Fergie and a floral tribute to Wallis

SARAH, Duchess of York, who has described Wallis Simpson as ‘courageous’, invited the American divorcee’s biographer to lay flowers at her grave at Windsor.

Wallis’s intended marriage to Edward VIII caused a constitutional crisis that led to his abdication. But Anna Pasternak — who has written a sympathetic book about her, called Untitled: The Real Wallis Simpson — revealed at the launch party that Fergie had allowed her to visit Frogmore, where she is buried next to Edward. Sarah lives at Royal Lodge, Windsor, with her exhusband, Prince Andrew, and is a friend of Pasternak’s author husband, Andrew Wallas.

‘It was incredibly poignant for me to go to Frogmore and lay flowers on Wallis’s grave, as she had told the Queen at Edward’s interment that no one would ever put flowers on her grave,’ Pasternak tells me. ‘I took a bouquet with the same flowers, white peonies and delphiniums, that she had at her wedding. It was a great honour for me to be alone in the sacred burial ground and pay my tribute to Wallis in this way.’