He loved to be dominated: she even pushed him in a pram

DID Wallis and Edward go to bed with each other before their wedding? Both insisted later that they hadn’t slept together until after their marriage.

This may even be true. When she first began her affair with Edward, Wallis had no intention of giving up her dull but dependable husband: she was merely enjoying her moment in the royal sun, with the full knowledge that it wouldn’t last.

In any case, years of dealing with the amorous male had taught her the value of being elusive.

But when Edward and Wallis were alone together, he enjoyed being dominated. After one late-night party, the prince’s staff reported seeing her push him around his grounds in a baby’s pram.

Years later, one of his former mistresses, Freda Dudley Ward, was asked if she’d ever loved the man who called himself her ‘little slave’ or ‘little parpee’ (puppy).

‘Oh no,’ she replied crisply, ‘he was much too abject.’

As for Wallis, her sex life will probably always be wreathed in mystery. She told Herman once that she’d never slept with either her first or second husband.

Over the years, it became commonplace to suggest that Wallis was in fact hermaphrodite — but she had a hysterectomy in 1951, which suggests that she was wholly female.

Another rumour, that she learned Oriental sexual techniques in a brothel, remains deliciously unprovable and unlikely to have any basis in truth.