Extract from The Duchess
It was the union that destroyed the monarchy and in The Duchess, a fictional tale based on the real royal scandal, the inside story of the decision that ended King Edward VIII’s reign unfolds.
She could not believe what she was hearing. She stared at her gloved hands, on the knee still covered with her outside coat. “It’s all arranged,” Ernest told her. “Mary is coming over.” “You’ve arranged it?” she gasped. “Without even talking to me?”
“The king has arranged it.”
Her thoughts jumped about her brain. “What has he done?”
“He’s attended to everything.
Mary and I are to go to the Hotel de Paris in Bray and have a maid bring us breakfast in bed.”
Her panic was rising. Perhaps, she thought wildly, this was just a nightmare. David would never be so devious in real life. He would never encourage her to go away just so he could work on Ernest. And even had this happened, Ernest would never have capitulated, as he seemed to have done so easily here. He was telling her that the hotel maid would testify at the divorce hearing.
“You are to divorce me for adultery,” Ernest went on. “The king has arranged for his solicitor, a Mr Allen, to represent you. He has even decided the assumed name that Mary should use at the hotel. He wants her to call herself Buttercup Kennedy.”
“Buttercup Kennedy?” A wild urge to laugh possessed her, followed by a wave of complete despair. She thought of the years she had known Mary. How on earth had it come to this?
“The maid will discover us in an adulterous situation and after that I’ll move out of Bryanston Court and into the Guards Club.”
It was all real. She could never have dreamed this. “No!”
Ernest sighed. “There’s no point fighting it, Wallis.”
She looked about the sitting room, where the king had come so many times. She felt, now, that she regretted every single one of them. She looked at Ernest. The carpet seemed to stretch between them. “Why?” she asked. “Why isn’t there any point?”
“He made it perfectly clear to me. He means to make you his wife, come what may.”
“But I’m married to you,” she cried. They looked at each other.
“We had an arrangement,” she reminded him. “Once it was over, I would come back to you.”
He hunched his shoulders and stared at the carpet. “But it was never going to be over,” he said. “For a long time now, I … ” He stopped.
She felt terrified, as if everything anchoring her to the land was letting her go. “Ernest, talk to me. For a long time what?”
“I feel like I lost you ages ago,” he said quietly. “I don’t think you could come back to me now, even if you wanted to. It’s too late.”
She gasped, about to argue, but then her mouth closed again. He was right, and yet he was wrong too.
“Can’t we stop it?” she whispered. He looked at her sadly. “You have no idea what is ranged against us. The resources of an entire Empire. He will fight to the end. He will do literally anything to make you his wife.”
“But I don’t want to be his wife!” She went to him, took his hands and knelt on the floor before him. “Please don’t let me go, Ernest! I’m frightened!”
He held her close and kissed the top of her head. She started to sob into his sleeve. “Why does he have to destroy our marriage?”
“Because he can,” said Ernest.
She lifted her hot, tear-streaked face and tried to think straight. “It’s impossible. He can’t marry me. I’d be twice divorced. The Church would never allow it, as you said. And the Government, the Empire, the rest of it. They’d all refuse to let him.”
She looked distractedly about the sitting room. There had to be a way out of this. What was it? Spotting the copy of The Times by Ernest’s chair, she saw something gleam in her mind, a bright straw of hope. She clutched at it wildly. “The newspapers!” she exclaimed. “What happens when the story gets out? The people will hate it. They’re not going to want me as his wife, still less as queen!”
A great rush of relief filled her. But Ernest’s face remained grey and tense. “All part of the plan. The king has an understanding with the newspapers. They have agreed not to print anything until after the wedding.”
“He’s gagged the newspapers? Can you do that?” The strange reticence of the British press. She had never dreamed that this was the reason. He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Well, he has. That’s the sort of power we’re up against. We don’t have a chance.”
She felt sick. She could not accept that she was already trapped. That things had been planned and arranged without her knowing and events were already moving. She could hear the clang of prison doors, the rattle of chains.
She went to the Palace. She would make one last supreme effort to break things off. The king greeted her with delight and showed her the new shower he had installed, happily turning the water on and off.
“I’ve always hated baths you see,” he said. “They remind me of my childhood. That hateful nanny, putting soap in my mouth. And all the other beastly things she did to me.” “Stop manipulating me!” she cried. He looked hurt. “Why do you say that? I thought you sympathised. We’ve been through all the same things.” Guilt flooded her, and love, and all the other usual passionate, protective feelings.
“Abuse, violence, addiction,” he reminded her.
She turned away, to the window. It had not been cleaned for some time. “Yes,” she said. “And now we’re addicted to each other.”
He said nothing to this, but merrily started to talk about the cruise he was planning for the summer, that they would go on together. She touched his arm. “David. You know it can’t happen. It’s impossible.”
His blue eyes creased with amusement. “Now, I know exactly what you’re about to say! I know what your concerns are and I have devised a brilliant solution!”
She felt the wind conclusively leak from her sails. “You have?”
The golden head nodded gleefully. “Yes! You’re thinking that we can’t go via Italy as planned because of Abyssinia!”
“Abyssinia,” she repeated. The tensions in Europe arising from Mussolini’s African invasion had gone right to the back of her mind. The Foreign Office’s pro-Italian route had proved controversial; Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare had lost his job because of a secret pact with the French to divide Abyssinia between Italy and Ethiopia. He had been replaced by the suave Anthony Eden.
“But we are going to avoid Italy altogether and join Nahlin at Šibenik, which is in Yugoslavia. Isn’t that clever?” His face was full of a bright expectation.
“Narling? Who’s he?”
“It’s the name of the boat. Duff and Diana are coming, and Tommy.”
As he continued, humming, about the room, she took a deep breath and tried again.
“David. Marriage is out of the question.”
He continued to hum, removing items from boxes, regarding them with his head on one side.
“David, you know how much I love you and always will.”
He bent to open another box, humming all the while.
“David, please. I have to go back to Ernest.”
He stopped unpacking, but did not look up.
It was so painful, so difficult. More so even than she had imagined. She pushed on, even so. “In a few months’ time you will have forgotten me completely. You’ll be so busy, and you’ll go on with your job, doing it better and better each year.” She forced herself to smile. “And you’ll be relieved not to have me nagging you anymore!”
His face remained hidden, still. Tears stung her eyes. She rummaged for a handkerchief. “We have had such beautiful times together, David. And I am so thankful for them and I will never forget them. But you are better off without me. You and I would only create disaster together.”
Still he said nothing.
“David … ” Her voice had a pleading note now. “More than anything I want you to be happy. Please believe me when I say that. But I feel sure I can’t make you so and I honestly don’t think you can me.”
She waited. Her thumping heart seemed to fill the room. Still no reaction.
“I shall always read about you in the newspapers – believing only half! But please, David. No more talk of marriage.”
She stopped. Both voice and nerve were breaking under the strain.
He looked at her then, his eyes full of hurt. “What have I done?” he asked, as a child might.
It was like talking to someone in a language they didn’t understand.
“Destroyed my peace of mind!” she cried. “Now you want to destroy my marriage. Why do you have to marry me?”
“Because you are everything to me,” he replied simply. “Everything depends on you.”
“But we can remain friends! Lovers even! We don’t have to marry! Why can’t you take no for an answer?
You asked those other women, they all said no.”
He smiled. “On the contrary, they all said yes. But I didn’t mean it with them.”
She took a moment to absorb this. “So why do you have to mean it with me?”
“Because I love you.”
“You loved them too!
Remember how devastated you were about Thelma.”
He shook his head. “When I met you I had only experienced passion. Love, never.”
Love is warmth, affection, tenderness, decency.
She covered her face. “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. We must learn to live without each other.”
“Why?” Again, like a child.
“Because the alternative is worse.” “No, Wallis, I promise you this is worse.”
A kind of terrified despair filled her. She lowered her hands and looked at him. “But you can’t marry me and make me queen.”
“David can. And he will.”
All calmness deserted her then. “What if I go away?” she cried, desperate. “What if I leave the country?”
“David will follow you,” he said simply.
Ernest duly spent the night with Buttercup Kennedy at the Hotel de Paris in Bray. As arranged, he was discovered ‘in an adulterous situation’. A few days later he left Bryanston Court and moved to the Guards Club. She was not at home when he went. But when he went to his room and looked out of the window, across Piccadilly to the Green Park opposite, he might have seen, sitting alone on one of the benches, a slender figure in black sobbing her heart out.
The king’s solicitor filed her divorce petition. With the king and his party, she went to join the Nahlin in Yugoslavia. Local dignitaries and peasants in costume crowded the quay. They stood waving as the boat sailed out, shouting.
The king waved cheerfully back, his pale bare chest gleaming in the strong sunlight. Diana came up. “Tell me, Wallis,” she said in her musing way. “Do you think it might be at all possible to get His Majesty to at least
“We can remain friends. Lovers even! We don’t have to marry! Why can’t you take no for an answer?” – Wallis Simpson
put his shirt on until we get out of sight of all these people?”
Wallis laughed. What on earth made anyone imagine she had the smallest influence on the king? She turned to Diana, trying to keep her tone light. “Feel free to ask him yourself. But it’s my experience that when it’s something he doesn’t want to do, he has a won’t of iron.”
Diana’s pale blue eyes widened. “Won’t of iron?” “As opposed to a will of iron.” “Ha! That’s a good one.”
The king was in high spirits throughout the voyage. Her own mood lurched wildly from one extreme to the other. She would go from a determination to resist him, to find a way to break free even now, to a feeling of overwhelming love. She was full of wild energy one minute, and utterly drained the next. She was brilliant at dinner, holding the table in thrall, the stories and wisecracks following in quick succession and everyone admiring and amused. Then she would go to her cabin and weep from sheer frustration. The king had now abandoned all pretence of caring what anyone thought. At night, he would take her off to his cabin in a highly public manner and more than once, in the morning, he appeared at breakfast with her lipstick smeared on his face. She sat sipping her coffee, cringing inside. “How could you?” she stormed at him afterwards. “It’s so indiscreet!”
The king maintained his benign smile. “Discretion,” he remarked, almost proudly, “is a quality which, though useful, I have never particularly admired.”
When they arrived at Athens she refused to leave the ship. He wanted to take her to meet the British ambassador but the thought of yet more official disdain was more than she could bear. She spent the day swimming, floating on her back in the clear cool water and fighting off the urge to strike out to the horizon and never return.
One evening, as the Nahlin lay at anchor off a tiny fishing village,
Wallis stood at the rails looking at the mountainsides that rose straight out of the sea. She could just make out the tracks cut into the rocky sides, tracks which, presumably, peasants had used for centuries to make their way down from the villages to fish.
The sun was now setting behind the boat. Crimson spread across the water. Wallis thought of Chanel and her rubies. She doubted that if she hurled the whole of the Crown Jewels overboard now that it would make any difference. She should have taken the designer’s advice; run, jumped. But she could not. Despite it all, she loved him. Then fear would consume her, what they were doing was madness. It would end badly and she must escape before it was too late. And round and round her thoughts went, chasing each other from one extreme to the other.
The red in the sky deepened. The ocean had a sanguineous gleam. The mountains now loomed in a shapeless mass but something caught her eye, a flash of something. “What’s that?” The king, as ever, was at her elbow. They both stared across the blood-red water. A moving snake of light was rippling up the side of the mountain. She realised that on the trails she had seen, thousands of peasants were now standing carrying flaming torches.
The king held up his hand. His signet ring gleamed red in the sunset. “Listen!”
Music could be heard. Echoing from the cliffs came refrains of folk songs, sometimes sad and sometimes gay … “Zivila ljubav”.
“What are they saying?” Wallis wondered.
“Zivila ljubav.”
“And what does that mean?” He turned to her, smiling. “I believe that it translates as ‘Long Live Love!’”
He raised her hand and kissed it. “These simple peasants know a king is in love with you.”
Wallis stared at the glimmering cliffs. That their relationship had touched these remote people seemed
to her extraordinary. They clearly saw it as some epic romance; perhaps it was. She thought of all the other great lovers of history. How had things seemed to them from the inside? Complicated, no doubt. Would she be part of history herself? The picture had got so big now, everything had enormous consequences. She had fought hard to retain control and she had lost. The feeling of the ship moving beneath exactly reflected how she felt, that it was out of her hands and someone else was guiding her destiny.
On the return to London Wallis found, waiting for her at Bryanston Court, a fat parcel of newspaper clippings from Aunt Bessie. They were not just American but from the foreign press too. Her relationship with the king and the forthcoming divorce case were extensively covered in all of them. With a cold and churning horror she realised she was gossip subject number one for every newspaper reader in the United
States, Europe and the Dominions.
She ran to her room and hurled herself under the bedcovers. Never had she longed for Ernest more, but he was in America himself now, with Mary. The faithful Lily appeared from time to time bearing trays of tea and bowls of nourishing soup only to find her mistress still sobbing under the blankets. Only when, at her wit’s end, she appeared with a large whisky could Wallis be tempted out. She knocked it back in one and felt something like resolve return. She looked at Lily with flaming eyes. “Bring me some notepaper, please.”
The panicked, drastic note she now wrote to the king set out in balder terms still what she had already told him. Her life was being ruined, her reputation utterly destroyed. She loved him and always would but he must let her go now. It was over between them for ever. She was going to return to America, find Ernest and beg him to take her back.
The next morning, the telephone rang. She lifted it with a shaking hand, hardening her heart against and yet longing for the tones of the hurt little boy. She heard, to her surprise, the icy voice of Tommy Lascelles.
“His Majesty wishes to know when you will be joining him at Balmoral.”
“I don’t want to go to Balmoral,” she replied curtly. “He knows that already.”
The king had suggested, on the return trip, that she join him at the family castle on Deeside. She had been doubtful to start with, but the news that the Yorks were to be there too turned doubt into absolute refusal. He had been so dismayed it had alarmed her and she had promised to think about it. But the press cuttings had only reinforced the need to say no.
“I see,” said Lascelles, distantly. “That may cause His Majesty a degree of difficulty.”
“Well I’m sorry about that,” she said, politely unrepentant. “But it can’t be helped.”
There was a gentle cough from the other end.
“His Majesty wished me to convey the fact that if you were unable to join him at Balmoral, he would slit his throat.”
“Her life was being ruined ... She loved him and always would but he must let her go now.”
This is an edited extract from The Duchess by Wendy Holden, published by Allen & Unwin, on sale now.