THE QUEEN MOTHER VS WALLIS SIMPSON
For sheer virulence and long-lasting antipathy, nothing matches the 50-year feud waged by the late Queen Mother against her despised American sister-in-law,
Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor.
Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, blamed Wallis – for whom King Edward VIII abdicated the throne – for shortening the life of her husband. Shy and stuttering Bertie stepped up to become King George VI, despite never having been groomed for the role. (He died at just 56 from throat cancer after years of heavy smoking.)
Apparently, Wallis made an enemy of Elizabeth from their very first meeting, long before either of their husbands became King, when Elizabeth walked into a drawing room only to overhear Wallis performing a cruelly clever imitation of her. Elizabeth, plump, homely and moralistic, and from an aristocratic Scottish family, found the twice-divorced, loud, thin and fashion-obsessed Wallis an offence to every one of her senses.
As the new Queen Consort, Elizabeth ensured Wallis was denied the title Her Royal Highness when she married Edward – now demoted to Duke of Windsor – in 1937.
It was at her insistence that the Windsors were condemned to permanent exile in France after the abdication. ‘A country can only have one King at a time,’ she told an interviewer in 1978.
Because of Wallis and Edward’s unseemly fascination with the Nazis (in 1937 they made a disastrous visit to Germany, where Edward gave the Nazi salute and they were photographed in animated, smiling discussion with Hitler), they were whisked even further afield – to the Bahamas. The duke was appointed Governor-General there in 1940, and instructions from London were sent to local ladies not to curtsey to Wallis.
A biographer who visited the Windsors at their home in 1957 noted that Wallis showed a ‘facial contortion, reserved for speaking of the Queen Mother, which is very unpleasant to behold, and seemed to me akin to frenzy’.
In 1967, after more than 30 years of estrangement, the sisters-in-law came face to face at the unveiling of a plaque to Queen Mary in London. A bank of cameras whirred as they shook hands, capturing Wallis pointedly not curtseying to the crowned Queen.
The Duke of Windsor said of Elizabeth in a 1971 interview: ‘Behind that great abundance of charm is a shrewd, scheming and extremely ruthless woman.’
And Wallis was in no doubt about who had been behind their banishment. ‘We were never allowed to go back, and we never will be allowed. Not until the day we die. She will never permit it.’
But, in 1976, as Wallis suffered her final illness, she received a basket of roses and a card written in Elizabeth’s own hand. It read: ‘In friendship, Elizabeth.’
Perhaps there is hope for royal feuds yet.