How Mrs Simpson tried to bed the love of her life – two days before she married Edward
Drawing on newly found papers, a riveting new biography by ANDREW MORTON reveals Wallis was bored by the man who sacrificed his throne for her – and her heart lay elsewhere
ON BONfIrE Night 1936, a friend of Edward VIII attended a firework party with a number of fellow aristocrats. High on the bonfire, a straw effigy was already well alight. ‘I see you have Guy fawkes up there,’ he remarked to his host. ‘Oh no, that’s Wallis Simpson,’ was the reply. Then, with a laugh, the host added: ‘ Now, an unmarried man needs a girl now and again, but
marrying her? Can you believe it?’ At that point, thanks to a news blackout agreed between newspaper proprietors, the vast majority of the British public was still in the dark about Edward’s romance with a twice-divorced 40-yearold American. But the flames of publicity were crackling ever nearer.
In Parliament, MPs openly discussed the possibility that the king might abdicate. At Buckingham Palace, the elderly Queen wailed that her beloved son had been beguiled by an American sorceress.
Had Edward listened to the wise counsel of supporters including Winston Churchill, he could have avoided abdication by going ahead with his coronation and then gradually introducing the public to the woman he wanted to marry.
Yet he chose not to take their advice, thus provoking a full-blown constitutional crisis, with just one inevitable result. So why did he do it?
One factor was unquestionably his obstinacy: there could be no coronation, he insisted, without Wallis at his side. But there was another, altogether murkier, reason why he dashed headlong into his clash with the Establishment.
The truth is, Edward had always hated the idea of being king. It wasn’t just the job he hated but the system; he referred to royal engagements as ‘stunts’ or ‘camouflage’ and a successful event as ‘good propaganda’.
GIVEN that Wallis herself nursed a private but passionate ambition to be queen, it was hardly a great recipe for a marriage. Of course, the world knew nothing of this — and few doubted that this was the royal romance of the century.
But in fact, I can reveal, it was nothing of the kind — at least on Wallis’s part. Because at the time, she was secretly in love with another man, a handsome American called Herman rogers. And her passion for him was no idle fancy.
Just two days before her wedding to former King Edward VIII, Wallis desperately tried to lure Herman into her bed... HOW different it had all been earlier in Wallis’s affair with the Prince of Wales. Back then, she’d been Edward’s wife in all but name, hosting his parties and even buying and wrapping all 165 Christmas presents for his staff.
Her husband, Ernest Simpson, had initially turned a blind eye, but after being abandoned for long periods he’d eventually embarked on a secret affair of his own.
As for the Prince of Wales, his dalliance with Wallis was consuming all his waking hours. ‘Oh! A boy does miss and want a girl here so terribly tonight,’ he wrote to her once in the middle of the night.
‘No difficulties or complication can possibly prevent our ultimate happiness.’ Determined to marry his new love, he decided to speak to his father, George V, about retiring from the succession and giving his brother, the Duke of York, a number of years to grow used to his new position as the king’s successor.
But Edward fatally hestitated — at first because he didn’t want to disrupt the 1935 Silver Jubilee celebrations. Then he swanned off to Europe on a three- month holiday with Wallis; and finally he used the king’s ailing health as an excuse not to bother him with such matters. George V’s life drew peacefully to a close on January 20, 1936, as his family watched by his bedside. Turning to her eldest son, Queen Mary kissed his hand, dropped a deep curtsey and murmured: ‘Your Majesty.’ TWENTY days into his reign, the new king invited Wallis’s husband to dinner. According to a friend of Ernest’s who was there, Mr Simpson, an American shipping broker, asked the king point-blank about his intentions: ‘Are you sincere? Do you intend to marry her?’ Edward VIII rose dramatically from his chair and said: ‘Do you really think I would be crowned without Wallis at my side?’
Suitably assured, Ernest promised to stand aside if Wallis wanted a divorce, with the proviso that the king would look after her financially whether or not they eventually married.
Meanwhile, Wallis was thoroughly enjoying herself. As the great and the good curried favour with her, she treated the first months of his reign as something of a hoot. In March, during a visit to Paris to stock up on spring fashions, she brazenly paraded her closeness to the king to all and sundry.
When Edward rang her at her hotel, which he did four or five times a day, she deliberately left the phone booth door open so that people could listen in as she coolly responded to his passionate declarations of love.
In complete contrast to the besotted monarch, who thought of her constantly and fretted when