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 Summer voyage
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| Summer camp picnic in Central Park. 1:00 PM. Photo: JH. |
July 23, 2010. Very warm but lower humidity; and so a pleasant day, yesterday in New York. However, the weather is forecasting temperatures over 100 degrees by the weekend, with high humidity.
So let us divert our attention to some cooler images of long ago places in faraway climes.
This is the Nahlin, a 250-foot motor yacht, completed in 1931 for Lady Yule, widow of a very rich Englishman. In its 80-year history it has seen several owners but its most famous voyage was a summer cruise in the Adriatic in 1936 when it was chartered by Edward VIII, the King of England. |
| The famous yacht, the Nahlin, in Dartmouth harbor in Devon. In 1936, the boat was the scene of a summer voyage that changed the course of British history, pictured here completely restored. |
This cruise began on August 10, 1936 with 16 guests, two of the King’s secretaries and his equerry; and the King. And Wallis Simpson. The guests shared eight luxurious staterooms.
Lady Diana Cooper who with her husband Duff Cooper, was aboard, later recalled that the King “slept at one end of the yacht with Mrs. Simpson and we slept at the other. We all knew it was a love affair, but we didn’t suspect a divorce or marriage or abdication. She was still married (to Mr. Simpson) and he would write to her quite often.”
The trip was intended to be a secret. Among other things, the King’s now full time relationship with the still-married American Mrs. Simpson, which had begun two years before, had been kept out of the British press and from the British people. The world press, especially the Americans – were well aware, and referred to it constantly, wondering if Wallis Simpson would be the first American to become Queen of England.
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| Prince of Wales with Lady Thelma Furness and His Caim Terriers Cora and Jaggs at York Cottage, c. 1930. |
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| The new (and brief) King Edward VIII. |
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Mrs. Simpson was not only married at the time (to Ernest Simpson), but also a divorcee (from an American naval officer named Earl Spencer). She had first met the King five years before when he was still the Prince of Wales. They were introduced by the Prince’s then current mistress, an American who had been married to a British peer, Thelma, Lady Furness. Lady Furness was also the twin sister of Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt and aunt of Gloria Vanderbilt.
The relationship between the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Simpson didn’t jell on meeting. It happened two years later when Lady Furness took a trip back to America to visit her twin sister for a few weeks. She had asked her friend Wallis to “look after the little man” when she was away. Wallis graciously granted the request. When Thelma returned, the die had been cast.
The summer cruise aboard the Nahlin of the King of England and his mistress and friends became public immediately (outside England). The couple had taken the Orient Express to get to the ship. When it made a stop in Salzburg, they got off to take a stroll along the platform. There they were besieged by photographers. Within hours their pictures were being wired all over the world.
When they arrived at Sibenik, Yugoslavia to meet the Nahlin, gleaming from stem to stern, the lovers were greeted by more than 20,000 Yugoslavs in native costume cheering them.
In today’s world it might be difficult to imagine but at that moment, England was still the ruler of the world’s oceans, the greatest political, financial and military power on Earth, and the new King Edward VIII was also Emperor of India and leader of the Church of England. Whomever he would finally marry would be his queen even if not in title. The idea of his marrying an American twice-divorced was not even considered a realistic possibility. |
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| Wallis Simpson aboard the Nahlin in the Adriactic in August 1936. |
By the second day out, on its royal voyage, the Nahlin, escorted by two Royal Navy destroyers, made her way leisurely down the Yugoslav coast. In some places they were greeted ashore by great numbers of local people. Laying anchor off a small fishing village called Cetinje, they were serenaded by thousands of peasants singing folk songs to them. In Trogir, the King of the British Empire, and his ... girlfriend ... walking hand-in-hand through a village on the Adriactic, surrounded by hundreds of curious citizens, was a sensation beyond belief. In Dubrovnik they encountered a mob chanting “Zivila Ljubav” (“long live love”).
Meanwhile shipboard, not all guests were so thrilled. Lady Diana Cooper felt “the sooner the trip ends for us, the better. "Wallis is wearing very very badly. Her commonness and Becky Sharpishness irritate ... The truth is she’s bored stiff by him, and her picking on him and her coldness towards him, far from policy, are irritation and boredom.”
Maybe for Lady Diana, but definitely not for the King. If anything, the trip cemented the relationship between Mrs. Simpson and her little man. He was, it turned out, one of those men who loved, was besotted by, completely in the thrall of this “cold” woman who could order him about. A slave, it would seem, was his most serenely royal state of mind.
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| Queen Mary with her son David, King Edward VIII. |
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The voyage ended that September 14th. When the King returned to London – Mrs. Simpson had gone off to Paris to buy some clothes. He dined that night with his mother Queen Mary at her new home, Marlborough House (the King had moved into Buckingham Palace). Queen Mary was well aware – as were all the members of the government – of her son’s trip and his mistress. George V had been dead less than a year and already the new King was fostering what was shaping up to be a Constitutional Crisis because of Mrs. Simpson.
Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson was never a beauty. She was a faded debutante from an old Baltimore family with little means and world class charm. When she met the king, seated next to him at a dinner, she was in her mid-thirties and living in London with her husband who was in business there.
Up until that time in his life, the Prince of Wales (known as David in his family) was the most famous British royal in the world. His fame and the charm of his public image was as great and glamorous as that of the late Diana, Princess of Wales when she was married to Charles. He was enormously popular with the British people because he was the first “modern” royal. He was also enamored of anything American, and impressed to imitation with its youthful zest and energy.
Just how Wallis Simpson first ignited that spark in the Prince of Wales two years after they were first introduced is not quite clear, but within short time after, they became “intimate” and it was fatal.
Up until that time, the man who would soon be King, had had long term liaisons with married women including Lady Furness and an upperclass woman named Freda Dudley Ward. This was traditional in not only royal families but with wealthy and prominent people in the Victorian and Edwardian age. His grandfather, Edward VII had had a great many mistresses over his long life (waiting for his mother to die so he could inherit the throne), including Mrs. Keppel, his last great love affair, whose great-granddaughter Camilla is now married to her King’s great-great-grandson, the current Prince of Wales).
A married woman gave “legitimacy” in the form of a pretense to the relationship. It assumed that the relationship would never be consecrated in marriage.
However, Wallis Simpson’s effect on the new King was obvious. He showered her with fantastic jewels; some said there was something new and fabulous everyday. Indeed when she died, her jewels were sold at auction for more than $50 million (with the proceeds going to AIDS charities).
Although she was still married to Ernest Simpson that September 1936 when the Nahlin voyage ended, many people actually expected that she might one day be Queen of England. Many who knew her also suspected that that was her objective. She would deny the inference but there was evidence that she had it in mind.
Meanwhile, back in London, the fires of the press had begun to stoke up since the Nahlin affair and all that world press coverage. On October 15, the constitutional crisis that had been a-brewing over the not yet crowned King began.
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| The official portrait of the King just before he abdicated. |
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The King was so obviously compulsively obsessed with Mrs. Simpson that literally nothing took precedent over his being with her as much as possible. The press blackout was graying fast. A royal footman who had been employed at Fort Belvedere (the King’s retreat in Windsor Great Park) quit, later telling a prospective employer in explanation, “Well Madam, the butler, Mr. Osborne, sent me down to the swimming pool with two drinks. When I got there what did I see but His Majesty painting Mrs. Simpson’s toenails. My Sovereign painting a woman’s toenails. It was a bit much, Madam. I gave notice at once.”
The diplomat and diarist husband of Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicholson wrote: that “that silly little man en somme should destroy a great monarchy by giggling into a flirtation with a third-rate American.”
Then it was revealed that Wallis Simpson would have a divorce petition heard at Ipswich Assizes at the end of October. An American tabloid jumped on it: King’s Moll Reno’d in Wolsey’s Hometown.
It was now on everyone’s lips. Winston Churchill at a luncheon asked the table why the King shouldn’t be “allowed to marry his cutie?” Noel Coward summing it up retorting: “Because England doesn’t wish for a Queen Cutie.”
By mid-November, the King told his mother that he intended to marry Wallis and asked if she might “receive her.” Queen Mary refused. When asked by her son why, she said: “because she is an adventuress.”
The following day he told his brother Prince George, the Duke of Kent that he was going to marry Wallis.
The Duke was shocked. “What will she call herself?” he asked his brother the King.
“Call herself?” the King responded, “What do you think? Queen of England of course.”
“She is going to be Queen?” the Duke asked.
“Yes,” his brother replied, “and Empress of India, the whole bag of tricks.”
The government sent out a questionnaire to its dominions about the possibility of a marriage between the King and Mrs. Simpson. 1. The King should marry Mrs. Simpson and she should be recognized as Queen. 2. The King should marry her and she should not become Queen (morganatic proposal), 3. The King should abdicate in favor of the Duke of York.
The response was for Number 3.
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| the newlyweds, HRH the Duke of Windsor and his duchess in June 1937 at Chateau de Cande in Moins France. |
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Talk of abdication was suddenly everywhere -- in the highest quarters of power as well as the drawing rooms and dining rooms and press rooms of London. Although his ministers tried to advise him to approach the matter with more restraint (and, it was hoped, eventually get over Mrs. Simpson), the King was obdurate. Nothing mattered more to him than his Wallis. Not his family, not his mother, his family, nor his country.
Again Harold Nicholson commenting: “He imagines that the country, the great warm heart of the people, are with him. I do not think so. The upper classes mind her being an American more than they mind her being divorced. The lower classes do not mind her being an American but loathe the idea that she has had two husbands already.”
By the end of November, the public knew and the clamor against Mrs. Simpson turned dangerous. There was graffiti painted on walls and railroad bridges like “Down with the American whore.” Mrs. Simpson was being accosted by people on the street. People threw bricks through windows of houses neighboring hers.
On November 28th, Wallis and her American aunt left her house on Cumberland Terrace for the Fort. Two days later, in the company of one of the King’s equerries, Mrs. Simpson and her aunt were secreted out of the country to France. Ten days later, on December 11, 1936, King Edward VIII, after a ten month reign, abdicated the throne so that he could “marry the woman I love,” as he explained to his people and the world.
Late that night, actually 2. a.m.. December 12th, the former King of England, newly titled HRH The Duke of Windsor, boarded the His Majesty’s Ship Fury and departed Portsmouth Harbor, on the first leg of what would be a lifelong journey in exile with the woman he loved, lasting until his death 36 years later.
For MORE on the duke and duchess of Windsor, click here. |
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