Wallis Simpson book reveals a different kind of love
Book shows relationship between Edward VIII and his American wife had a much darker side
Wallis in Love is the somewhat misleading title of British author Andrew Morton’s scabrous portrait of the Duchess of Windsor, the woman who caused the greatest crisis in the modern history of the British monarchy when her affair with Edward VIII resulted in his abdication less than a year after his becoming king in 1936. A twice-divorced American commoner was viewed as a totally unacceptable candidate as queen-consort, and the resulting abdication crisis shook the monarchy and the British Empire to its rafters.
Often described as the “greatest love story of the 20th century,” except, as this book makes clear, while Wallis was in love, it was not with her hapless third husband, Edward Windsor. In arguably the book’s greatest reveal, Morton argues that an American aristocrat named Herman Rogers was “the only man Wallis ever loved.” Indeed, those are the words the duchess confides to Herman’s second wife, Lucy, just after the younger woman tied the knot with Rogers.
“How nice for the Duke,” snapped Lucy. “There was never anything between Herman and me,” Wallis replies (despite their love, they always denied any physical relationship).
Lucy’s rejoinder? “Wallis, you got the king but I got your Herman.”
That exchange neatly captures the rich material Morton mines in Wallis In Love. At one point Morton opines that the famously empty fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square would be a fitting pedestal for a statue “honouring” Wallis for one simple reason: the one-time Mrs. Simpson did Britain and the Commonwealth a huge favour by forcing the spoiled, simpering pro-Nazi Edward VIII off the throne. Frankly, Edward was weak; when he announced his intention to shirk his royal responsibilities by abdicating the throne, his younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, slapped him across the face.
Among the most interesting subplots of the book are the cross-purposes at the core of Edward and Wallis’s relationship. He used her to escape his “kingly” destiny and, despite her protestations to the contrary, she was using him to grab the biggest prize in the world, the British Crown. It seems Wallis loved the role, not the man. The man she loved got away. When Edward finally abdicated, Wallis screamed via telephone to him from Herman Rogers’s Riviera villa, “You goddamned fool.”
The result of that decision was a lifetime of bitter disappointment and recrimination for both of them. Wallis’ great attraction to him was a plausible excuse to give up the throne. But his great attraction to her was that he was king. For the rest of her life Wallis was not so much in love, as in despair.
As her friend Constance Coolidge observed, “Can you imagine a more terrible fate than to have to live up publicly to the legend of a love you don’t feel.” Robert Collison is a writer and editor.