From the Daily Mail:
"
The need to ‘keep Ernest in good humour’, she told her aunt Bessie Merryman in a letter, was critical. ‘
At the moment, he’s flattered with it all and lets me dine once a week with the prince alone. It all takes a certain amount of tact.’Reassuringly, she added: ‘
I think I do amuse. I’m the comedy relief and we like to dance together but I always have Ernest hanging around my neck so all is safe.’...She knew she wasn’t in love with Edward — so why didn’t she step back then? The truth is that she was still convinced that the affair would soon end, and that Ernest loved her enough to resume where they’d left off... Yet she worried about Ernest endlessly, describing him to her aunt Bessie at this point as ‘
still the man of my dreams.’...Exhausted, frustrated and even angry, she had just one thing on her mind: she wanted to get Ernest back.
He was now, however, far less pliant. This was at least partly because Wallis had invited her old schoolfriend Mary Kirk over from America to keep Ernest company while she dallied with the King —and her plan had backfired spectacularly. Mary had fallen in love with Ernest — and Wallis was deeply hurt. In a showdown with her friend, she accused her to her face of stealing her husband. Mary promptly packed her bags and moved into a hotel — but she carried on seeing Ernest, and later married him....Laid low by a cold as she read lurid details about herself in the press, Wallis made a belated attempt to break with the King. The time had come for her to return to Ernest and the ‘
calm, congenial’ life he offered, she told him, ‘
where it all runs smoothly and no nerve strain. ‘
True we are poor and unable to do the attractive amusing things in life which I must confess I do love and enjoy. I am sure you and I would only create disaster together.’ The King’s response was to threaten to kill himself. From then on, there was a painful inexorability to Wallis’s fate, as she was carried forward, more or less unwillingly, by his alternating threats, blandishments and jewels. But, as her previously unpublished letters to Ernest reveal, she deeply regretted the loss of her husband. ‘I
wake up in the night sometimes and I think I must be lying on that strange chaise longue and hear your footsteps coming down the passage of the flat and there you are with the Evening Standard under your arm!’ she wrote to him. ‘
I can’t believe that such a thing could have happened to two people who got along so well.’ She poked fun at the King, calling him Peter Pan — the child who never grew up. And, in another letter, she complained of loneliness. The security that Ernest had offered her suddenly seemed extraordinarily appealing compared with the hate and loathing she increasingly had to face as Edward’s lover."
"Her affair with Edward, however, eventually spiralled beyond even her control. Not because she was passionately in love with him — but because her desperate pleas to be released were met with emotional blackmail. If she tried to leave him, the prince told her, he would either kill himself or pursue her to the ends of the earth. In the end, Wallis had little choice. But even after she married him and became the Duchess of Windsor, she never lost her affection for Ernest Simpson, her beloved second husband.
Significantly, she kept writing to him. And these intimate letters, which have only recently come to light, reveal that even when the world imagined that Wallis had triumphed, she was beset by fears and regrets."
"For years, Edward had suffered on and off from undiagnosed anorexia nervosa — an illness often related to a wish to remain eternally childlike.His letters and diaries from the 1920s are full of adolescent self-pity and dismal self-disparagement. Never close to his mother and father, he leaned heavily for 16 years on his first long-term mistress, Freda Dudley Ward, the petite and pretty wife of a Liberal MP. Writing to her up to three times a day in an invented baby language (‘pleath’ for please and ‘vewy’ for very) , he swore he was going to marry her, fantasised about dying with her and even talked of ‘resigning’. ‘I just don’t feel I can even exist let alone try to live much longer without you, my precious darling beloved little mummie!!’ he groaned. Sensibly, Freda paid no attention, knowing full well that the nation and the Royal Family would never accept a divorcee as queen.
Was his behaviour normal? The psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has described how such dependence on a mother figure, as well as some of the prince’s other quirks, are typical characteristics of autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. Other signs are Edward’s refusal to eat adequately, his liking for violent exercise, his obsessive concern about weight and the thinness of his legs, the way he arranged his clothes in serried rows, his social insensitivity and various nervous tics — such as constantly fiddling with his cuffs.
But during Edward’s lifetime, several of those who worked with him closely went much further: they actually believed the Prince of Wales was mad. Certainly, the prime minister Stanley Baldwin came to this conclusion. Lord Wigram, a long-serving courtier, also thought he wasn’t ‘normal and might any day develop into a George III’ — his mad ancestor. After a conversation with the prince, Wigram was once heard to exclaim: ‘He’s mad — he’s mad! We shall have to lock him up. We shall have to lock him up.’ And later he proposed passing a Regency Bill ‘so that if necessary he could be certified’. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury considered that Edward was ‘definitely abnormal psychologically if not mentally or physically.’ More crucially, Lord Dawson of Penn, the Royal Family’s doctor, was ‘convinced that [Edward’s] moral development had for some reason been arrested in his adolescence.’"
full article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2023590/The-truth-Mrs-Simpson-Why-Wallis-wanted-marry-king.html