, in an article for McCall's magazine, said: ''At last I have a chance to tell the world what I think about the treatment of my husband by his family, the British Government and many of his countrymen. His hurt has been deep. Years of persecution have been enough to break anybody's spirit. I am proud to say that mine is intact, despite the many times I have wanted to cry.''
She also wrote, ''My husband has been punished like a small boy who gets a spanking every day of his life for a single transgression.''
There were rumors in the 1930's that Mrs. Simpson was pro-Nazi. But she always insisted she did not try to influence the Prince of Wales to regard Hitler and the Third Reich favorably. There was no need for her to do so; the Prince already regarded the Germans favorably.
The rumors of Mrs. Simpson's being pro-Nazi may have been a result of her having been seated in the spring of 1935 beside Hitler's special envoy, Joachim von Ribbentrop, at a luncheon given by Emerald Cunard, an American who was one of London's most fashionable hostesses.
That week the Prince and Mrs. Simpson were supper-party guests of Dr. Leopold von Hosch, who had been the German Ambassador since 1932 and had become a good friend of the Prince. Ribbentrop, who was also a guest, sent roses to Mrs. Simpson and a message to Hitler saying that she and the Prince seemed most friendly toward the German cause.
She always denied this. But the Prince gave clear evidence of his sentiment when in June 1935 he addressed the convention of the British Legion and urged its members to visit Germany and shake hands with their former enemies. The speech made a sensation around the world, and George V forbade the Prince from discussing politically sensitive subjects before alerting the Government.
Persistent questions about the woman for whom Edward VIII gave up his throne revolved about how she had managed to charm him at almost their first meeting and how she had kept him devoted thereafter. She believed it was her American forthrightness and independence that drew him in the first place.
'Every Ounce Of My Affection' On their 24th wedding anniversary, the Duchess said: ''I have given my husband every ounce of my affection, something he never had a great deal of in his bachelor life. Notice I use the word 'affection.' I believe it is an element apart from love. It means doing the things that uphold a man's confidence in himself, creating an atmosphere of warmth and interest, of taking his mind off his worries.''
She never gave up her independence, however. The Duke loved horses; she never tried to get over her fear of them. He loved golf; she never played. He loved the country and gardening; she preferred cities, and they spent most of their time in urban settings. He obviously cared less than she did for big social affairs, but they kept attending them.
The Duchess often served on committees for charity balls and even more often lent her name as honorary chairman. The couple had no children. The Duchess was named many times to the list of best-dressed women, and her sense of style remained undiminished throughout her life.
''One can never be too rich or too thin,'' the Duchess had needlepointed into a pillow years ago.
Where Did Walls Simpson Live After Her Husband Died
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/25/obituaries/duchess-of-windsor-89-dies-in-france-woman-who-won-a-king.html
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