Was his wartime treachery the real reason the Royals never forgave him?
AS MOST people understand it, the Windsors were rejected by the Royal Family because the former King had put private desire above public duty. But might the real reason have been more complex?
The conventional story line goes that the Duke, like many, had been determined that the carnage of the First World War must be avoided at all costs and that some form of accommodation with Hitler was possible.
It argues that in the summer of 1940, the couple became unwitting pawns of the Nazis in a plot to overthrow the British monarchy. The Windsors were naive and foolish, and at worst, used German approaches to leverage their own interests.
But my research has revealed that far from being innocent dupes of Hitler, the Windsors were actively engaged with a German plan to place Edward back on the throne under Nazi control.
It is my belief that their wartime treachery, known about at the highest levels of government, could be the real reason why the Royals never forgave the Duke of Windsor, nor ever accepted Wallis Simpson.
The Germans had long realised that Edward VIII was a potential ally. As a result he and Wallis were actively targeted before, during and after his reign.
Countless sources speak of Wallis’s closeness to the German embassy during t he pre- war years, and in particular her strong bond with the ambassador to London, Joachim von Rib bentr op. An intelligence source noted that ‘Mrs S… has access to all secret and Cabinet papers’.
In 1937, flattered by the continued attention of the Nazi regime and depressed by the hostility of the Royal Family following the Abdication, Edward and Wallis accepted an invitation to visit Germany. There they dined with leading Nazis, including Ribbentrop, Hess, Himmler and Goebbels, and took tea with the Fuhrer at his mountain retreat of Berchtesgaden.
Following the outbreak of war, the Windsors were moved out of occupied France to Spain. An illuminating memo from the Russian secret service to the Kremlin on June 25, 1940, read: ‘ The former king of England Edward together with his wife Simpson is at present in Madrid, where he is in touch with Hitler. Edward is conducting negotiations with Hitler on the question of the formation of a new English government and the conclusion of peace with Germany contingent on a military alliance against the USSR.’
Weeks later, Edward was appointed Governor of the Bahamas by Churchill so as to remove the former monarch from Europe. Before sailing to his new posting, the Duke was briefly t he guest of t he Portuguese banker Ricardo do Espirito Santo Silva, a German agent.
It was at this point that Edward was to commit his greatest act of treachery against his homeland.
According to MI5, before he left, ‘he fixed up, according to the telegrams, some kind of code with Ricardo do Espirito Santo in order that he might fly back to Portugal… if his intervention was required’.
A similar memo from the German ambassador in Portugal, Baron Oswald von HoyningenHuene, to Ribbentrop confirmed that: ‘To the appeal made to him [the Duke] to co-operate at a suitable time in the establishment of peace, he agreed gladly. He would remain in continuing communication with his previous host [Espirito Santo Silva] and had agreed with him upon a code word, upon receiving which he would immediately come back over.’
In August 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain when the country was fighting for its very survival, the Duke duly sent a coded telegram to Santo, who reported it to the German ambassador.
Did Edward send the telegram because he believed his beleaguered homeland was about to capitulate?
In turn, Ambassador Hoyningen- Huene sought instructions from Berlin. ‘The confidant has just received a telegram from the Duke from Bermuda, asking him to send a communication as soon as action was advisable. Should any answer be made?’
If genuine, as it almost certainly was, this was communication with a known foreign agent during wartime, which meant that the Duke could have been prosecuted under the 1940 Treachery Act.
The spy writer Nigel West tells me: ‘The Duke knew exactly what he was doing, and was not a dupe.’ The story did not end there. On May 2, 1941, an FBI agent said he ‘had proof that Goering and the Duke of Windsor had entered into some sort of an agreement, which in substance was to the effect that, after Germany won the war, Goering, through control of the army, was going to overthrow Hitler and then he would install the Duke of Windsor as the King of England.’
Another FBI source reported that ‘there was no doubt whatever that the Duchess of Windsor had had an affair with Ribbentrop, and that… she had an intense hate for the English since they had kicked them out of England’.
There is plenty of evidence that despite everything, and even with the benefit of hindsight, the Duke’s views about the Nazis did not change after the war and t hat his choice of close friends, including Oswald Mosley, was unfortunate.
‘My parents were horrified by their dinner table talk, where they made it perfectly clear that the world would have been a better place if Jews were exterminated,’ recalled academic Gaea Leinhardt.
The author Patrick Kinross, too, was shocked when the Duke claimed: ‘I have never thought… Hitler was such a bad chap.’
And art historian Sir Roy Strong has written of how the Duke ‘ eulogised Hitler. It confirmed all one had feared’.
There can be little doubt that if the Duke of Windsor had not renounced the throne, he would have tried to use his influence to seek peace with Hitler in 1940. Without the support of George VI, after Dunkirk, even Churchill might have been unable to resist the pressure from many politicians to negotiate with Germany.
If so, the history of the world might have been very different.
‘Wallis had an intense hatred for the English after she was kicked out’