Wallis, The Duchess of Windsor

Bessie Wallis Windsor, The Duchess of Windsor (Bessie Wallis Windsor, formerly Simpson, previously Spencer, née Warfield) (June 19 1896 – April 24, 1986), but widely known simply as Wallis Simpson, was the wife of The Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor. The desire of Edward, who was then King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, to marry Wallis, an American divorcée, caused a constitutional crisis in the United Kingdom and then the British Commonwealth which ultimately led to his abdication to marry "the woman I love".

The Duchess of Windsor remains a controversial figure in British history. She was seen as the woman who took a highly popular king from his people. Her private life has remained a source of much speculation. Both the Duke and Duchess of Windsor have also been accused by some critics of being Nazi sympathisers.

Following her marriage to the former king, she was formally known as Her Grace The Duchess of Windsor.

Life

Bessie Wallis Warfield was born in Square Cottage at Monterey Inn, a resort hotel in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania in the United States of America. The inn is extant. She was the only child of Teackle Wallis Warfield and his wife, Alice Warfield née Montague. She was born seven months after their wedding, though some sources state that she was born before her parents' marriage. She was christened Bessie Wallis (Bessiewallis according to some sources), in honor of her father and her mother's sister, Mrs. D. Buchanan Merryman of Washington, D.C., but was generally known as Wallis. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was five months old. She was raised in Baltimore, Maryland.

Previous marriages

Her first marriage on November 8, 1916 was to Earl Winfield Spencer, Jr., a hard-drinking, reportedly abusive US Navy pilot. She accompanied him to the Far East and they separated in 1925. She remained alone in Shanghai for a year. She divorced him in 1927. She then became the mistress of Ernest Aldrich Simpson, a mild-mannered half-English, half-American shipping executive and former captain in the Coldstream Guards, who divorced his first wife to marry her on July 21, 1928. Their union lasted until their divorce in October, 1936.

Relationship with Edward, Prince of Wales

After her second marriage, Wallis was living in Britain and had been introduced to Prince Edward, The Prince of Wales. The Prince was the eldest son and heir of King George V and Queen Mary. Wallis later became his mistress, although Edward denied to his death that she was his mistress before they married. Wallis soon ousted the Prince's previous companion, the exotic American-born Viscountess Furness (born Thelma Morgan), and distanced him from a former lover and confidante, the Anglo-American textile heiress Freda Dudley Ward.

The Prince was infatuated by Wallis, finding her domineering manner and abrasive irreverence as to his position appealing. The relationship infuriated his parents because of Wallis's unsuitability as a consort for a Prince of Wales, primarily on account of her marital history but also because of her evident obliviousness to the proprieties. Although the pre-war media in the UK remained deferential to the monarchy, and no stories of the affair were reported in domestic press, foreign and Commonwealth media reported Edward and Wallis’s relationship widely.

Abdication Crisis

On January 20, 1936, King George V died and Edward ascended the throne as King Edward VIII. The next day, he broke royal protocol by watching the proclamation of his accession from a window of St. James's Palace, in the company of the still-married Wallis. The King’s behaviour and his relationship with Wallis made him unpopular with the 'Conservative' National British government, as well as horrifying his mother and brother.

There was no legal barrier to King Edward marrying Wallis, and she would have automatically become Queen of the United Kingdom, and Empress of India. However, the British government and the governments of the dominions (except the Irish Free State) were against the idea of marriage between the King and an American divorcee. The British Royal Family and the Churches of England and Scotland were also opposed to the union.

After Wallis and her second husband laid a petition in court to divorce, her relationship with the King began to become public knowledge in the UK. Wallis fled the country as the scandal broke, going to the South of France to stay with friends.

Back in the United Kingdom, the King consulted with both the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, on a way to marry Wallis and keep the throne. A suggested morganatic marriage was rejected by Baldwin and the other Commonwealth Prime Ministers, and Baldwin advised that if the King were to marry Wallis against his advice, he would be required to resign, causing a constitutional crisis. The Walter Monckton papers recently made available reveal that Wallis was willing to be co-operative with the both the government and the palace. As the issue of abdication gathered strength, John Theodore Goddard, Wallis's solicitor stated: "client was ready to do anything to ease the situation but the other end of the wicket [http://www.guardian.co.uk/monarchy/story/0,2763,191136,00.html" target="_blank" >^*. The King signed the Instrument of Abdication on December 10, 1936 and special laws in the British Parliament, His Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act 1936 ended his reign with effect from 11 December. That day, the now HRH The Prince Edward made a broadcast to the British people, saying of Wallis, “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility, and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love”.

Afterwards, Prince Edward left the UK and went to Austria, remaining apart from Wallis until there was no danger of compromising the granting of a decree absolute in her divorce proceedings.

Duchess of Windsor

Free to marry, Wallis and Edward married on June 3,1937 at Chateau de Candé, Monts, France. No member of the British Royal Family attended the wedding.

Edward had previously been created Duke of Windsor by his brother, the new King George VI. However, letters patent, passed by the new King, prevented Wallis from using the style of Her Royal Highness, following pressure from Queen Elizabeth. As such Wallis was now styled Her Grace The Duchess of Windsor. Edward and Wallis lived in France in the pre-war years. In 1937, the Duke and Duchess visited Germany as personal guests of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, a visit much publicised by the German media.

World War II

When the Germans invaded the north of France in May 1940, they fled south, first to Biarritz, then in June to Spain. In July the pair moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where they lived at first in the home of a banker with close German Embassy contacts. The British Foreign Office strenuously objected when the pair planned to tour aboard a yacht belonging to a Swedish magnate, Axel Wenner-Gren, whom American intelligence considered to be a close friend of Hermann Goering, one of Hitler's top lieutenants. A "defeatist" interview with the Duke that received wide distribution may have served as the last straw for the British government: in August a British warship dispatched the pair to the Bahamas and the Duke was installed as Governor, a role in which he and the Duchess as the Governor's lady appear to have performed with adequate competence for five years, returning to France and retirement after the war.

Later life

The British Royal Family never accepted the Duchess and would not receive her formally, although the former king sometimes met his mother and a brother after his abdication, and both the Queen and Prince Charles paid visits to the Windsors in the Duke's later years. The Queen Mother also tried to visit the Duchess, though by then the Duchess was too frail and mentally absent to receive her. It is believed that Queen Elizabeth, Edward’s sister-in-law, remained bitter towards Wallis for her role in bringing her husband to the throne and for other inappropriate behaviour. It is said that, during the period when Mrs. Simpson was Edward's mistress, she had prematurely behaved as his consort at Fort Belvedere and Balmoral, and had behaved with extreme hauteur towards the Yorks. Mrs Simpson invariably referred to Princess Elizabeth as "Shirley," as in Shirley Temple, and to the Duchess of York alternatively as Mrs Temple or as Cookie, alluding to the Duchess's solid figure and forthright cheerfulness. Queen Elizabeth was unable ever to overcome the awkwardness that arose from this behaviour.

The couple lived in Neuilly near Paris for most of the remainder of their lives, essentially living a life of easeful retirement. The Duchess published her ghost-written memoirs, The Heart Has Its Reasons, in 1956. They soon became close friends of their neighbors Oswald and Diana Mosley. They had no children, though the Duchess had been briefly a stepmother by her marriage to Ernest Simpson, who had a daughter by his first wife.

In 1965 the Duke and Duchess visited London. They were visited by the Queen, Princess Marina and also the Princess Royal. Later, they joined the Royal Family in 1967 for the centenary of Queen Mary's birth. The last occasion they were in England together was the funeral of Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent in 1968.

Upon the Duke's death from cancer in 1972, the increasingly senile and frail Duchess travelled to England to attend his funeral, staying at Buckingham Palace during her visit. The Duchess lived the remainder of her life as a recluse. In October 1976 she was due to receive the Queen Mother; her condition made it necessary to refuse the visit and instead, she received flowers from her. On the card, in the Queen Mother's handwriting, were the words "IN FRIENDSHIP, ELIZABETH." After her husband's death, the Duchess gave her legal authority to her French lawyer Maître Suzanne Blum. She was under her care until her death. Towards the end, she was bed-ridden and did not receive any visitors, apart from her doctor and nurses.

The Duchess of Windsor died on 24 April 1986 in Paris. Her funeral was held at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle attended by her surviving sisters-in-law Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and Princess Alice. The Prince and Princess of Wales attended both the funeral ceremony and the burial with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. She is buried next to Edward behind the Royal Mausoleum in Windsor Castle's Home Park. Her tombstone simply reads "Wallis, Duchess of Windsor"".

The bulk of Wallis Simpson's estate, valued at £40m, went to the Pasteur Institute medical research foundation, recognising the help of France in providing her with a home. There were no major bequests to the Royal Family. Many of the Duke and Duchess's possessions, including the Paris mansion, were bought after her death by Harrods boss Mohammed Al Fayed. He sold much of the collection in 1998, raising more than £13m for charity.

The Duke and Duchess's correspondence was published after the death of the Duchess and provoked little public interest -- in part no doubt because of the long past topicality of their brief public importance but also because of the extreme banality of both parties' letters. Of passing curiosity was the Duke's invariable term of endearment for the Duchess, "Eanum Pig."

Historical speculation

FBI files compiled in the 1930s, released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act in 2003, portray Wallis Simpson as a possible Nazi sympathiser. It has been suggested that this may have been the real motivation for the abdication crisis, although officially released British documents do not appear to confirm this. British documents released on January 30, 2003 also stated that in 1935 Wallis Simpson was being followed by Special Branch detectives and was secretly conducting a love affair with Guy Marcus Trundle, an engineer and salesman for Ford, who was an upper-middle-class Englishman and son of a respected Anglican canon. However, a lengthy September 2003 article in the U.S. magazine Vanity Fair casts considerable doubt on the veracity of the Simpson-Trundle affair, based on comments from a man whose mother was Trundle's mistress for nearly two decades.

There have been rumours of pregnancy and abortion, but no hard evidence that the Duchess became pregnant by any of her lovers or her three husbands. The aforementioned Vanity Fair article included the comments of a doctor who, after examining X-rays of the duchess, stated that she likely suffered from androgen insensitivity syndrome, also known as testicular feminisation. Rumors of abnormal genitalia date to a dossier compiled at the start of her relationship with Edward VIII.

Titles from birth to death

These are the titles that the Duchess of Windsor bore, in chronological order:

Miss Bessie Wallis Warfield (birth - 1916)
Mrs Earl Spencer (1916 - 1927)
Mrs. Warfield Spencer (1927 - 1928) (American social custom for women linked the maiden and married names)
Mrs. Ernest Aldrich Simpson (1928 - 1936)
Mrs. Wallis Simpson (1936 - 1937)
Mrs. Wallis Warfield (1937) (she re-adopted her maiden name by deed poll prior to the wedding)
Her Grace The Duchess of Windsor (1937 - death)
- during Edward's term as Governor of the Bahamas (18 August 1940 - 28 July 1945), she was entitled to be known as Her Excellency. However, this was subsumed by the superior appellation Her Grace to which she was entitled as a Duchess.
- Edward could not accept that his wife had been denied the style Her Royal Highness, and she was unofficially styled within their own household as Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Windsor.

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