On the 18th of May 1972, Queen Elizabeth II visited her dying uncle in Paris. He was Edward VIII, the king who had abdicated for Wallis Simpson, and he would be dead within ten days. That morning, he had been given a blood transfusion just so he could stand. He weighed less than six stone, and the drip keeping him alive was hidden behind his chair.
When his niece walked in, the man who had once been king rose and bowed to her. Nineteen years earlier, she had been crowned without him, and he had watched the ceremony on a television in Paris. The Queen had not come to France for him. The state visit ran from the 15th to the 19th of May, and its business was Europe.
Britain was entering the European Economic Community, and her job in Paris was to stand beside President Pompidou and make the new partnership look like an old friendship. Somewhere in that program, on the afternoon of the 18th, there was a private call. A short drive from the center, at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, stood a small house in its own park. After the liberation of Paris, it had been the residence of General de Gaulle.
Since 1953, it had been leased to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor by the city of Paris for a nominal rent. As far as the record shows, the Queen had never been inside it. The man upstairs was 77. In the summer of 1971, he had lost his voice.
His doctors found the reason: a malignant tumor in his throat, too far advanced to operate on. He had smoked all his life. He went through a course of cobalt treatment, and for a while it seemed to hold. By February of 1972, tests showed that it had not.
By May, he was being kept going by machines. On the morning of the visit, he was given a blood transfusion so he would have the strength for one afternoon. He insisted on being dressed. The clothes hung on him.
His doctors drew one line: he was not to go downstairs. The plan was arranged around his body. The Queen would be received below by the Duchess and taken up to him afterwards. According to one account, he was bitterly disappointed.
A former king of England would not be at his own front door when the sovereign arrived. She came with her husband, Prince Philip, and with their eldest son, Charles, the Prince of Wales, who was 23. Wallis was waiting on the front steps. She was 75, and she swept down into a deep curtsy, so deep that she nearly lost her footing.
The photographs of that moment show the arrival on the steps. They do not show the floor above. The only person in the house who had ever been king is not in a single frame. Inside there was tea.
It was served in the drawing room on the ground floor, the room the doctors had placed out of his reach. The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, and the Duchess of Windsor sat together for tea, while the Duke of Windsor waited upstairs. Then Wallis rose and led the Queen to the staircase. The first time Wallis had sat across a tea table from her, the Queen was ten years old.
That afternoon went back 36 years, to a spring afternoon, a new American car, and an uncle the children called David. In the family, nobody called him Edward. He had been christened with seven names, and the one used at home was the last of them, David. To his brother’s two little girls, he was Uncle David, the glamorous one, the bachelor Prince of Wales, who lived at Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park.
A few miles away was Royal Lodge, the country house of his younger brother Bertie, the Duke of York, his wife Elizabeth, and their daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret. In the family, the elder girl was Lilibet. In January of 1936, George V died, and Uncle David became King Edward VIII. That spring, a new station wagon arrived at the Fort, ordered from the United States.
The King drove it over to Royal Lodge to show it off, and he did not come alone. Beside him was Mrs. Ernest Simpson. There was tea, with the girls’ Scottish governess, Marion Crawford, in the room.
Wallis later described the two princesses in a single admiring sentence: they were so blonde, so beautifully mannered, and so brightly scrubbed that they might have stepped out of a picture book. As the guests were leaving, ten-year-old Lilibet turned to her governess and asked, Crawfy, who is she? By December, the question had become a crisis. The King intended to marry Mrs.
Simpson, an American with one divorce behind her and a second in progress, and the government, the church, and the Dominions would not accept her as queen. A servant at the York household overheard the two princesses that week. Margaret, who was six, asked her sister what was happening. Lilibet answered with a child’s summary of a constitutional crisis: Uncle David wanted to get married.
She believed he wanted to marry Mrs. Baldwin. And Mr. Baldwin did not like it.
She had the wrong name and the right politics. Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, did not like it at all. On the 10th of December, 1936, Edward VIII signed the instrument of abdication at Fort Belvedere. The next evening he spoke to the nation on the radio, and that night he left England.
He had been king for less than a year and had never been crowned. His brother Bertie became King George VI, and the ten-year-old who had asked who the American lady was became, overnight, heir presumptive to the throne. Lilibet was going to be queen because Uncle David had chosen Wallis. The abdication did not end the matter.
It opened a negotiation, and almost everything the former king wanted afterwards came down to one word: invitation. Start with money. As king, Edward had owned two of the great private estates of the monarchy, Sandringham and Balmoral. They passed with the throne in practice, but they were his personal property, and his brother had to buy them from him.
The settlement came to roughly £300,000. On top of that, the new king agreed to pay him an allowance. Parliament refused to put him on the civil list, so the allowance came out of George VI’s own pocket. And it came with a condition.
According to his official biographer, Philip Ziegler, the payments depended on the Duke not returning to Britain without the King’s invitation. The man who had been king could no longer simply come home. He needed to be asked. The second condition arrived in May.
On the 27th of May 1937, letters patent were issued under the great seal. They confirmed that the Duke of Windsor was entitled to be called His Royal Highness. Then they added a clause: his wife and descendants, if any, would not hold that title. On the 3rd of June, 1937, Edward married Wallis at the Château de Candé in the Loire Valley.
No member of the royal family was there. Three weeks earlier, on the 12th of May, George VI had been crowned in Westminster Abbey, on the date that had been set aside for Edward’s own coronation. The Duke had not been invited to that either. In those first months, the Duke telephoned his brother constantly, pressing for money and for the title for Wallis, until, by Ziegler’s account, the King told his staff to stop putting the calls through.
With his mother, Queen Mary, the break went further. In 1939, he wrote to her that her last letter had destroyed the last vestige of feeling he had left for her. War took him to the Bahamas as governor. Peace brought him back to France.
And in the summer of 1947, the family produced the next invitation he would not receive. Princess Elizabeth was engaged to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, and the wedding was set for November in Westminster Abbey. The Duke made it known that he would not come without Wallis. According to Greg King, the Duchess’s biographer, the Queen, Elizabeth’s mother, let it be known that she would not attend if the Windsors were asked.
Neither of them was asked. So the niece married without her uncle. In February of 1952, her father died at Sandringham in his sleep at 56. The man who paid the Duke of Windsor’s allowance was gone.
The person who now held every invitation in the family was 25 years old, and she was Lilibet. The Duke heard the news in New York and sailed for England at once. He went alone. The Duchess of Windsor would not be welcome at the funeral of George VI, and none of the three queens now living would receive her.
Before he went, Wallis sent him a short piece of advice: he was not to raise the subject of her or her recognition. On the 26th of February 1952, the new Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh gave him lunch. He had a list. He wanted a job, some official role that would let him serve.
He wanted the question of his wife’s title reopened. And there was the allowance, which had been a personal promise from a brother who was now dead. The Queen was advised against offering him any post. The title stayed where the letters patent had put it.
On the money, there was discussion, and the details are still argued over. Whatever was said in 1952, the allowance survived. What also survived was his private opinion of his relatives. In 1988, two years after Wallis died, the historian Michael Bloch published a selection of their private letters.
Put the documents side by side. On one side, a lunch at Buckingham Palace with his niece and her husband, polite enough that he came away with no new grievance on the record. On the other side, his report to Wallis on how it felt to be at their mercy. It was hell, he wrote, to be even this dependent on these ice-veined relatives.
The family had code names in that correspondence. His relatives as a group were a smug, stinking lot. Between the insults sits the sentence that tells you what he actually wanted. If only, he wrote, they could be invited just once for tea.
Not a title, not a job, not money. Tea. One afternoon in a family drawing room with his wife beside him. In 1952 there was no tea.
The Windsors went back to France and settled in for the long wait. Soon afterwards they took the house in the Bois de Boulogne and waited for the next date on the family calendar. It was already set: the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II would take place on the 2nd of June, 1953. There were claims that the Queen banned her uncle from her own coronation.
No written order from the Queen forbidding him has surfaced in any published record. What exists is colder. In the notes of the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, on the Duke of Windsor, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, is recorded in three clipped words: advised him not to come to coronation. The next line in Brook’s notebook is the remarkable one.
It is the cover story written down before anyone had used it. The Duke, the note says, will tell the press that it would not be consistent with usage for a coronation to be attended by a former ruler. The Duke accepted, and in public he said exactly what the cabinet secretary had written he would say: it would be contrary to precedent for a sovereign or former sovereign to attend the coronation of another. The other half of the record belongs to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, who kept a diary.
It records where the Queen herself stood. Of everyone involved, the Queen would be less willing than anyone to have him there. On the 2nd of June, 1953, the Queen was crowned in Westminster Abbey in front of 8,000 guests and a television audience counted in the tens of millions. Her uncle watched it in Paris.
He did not watch at home. The Windsors spent the day at the house of an American friend, the society hostess Margaret Biddle, who held a coronation party for them. Press photographers were let in. One picture shows the Duke on a sofa in a dark suit, his eyes on the screen, one foot propped on the coffee table.
Beside him, the Duchess is reaching for the tea. The Duke was not only watching the coronation; he was being paid to write about it. That November, the Windsors made a private visit to London together. Word got out, and crowds gathered to cheer them.
The public, it seemed, was readier to forgive him than his family was. There was no official reception. The Queen would go twelve more years without visiting her uncle. By the 1960s, the Duke of Windsor was an old man with an old man’s file of operations.
In December of 1964, the American heart surgeon Michael DeBakey repaired an aneurysm of his abdominal aorta in Houston. Two months later, one of his eyes failed. The retina had detached, and the specialist he needed was in London. In February of 1965, the Windsors came to London together, and they did not stay at the palace.
They took rooms at Claridge’s. The Duke had his surgery, and the British press started asking a question the family had avoided for almost thirty years. Why was a sick former king, the Queen’s own uncle, recovering in a hotel? On the 15th of March, 1965, the Queen called on her uncle.
She stayed about half an hour. Wallis was there, and she curtsied. It was the first time the two women had stood face to face since the tea table at Royal Lodge in the spring of 1936. The Duke had two requests.
The first was small. He asked whether he might walk in the garden of Buckingham Palace while he recovered. The answer was yes, on one condition: he would come without Wallis. The second request was the one that mattered to him.
He asked about burial. The royal family had a private burial ground at Frogmore in the grounds of Windsor. The Duke wanted to know whether he and Wallis could be buried there side by side after a service in St. George’s Chapel.
The Queen gave no answer that day. She said she would look into it. Ten days later, on the 25th of March, she came back and she said yes, both of them. Count the requests he had made since 1936: a title for his wife, a job, the allowance, a cup of tea, a walk with his wife in the palace garden.
Only one had been granted in full, and it was a grave. Two years later came the first invitation in thirty years that had both their names on it. In June of 1967, the Queen unveiled a memorial plaque to Queen Mary at Marlborough House on the centenary of her birth, and she invited the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor together. She even moved the date to suit them.
On the 7th of June 1967, the two women stood in the same place for the first time since 1936. Wallis did not curtsy to the Queen Mother. They shook hands. To the Queen, Wallis gave a brief curtsy on arrival and a deep one when she left.
The public saw a reconciliation. The Court Circular, the official daily record of the royal family’s engagements, did not mention that the Windsors had been there at all. The next exchange was about money, and it was in writing. On the 17th of August, 1968, the Duke wrote to his niece.
His health was failing, and he was worried about the £10,000 a year his brother had guaranteed him for life. When he died, it would stop. He asked whether it could continue for Wallis. The Queen’s answer came on the 26th of February, 1969.
She would guarantee Wallis an allowance after his death, £5,000 a year, half of what he had asked for. She signed it with love and affectionate thoughts from Lilibet. Five months later she invited him to the investiture of her son as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle. It was the title Edward had held for 25 years.
He declined. He had no wish to appear there as an aged great-uncle. He was 75. Two summers later he lost his voice.
Within a year came the tumor, the cobalt, the brief recovery, and the relapse. By the spring of 1972, the Duke’s doctors could do nothing except keep him comfortable, and the dates of the Queen’s state visit to France were fixed. The family had promised him Frogmore. The one thing he had not had from his niece was a visit to his own home.
Now go back to the staircase in the Bois de Boulogne on the afternoon of the 18th of May. Wallis leads the Queen up. Upstairs, the Duke is waiting in his sitting room, dressed, the drip running into him, and the stand pushed out of sight behind his chair. Every account agrees on what happened when the door opened.
He stood up. The man who had been King Edward VIII pulled himself to his feet with a tube in his arm and bowed to his niece, his sovereign. Then he kissed her on both cheeks. The arrangement of 1936 had ended in exactly this posture: the former king standing in his own house at the pleasure of the crown.
Then Wallis left them alone. They had about fifteen minutes. Nobody else was in the room, and neither of them ever described what was said. The Windsors’ secretary later called the visit very healing, and admitted in the same breath that nobody knew exactly what had passed between them.
When she asked how he was, by one account, he told her, Not so bad. That is the only line anyone claims to have heard. After that, Charles and Philip were brought up. The nurse on duty, an Irish nurse named Una Shanley, saw the Duke’s face light up at the sight of the Prince of Wales.
He started asking him about the Navy. Within minutes, he began coughing, and the coughing would not stop. The visit was over. The whole call, from the steps to the car, lasted about half an hour.
Here the witnesses split, and they split along the line that had divided the family for 36 years. Wallis gave her version afterwards to her friend, the Countess of Romanones. The Queen’s face, she said, showed no compassion, no appreciation for his effort, his respect. In Wallis’s reading, her niece had not come to honor him at all.
She had come to cover appearances because he was dying, and everyone knew she was in Paris. The nurse, who had no stake in the feud, remembered something else. She remembered the Queen speaking kindly to her uncle. What can be measured is the arrangement.
Twenty years after he wrote about being invited just once for tea, the tea finally happened. The Queen of England, her husband, her heir, and the Duchess of Windsor sat down to tea together in a drawing room in Paris. It was the Windsors’ own drawing room, and the man who had asked for that afternoon was upstairs under doctor’s orders, unable to come down. Ten days later he was dead.
He died in his sleep in the early hours of the 28th of May 1972. He was a month short of his 78th birthday. The nurse woke Wallis. She went to him, kissed his forehead, and held his face in her hands.
My David, she said, my David, you look so lovely. On the 31st of May, his body was flown to England in an aircraft of the Royal Air Force and received by the Duke of Kent. It was taken to Windsor and placed in St. George’s Chapel, where for two days the public filed past the coffin.
One biographer puts the number at more than 60,000 people. Wallis followed on the 2nd of June, and Lord Mountbatten helped her down the steps. She was driven to Buckingham Palace, and she was given rooms there. In 35 years of marriage to a son of the house, it was the first time she had ever been invited to stay.
The Queen received her in her own sitting room. The funeral was on the 5th of June in St. George’s Chapel. Wallis sat among the family she had married into.
Afterwards, at the reception, the one person she least expected sat down beside her. It was the Queen Mother, the woman who had refused to receive her for three and a half decades. I know how you feel, she told her. I’ve been through it myself.
Then the Duke was buried at Frogmore in the plot his niece had promised him in a London hotel seven years earlier. His stone gives him the title he gave up: King Edward VIII. Wallis flew home to Paris the same day. Nobody from the family went with her to the airport.
She lived another fourteen years, most of them in that house in the Bois de Boulogne, and the last of them blind and bedridden. She died on the 24th of April 1986 at 89. On the Queen’s instructions, her body was collected and flown to England. The Queen attended the funeral at St.
George’s. The service lasted 28 minutes, and Wallis’s name was not spoken once. Then she was buried at Frogmore beside him, as the Queen had promised in 1965. Two years later, the letters about the ice-veined relatives and Shirley Temple Jr.
were in the bookshops. So what did the Queen see when she finally climbed those stairs? She saw the result of an arrangement she had inherited at 25 and kept in force for twenty years. A former king who could not come home without being asked, whose wife could not be called royal, who had watched her crowning on another woman’s sofa, and whose one granted wish was a grave.
And she saw him honor the arrangement to the last. He did not ask for anything that afternoon. He stood up. It was not a farewell between equals.
It was a receipt, the last installment of the price of 1936, paid in person on his feet with a drip hidden behind the chair. For 36 years the family answered him with invitations withheld. The only one he received from his niece in his own house was to tea, and he could not come down for it.