Wallis Simpson
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Bessiewallis Warfield (June 19, 1896–April 24, 1986), better known as Wallis Simpson and later as The Duchess of Windsor, was a mistress, and later wife, of the former King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom. The king's desire to make her his wife was the primary reason for his abdication of the throne. She was the first woman to receive Time magazine's Person of the Year designation, in 1936.
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Life
The future duchess was born in Square Cottage at Monterey Inn, a still-extant resort hotel in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. She was the only child of Teackle Wallis Warfield and his wife, the former Alice Montague, and was born seven months after their wedding, though other sources state that she was born before her parents' marriage. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was five months old. She was raised in Baltimore, Maryland and christened Bessie Wallis (Bessiewallis according to some sources), in honor of her father and her mother's sister. She was called Wallis.
Her first marriage was to Earl Winfield Spencer, Jr., a hard-drinking, reportedly abusive US Navy pilot, in 1916; she divorced him in 1927. She then became the mistress of Ernest Aldrich Simpson, a mild-mannered half-English, half-American shipping executive and former captain in the Coldstream Guards, who divorced his first wife to marry her. Their union lasted from 1928 until their divorce in October, 1936. By then Wallis Simpson was living in Britain and had been introduced to the Prince of Wales. She soon became his mistress (although the Duke of Windsor denied to his death that she was his mistress before they married), after ousting the prince's previous companion, the exotic American-born Viscountess Furness (née Thelma Morgan), and distancing him from a former lover and confidante, the Anglo-American textile heiress Freda Dudley Ward. Wallis was regarded by the royal family as a totally unsuitable wife for the heir to the throne.
It is generally believed that it was her status as a twice-divorced woman that made it problematic for the Prince to marry Wallis. As king, he would become head of the Church of England, which forbade remarriage for divorcées, but both were determined to formalise their relationship. Following his accession to the throne as Edward VIII, he looked for a way around the problem and consulted the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, but no acceptable compromise was found.
The result was the Abdication Crisis of 1936. King Edward renounced his throne, and his brother, the new king George VI, created him Duke of Windsor. The following year Edward married Wallis Warfield (who had resumed her maiden name by deed poll after her divorce). Had there been no controversy over the union, the duke's bride would have become HRH The Duchess of Windsor. But the British royal family, notably George VI's wife Queen Elizabeth, ensured that she was denied the designation Her Royal Highness, instead being styled merely Her Grace.
The British Royal Family never accepted the duchess and would not receive her formally, although the former king sometimes met his mother and a brother after his abdication. The couple lived in Neuilly, near Paris, for most of the remainder of their lives. They were neighbours and soon became close friends of Oswald and Diana Mosley. They had no children, though the duchess had been briefly a stepmother by her marriage to Ernest Simpson, who had a daughter by his first wife.
Upon the duke's death from cancer in 1972, the increasingly senile and frail duchess traveled to England to attend his funeral, her first trip to the country since her marriage. Wallis Windsor lived the remainder of her life as a recluse, a bedridden invalid fed by tubes. She followed her husband in death fourteen years later, in Paris. She is buried next to Edward, behind the Royal Mausoleum in Windsor Castle's Home Park. Her tombstone simply reads "Wallis, His Wife."
Historical speculation
FBI files compiled in the 1930s, released under the FOIA in 2003, portray Wallis Simpson as a possible Nazi sympathiser. It has been suggested that this may have been the real motivation for the abdication crisis, although officially released British documents do not appear to confirm this. British documents released on January 30, 2003 also stated that in 1935, Wallis Simpson was being followed by Special Branch detectives and was secretly conducting a love affair with Guy Marcus Trundle, an upper-middle-class Englishman (and son of an respected Anglican canon) who was an engineer and salesman for Ford. A lengthy September 2003 article in the U.S. magazine Vanity Fair, however, casts considerable doubt on the veracity of the Simpson-Trundle affair, based on comments from a man whose mother was Trundle's mistress for nearly two decades.
There have been rumors of pregnancy and abortion, but no hard evidence that the duchess became pregnant by any of her lovers or her three husbands. The aforementioned Vanity Fair article included the comments of a doctor who, after examining X-rays of the duchess, stated that she likely suffered from androgen insensitivity syndrome, also known as testicular feminization. (Rumors of abnormal genitalia date to a dossier compiled at the start of her relationship with Edward VIII.)
Titles from birth to death
These are the titles that the Duchess of Windsor bore, in chronological order:
- Miss Bessiewallis Warfield
- Mrs. Warfield Spencer (social custom for women links the maiden and married names)
- Mrs. Ernest Aldrich Simpson
- Mrs. Wallis Simpson
- Mrs. Wallis Warfield
- Her Grace The Duchess of Windsor
External links
- BBC news story: Simpson's 'Nazi past' led to abdication (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2644123.stm)
- BBC news story: Mrs Simpson's secret lover revealed (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2706889.stm)
- Guardian story: Fear that Windsors would 'flit' to Germany (http://www.guardian.co.uk/freedom/Story/0,2763,885183,00.html)nl:Wallis Simpson