When the man who was once King, Edward, the Duke of Windsor died on May 28, 1972, The Weekly’s long-time royal correspondent Anne Matheson wrote about the love affair — and the woman, Wallis Simpson — who would define his legacy. We revisit that story here.
For only ten months, in 1936, King Edward VIII reigned on the Throne of England.
He was 42 years old, the most eligible bachelor in the world. Plus, a real charmer, who, as Prince of Wales, had captured the heart of the whole British Empire — as the Commonwealth was then known. But his own heart was making his life as King so unbearable. So much so that before the year was out the greatest constitutional crisis of our times shook the Empire. The King abdicated for the woman he loved.
When Edward VIII came to the Throne, he was already desperately in love with Mrs Wallis Simpson, the American living in London, married, and with one divorce behind her.
She was the light of his life. He had known her for about three years. And had fallen deeply in love with the witty and sophisticated woman who personified the life of the thirties.
As Prince of Wales, he had been fascinated by Americans and he found relaxation in their circle. He liked their informality, their easy companionship. Mrs Wallis Simpson, a leading hostess, opened the door to a way of life that had immediate appeal for him.
Edward had a strong sense of domesticity so that it was in the home he first became intrigued by Mrs Simpson.
I remember his housekeeper at Fort Belvedere, his home near Windsor Castle, where he lived as Prince of Wales and later as King, recalling in her retirement how Mrs Simpson would go down to the kitchen and cook bacon and eggs for a late supper.
“His pleasure in such simple things was astonishing in that day and age,” she commented.
In her own home in Bryanston Square, London, Mrs Simpson had this same flair for making quite simple things exciting. She introduced her Southern American cooking, remembered still. The Prince of Wales loved her dinner parties — intimate, perfect cuisine, rich in bright conversation. Weekends at Fort Belvedere began to take on the same pattern once Mrs. Simpson was invited there.
They were not the dizzy kind the playboys of the 30s indulged in. Instead, they were spent gardening, golfing, chopping down trees, and landscaping. After the splendour of royal palaces, the Fort was becoming a real and very dear home.
For a while, there was a pleasing and not-too-emotional friendship between the Prince and Mrs Simpson. He liked her husband, Ernest. They had lots in common, like World War I stories, to be swapped after a perfect dinner. Supervised by Mrs Simpson, of course.
But before 1934 was out the Prince of Wales was in love with Wallis Simpson. Hopelessly, finally, and — to nobody’s astonishment who knew them — lastingly.
Gradually the news seeped through to the world that there was a Mrs Simpson in the life of the future King of England. People were baffled. How could he brush aside all the beautiful and well-connected women in Court circles for a mature American? And one who was already married?
It was incomprehensible both to the simple and the worldly. But to the sharp eyes of the press, following the Prince around the coalmines of Wales, the Depression areas, slums, and dockyards, the signs were unmistakable.
Here was a man whose only happiness was away from royal routine, with this woman he loved.
“He would rush through the Friday afternoon program to get back to the Fort for the weekend,” said one close observer, who followed the love story right through to his marriage with Mrs Simpson. “He seemed to just live for the moment he would be with her again.”
Then King George V died. The Prince of Wales was proclaimed King with trumpeters, Guardsmen, heralds, and all the panoply of monarchy.
The hush-hush love affair made two persons of King Edward VIII.
At his desk, he was a man of uncertain temper. Only with Mrs Simpson would that smile which had captivated the world return to the King’s still very boyish face. With her, he would be totally relaxed, never irritable, and achieve as near happiness as the muddled state of his emotional life would allow.
Though middle-aged by the yardstick of the 30s, when alone at Fort Belvedere they walked on air like young lovers, planning a future that stretched ahead remotely. Both hoped that by treading softly they would win over those in opposition, that little by little their love would win out and that Mrs Simpson would one day be his Queen.
So, in the first months of his reign, the King set about making Mrs Simpson part of the Court circle, by inviting her and her husband to dinner at St. James’s Palace and announcing it in the Court Circular.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and his wife were there, and as a move to have Wallis Simpson accepted it didn’t work. Baldwin is said to have disliked her on sight.
The King tried again, and this time he invited the Duke and Duchess of York, but not Mr Ernest Simpson. He was absent, and 12 days after, it was later stated in the Simpson divorce case, he spent the night at a Bray hotel with a lady named “Buttercup.”
Throughout the summer of 1936, the love affair flourished, reported, and gossiped about all over the world. But in Britain the Press maintained silence.
The King chartered a yacht, the Nahlin, and with Mrs Simpson on board he cruised the Mediterranean with friends who were to stick by them. Later he took Mrs Simpson to Balmoral, infuriating the Scots by ducking a royal chore so that he could meet her at Aberdeen Station in his own car.
All this time Queen Mary gave no sign of her concern — though she was so well aware of Mrs Simpson’s presence in her son’s life that, immediately after he became King, she took the jewellery that was destined for the next King’s consort straight to the royal jewellers, commanding them to lock the jewels safely away. “From that woman,” she said. The royal jewellers did not have to be told whom she meant.
After King Edward VIU’s abdication and the accession of his brother as King George VI, Queen Mary took his consort, Queen Elizabeth, straight to Garrards, and commanded the jewels to be brought forth. She passed them on to the woman she felt to be her rightful successor and inheritor. There was champagne all around.
![A Reign Ended', 1936 (1937). From Coronation Souvenir Book 1937, edited by Gordon Beckles. [Daily Express, London, 1937]. Artist Unknown. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)](https://api.photon.aremedia.net.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/02/gettyimages-1003472032-67a5464ba2005.jpg?resize=862%2C1024)
After the Simpson divorce, the world was agog to see what would happen next.
On December 1, 1936, the secret was out. It was then the papers gave for the first time the full story of the crisis.
Mrs Simpson went to friends in the Riviera. While back in England events moved inexorably toward the night when King Edward VIII announced on the wireless that he was abdicating. They were married in France in the following year.
There were those who never quite forgave the King for abdicating. Dr Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was to write piously in his diary, “My heart aches for the Duke of Windsor, remembering his childhood, the rich promise of his services as Prince of Wales … I cannot bear to think of the life into which he has passed.”
But it was a life so overlaid with tenderness, loyalty, and the devotion of a loving wife that any rancour that from time to time emerged was smoothed away.
At no time was the Duke given a job worthy of his training and his wife’s capabilities. He returned again and again to England asking for something more important as an assignment. But nothing eventuated they could get their teeth into.
So the Duchess, who was denied the title of Royal Highness, had to create a life for her husband with which he could be content and in which she could shine.
In fact, he and the Duchess were soon reigning over another kind of court and society, the cafe society of the 50s and then the jet age of the 60s, swapping royal protocol for another demanding one and filling in later years with writing their memoirs, longing always for the royal family’s recognition of the Duchess.
It was not until the Queen’s Royal Visit on 18 May 1972 to France that, with her husband and her heir, she visited the Windsors at their Paris home, having accepted their invitation to tea. To see the Duke himself, she went upstairs. For he was already suffering his last illness. He passed away ten days later.
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