For three years the hated royal couple evaded assassination attempts, rarely going out of the palace, for they knew that Death lurked just outside the gates. In 1903 Death grew tired of waiting and invaded the palace. A band of revolutionaries broke in and tore the king and queen limb from limb, then held a Mass celebrating their liberation from a tyrant and the whore he had made queen.
We find an almost biblical morality lesson in cases where the monarch made an unseemly marriage. Divine wrath was swift and sure. It was as if the Almighty did not approve of the king transforming fornication into the sanctified sex of marriage. For a worse sin than fornication was ignorance of one’s proper place in the scheme of things. When a mere pawn became queen in the chessboard of life, the game was forfeit.
The twentieth-century world was no longer pyramid-shaped but completely flattened by the rolling pin of equality, except for princes, who still found themselves tightly constrained when it came to marriage. Indeed, the biggest royal scandal of the 1900s occurred when a king insisted on marrying his mistress.
Edward and Wallis
On December 11, 1936, Edward VIII (1894–1972) told the world, “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.”3
Like a triumphant cat bringing home the carcass of a vanquished chipmunk to his horrified owner, Edward dumped the sacred gift of his abdication in his mistress’s lap. Wallis Warfield Simpson, the ultimate social climber, had been angling for years to become queen of England, a position that would finally even the score for the embarrassing poverty of her childhood in Baltimore. But now with the world staring hard at her, she was trapped into accepting the booby prize. As she listened to the king’s radio address, tears rolled down her face, and we can assume they were not tears of joy.
Wallis was hardly queen material. An American, she had divorced her first husband, a dashing naval aviator, for his alcoholic brutality. When she met Prince Edward in 1931, she was happily married to handsome ship broker Ernest Simpson who had brought her to London. She nevertheless entered into an affair with the prince; five years later Edward’s father, George V, died, and Edward was suddenly king. Shortly thereafter, Wallis filed for her second divorce, this time to become queen of England.
Wallis was completely mesmerized by the trappings of royalty. She wrote of Edward, “His slightest wish seemed always to be translated instantly into the most impressive kind of reality. Trains were held; yachts materialized; the best suites in the finest hotels were flung open; airplanes stood waiting…. He was the open sesame to a new and glittering world that excited me as nothing in my life had ever done before.”4
While Wallis’s fascination with the king was understandable, no one could comprehend his violent passion for a woman whose face resembled the metal part of a garden shovel and her body the wooden handle. Her nose was lumpy, her mouth large and ugly, her hands short and stubby. Some speculated that Wallis had conquered Edward with bizarre Asian sexual techniques she had learned in China after having separated from her first husband, who was stationed there. Others claimed the two were brought together by an avid aversion to sex—that Edward was hopelessly impotent and Wallis icily frigid. The theory of Wallis’s frigidity melted in 2003 when the British government released secret files revealing that in 1935 Wallis, while married to Ernest Simpson and dangling the Prince of Wales, was having a torrid affair with Guy Trundle, a handsome car salesman. It is interesting to speculate whether the prince, while offering Wallis a glittering life, delivered a lackluster performance in bed.
Whatever their sexual relationship, certainly Wallis had a strong psychological hold over the prince. Whereas other women had melted into butter at his feet, Wallis completely dominated Edward, who became gushingly subservient. And, like many a royal mistress before her, Wallis offered scintillating charm and delightful wit.
But why did Edward insist on marrying the woman? Why didn’t he simply keep her as his mistress? Perhaps Edward, stubborn, selfish, and intellectually limited almost to the point of imbecility, could not imagine himself on the throne without her seated on a throne beside him, smoothing things over, telling him what to do. Or maybe he never wanted to be king at all and used Wallis as a convenient and romantic excuse to liberate himself from a monarch’s responsibilities.
Nothing in the British Constitution forbade the king from marrying a divorcée, a commoner, or an American. The Settlement Act of 1701—passed when a Catholic pretender was angling for the British throne—stated that the monarch could neither be a Catholic nor marry one. (Oddly, the act is still in effect today.) The Royal Marriages Act of 1772—pushed through by George III, who was furious that his brothers had secretly married for love rather than royal suitability—stated that heirs to the throne must obtain the monarch’s consent to a marriage unless the heir was over twenty-five. Neither of these acts would have prevented Edward from marrying Wallis.
He would have found himself in an uncomfortable position with the Church of England, however, which forbade a divorced person from remarrying as long as the former spouse was alive. Wallis had not one but two former spouses very much alive. As king, Edward was also supreme governor of the Church of England and was supposed to uphold its precepts. Perhaps worse, public opinion was against the marriage. Yet, if Edward had had the patience and public relations savvy to calm his clucking bishops and smooth the ruffled feathers of his subjects, he could certainly have married Wallis.
But ignoring sensible advice from friends and advisers, Edward made every disastrous political and public relations blunder possible, insisting on an immediate marriage so the two could be crowned together. It is likely that Wallis, rather than persuading the king to wait for public opposition to die down, was pushing for an early marriage. Wallis knew how extremely fickle and cowardly Edward had been with his earlier amours, deciding from one day to the next to dump a mistress and letting someone else give her the bad news.
As the crisis over the king’s proposed marriage deepened, people picketed the palace with placards: “Down with the Whore!” “Wally—Give us back our King!” “Out with the American Garbage!”5 Bricks and stones were hurled at her windows. Children sang, “Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs. Simpson stole our King!”6
Agreeing with the age-old adage that the bedded can’t be wedded, a patron of a London pub reportedly said, “It just won’t do. We can’t have two other blokes going around saying they’ve slept with the Queen of England, can we?”7
The customs of earlier centuries—which could have quickly dispatched the problem—were no longer acceptable in 1936. The royal family could not order courtiers to stab Wallis to death, as poor Inez de Castro had been six hundred years earlier, though perhaps they would have liked to. Nor was Edward in a position to hang and burn all who spoke against his marriage, as his ancestor Henry VIII had done four hundred years earlier. And so the lovelorn king abdicated, concealing his ineptitude with a legend of chivalrous romance and honorable sacrifice.