On the 11th of December 1936, a man who was no longer king sat before a microphone at Windsor and told the largest radio audience the world had ever gathered that he could not carry his burden without the woman he loved. The world called it the grandest sacrifice of the century, a throne and an empire given up for love, and that is how it has been told ever since. But the marriage that sacrifice bought ran on for another thirty-five years, most of them inside a rented house on the edge of a Paris wood. Those who watched it from close up saw something the legend never mentioned.
Two people had given up everything to be together and then found they had almost nothing to do. Edward VIII came to the throne in January 1936 after the death of his father, George V. He had been born on the 23rd of June 1894, the eldest son of the man who would become king, and from the cradle his future was settled. He was the heir, and there was never a moment when that fact was in doubt.
His upbringing was rigid and cold in the manner of royal households of the time. His father was short-tempered and loved through correction. His mother, Queen Mary, was magnificent and remote. He went to naval college and endured it, went up to Oxford and left without a degree, and in 1911 was invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle.
The First World War gave him his first genuine popularity. He wanted to fight, was kept from the front line for fear of capture, and was seen among ordinary soldiers, which the exhausted public read as courage. Through the 1920s he became something the monarchy had never produced before, a celebrity. He was slight, fair, boyish, and the camera adored him in the first age when the camera ruled public life.
His tours carried him across the empire and to America, and the crowds were vast. His clothes were copied, his informality was read as royal warmth after the stiffness of his father’s court. For close to ten years the press treated him as the future of the monarchy in human form. The men who worked beside him saw a different man.
He drank and gambled, kept late hours, resented the dull ceremonial that was the actual substance of the job. He was brilliant at the surface and had almost no appetite for what lay beneath it. As Prince of Wales he held the Duchy of Cornwall, and the rents of a great slice of the west of England flowed to a young man with no expenses he did not choose. By the time of the abdication those revenues had left him sitting on a private fortune of over a million pounds.
In 1931 he met a married American woman named Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson. She had been born into an impoverished branch of an old Maryland family on the 19th of June 1896, raised largely on the charity of a wealthy uncle, a childhood spent as the poor relation inside other people’s grand houses. She had married twice before Edward, first an American naval aviator who drank heavily, then Ernest Simpson, an Anglo-American shipping executive whose comfortable London life carried her to the fringes of the society that circled the Prince of Wales. By 1934 she had done what none of the others had managed.
She had become the single dominant presence in his life, while still married. The household could not understand the completeness of his need for her. He reorganized his days around her, deferred to her in a way that reversed the natural order of things. Observers reached for the language of enchantment.
The most eligible man in the world had fixed himself absolutely upon a twice-married American commoner whose second divorce was not even final. It is only fair to say plainly what the record shows. As the crisis gathered through 1936, Wallis grew frightened rather than triumphant. At one point she fled to France to put distance between herself and the gathering storm.
She was willing to withdraw, to step aside. The driving force toward catastrophe was his own refusal to give her up. On the 20th of January 1936 George V died, and the private scandal became a constitutional one. The king is supreme governor of the Church of England, a church that would not then remarry divorced people whose former partners still lived.
Here was a king set on marrying a woman with two living former husbands. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, and the governments of the dominions were united and immovable. The country, they told him, would not accept her as queen. For most of 1936 the British press held a strange and disciplined silence.
On the 13th of November his private secretary, Alec Hardinge, wrote to him that the silence was about to break. Three days later Baldwin told him to his face that the country and the dominions would not accept a marriage to Wallis Simpson. A compromise was floated, a morganatic marriage that would deny her the rank of queen. It satisfied no one.
The paths closed until only two were left. He could give her up and keep his throne, or keep her and give up his throne. The end was swift and oddly domestic. On the 10th of December 1936 at Fort Belvedere, his private house near Windsor, he signed the instrument of abdication.
His three younger brothers stood as witnesses, among them the shy and stammering Bertie who knew the throne would land on him within hours. The following day an act of Parliament gave the abdication the force of law, and that evening the man who had that morning still been called His Majesty made the broadcast that would define him forever. Then he simply left. That same night he crossed to the continent.
His reign had lasted about 326 days, one of the shortest in the history of the English crown, and he was never crowned. The coronation that had been planned for him became his brother’s instead. On the 3rd of June 1937 he married Wallis in a château in France, and not one member of his family came. Her second divorce had been made absolute on the 3rd of May, one month to the day before the wedding.
On abdicating he had been created Duke of Windsor, granted the style of His Royal Highness. But on the 27th of May 1937, letters patent confirmed the style for him alone, expressly denying it to his wife and to any children. Wallis would never receive the words Her Royal Highness for the rest of her natural life. Queen Mary never received her, not once.
The new queen consort pressed the king hard to withhold the rank as well as the welcome. The Duke called the denial a nice wedding present. He swore he would never return to England to live unless and until she was granted the style, and for thirty-five years he kept that vow. Behind the polished surface, the marriage had almost nothing in it.
He had no office, no duty, no country he was welcome to live in, and no children. The household staff in France were required to address the duchess as Son Altesse Royale. Guests were expected to bow and curtsy to her as to a royal princess. A whole domestic protocol was built to sustain within those walls a rank the crown had refused to grant beyond them.
In the early 1950s the couple took a fourteen-room French neoclassical mansion at number four Route du Champ d’Entraînement on the western fringe of the Bois de Boulogne, for a peppercorn rent widely reported at about fifty dollars a year. She refurbished it through Maison Jansen, room by room to a standard that came very close to royal. There was a second house, a converted watermill at Gif-sur-Yvette southwest of Paris, where the Duke gardened, which became the nearest thing he had to an occupation. The house was a stage.
Two people performed day after day the outward appearance of a royal life that had no content behind it. There was no purpose in the marriage but its own continuation. There was no work, no duty, no children. The emptiness was total.
The Duke poured his devotion into jewels, endless gifts inscribed with private codes only the two of them could read. In the spring of 1950, they sailed for France with a man eighteen years her junior at her side, Jimmy Donahue, an American heir to the Woolworth fortune, openly homosexual, who became a fixture of their circle. The talk was that Wallis was carrying on something like an affair beneath her husband’s nose. The Duke was visibly distressed by it.
Biographers have argued the point ever since without settling it. Whether anything physical ever passed is unknowable. What can be said is that for several years an amusing younger man was constantly at her side, the Duke was pained by it, and the drawing rooms of two continents talked of little else. The man who actually paid for the crown was the brother.
George VI took up the burden he had never wanted, mastered his stammer well enough to broadcast to his people through the darkest hours, stayed in London through the bombing, and was worn down by it. He died in 1952 at fifty-six, having given the whole of himself to the duty his elder brother set down. The exile lived on to seventy-seven in comfort and idleness. By the late 1960s the Duke was failing.
He had been a heavy smoker his whole adult life, and cancer was growing in his throat. Ten days before he died, his niece, Queen Elizabeth II, came to the Paris house on a state visit, with the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales. It was the reconciliation gesture the long years of grievance had refused to allow. On the 28th of May 1972, Edward, Duke of Windsor, once King Edward VIII, died in the house on the edge of the wood, aged seventy-seven.
His body was flown home and lay in state in St. George’s Chapel for three days. The funeral was held on the 5th of June, attended by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother, and the wider royal family. Wallis was brought to England and lodged at Buckingham Palace.
She dreaded meeting the Queen Mother, her oldest adversary. It fell to Lord Mountbatten to reassure her that her sister-in-law would receive her with open arms. The two women met, and the long war was for that one day set aside. The burial at the royal burial ground at Frogmore was attended by only about fourteen people.
The Duchess flew straight back to Paris and did not really leave the house again for fourteen years. She was already losing her grip on her mind to advancing arteriosclerosis. Her French lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum, took power of attorney and something very near to total control. Blum was accused of exploiting her helpless client, selling off her possessions, ruling the sick room like a jailer.
Her speech went entirely by about 1980. She lay bedridden, seeing no one but her doctor and her nurses. The Queen quietly provided an allowance of some five thousand pounds a year toward her care. Wallis died on the 24th of April 1986, about two months short of her ninetieth birthday, in the same house where her husband had died.
She was buried at Frogmore beside him, with only about fifteen people present, the Queen among them. Her estate went largely to the Pasteur Institute. After her death the villa passed to Mohamed Al-Fayed, and in February 1998 Sotheby’s dispersed the contents in New York, more than forty thousand objects broken into some thirty-two hundred lots. The jewels had already fetched more than fifty million dollars at auction in Geneva in 1987.
Stand back and look at the whole shape of it. A king gave up the oldest throne in Europe, an empire of a quarter of the earth, his family, his country. In exchange he received a wife, a title he could not fully share with her, a hidden fortune, two beautiful houses, and thirty-five years with nothing whatever to do. The love had been real, but it had been forged entirely in obstacle, in secrecy and crisis and the long war against his church and his family.
Once the obstacles fell away, the love had almost nothing left to be about. Two people made themselves world historical for each other and were left with a gilded, grievance-filled, purposeless half-life. The man at the microphone in 1936 spoke the truest sentence he ever uttered, and it was also the beginning of the longest and emptiest chapter of two lives.
He got the woman he loved, and it cost them very nearly everything, and bought them in the end a beautiful house with nothing to do in it.
