Author Topic: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)  (Read 573971 times)

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feodorovna

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1110 on: August 22, 2011, 03:09:07 AM »
I think when Wallis was first aware of David's interest she probably felt "Well look at me now, little Wallis Warfield who lived on Uncle Sol's charity and whose mother sewed for money, being escorted to grand places by THE PRINCE of WALES" - what woman would not have thought along similar lines?-she may not even have liked him but I imaginge she felt sorry for him later. I think it possible that she saw each meeting as being the last and by the time it dawned on her that he was serious, it was too late, she was stuck with him.

Offline Kalafrana

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1111 on: August 22, 2011, 03:20:16 AM »
Off topic

Larry
I'm agog to know what was in your grandmother's 17 steamer trunks and how long your grandmother was actually away for! Just for comparison's sake, I went to university with my father's uniform tin trunk and one suitcase - entirely normal for a student, and that included blankets.


Back on topic

Wallis may have been a poor relation, but during her adult life there was always SOME money. It is noticeable in Greg King's book that even at the lowest point in her fortunes she never had to take a job, unlike her mother, and her Aunt Bessie and others were prepared to take her on lengthy trips to Europe.

Ann

Offline grandduchessella

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1112 on: August 22, 2011, 09:38:53 AM »
Whilst I have said that I don't believe Wallis wanted marriage with David, the irony is that I also believe her to have been the only woman suitable to be his wife. My reasons for this are as follows. The influential women in his early life had dominated him and gaining their approval required certain behavioural patterns. His nurse would pinch him just prior to handing him to his mother for his daily visit with her and Queen Mary, who had little understanding of small children, was so irritated by his crying that she handed him straight back into the arms of his mentally unstable nurse who was so obsessed with him that she both neglected and starved little brother, Bertie. It was many months before her behaviour was discovered and she was sacked but the damage had been done. In adulthood David would look for, indeed he would probably NEED, a strong, dominant woman to whom he could be subservient. To find that woman in the form of a nice, wellbred "gel" from the aristocracy would have been next to impossible as by nature they showed deference to Royalty. The demure "Miss" who allowed him to speak first and hung on his every word would have had nothing about her to attract him. Wallis, on the other hand, whilst behaving correctly, lacked that formal deference and when she addressed him I feel that the requisite "Sir" was a last minute add on. She was probably the only woman in the world to treat him like any other man and that made her the one woman he could look up to.

Charlotte Zeepvat seems to have debunked much of the mistreating nanny tale (given out by David) in either a Royalty Digest article or Cradle to the Crown, I can't remember which. Basically by going over employment records and other documents, she was able to prove that the 'mentally unstable' nanny didn't exist.
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Offline grandduchessella

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1113 on: August 22, 2011, 09:53:20 AM »
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
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CHRISinUSA

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1114 on: August 22, 2011, 11:48:14 AM »
There is something of an issue over whether the income from the Duchy of Cornwall, received by each adult Duke until he succeeds to the throne is 'public' or 'private'. In practice it is used both to cover the cost of public duties (currently for Prince wWlliam and Prince Harry as well as the Prince of Wales), and partly for private expenditure. Newspaper articles frequently fail to make a distinction between the two

According to the Prince of Wales' own website, the Duchy income is private.  The current Duke "chooses" to use the income to support his vast charitable and public functions as well as meet his private expenses - but the implication of the wording is quite clear - that's his choice.  Charles does not receive Civil List income. 

When he was Duke of Cornwall, David (Edward VIII) did not carry out even a fraction of the activities that Charles currently does, nor did he have the size of establishment Charles does.  Further, unless I'm mistaken David would have also received Civil List support in those days.  So the Duchy's income would have essentially been his personal income to use as he saw fit.  He had to maintain and staff the Fort, but I imagine there was a lot left over that was invested on his behalf.

Offline Kalafrana

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1115 on: August 22, 2011, 02:12:01 PM »
It happens that I'm supervising a student who is doing a Ph.D on the Duchy of Cornwall and the public/private issue is quite interesting.

I agree that the Duke of Windsor must have used a vastly greater proportion for his own purposes than Prince Charles does!

Ann

Offline Eddie_uk

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1116 on: August 22, 2011, 02:51:48 PM »
Did I not read some where that following the abdication Edward lied to his brother about his finances? I believe George VI found out later and was very hurt to discover this.
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CHRISinUSA

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1117 on: August 22, 2011, 02:57:13 PM »
I realize I'm wandering off-topic, I'm also fascinated with the two duchies (Cornwall and Lancaster) - unique and archaic in modern times, which for me adds to their intrigue.  

Eddie, I also read that from several sources - that Edward hid his true net worth during financial negotiations with George arising from the abdication.

feodorovna

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1118 on: August 23, 2011, 01:22:24 AM »
I t maybe splitting hairs, but he could possibly have been telling the truth about his own lack of finances because I am certain that he put breathtaking amounts of funds into an account in Wallis' name.

Alixz

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1119 on: August 23, 2011, 08:02:35 AM »
Even is that is true, then he still had access to the funds as she was his wife.  That sounds a lot like the tax dodges we have been talking about in another thread.

Offline Kalafrana

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1120 on: August 23, 2011, 01:30:49 PM »
Precisely.

According to Ziegler, the Duke consistently misrepresented his financial situation to George VI, and made him pay well over the odds for Sandringham and Balmoral.

Ann

Robert_Hall

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1121 on: August 23, 2011, 02:06:46 PM »
With their lifestyle, I would not buy the "poor boy" act for an instant.

Eric_Lowe

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1122 on: August 23, 2011, 03:49:43 PM »
I think the trust between the brothers fell apart on David's wedding day when nobody in the Royal Family was allowed to attend his wedding and Wallis was denied her rightful HRH. He cried. That is cruel to do that on one's wedding day. If his brother could cheat him out of that, I don't think David felt bad about squeezing money from the Royal Family.

Offline Petr

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1123 on: August 23, 2011, 05:01:35 PM »
With their lifestyle, I would not buy the "poor boy" act for an instant.

Plus, he never picked up a check.
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CHRISinUSA

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Re: King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Duke and Duchess of Windsor)
« Reply #1124 on: August 24, 2011, 08:07:35 AM »
I think the trust between the brothers fell apart on David's wedding day when nobody in the Royal Family was allowed to attend his wedding and Wallis was denied her rightful HRH. He cried. That is cruel to do that on one's wedding day. If his brother could cheat him out of that, I don't think David felt bad about squeezing money from the Royal Family. /quote]

I think the trust between the brothers fell apart a little before that Eric.  Like when Edward decided to abdicate the throne, forcing George onto a throne he didn't want and wasn't prepared for, and at the potential risk of the entire 1,000 year old British and Commonwealth monarchy.  Or when Edward lied about his wealth and deceivingly claimed poverty, effectively stealing from his brother who didn't have all that much to offer in the first place.

So please forgive me if I don't feel that sympathetic at the thought of this selfish, whiny man getting a bit teary eyed because nobody attended the wedding that caused so much misery to everybody else.