In the late autumn of 1934, a small woman in a Mayfair salon picked up the telephone and asked to be connected to York House. She had made this call almost every day for 16 years. The operator, a man she knew by name, hesitated. Then he said, very softly, that he had been instructed not to put her through.
She placed the receiver down. Her hair, she would later say, turned grey within that same month. The Prince of Wales had not died. He had not been called away. He had simply, after 16 years, decided that Freda Dudley Ward no longer existed.
By the time he was 23, half a million British women had pinned his face above their mantelpieces, and not one of them knew the man behind it. His full name was Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. His family called him David. The world called him the Prince of Wales after July 1910.
He was the eldest son of King George V and Queen Mary of Teck. He was born at White Lodge in Richmond Park on 23 June 1894. He stood 1.69 meters tall in his shoes. He weighed less than 57 kilograms for most of his life. He had pale blue eyes, fair hair that curled at the temples, and the unflappable gaze of a boy who had been photographed since childhood and had learned to pose without thinking.
Between the wars, he was the most admired heir to a throne in the world. Between 1919 and 1925, he travelled an estimated 240,000 kilometers on official tours. He visited Canada twice, India once, Australia once, South Africa once, Japan once, and the United States so often that the American press lost count. He opened the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924.
By his 30th birthday, he was patron of 964 different charities. He had, according to a Foreign Office estimate, shaken half a million hands. The image was carefully constructed. His tailors were Frederick Schultter of Cork Street and Hawes & Curtis of Pall Mall. Vogue and Tailor and Cutter credited him with inventing the modern double-breasted suit, the soft collar, the dinner jacket worn without a waistcoat, and the tweed plus-four trouser.
His face appeared on cigarette cards, biscuit tins, magazine covers, and the front pages of newspapers in every English-speaking country. He was photographed at investitures, troop inspections, and in every mining community in South Wales. The phrase he would utter in 1936 at the Dowlais ironworks, "Something must be done," had been rehearsed for him by his press secretary years before he needed it.
Inside the suit was another person. He had been a slow and anxious child. He stammered, which worsened under his father's gaze. His father, the future George V, imposed naval discipline in the royal nursery and beat his sons for minor transgressions. His mother, Queen Mary, was distant, formal, and uninterested in any form of physical affection.
Edward grew up longing for warmth that was not given to him. By the time he was an adult, that longing had become a habit. His letters to his mother in middle age read like the letters of a twelve-year-old begging for praise. His relationships with women followed the same dependency. Only the women in question were older, married, emotionally stronger than him, and almost always already taken.
There was a pattern. It would repeat four times in this story before it repeated a final time and brought down the monarchy. First came the intense overture, almost always to a married woman with a husband whose name carried weight. Then came the period of total absorption. Daily letters, phone calls at every hour, the prince's schedule planned around her. Then came the long plateau where her preferences became his opinions.
And then came the abrupt withdrawal. No letter, no telegram, no warning. The telephone operator received the instruction not to put her through. She learned, sometimes through a servant, that she had ceased to exist.
The Prince of Wales conducted his romantic life within an agreement the British press made not to publish. Wilson Harris of The Times knew. The lobby correspondents of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express knew. Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere, the owners of those papers, instructed their editors not to touch it. The American press, not bound by such an agreement, circulated its own quieter speculation. The Baltimore Sun was the first newspaper in any country to break the Wallis story in October 1936.
Until then, for twenty years, the British public was the only one in the Western world that did not know what every London hostess and every Parisian couturier already understood. The protection extended to the women only as a byproduct of a protection intended for him. The women were not consulted. They were not warned. When the break came, none of them received an explanation, an apology, or a settlement.
The institution that had concealed each affair while it lasted, once the prince withdrew, acted as if nothing had ever happened.
Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower was 20 years old when the future King Edward VIII asked her to be his wife, and she said yes. She was, by the standards of her time, a perfect match. Her father was the fourth Duke of Sutherland, one of the richest landowners in Britain. Her family seat was Dunrobin Castle, 189 rooms on the coast of Sutherland. Her London home was Stafford House on The Mall.
Her mother, Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, was one of the great hostesses of Edwardian London and, during the First World War, founder of a famous military hospital in Calais. Rosemary was tall, her hair was dark, her eyes were grey. Contemporaries described her as radiating a quiet authority even at 18.
She met the prince for the first time in 1915. She had trained as a nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment and was working in her mother's hospital in Calais. The prince was 21 and campaigning, against his father's wishes, to be allowed closer to the front. He visited the hospital that summer. He saw Lady Rosemary during an inspection of the ward.
He asked her, in front of a room full of officers, whether she had been afraid when German artillery had shelled the town the previous Tuesday. She replied that she had been more afraid the next morning when she had to change the bandages. He laughed. He did not forget her.
For three years, they saw each other intermittently. She tended the wounded. He made his careful rounds. They met in the houses of mutual friends in London and Norfolk. The relationship was easy, in the manner of a relationship where both parties, without saying it aloud, expected it to end at the altar.
The proposal came, according to all surviving accounts, in the late autumn of 1918 after the armistice. The most likely occasion was a small party at Sutton Place, a Tudor manor in Surrey. Rosemary accepted. The prince told her he would speak with his father the next day. He did.
The answer from Buckingham Palace was the answer that would shape the rest of his life. The Queen, Queen Mary, took the lead. Her objection, recorded in correspondence with the King and cited in the official biography by James Pope-Hennessy, was that the Sutherland-Leveson-Gower family had what she called tainted blood. The claim referred to an old rumour, never substantiated, about madness in the maternal line.
Modern genealogical research has found no clear evidence for it. The accusation in 1918 was almost certainly a pretext. The real objection was rank. A future king of England could not, in the Queen's reading of the constitution, marry the daughter of a duke. He could only marry a princess of the blood, almost certainly from one of the German-speaking royal houses.
The King agreed. The prince was instructed that the engagement must be ended. The prince protested briefly. He cried. He drank. He wrote a letter to his mother begging for permission. Permission was refused.
By the end of 1918, the prince had withdrawn his proposal, and Lady Rosemary, with the dignity that characterised her, had accepted his withdrawal. Within three months, she was engaged to someone else. Edward Ednam, Viscount Ednam, son of the second Earl of Dudley, was in every respect a good match, except royal. They married on 15 March 1919 in the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace.
The King and Queen attended. The prince did not. He left London the week before for a hunting party in the New Forest. He returned three days after the wedding. He did not write to Rosemary. The Dudleys had three sons. The marriage was, by all accounts, happy.
A Zeppelin raid in February 1918 drove a young married mother to the doorway of a stranger, and the man she found there changed her life and ended it twice. The raid was real. The German army was still able to send a small number of Zeppelins over southern England in the last winter of the war, and one flew over central London on the night of 17 February 1918.
Two of those people were a small, dark-haired woman of 23, the daughter of a Nottingham lace manufacturer and an American banker's daughter, and her escort that evening, a Spanish nobleman from her circle of acquaintances. They ducked into the portico of a strange house in Belgrave Square. In the portico, sheltering from the same raid, stood the Prince of Wales.
Her name was Winifred May Birkin. Everyone called her Freda. She was born on 28 July 1894, four months and five days before the prince. Her father, Colonel Charles Birkin, owned a successful lace factory in Nottingham. Her mother, Claire Howe, was an American from a Brooklyn banking family.
Freda was educated at fashionable boarding schools in Paris and Dresden. She spoke French and German, played piano, danced beautifully, and was married. At 19, she married William Dudley Ward, a Liberal MP for Southampton and Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household. They had two daughters, Penelope, born in 1914, and Angela, born in 1916. They lived at 30 Keren Street in Mayfair.
She was, by every contemporary account, beautiful. She was small. Her dark hair was cut short and smoothed against her head. Her clothing, in a city flooded with women whose clothes were rationed, was French and immaculate. Her great strength was a certain quiet wit, a refusal to be impressed, and an ability to correct a man privately without humiliating him in public.
The prince fell in love with her within an hour of meeting her in that portico in Belgrave Square. The earliest surviving letter is dated 18 February 1918. The morning after the raid, he addresses her as "my own darling, beloved, precious little Freddy." He signs it, "Your own little David."
By the spring of 1918, the relationship was the open secret of London society. Freda's husband, William, was a tolerant man who personally liked the prince and had no interest in trouble. By the autumn of 1918, the prince was attending the birthday parties of Penelope and Angela. He bought the girls dolls, garden sets, and on one occasion a small white pony.
The pattern of his daily routine between 1920 and 1930 was determined by her. He called her in the morning before breakfast. He called her mid-morning between engagements. He called her in the afternoon. He called her in the evening before bed. When he was abroad on tour, he wrote to her on average two letters a day.
He was in Australia in 1920, and his letters from that tour comprise 420 separate pieces of correspondence over four months. Most are written in pencil on hotel paper. Most describe his loneliness. Most ask her, in increasingly direct language, to leave William and come to him. She refused.
She did not want to leave her marriage. She did not want to abandon her daughters. She did not want to become the morganatic mistress of a future king. The refusal was not a romantic refusal. It was the refusal of a clever woman who knew exactly what the institution would do to her if she accepted.
The prince settled for second place in her life. He became, in the words of her younger daughter Angela in an interview decades later, almost a second father. He came to the house in Keren Street most evenings. He let himself in. He played with the girls before dinner. He sat with Freda after dinner. He only went home when his aides required it.
This continued, with minor interruptions, for 16 years. There were other women. He had a short and superficial affair with Audrey Coats. He had a longer and more public relationship with Lady Furness. He had fleeting affairs with a number of European actresses and at least one American singer. Freda knew about each of them. Freda did not complain, at least not in the surviving correspondence.
By the late 1920s, she was the unofficial queen of London. Duff Cooper used that term in his diary. Ministers consulted her about the prince's probable mood for a difficult interview. The cartoonist David Low caricatured her kindly as the prince's small, dark conscience. She was photographed at Royal Ascot and at the Eton and Harrow match at Cowes.
This was the height of the prince's power. In 1925, he was the most photographed man in the world. His personal income from the Duchy of Cornwall was about £110,000 a year. He spent lavishly. He had inherited Fort Belvedere in 1929 and was renovating it.
At the centre of all this stood Freda Dudley Ward in a small house in Mayfair, raising two daughters, writing nothing for the press, giving no interviews, refusing the prince every time he asked her to leave her husband, and picking up the telephone whenever it rang. At the end of 1934, the telephone would stop ringing. She did not know that yet.
In the spring of 1917, a French courtesan opened the door of her apartment to a 22-year-old man, and he wrote to her for the next five months on paper. Her name was Marie Marguerite Alibert. She was born on 9 December 1890 in a working-class district of Paris. Her father was a coachman. Her mother worked in domestic service.
On her sixteenth birthday, Marguerite was sent to a Catholic reformatory where orphans, unmarried mothers, and what the church called "fallen girls" were placed together without distinction. The girls worked in the laundry. They prayed eight times a day. They were beaten. Marguerite ran away within a year.
From there, she entered the Parisian underworld. She was first a cheap prostitute on the boulevards. Then she was kept by a series of older men. By her twentieth year, she was an established courtesan in her own right. By 1917, when the prince met her, she was 26. She had her own apartment at number four Avenue Henri Martin in the 16th arrondissement.
She had a maid. She had a Renault. She had a wardrobe of expensive gowns. She was a well-known figure in the French gossip press, which called her simply "Maggie." She was famous for her beauty. She had chestnut hair, a pale complexion, large dark eyes, and the slow, even manner of speech of a woman who had painfully learned what every word was worth.
The prince was 22. He was a junior staff officer attached to British headquarters in northern France. He came to Paris on leave once or twice a month. He stayed at the Hotel Meurice. The introduction in the spring of 1917 came through a fellow officer, the playboy heir to a small Italian duchy. The meeting took place in a private dining room at the Café de Paris on the Avenue de l'Opéra.
The affair lasted five months. From April to early September 1917, the prince saw Marguerite during every leave he was allowed. He wrote her, by his own later admission to his private secretary, at least 20 letters. He also called her at least once from the field telephone of his unit at the front, a breach of every protocol for royal communication.
The letters, copies of which appear in French police files released in the 1990s, were sentimental, indiscreet, and dangerous. They spoke of the prince's father, the King of England, in derogatory terms. In one letter from August 1917, the King was described as a man with many symptoms of an incurable old fool. Another complained about the prospect of returning to a country whose monarch was the worst kind of fool, the type who thought he was clever.
In early September 1917, the prince ended the affair. He told Marguerite in a final letter that they could not continue. He asked her to return his letters. He explained, with the bluntness of a frightened young man, that the letters must not fall into the wrong hands. She refused.
The palace response was slow and inadequate. The prince told his father's private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, that he had been indiscreet. Stamfordham contacted the British Embassy in Paris. The embassy contacted the French Ministry of the Interior. The French police were instructed to retrieve the letters from Madame Alibert.
Pressure was applied. Marguerite, who had survived the convent and the boulevards by understanding exactly how much she was worth at any given moment, refused again. She demanded a sum that is not recorded in the surviving correspondence, but which the embassy described in a telegram to London as considerable. The palace refused to pay.
The letters remained in her drawer for five years. They did nothing in particular. Marguerite continued her career. She married briefly in 1919. She kept the apartment. She kept the wardrobe. She kept the maid. She kept, in a small leather portfolio in the bottom drawer of her dressing room, the prince's letters and the small sentimental gifts he had sent her.
In December 1922, Marguerite married a man the British government would later wish she had never met. His name was Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey. He was a wealthy Egyptian playboy, ten years younger than she was, attaché at the Egyptian legation in Paris, and holder of a courtesy title as prince, granted by King Fuad of Egypt.
The marriage was, by all surviving accounts, a disaster from the first week. Fahmy was jealous, violent, and unpredictable. He watched her through a small army of servants. He confiscated her papers. He beat her. Witnesses would later testify at the Old Bailey that he beat her with a stick.
She did not, however, give up the prince's letters. They travelled with her. They were in her luggage when the Fahmys arrived in London on 3 July 1923 to take up residence at the Savoy Hotel. What she would do with those letters in the corridor of that hotel six evenings later would change British legal history and save her from the only consequence she had ever feared.
Thelma Morgan was an American beauty with a titled husband and a sister whose custody case would become the most famous in America. She was born in Lucerne on 23 August 1904. Her twin sister Gloria was born the same hour. Their father was Harry Hays Morgan, an American diplomat who worked at consulates across Europe.
The Morgans were not rich. They were merely beautiful, well-connected, and willing to travel. They grew up in hotels. Thelma was married at 17 to an alcoholic American twice her age. The marriage was annulled within a year. At 22, she married Marmaduke Furness, the first Viscount Furness, a shipping millionaire from Hartlepool who was 16 years older.
He was a notorious drinker, a serial womaniser, and one of the richest men in the British Isles. He was also, importantly for this story, a personal friend of the Prince of Wales. The marriage to Furness had given Thelma everything her mother had wanted for her. The London house was on Grosvenor Square. The country house was Burrough Court in Leicestershire. The yacht was the Sapphire, 73 meters long with a crew of 34.
The husband was a drinker. The husband was almost never present. The wife, 24 years old, was free. She was, by everyone's account, less subtle than Freda Dudley Ward. She was theatrical, witty, and sharper. She wore her clothes with flair. She spoke French and Italian. She made jokes at her husband's expense at her own dinner table.
She met the prince in the autumn of 1929. The introduction took place during a transatlantic crossing on the Empress of Britain from Southampton to New York. The prince was returning from a short private holiday in Canada. Thelma was on her way to visit her family. They met in the first-class lounge on the second evening of the voyage.
The affair was conducted with a directness Freda had never allowed. By the time the Empress of Britain docked in New York, Thelma had been invited to spend Christmas at the prince's country house, Fort Belvedere. By the spring of 1930, she had become the permanent hostess at the Fort. In the summer of 1930, she was photographed at Royal Ascot in the royal enclosure, wearing the prince's monogrammed brooch.
Freda was not set aside. That is the strange thing about this period. The prince continued to write to Freda, call her, and consult her about his moods. Freda was, reportedly, relieved by Thelma's arrival. She told her younger daughter, Angela, that she liked the woman. She said the prince needed a flamboyant mistress to take the pressure off the real relationship.
Thelma never understood that she was not the real relationship. She thought she was the future. The years at Fort Belvedere between 1930 and 1934 were the happiest of the prince's life. The house was a small, castle-like building in neo-Gothic style in Windsor Great Park, originally designed in 1750 for William, Duke of Cumberland.
The prince had inherited it from his father in 1929 and spent the next four years renovating it. He installed a swimming pool. He laid a tennis court. He installed a sauna. He designed a steam bath himself. He planted a long lavender border along the south facade and a series of rhododendron beds along the drive.
Weekends at the Fort were intimate. There were never more than 12 guests. The dress code was informal. As hostess, Thelma organised the meals, instructed the staff, and chose the music for the gramophone in the salon. The prince, in flannel trousers and a cardigan, worked in the garden in the morning, swam in the afternoon, and drank in the late afternoon.
The guests were the people Thelma chose. Cabinet ministers came. Lord Beaverbrook came. The American ambassador came. Thelma's twin sister Gloria came when she was in Europe. The prince's brother, George, Duke of Kent, came almost every weekend. He was the only member of the immediate royal family with whom the prince could relax in that period.
In 1931, Thelma made a small but momentous introduction. She invited to Burrough Court, her own country house in Leicestershire, a couple she had met through her cousin Benjamin Thaw of the American Embassy. That couple was Ernest and Wallis Simpson. The prince was present at the house party. He met Wallis briefly. He paid her no particular attention at that first meeting.
The second meeting was at Fort Belvedere in 1932. The third was a modest dinner in London later that year. By 1933, Wallis was a regular guest at the Fort. Thelma noticed nothing, because there was nothing yet to notice. The prince was still sleeping in Thelma's bed. The prince was still calling Freda every day.
But Thelma's twin sister, Gloria, in New York, was about to be subpoenaed. Her late husband's family wanted to sue her for custody of her 10-year-old daughter, the future Gloria Vanderbilt, the fashion designer. The case would dominate the front page of every American newspaper for the next eight months. Thelma was needed in New York. She had to go.
She made her preparations in the first week of January 1934. She had a few days to arrange for her absence at the Fort. She thought, naturally, of Wallis. Wallis was clever. Wallis was discreet. Wallis was at that moment the sharpest hostess in the prince's London circle. She would, Thelma thought, be the perfect substitute.
The Mauritania sailed on 17 January for New York. The day before departure, Thelma had lunch with Wallis at the Savoy. They sat at a corner table. At the end of the meal, Thelma made the request that would seal her own future. She asked Wallis to look after the little man while she was away. Wallis said she would.
Thelma left the next morning on the boat train from Waterloo. She would later write in her memoirs, Double Exposure, that she felt no anxiety during the journey to Southampton. She had been away before. She had come back before. The prince, she believed, was hers in a way that survived absence.
The Mauritania reached New York eight days later. She went straight to her sister Gloria's apartment on Park Avenue. The custody case had already begun at the New York Supreme Court. Thelma was photographed entering the courthouse, hand in hand with her sister, dressed in a dark wool coat with a fur collar, looking for the first time in her life her age.
The case kept her occupied for the next two and a half months. She had no time to write to the prince more than once a week. He did not write to her at all during that period. She returned to England at the end of March on the Berengaria. The boat train brought her to Waterloo on 23 March 1934. The prince's car was waiting for her. The prince himself was also waiting.
They drove to the Fort. That weekend was the lettuce moment. It is the moment all four of these women remembered for the rest of their lives, although only Thelma was present for it. It is the moment when the pattern fully revealed itself in one small gesture at a dinner table, before the only woman in the world who needed to see it.
In January 1934, Thelma Furness boarded the Mauritania for New York and asked her friend Wallis to look after the little man while she was away. She had no idea what she had set in motion. The words "light and casual" would be repeated in newspapers and biographies for the next 90 years.
The favour itself was small. Wallis was to keep the prince company. She was to make sure he ate. She was to entertain him at the Fort on weekends. She was to become his hostess, his audience, his manager; the role Thelma had filled for the past four years and Freda before her.
Wallis was good at this kind of work. She had a talent for the subtle management of an emotionally fragile man. She had, in fact, already honed this talent in two American marriages. The first to a violent naval pilot, the second to a charming and reckless shipbroker who now sat in their London flat reading The Times.
Wallis Warfield Simpson was 37 years old in January 1934. She was born in June 1896 in Pennsylvania. Her father had died when she was a baby. Her mother had run boarding houses to support them. She was handsome rather than beautiful. She was slender, dark, and angular. She had a short, clear voice. She wore her clothes with a precision that the English aristocracy found, depending on the day, admirable or alarming.
The lunch at the Savoy ended at 3 o'clock. Thelma went home to pack her bags. Wallis went to her flat in Bryanston Court to prepare for the weekend at the Fort. That weekend was, by every surviving account, the turning point.
Wallis arrived on Friday afternoon. The prince was nervous. He had not been alone with her in a social, rather than romantic, sense since Thelma had taken her under her wing as a friend. Wallis began, according to her own later account in The Heart Has Its Reasons, to do her best to be amusing. She corrected him gently when he said something stupid. She teased him about his vanity. She challenged him on his political opinions, which were softer and more pro-German than was respectable in 1934.
The prince was by then accustomed to being cosseted by his hostesses. He was not accustomed to being teased. He fell in love with her over the course of that weekend. It is important to understand what kind of love this was. It was not the boyish, hungry, dependent love he had given Freda. It was not the semi-public, semi-adolescent love he had given Thelma.
It was the love of a small and weak man for the first person in his life who treated him as if he were not a king. Wallis did not need him. She had her own marriage. She had her own American shrewdness. She had no stake in being his princess. The prince, who had spent his whole life surrounded by people whose interest in him was indistinguishable from their interest in his title, found himself for the first time in the company of a woman who did not require him to be the Prince of Wales.
He could not stop calling her after that weekend. For the eight weeks that followed, while Thelma was in New York with her sister Gloria, the prince began what was in effect a new courtship. He invited Wallis to dinner three or four nights a week. He took her to the theatre. He took her, in the company of Ernest, for weekends at the Fort. He took her, occasionally without Ernest, to small private parties at friends' houses.
He bought her a small emerald ring that February. He did not yet tell her he loved her. He did not need to. She knew.
Freda Dudley Ward in Keren Street was called every morning as usual during those eight weeks. She would later say in her brief and reticent interviews that she had noticed something in the prince's voice during those weeks but had not been able to identify what it was. He sounded, she said, like a small boy who had been given a present he did not quite deserve.
Thelma came home on 23 March. The drive to the Fort that evening was, by her own account, normal. The prince talked about the gardens. He asked about Gloria. He held her hand in the back seat. He said she looked tired. They arrived at the Fort. They went upstairs to change for dinner.
The lunch was the next day, Saturday 24 March 1934. The party was small. The prince, Thelma, Ernest Simpson, Wallis Simpson, and two other couples whose names have not survived. The food was English. A soup, a roast lamb, a salad, a pudding. The lettuce was served with the salad course.
The prince casually picked up a piece of lettuce from his plate with his fingers. It was an old habit. He had always done it. Thelma had teased him about it for years but had never corrected him in front of others. He chewed the lettuce. He smiled at the table.
Wallis Simpson reached across the table and tapped his hand. She said lightly, "David, that isn't done." The prince put the lettuce down. He blushed. He picked up his fork. Thelma, sitting opposite them, watched the whole small exchange. She watched the prince obey. She watched Wallis, unperturbed, return to her own plate. She saw the prince look at Wallis again. She saw the prince blush a second time.
In her memoirs, written 24 years later, Thelma described the precise moment in three sentences. "I knew then," she wrote, "that he was no longer mine. I knew that Wallis already had him in her possession. I knew, though I did not yet know how, that I had given him to her."
She finished the meal. She remained outwardly calm. After lunch, she walked with Wallis on the south terrace. She said, in as light a voice as she could manage, "I think he likes you." She watched Wallis's face. Wallis laughed and said, "Don't be silly, Thelma."
Thelma, who had studied the prince for five years and was a clever woman, understood that Wallis was lying and that the lie was rehearsed. She left the Fort that Sunday evening. She returned to London. She waited for the prince to call her on Monday morning. He did not. She waited for him on Tuesday. He did not.
By Wednesday, she understood. She picked up the telephone herself and asked for him at York House. She was put through. He took the call. He was polite. He was distant. He said he was busy. He said he would call back. He did not call back. Within three weeks, Thelma was no longer invited to the Fort. Within two months, her name had been removed from the prince's diary.
By the end of 1934, she had been effectively deleted. She had not been told, in any spoken sense, that the relationship was over. She was simply, in the manner that had become his habit, no longer put through. She had, unlike Freda, no 16 years of intimacy to lose. She had only four. But she had brought the woman who would replace her into the centre of his life. And she had said yes to a favour at a railway station that turned out to be the greatest mistake of her life.
For sixteen years, Freda Dudley Ward only had to pick up the receiver and the prince was on the line, and one morning he was not. There is no exact date in the archive. Biographers who have tried to pin one down disagree on the month, though they agree on the season. The most carefully reconstructed account dates the break to the late autumn or early winter of 1934.
Freda herself, in her only detailed conversation about this, decades later with journalist Francis Donaldson, never named the exact morning. She only said it was a Tuesday and that she had called to wish the prince a happy birthday. The prince's birthday is 23 June. The dates do not match. The conclusion most biographers have drawn is that the call was in the early winter, and that the birthday remark was Freda's later reconstruction, a way of softening the story so it was bearable to tell.
The call was probably one of her many. It was probably routine. It was probably the kind of call she had made at least 3,000 times in the past 16 years. She picked up the receiver in the morning room at 30 Keren Street. She asked the exchange for York House. The exchange connected her to the palace switchboard. The operator who answered was a man named Gilbert. Freda knew him by name. She had known him by name for ten years.
She said, in her usual quiet voice, "Good morning, Gilbert. Would you put me through to His Royal Highness?" Gilbert hesitated. He hesitated for what Freda would later describe as a very long time. Then he said, very softly, "I'm sorry, madam. I have orders not to put you through."
Freda did not believe him. She said, kindly, "Gilbert, I think there must be a misunderstanding. Would you please try again?" Gilbert remained silent for a moment. Then he said, "I'm sorry, madam." Freda said, "Perhaps I should speak to His Royal Highness's secretary. Would you put me through to Major Metcalfe?" Gilbert said, "I'm sorry, madam. I have orders."
Freda put the telephone down. She walked to the window of the morning room. She looked out at Keren Street. She did not cry. Her daughter Penelope, who had entered the room halfway through the conversation, asked her what had happened. Freda said, in a voice Penelope would describe 60 years later as unrecognisable, "The prince has dropped me."
Penelope said, "What do you mean, dropped you?" Freda said nothing more. She did not eat that day. She did not eat the next day. By the end of the week, she had aged ten years. By the end of the month, her hair, which had been dark for 40 years, had turned grey.
She told her youngest daughter, Angela, at the end of that month that she could not understand it. She kept asking why he had not written. Why he had not even called to tell her himself, why he had not sent a note, why he had not sent Major Metcalfe round. He did none of those things. He never wrote to her again. He never called her again. He sent her no message of any kind. He had simply, according to his own pattern, decided that she no longer existed.
The price for her was social, financial, and psychological. Socially, her position as the prince's hostess had been the centre of her life for sixteen years. The invitations that filled her salon every morning began to decline. The Mayfair hostesses who had cultivated her as a route to the prince no longer needed her. Within six months, her salon, which had received the cream of London for a decade and a half, was empty most evenings.
Financially, the loss was real. Freda was a divorced woman. Her allowance from William Dudley Ward was modest. The income she derived from the small advisory work that the prince's circle had pushed her way, access to the right charities and fashion houses, depended on her central role in that circle. Without it, the income dried up. By the end of 1935, she was living, according to her own daughter's later account, on a budget she would have found unthinkable in 1930.
Psychologically, she never recovered. She lost weight. She slept badly. She gave up the small public appearances she had once enjoyed. She refused, with a politeness that became famous in her own circle, every request from every journalist who tried to interview her about the prince for the rest of her life.
She would marry again in 1937. She married the Cuban racing driver and film producer Pedro Casamayor, the Marquis de Casa Maury, for whom she felt affection but not the love she had given the prince. The second marriage lasted until 1954. She had no more children.
She kept the letters, all 260, written in the prince's small, careful pencil handwriting in language so private that diplomats and biographers, who later read them in the royal archives, would describe the experience as embarrassing. They were kept in a leather folder in the bottom drawer of her desk in the Knightsbridge flat she occupied for the last 40 years of her life.
She took them out, said her daughter Angela, perhaps once a year on the prince's birthday, and read them. She put them back. She gave three brief interviews about her relationship with the prince in 50 years. The most detailed account was the long conversation with Francis Donaldson in the late 1960s for the biography of the Duke of Windsor. In that conversation, she described the break in the terms quoted above. Even 60 years later, she expressed no anger. She described the prince repeatedly as a man who had once loved her. She refused to allow Donaldson to use the word "cruel" about him.
She died on 16 March 1983 at the age of 88. The funeral was small. The Duke of Windsor had been dead for 11 years by then. Wallis in Paris was still alive but no longer of sound mind. No surviving member of the royal family attended. The letters were sold at Sotheby's after long deliberation by her daughters. They were divided between the Royal Archives at Windsor and a small number of private collections.
This was the second iteration of the pattern. Rosemary was removed by institutional decree. Freda was removed by the prince himself, without a word. The third iteration, Thelma's, was similar, but Thelma at least had been able to see the woman who replaced her. The fourth iteration, Marguerite's, was the only one where the prince was the loser, and the fifth, with Wallis, was the only one where the pattern, after failing to break him for two decades, finally swept him along with it.
At 2 o'clock in the morning on 10 July 1923, a French courtesan walked into the corridor of the Savoy Hotel and shot her Egyptian husband three times in the back. The Fahmys had arrived in London on 3 July. They had taken suite 41 on the fourth floor of the Savoy. The suite consisted of a large salon overlooking the river, two bedrooms, two dressing rooms, and a bathroom. The cost of the suite was 35 guineas a week, roughly the annual salary of a London housemaid in the currency of the time.
The marriage had deteriorated further during the journey from Paris to London. By all witness statements, Fahmy was morbidly jealous, drunk for most of the journey, and prone to outbursts in front of the staff. He had forbidden Marguerite to leave the suite unaccompanied. He had confiscated her passport. He had threatened her repeatedly within earshot of the staff in the corridor.
On the evening of 9 July, they had dined in the hotel restaurant. A violent argument had broken out over the bill. They had returned to the suite. The argument had continued. At one point, according to the statement of the chambermaid who came to turn down the beds, Fahmy had struck Marguerite across the face with the back of his hand.
At 1:57 in the morning of 10 July, a thunderstorm broke over London. The chambermaid, on duty in the corridor outside suite 41, heard the door open. She saw Fahmy step into the corridor. He wore a silk dressing gown over silk pyjamas. He was barefoot. He had a small dog under his arm. He shouted in French at Marguerite that she must not speak to him like that. He turned and walked down the corridor.
Marguerite came out of the suite behind him. She wore a peach-coloured silk evening dress with mink trim, the dress she had worn to dinner. She held a .25 calibre Browning automatic pistol. She fired three shots into Fahmy's back. He fell. The dog ran away. The chambermaid screamed. The night porter came running from the lift.
Marguerite stood perfectly still in the corridor. She dropped the pistol on the floor. She said in French, "What am I to do?" She said it again. She said it three times. The night porter, an Englishman who spoke no French, did not understand her. He picked up the pistol. He led Marguerite back into the suite. He sat her in a chair. He called the manager. The manager called Bow Street.
The doctor who treated Fahmy, a French-speaking physician staying in the hotel, pronounced him dead at 3:24 am. The cause of death was three gunshot wounds to the back, two in the lower chest area and one in the lumbar region. The bullets had pierced both lungs. He had drowned in his own blood within 90 seconds of the shooting.
Marguerite was arrested at 4 o'clock in the morning. She was taken to Bow Street Magistrates' Court and from there to Holloway Prison. She would spend the next ten weeks in remand. During those ten weeks, the British and French press together devoted more column space to the case than to any other criminal case in 1923.
The trial began on 10 September 1923 at the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. The judge was Mr Justice Rigby Swift. The prosecution was led by Percival Clarke. The defence was led by Sir Edward Marshall Hall, the most famous criminal barrister in England.
Marshall Hall's defence strategy was, at one level, very simple. He told the jury that Marguerite was a respectable European woman who had been lured into marriage by a rich and exotic foreigner, then abused, beaten, and sexually humiliated by him beyond the limits of human endurance, and had finally shot him in self-defence out of fear for her life.
He repeatedly emphasised that Fahmy was an Oriental, a phrase he used with deliberate weight, which the press of the day picked up and amplified. He emphasised that he was Egyptian, in a year when the British public, in the aftermath of Lord Carnarvon's death at Tutankhamun's tomb, had just experienced a great wave of journalistic suspicion about the dangers of the East. In his closing speech, which took three hours, he emphasised that no European woman could be expected to survive a marriage to such a man.
What Marshall Hall did not do during the entire trial was challenge Marguerite's account of her life before her marriage to Fahmy. He did not mention her childhood in the Rue de Lappe. He did not speak of the Catholic reform school. He did not speak of her early years on the boulevards. He did not speak of the daughter she had borne at fifteen. He did not speak of her professional career as a courtesan, although the French and British press of the time had been writing about it for years and the prosecution had every reason to be aware of it.
Throughout the trial, he spoke of her as a woman of good family and education who had fallen in love with an unworthy husband and been destroyed by him. The prosecution did not challenge this account. Percival Clarke was conspicuously restrained during his cross-examination of Marguerite. He discussed her marriage to Fahmy. He discussed the events of the night of the murder. He did not discuss her past.
The jurors, all men, noticed the restraint and logically interpreted it as a sign that the prosecution had nothing useful against her. The restraint had a private cause. In the weeks before the trial, Marguerite's French lawyers had sent a discreet message to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin. They had told him that Madame Fahmy possessed a quantity of correspondence from an important person in British public life. They had not named the person. They did not need to.
Bodkin understood. He consulted the Home Secretary, William Bridgeman. He consulted, even more confidentially, Lord Stamfordham at Buckingham Palace. Through the Director of Public Prosecutions' office, the instruction was given that the prosecutors at the Old Bailey were to leave Madame Fahmy's past alone.
The prince was in Canada at the time, on the third of his great North American tours. He was kept informed of developments through daily telegrams from Stamfordham. In his later voluminous private archives, he never mentioned the trial.
The trial lasted seven sitting days. The forensic evidence was clear. The defence evidence was vivid. The prosecution evidence was, by every observer's account, weak. Marshall Hall closed the defence on 24 September. The judge summed up on the 25th. The jury retired at 12:47 pm. They returned at 1:44 pm. They had been deliberating for 57 minutes.
The foreman read the verdict. Not guilty of murder. Not guilty of manslaughter. The courtroom erupted. Marguerite fainted in the dock. She was carried out of the Old Bailey to a private car waiting in the courtyard. The crowd in the street cheered her as she was driven away.
She returned to Paris. She returned to the apartment near the Avenue Henri Martin. She lived there for another 47 years in comfort. The letters were never shown in court. No formal reference was made to them by either side. They were not even mentioned in any surviving document in the closing speeches. They lay in their leather folder in the bottom drawer of Marguerite's dressing room at 4 Avenue Henri Martin, and they remained there until the day she died.
She had used them once. She had used them quietly as a weapon against the British state, and she had walked out of an English murder trial a free woman. She had done what none of the other three women would do. She had collected the price that being discarded by the prince was worth, and the institution that had been set up to discard her had paid it without complaint.
Twelve years later, in December 1936, that same institution would be confronted for the second time with the consequences of the prince's emotional architecture. This time, payment would not be made with money. It would be made with a throne.
On 11 December 1936, the King declared to the Empire that he could not be king without the help and support of the woman he loved. He had been king for eleven months. His father, George V, had died on 20 January 1936 after a long decline at Sandringham. The succession had been smooth. The proclamation at St James's Palace had been formal. The new King had taken the title Edward VIII.
He was 41 years old at his accession. To those who saw him in those weeks, he looked thirty. He had, moreover, been in love with Wallis Simpson since the spring of 1934. The relationship had progressed in 1935 and 1936 beyond what Thelma or even Freda had achieved. Wallis was at Fort Belvedere most weekends. She organised the King's social diary. She corrected his views on the diplomatic service. To the inner circle, she was no longer the prince's mistress. She was the future queen, at least in his mind.
The constitutional difficulty was considerable. Wallis was an American. By the autumn of 1936, she was a woman who had been divorced twice. The second divorce was only weeks old. The Church of England, of which the King was head, did not recognise remarriage of divorced persons whose former spouses were still alive. Both of Wallis's former husbands were still alive.
The Cabinet, led by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, was unanimously against the marriage. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, was unanimously against it. The premiers of the Dominions, consulted through the Commonwealth Relations Office, were unanimously against it. The King did not waver when the constitutional position was put to him in November 1936.
He was told by Baldwin that he could keep the throne and give up Wallis, or give up the throne and keep Wallis. He chose to give up the throne. He did so within three weeks of the choice being formally put to him. This is the version of events that has appeared in every textbook of British constitutional history for nine decades.
From the perspective of this story, it is only one iteration of a pattern that had been running since 1917. The mechanism was identical. The Crown, after eleven months in his possession, had become familiar. It began, in his personal letters to Wallis, to bore him. The pattern of his emotional life required, at the moment of intimacy, the introduction of a new object. He could not, in the conventional sense, find a new woman. He had Wallis.
He could, however, find a new dramatic gesture. He could give up the throne. He could, as he had done with Freda and Thelma, be the one who decided that the earlier commitment no longer existed. He did this, as usual, without consulting the people whose lives the decision would change. He did not consult his three brothers, who would inherit the consequences. He did not consult his mother, Queen Mary, whose horror at the abdication was the last personal grief of her long life.
He did not consult the Cabinet about the timing of his broadcast. He did not consult the Dominion premiers. He did not, in any meaningful sense, even consult Wallis; she was kept in a small villa near Cannes by his ministers during the final weeks of the crisis, and she would later say privately that she had not wanted the abdication and had begged the prince to find another way.
He consulted his lawyer, Walter Monckton. He consulted the King of the day, his father, repeatedly in his head in the form of a long imaginary debate in which he always won. He consulted, in his own diaries, no one but himself.
The Instrument of Abdication was signed at Fort Belvedere on the morning of 10 December 1936. It was witnessed by his three surviving brothers, Albert, Duke of York, who would now become King, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and George, Duke of Kent. The Abdication Act was passed by both Houses of Parliament the next day. Royal assent was given that same afternoon.
That evening, he broadcast from Windsor Castle. The broadcast lasted 6 minutes. The text was edited by Walter Monckton and by Winston Churchill, who at this point in his life was the prince's most important political champion. The text contained one of the most famous sentences in the history of the English monarchy. "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."
He left England that night on the destroyer Fury from Portsmouth. He sailed to Boulogne. He was driven to Schloss Enzesfeld in Austria, the home of his friend Eugene Rothschild. He waited there until Wallis's second divorce was final. He married her at the Château de Candé in Monts on 3 June 1937. The wedding was attended by 16 people. No member of the British royal family was present.
The pattern was complete. He had cut off Rosemary through institutional veto. He had cut off Freda through silent withdrawal. He had cut off Thelma by replacing her. He had failed to cut off Marguerite, and she had claimed her share. Now he had cut off the Crown itself. He had done it as he always did: abruptly, without consultation, without warning, and without negotiation.
The institution that had spent twenty years trying to protect him from the consequences of his pattern was forced in December 1936 to admit that his pattern was incompatible with the institution itself. He believed at the moment of his abdication that he had won. He had escaped his father's expectations. He had escaped the institution that had refused Rosemary. He had Wallis. He had kept Fort Belvedere, which he had been promised would remain his country house. He had, he believed, the love of the Empire he left behind.
He was wrong about everything. Within six months, he discovered that his brother, George VI, advised by Queen Mary, had no intention of allowing the Duke of Windsor to keep Fort Belvedere. Within twelve months, he discovered that the title "Her Royal Highness," which he had demanded for Wallis as a condition of his cooperation, had been withheld by letters patent issued in the spring of 1937. Within eighteen months, he discovered that his brothers regarded the abdication not as a noble sacrifice but as the most selfish act of his life.
Within five years, he discovered, during a listless and humiliating governorship of the Bahamas during the war, that the Empire he thought loved him had effectively forgotten him. Wallis, who had in no way asked for any of this, would spend the next 35 years caring for a husband whose pattern she had, by a quirk of timing, not had to endure. The switch that had cut off Freda in 90 seconds and Thelma in a weekend was not, in her case, connected to a sequel. There was no woman after Wallis. She was the final destination, but only because the institution had collapsed under the pattern before it could repeat itself again.
In that sense, she was the last and least successful of the women who had been the prince's mistresses. The others had been discarded. She had been kept. She would regret that decision for the rest of her life.
Rosemary Ednam was 30 years old when the Junkers carrying her from Le Touquet broke apart over Meopham in Kent. She had been Lady Ednam for eleven years. She had borne three sons. The marriage had not been the marriage promised to her in the autumn of 1918 at Sutton Place. But it had been a good marriage, kind, comfortable, and full of children.
She spent the 1920s as a respected hostess at Witley Court in Worcestershire, the great Italian house with the largest private fountain in Europe. She was painted in 1922 by John Singer Sargent. She had nursed her father-in-law through his final illness. In the summer of 1930, she was invited, with a small party of friends, to spend a long weekend at Le Touquet. The host was Sir Philip Sassoon.
The return flight was operated by Imperial Airways. The aircraft was a Junkers F13, a small single-engine high-wing monoplane with a capacity of six passengers. The pilot was Captain Walter Lancelot Hinchliffe, a replacement pilot called in at short notice when the regular pilot, Captain Stinchcombe, had fallen ill. They took off at 3 o'clock in the afternoon from Le Touquet. The weather over the Channel was unstable. A line of thunderstorms was moving northeast towards the Thames estuary.
Around 5 o'clock that afternoon, witnesses in the village of Meopham in Kent saw the Junkers in trouble. The aircraft was flying at about 3,000 feet. The starboard wing detached from the fuselage. The aircraft entered a flat spin. It crashed into a wheat field on the edge of the village. There was no fire. There were no survivors.
The subsequent inquiry concluded that the wing had failed due to metal fatigue at the strut attachment points. The aircraft had been in service for seven years. It had, according to Imperial Airways' maintenance reports, accumulated an unusually high number of flying hours for its type. The cause was structural. The crash was, to that date, the worst civil aviation accident in British history.
Rosemary's death was technically unrelated to the prince. She had not seen him in social circles for more than ten years. She had no correspondence with him. She was married to the Dudley family and had built a life that had nothing to do with him. When the news reached York House, the prince behaved, according to accounts from his staff, with little restraint. He locked himself in his rooms. He drank for two days. He attended the funeral at the church at Great Witley. He was seen by Lady Diana Cooper, who was present, weeping openly during the service.
He had not seen Rosemary for eleven years. He had, by his own admission to his confidant Lord Brownlow, not thought seriously about her since the spring of 1919. The grief was genuine. It was, in a specific way, also the grief of a man weeping for the woman the institution had taken from him, rather than for the woman he himself had failed to fight for. He wept at her funeral because she was the first and only woman he had ever asked to marry him, and the institution, rather than he himself, had said no.
Freda Dudley Ward lost the prince in 1934, but not her life. She married Pedro Casamayor in 1937, four months after the abdication. The wedding took place at a register office in London. The bride wore a small navy blue hat. The Marquis was a quiet, kind, and attentive man. The marriage lasted 17 years. They divorced in 1954.
Freda lived in a small flat in Knightsbridge after the divorce. Her daughters were a constant presence. Her grandchildren came for tea. She was, by her own account, a happy woman in her seventies. She kept her silence. She refused all approaches from biographers. She gave three brief interviews, the longest being the conversation with Francis Donaldson. She kept the letters in a drawer. She read them every year on the prince's birthday, until the year before her death. She died in March 1983 after a long and patient illness. She was 88.
Thelma Furness did not know such a later phase of life. Her marriage to Marmaduke Furness ended in divorce in 1933. Her relationship with her twin sister Gloria, the subject of the great custody case in 1934, remained strained for the rest of her life. She drank. She moved between London, New York, and Florida. Her son by Furness, Tony Furness, was killed in a private plane crash in 1957. He was 27. She published her memoirs with Gloria, Double Exposure, in 1958. The book sold modestly. She lived in a small apartment on Park Avenue after publication. She died on 29 January 1970 in New York at the age of 65.
Marguerite Alibert did, by every measure, the best. She returned to Paris in September 1923 after her acquittal and took up residence in the apartment near the Avenue Henri Martin. She did not remarry. She kept her wardrobe, the maid, and the carriage until her seventies. She was photographed at Maxim's in 1952 in a black Chanel dress with a single string of pearls. She was photographed at Longchamp in 1964; her chestnut hair was now white, her eyes still large and unwavering.
She lived her final years alone. She gave one brief interview to a French gossip magazine in 1967. She made no mention of the prince. She made no mention of the letters. She said only that she had known many interesting men in her youth and that one of them had been more interesting than all the others. She died in Paris on 29 January 1971. She was 80 years old.
The letters were inherited by her descendants. They were the subject of persistent speculation in the press throughout the 1970s and 1980s. They were eventually fully examined academically with the cooperation of British government archives released in 1997 in Andrew Rose's 2013 book.
Each of the four women had, in her own way, survived the pattern. Two, Rosemary and Thelma, had died young. Two, Freda and Marguerite, had lived long. Each had paid the price in a different currency. Rosemary had paid with resignation. Freda had paid with her hair. Thelma had paid with alcohol. Marguerite had paid in the courtroom. And she alone had ultimately been repaid.
The prince spent the last 36 years of his life in Paris, waiting for letters from a court that no longer wrote to him. The Windsors lived, after a brief and unhappy stint as Governor of the Bahamas during the war, in a series of rented houses in France. From 1953, they lived in a house in the Bois de Boulogne on the Route du Champ d'Entraînement, rented from the city of Paris for a nominal sum.
The house was decorated in cream and gold. The Duke kept his Welsh terrier, his French valet, his collection of pre-war whisky, and his daily routine of bridge, walks in the garden, and late-night reading of the British newspapers, which were flown in from London every morning at 8 o'clock. He was, in his sixties and seventies, a small, grey, faded man. He still wore his clothes with flair. He still danced at small private parties with the lightness he had brought to the charity balls of Mayfair in 1924.
He had nothing to do. He was the only living former monarch of England. There was no position in the constitutional arrangements of his country for such a man. In 1937, he had received a generous personal settlement from the new King. He had been allowed to keep the title Duke of Windsor. He had been forbidden by his brother and then by his niece from addressing his wife, the Duchess, as Her Royal Highness. This rankled with him more than anything else until his dying day.
He wrote his memoirs, A King's Story, in 1951. The book was ghostwritten by Charles Murphy of Life magazine. It was a careful, polished, and defensive book. It made no mention of Freda Dudley Ward. It mentioned Lady Furness only in two fleeting references. It did not mention Rosemary at all. It mentioned in three short sentences the existence of a certain French woman in 1917 without naming her, describing the relationship as one of the rash friendships of his youth.
Wallis, who had lived with him in increasing isolation throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grew tired. The marriage was in no sense happy. The Duke was demanding. He was passive. By the late 1950s, he had become emotionally dependent, exactly as he had been with Freda half a century earlier. Wallis, who was not Freda, did not possess Freda's gift for indulgence. The Windsors argued. They reconciled. They argued again. The household was small enough that the arguments were known to every member of staff.
In 1964, the Duke suffered a serious heart attack. In 1970, a tumour was discovered in his throat. The cancer was treated. The treatment was unsuccessful. By the spring of 1972, it was clear he was dying. His niece, Queen Elizabeth II, paid a private visit to the house in the Bois de Boulogne on 18 May. The visit was brief. The Queen met Wallis. The Queen visited the Duke in his bedroom. He was sitting upright in bed, dressed in his usual blue silk dressing gown. He tried to stand when she entered. She would not allow it.
He died 10 days later, on 28 May 1972. His body was flown to RAF Benson and from there to St George's Chapel at Windsor. He lay in state in the chapel for two days. He was buried in the royal burial ground at Frogmore, in the cemetery laid out by his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. The funeral was attended by the Queen, the Queen Mother, his sister-in-law, his three nieces and a nephew, and by Wallis.
Of the four women who had loved him before her, Thelma had been dead for two years. Marguerite had been dead for a year. Rosemary had been dead for 42 years. Only Freda was still alive in her flat in Knightsbridge. She would not have come to the funeral if she had been invited. She was not invited. She survived him by 11 years. She read the newspaper accounts of his death in her flat. She kept the letters in the drawer. She gave no interview.
Her daughter Penelope said of that day in May 1972 only that her mother had spent the morning rearranging the flowers in the salon and the afternoon at the window, looking out at the gardens of the Knightsbridge square below, and had not spoken a word to anyone until evening.
The closing of the circle is exact. The prince had begun calling Freda Dudley Ward at 30 Keren Street in February 1918. He had stopped in late 1934. He had not written, called, or seen her in the 38 years between that morning and his death. She, in turn, had not written, called, or tried to see him. The discipline was hers, not his. He had simply moved on. She had simply, with the dignity that was her only great quality, refused to humiliate herself by chasing him.
He died believing, as he had always believed, that he had loved only one woman, Wallis, and that the institution he had served had been unfair to her. The institution would, in its quiet historical record, allow this version to stand in turn. The other four women would survive in the archive in fragments. Rosemary in the Sargent portrait at Witley Court. Freda in the 260 letters at Windsor and Harvard. Thelma in the photographs at Royal Ascot and in the memoirs she had written with her doomed sister. Marguerite in the police files of two countries, the Old Bailey trial record, and the letters in the leather portfolio her descendants would never sell.
A king who could not love four women he had chosen could not love a country he had inherited. And the institution he served had spent twenty years pretending to know nothing. The story of the women before Wallis is not the story of a man who chose love over duty. It is the story of an institution that confused those two concepts for half a century.
The British monarchy between 1917 and 1936 operated an informal gentleman's agreement with the British press, keeping the love life of the heir to the throne hidden from the public, on the assumption that this protected his suitability for the throne. This agreement protected the institution. By accidental design, it also protected him from the consequences of his own behaviour. The four women in this story were not party to this agreement. They paid the price for it with their lives.
The silent veto of Queen Mary against the engagement to Rosemary was the foundation of this pattern. It taught the prince, in a formative emotional event in his early adulthood, that an institution he could not see and could not negotiate with would ultimately take the women he loved away from him. He learned that lesson only too well. He developed, over the next two decades, an emotional architecture in which he would remove the woman himself before the institution could remove her.
The mechanism of his discards was a private echo of the mechanism Queen Mary had used against Rosemary. The order was not given from Buckingham Palace to the prince's switchboard in 1934. The order to the switchboard came from his own decision, but the form of the order was the same. The Sutherland and Leveson-Gower calls were not to be put through. Mrs Dudley Ward was not to be put through. The mechanism in both cases was the refusal to answer the telephone.
The British press of the period was the operational arm of this pattern. The decisions of Lord Beaverbrook at the Express and Lord Rothermere at the Mail not to write about the prince's love life were, in their own eyes, acts of constitutional patriotism. They protected the monarchy from the consequences of his behaviour. By removing the public consequences, they also eliminated the only power in the land that could have held him accountable for his treatment of the women in his life.
Freda Dudley Ward was protected by the press from notoriety with the British public. But that same protection meant she could not appeal to the press when the prince dropped her in 1934. The protection worked as a one-way valve.
The private secretaries who served four successive monarchs in the years this story covers, first Lord Stamfordham, then Sir Clive Wigram, and then Sir Alec Hardinge, did the operational clean-up work. They negotiated with Marguerite Alibert's lawyers in 1917. They negotiated with the Attorney General in 1923. After the abdication, they negotiated the financial settlement with Wallis. They left nothing in the official archive about the fate of Freda, Thelma, or Rosemary.
The cover-up did not involve the women themselves. They were not paid. They were not consulted. They were not offered the decency of an explanation in any meaningful way. The result for the individual women was a series of ruined lives in four registers. Rosemary led a good life and died young in an accident that had nothing to do with the prince, but which was the only moment in his archive where he wept in public for a woman he had loved. Freda led a long life in dignified silence. Thelma led a life of decline. Marguerite led a life of remarkable success.
The result at the institutional level was the abdication. The prince's pattern, which could remain hidden as long as the public knew nothing and the women involved were willing to remain silent, became untenable in 1936 because he had set his sights on a woman the institution could not accept. Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American, could not become queen. The institution had spent twenty years trying to manage the pattern. It could no longer. The mechanism finally collapsed under its own weight.
This is the real meaning of the abdication as this story tells it. The abdication was not a love story. It was the moment when the institution refused, for the first time in twenty years, to clean up the prince's mess. It was the moment when the prince was forced, for the first time in his adult life, to discover that his behaviour had consequences. He characteristically chose to run away from the consequences rather than face them. That running away cost him a throne.
In his own personal accounting, it also came as a relief. He had spent his whole life looking for an institutional veto he could call cruel. The Cabinet of 1936 gave him that. He died in 1972 in a house in Paris, having spent the last 35 years of his life in a kind of melancholic exile that his early biographers found romantic and his later biographers found pathological.
The four women who had loved him before Wallis were, in different ways, what he had taken from them. He had taken from Rosemary the future she thought she had. He had taken from Freda the central relationship of her life and her dark hair. He had taken from Thelma her social status and her place at Fort Belvedere. He had taken from Marguerite in 1917 nothing more than five months of her time. But he had given her, in return, the influence that would save her life in 1923.
The exchanges were in no sense equal. What the Crown was really for, in the years of this story, was protecting a man from the consequences of his own behaviour. It performed that function well for twenty years. It performed it with Freda, with Thelma, with Rosemary, and with Marguerite. It performed it with the British public, which would not hear the truth about the prince's emotional state for half a century. It performed it with the British press, which agreed not to print what they all knew.
And when the price of doing it with Wallis Simpson became too high, the institution dropped the prince and moved on. The Crown survived him. It was, by a considerable margin, the strongest of all the things he had loved. Rosemary was 20 in 1918 and had loved him long enough to say yes. Freda was 23 in 1918 and had loved him for sixteen years. Thelma was 24 in 1929 and had loved him for five years. Marguerite was 26 in 1917 and had loved him, in her own difficult way, for five months.
The Crown did not love him at all. It survived him because it had, ultimately, what none of the four women were allowed to have. It had the institutional capacity to walk away from him first. The telephone call in the morning at Keren Street in late 1934 was the central image of this story. A small, dark woman in a Mayfair salon, asking for a man she had loved for sixteen years, is told by an operator she knows by name that she is not being put through.
The mechanism that ended Freda Dudley Ward's relationship with the prince was the same mechanism that ended the prince's relationship with the throne two years later. In the end, he was told by the Cabinet, the Archbishop, the Dominions, and his own brother George that he could not be put through on his own terms. He had used that same mechanism on others for twenty years. When it was applied to him, he discovered he had no answer to it.
The four women understood it before he did. They had each, at different times, been the person on the other end of his telephone exchange. They had each, in their own way, learned how the institution conducted its withdrawals. Two of them, Freda and Marguerite, took their understanding to the grave and never spoke of it. One, Thelma, wrote memoirs. One, Rosemary, died too young to write anything.
The collective account they leave us is the account of a monarchy that, in the years between the wars, had not yet learned how to be accountable for the behaviour of its heirs. It learned that lesson at considerable cost. The price was a king. The price, more privately, was four women whose lives were used by an institution that, at no moment in its long, careful, dignified history, ever acknowledged what it had done.