The Duchess of Windsor by Diana Mosley

Author:Diana Mosley [Diana Mosley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908096302
Publisher: Gibson Square
Published: 2012-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

He goes on to say that there was a religious side to the problem, the King having strong standards of right and wrong. ‘One sometimes felt that the God in whom he believed was a God who dealt him trumps all the time … but that view does him less than justice.’ He hated the cant and humbug which would have liked to keep him on the Throne with Wallis as his mistress, he hated much of what he saw in the conventional morality.

While the King was in South Wales Esmond Harmsworth invited Wallis to lunch with him at Claridges and made the suggestion that she should marry the King as his morganatic wife. Being an American, she was interested in the idea which was novel to her and which in fact, given the King’s chivalrous nature, was probably an almost impossible one. A morganatic wife is a second-class wife, the target of every petty-minded Court official and the recipient of endless pin-pricks. King Edward knew what the position entailed; not only was his own grandfather, Francis of Teck, the child of a morganatic marriage, a fact which but for Queen Victoria’s common sense might have ruined the marriage prospects of his mother Queen Mary, but a more recent case was also well known to him. It was that of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Emperor Franz Josef had given Countess Sophie Chotek the title of Fürstin Hohenberg, but she had been very much a second-class wife right up to the day when she and her husband, side by side in the carriage at Sarajevo, were both assassinated. Nevertheless the King put the idea to Mr Baldwin, who seized upon it, knowing full well that the Cabinet and the Dominions would turn it down; as a nasty foreign notion it would not go a yard. It is quite a good example of Mr Baldwin’s devious methods that he pretended to consider seriously the idea of a morganatic marriage. Lord Beaverbrook, now back in London, saw in a moment that the King had made a tactical error for he knew as well as Baldwin what the response of the Dominions would be. Yet it was, in fact, the only alternative to abdication.

The King saw various ministers who were friends of his and also Winston Churchill who was out of office. Churchill, Duff Cooper and Beaverbrook all urged delay. They wanted Mrs Simpson to go abroad for the winter, and they wanted the King to be crowned on 12 May and then it would be time to think again. This idea was unacceptable to the King. Coronation is a solemn sacrament, the King is anointed with ‘holy oil’; to be crowned, and make a number of vows he was not prepared to keep, was a cynicism of which he was incapable.

All this time Wallis had the almost impossible task of trying to induce him to change his mind and allow her to leave the country and yet not to hurt his feelings at a desperate juncture when he needed her as never before.

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