"Wallis Simpson dominated the Duke of Windsor... and he actually liked it: The secrets of the couple's twisted life in exile - and how tensions between their public duty and private desires triggered the abdication"https://www.dailymail.co....iked-new-book-claims.htmlThe Duchess of Windsor rather baffled me,’ observed Wallis Simpson’s wartime aide, Rene MacColl. ‘I was never at my ease with her. What causes one human being to fall madly in love with another is occasionally clear to third persons. But more often it remains a mystery to the onlooker. So far as I was concerned, it was emphatically a mystery in this case.’
It is a question that has continued to intrigue Royal analysts and the public nearly 50 years after the Duke of Windsor’s death and 35 years after his wife’s. What was the couple’s relationship really like?
Did they feel they had to pretend to live out a fairytale romance, as a result of the former King’s sensational decision to quit his Royal duties and move abroad with the woman he adored? Or was theirs a genuine love story?
What is certain is that the Duke of Windsor remained besotted with his wife until he died. ‘I have never known any person so totally possessed by the personality of another,’ wrote the journalist Kenneth de Courcy, a longtime confidant of Edward. ‘He seemed to me to retain no individuality at all whenever she was present.’
‘He watched her every movement, listened to her every word and responded to every inflection in her voice,’ remembered Mona Eldridge, who met the Windsors on numerous occasions. ‘He often said that nothing was too good for her.’
Winston Churchill noticed how ‘he delighted in her company, and found her qualities as necessary to his happiness as the air he breathed. Those who knew him well and watched him closely noticed that many little tricks and fidgetings of nervousness fell away from him. He was a completed being, instead of a sick and harassed soul’.
However, the evidence of Wallis’s affection for her husband is less apparent. ‘Did she love the Duke of Windsor? I am afraid the sad answer is that she did not,’ said de Courcy. ‘She never learnt to love the Duke and, in my opinion, she never ever experienced love at all for anyone.’
Even before they married, the socialite Lady Diana Cooper had noticed that during a cruise in 1936 Wallis did not want to be left alone with Edward. ‘The truth is she’s bored stiff with him,’ wrote Cooper in her diary, ‘and her picking on him and her coldness towards him are irritation and boredom.’
One area of conflict throughout their relationship was Wallis’s status and how she was treated by the Royals and the British Establishment. It began as soon as Edward abdicated, and continued throughout the 35 years they were married, much of her venom directed against his family. ‘She went at him morning, noon and night and right up to one o’clock in the morning, two o’clock in the morning, steaming up against his family,’ remembered de Courcy. ‘She went on and on and on and on.’
‘She dominated the Duke but he did not just put up with it. He actually liked it,’ remembered Cleveland Amory.
‘She had a way of denigrating him by reminding him that he had let her down again,’ remembered Mona Elridge. ‘People on her staff told me how she would reprimand the Duke like a harsh mother with a naughty child, not infrequently reducing him to tears. Paradoxically, this only caused him to cling more tightly to her.’
Edward’s ghostwriter Charles Murphy remembered how a journalist called at their Paris home to collect a manuscript from the Duke, only to hear the Duchess rant at him for littering the dinner table with his papers. ‘I’ve got 20 guests dining here in two hours,’ she scolded. ‘Why didn’t you make this mess somewhere else?’
The dining room was his only office and he had no other choice, replying – and the journalist never forgot his exact words – ‘Darling, are you going to send me to bed in tears again tonight?’
The photographer Cecil Beaton, a frequent guest at the Windsors’ various homes, believed their relationship was like that of a mother and child. The Duke called Wallis ‘Fredie-Wedie’ and their correspondence was marked by lots of baby talk (‘vewy angwy’, ‘your own little David is cwying so hard inside’) and dirty jokes.
Beaton also sympathised with the Duchess as she faced the challenge of how to keep her husband occupied day after day.
‘She looks after him like a child and yet makes entertainment for him as she did in the days when he was the Prince coming to her home for relaxation at the end of a long day,’ he said.
"Abridged, edited extract from Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile Of The Duke And Duchess Of Windsor, by Andrew Lownie, published by Blink on August 19 at £25."For the full article, click on the link above.
Note : The emigrated couple mentioned in this article are Off Topic on the forum.
