In December 1985, in a villa on the edge of Paris, an 89-year-old woman lay dying in a bedroom filled with priceless furniture. She weighed barely seventy pounds and had not spoken coherently in months. Her name was Wallis Simpson, and four decades earlier, she had caused the only voluntary abdication in modern British history. The man who gave up his throne for her, Edward, Duke of Windsor, had died in this same house thirteen years before.
She had nursed him through the cancer that killed him, and then lived on alone, isolated and legendary, until her own death on April 24, 1986. Born Bessie Wallis Warfield in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, on June 19, 1896, she came from an old Maryland family of considerable social standing but no money. Her father, Teackle Wallis Warfield, died of tuberculosis when she was five months old, leaving her mother, Alice Montague Warfield, a 26-year-old widow nearly penniless and entirely dependent on the charity of relatives. The Warfield name opened doors in Baltimore society, but the family’s circumstances meant Wallis grew up understanding class distinctions with a precision that children born securely inside privilege rarely develop.
Her education was paid for by her wealthy uncle, Solomon Warfield, who funded her schooling at Oldfields, a distinguished girls’ boarding school, and contributed to the dress she wore at her debut at the Bachelors’ Cotillion in 1914. Her first marriage, to Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. , a handsome United States Navy aviator, was a disaster. Spencer was an alcoholic of the progressive and destructive variety, controlling, jealous, and capable of cruelty that escalated as his drinking worsened.
Their marriage deteriorated steadily, and by 1921 they had separated. The divorce was finalized in December 1927. By that point, Wallis had already met her second husband, Ernest Aldrich Simpson, a clever, socially ambitious Anglo-American businessman with a modest but genuine income. They married in London in July 1928, and Wallis took British nationality.
The flat they established in Marylebone was comfortable but not grand, and it was not the life that the Warfield name, or Wallis’s ambition, had trained her to expect. What Wallis possessed in extraordinary degree was the ability to construct, through intelligence, taste, and focused social effort, an environment and a persona that exceeded the material circumstances of its creation. By 1931, through her American friend Thelma Furness, who was at the time the acknowledged mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales, the Simpsons were introduced to the heir to the British throne. Edward was 40 years old, the most celebrated and photographed royal in the world, and a man of considerable emotional immaturity beneath his practiced charm.
Wallis treated him with a combination of genuine warmth and unsentimental directness that his actual circumstances never otherwise provided. She told him when he was behaving badly. She organized his domestic life. She refused to acquiesce to his moods in the manner that surrounded him everywhere else.
By 1934, they were lovers. By 1935, the relationship was the subject of widespread private knowledge in London society and of total public silence in the British press. In January 1936, King George V died, and Edward became King Edward VIII. He was 41 years old, unmarried, and without an heir.
The new king made immediately and alarmingly clear that his relationship with Wallis was not a matter he intended to treat as separate from his kingship. He brought her into spaces and occasions from which previous mistresses had been excluded. He telephoned her many times daily. Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, understood that the British constitutional settlement did not permit the king to marry a twice-divorced woman.
As supreme governor of the Church of England, whose doctrine did not recognize divorce, Edward could not marry Wallis in any form the church could sanction. Wallis’s divorce from Ernest Simpson was finalized at Ipswich Assizes on October 27, 1936, making her legally free to remarry after six months. American newspapers covered the story as the romance of the century, while the British press maintained a complete silence until early December. Baldwin presented the king with three options: give up Mrs.
Simpson, make a morganatic marriage that the government would not support, or abdicate. On December 10, 1936, Edward VIII signed the instrument of abdication. The following day, he spoke by radio to his former subjects, stating that he found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge his duties as king without the help and support of the woman he loved. The cost of what he had relinquished was considerable.
He had enjoyed an income as Prince of Wales of approximately £120,000 annually, and as king he would have received the civil list of approximately £470,000 per year. His private estate was estimated at between one and two million pounds. The post-abdication financial negotiations were conducted with a bitterness that permanently poisoned his relationship with the royal family. His brother, King George VI, agreed to pay him an annual allowance of £21,000, conditional on his continued residence outside Britain.
Wallis was in the south of France during the crisis, and she and Edward were reunited in Austria in May 1937, after her divorce became absolute. They were married on June 3, 1937, at the Château de Candé near Tours. No member of the royal family was present. The letters patent issued by George VI created Edward Duke of Windsor with the style of Royal Highness, but explicitly specified that the title should not extend to his wife.
Wallis would be the Duchess of Windsor, but never Her Royal Highness, a distinction both felt as a deliberate act of permanent public humiliation. In the autumn of 1937, the Windsors visited Germany, where they toured factories, met numerous German officials, and received a private audience with Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Contemporary photographs show Edward performing what appears to be a Nazi salute. The visit was regarded by the British government as a diplomatic embarrassment, and its propaganda value for the Nazi regime was substantial.
Whether Edward was genuinely sympathetic to fascism or merely catastrophically naive has been debated by historians without a settled conclusion. During the war, Edward was appointed governor of the Bahamas by Winston Churchill in August 1940, widely understood as a means of removing the Windsors from Europe. Wallis threw herself into the work of the governor’s household and war relief efforts with genuine energy. The murder of Sir Harry Oakes, the wealthiest man in the Bahamas, on July 8, 1943, produced the most extraordinary crisis of Edward’s governorship, followed by one of the most incompetently conducted criminal inquiries in British colonial history.
The murder remains technically unsolved. After the war, the Windsors settled into a life of prolonged, gilded, and essentially purposeless exile. They maintained a house in the Bois de Boulogne, leased from the city of Paris for a nominal annual rent of fifty dollars, and a country property near Gif-sur-Yvette. They spent considerable time in New York, where Wallis’s clothes, created by Hubert de Givenchy, Balenciaga, and Mainbocher, became the most public face of the life they had constructed.
The Windsor jewels, including a series of Cartier panther brooches and an emerald and diamond bracelet, would realize approximately $50 million at auction at Sotheby’s in Geneva in April 1987. Edward’s health began to fail seriously in the late 1960s. He died of throat cancer on May 28, 1972, at the Villa Windsor, with Wallis at his side. She was flown to London for the funeral, stayed at Buckingham Palace at the Queen’s invitation for the first time in her life, and sat in the front pew, a small, thin figure of 75, utterly composed and utterly alone.
She returned to Paris and lived another fourteen years, her health declining slowly and then more rapidly, her memory deteriorating, until she was essentially confined to her bedroom, cared for by nurses. She died on April 24, 1986, at the age of 89. She was buried beside Edward in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore, the honor of burial in the royal precincts granted as a gesture of belated accommodation that her life had never quite received while she could appreciate it. The Villa Windsor and its contents were bequeathed to the Pasteur Institute, and the total value of her estate, including the jewels, has been estimated at between sixty and 120 million dollars.
It was a remarkable accumulation for a woman who had begun her adult life dependent on an allowance from an uncle who regarded her family’s dependence as a social embarrassment. The question that history keeps returning to is what, precisely, she wanted. Hostile accounts maintained she was a calculating adventuress who systematically conquered the emotional dependency of the most powerful man in her social world. Sympathetic readings propose she was a woman of limited resources and extraordinary intelligence who found herself the object of a love so total and so demanding that she could neither fully accept nor entirely refuse it.
The truth, as is usually the case, is more complex and less available than either version allows. At Frogmore, beneath a modest stone among the quiet graves of the royal family’s private burial ground, they lie together. The stone gives their names, their dates, and nothing more. It does not mention the abdication, the exile, the jewels, or the history-remaking love.
It says only what is carved on the humblest grave and the grandest alike, that they were here and that they are gone.
