On the afternoon of May 18, 1972, Queen Elizabeth II finally visited her dying uncle in Paris. He was Edward VIII, the man who gave up the throne for Wallis Simpson, and he would be dead within ten days. The Crown later turned that afternoon into a tender family goodbye.
But the people inside that house described something much harder.
That morning, he was given a blood transfusion just so he could stand. He weighed less than six stone, and the drip keeping him going 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 it on a television in Paris. What she saw that afternoon was the bill for every invitation he never received.
The Queen had not come to France for him. The state visit ran from May 15 to May 19, and its business was Europe. Britain was on its way into the European Economic Community, and the Queen’s job in Paris was to stand beside President Pompidou and make the new partnership look like an old friendship.
There were poppies to lay at a war memorial and speeches about a common purpose. Somewhere in that program, on the afternoon of the 18th, there was a private call.
At the edge of the Bois de Boulogne stood a small house in its own park near Neuilly. 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. In the autumn, 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. In February of 1972, tests showed that it had not.
By May, he was being kept going by machines.
His French physician had ordered an intravenous drip of saline and glucose with vitamins and medicine to support his heart. He weighed under six stone, about 84 pounds. On the morning of the visit, he was given a blood transfusion so that he would have the strength for one afternoon.
He insisted on being dressed. His biographers agree on that detail, and they agree on how it looked. The clothes hung on him.
The doctors drew one line. He was not to go downstairs, so 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 in the Windsors’ house, 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 at Royal Lodge ended with a question to her governess, and it goes 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 in a castellated folly in Windsor Great Park.
Fort Belvedere had been his since 1929. 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. The Yorks had met her before.
The children had not.
There was tea with the girls’ Scottish governess, Marion Crawford, in the room, and 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. The ten-year-old’s verdict on the visitor was a question.
As the guests were leaving, Lilibet turned to her governess. Crawfie, 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’s answer was 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 December 10, 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 the heir presumptive to the throne.
That is the fact the rest of their relationship would rest on. Lilibet was going to be queen because Uncle David had chosen Wallis. Before that December, he was the uncle with the American car.
After it, he was the reason her life had been decided for her. Within six months, the family would be writing down the conditions under which he could ever come back to see her.
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 in Norfolk and Balmoral in Scotland. 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, something in the region of £25 million in today’s money. 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. That is the mechanism under everything that follows.
The man who had been king could no longer simply come home. He needed to be asked. Every door in his old life now opened from the inside.
The second condition arrived in May. On May 27, 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. His wife did not yet exist in law.
The wedding was a week away.
On June 3, 1937, Edward married Wallis at the Château de Candé in the Loire Valley. No member of the royal family was there. The new king had made sure of it.
Three weeks earlier, on May 12, 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 and had made normal correspondence between them impossible.
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. 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.
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 ground rules had been explained in advance.
The Duchess of Windsor would not be welcome at the funeral of George VI, and none of the three queens now living, Queen Mary, the widowed Queen Elizabeth, and the new Queen, would receive her. He stayed with his mother at Marlborough House.
Before he went, Wallis sent him a short piece of advice. He was not to raise the subject of her or her recognition. Her hope was that he could win his niece round to a friendlier attitude.
He had a poor hand to play. In 1951, he had published his memoirs, A King’s Story, written with the help of an American journalist. The book was a success and told the abdication from his side at length while his brother was still on the throne.
He tried anyway. On February 26, 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 did not survive was his manners in private for decades. His private opinion of his relatives stayed private. Then in 1988, two years after Wallis died, the historian Michael Bloch published a selection of their private letters in a book called The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor.
The letters from that February are the hinge.
Put the two 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. The widowed Queen Mother was Cookie.
The young Queen was Shirley Temple Jr. His relatives as a group were a smug, stinking lot. His mother was as hard as nails.
And 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, as if the arrangement of 1937 had expired.
In 1952 there was no tea. The Windsors went back to France and settled in for the long haul. Soon afterwards they took the house in the Bois de Boulogne from the city of Paris at a nominal rent, with the French government granting them relief from taxes.
They also bought a country mill outside Paris at Gif-sur-Yvette, the only property they ever owned, and they waited for the next date on the family calendar. It was already set. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II would take place on June 2, 1953.
First, there was another funeral. In March of 1953, Queen Mary was dying at Marlborough House. The Duke crossed the Atlantic again, and again without Wallis.
He landed at Southampton on March 11, and on the day she died, the 24th, he went to see her twice. She was 85. She had not received her son’s wife once in 16 years.
She had also left an instruction. If she died before the coronation, it was not to be postponed on her account.
The Duke walked in her funeral procession on March 31, and then he was left out of the family dinner afterwards. His letter to Wallis about his mother is the bitterest thing he wrote that year. Grief was not the only feeling in it.
There was incredulity that any mother could have been so hard and cruel towards her eldest son for so many years.
Ten weeks later came the coronation, and with it came the claim that is still repeated about that June. The Queen, it is said, banned her uncle from her own coronation. What that claim never comes with is the order.
No written order from the Queen forbidding him has surfaced in any published record. What exists is colder and in some ways worse.
The first document is in the National Archives at Kew. The cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, kept handwritten notebooks of what was said around the cabinet table, and those notebooks, kept closed for decades, are now open. In his notes on the Duke of Windsor, the prime minister, Winston Churchill, the same Churchill who had defended Edward in 1936, is recorded in three clipped words of shorthand: 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.
According to accounts of the exchange, the Duke had asked Churchill whether he would be invited, and Churchill had told him plainly that it would be quite inappropriate for an abdicated king to be a guest at his successor’s coronation. The Duke accepted, and then in public he said exactly what the cabinet secretary had written he would say. It would be contrary to precedent, he announced, for a sovereign or former sovereign to attend the coronation of another.
So nobody had to ban him. He was told, and he read out the line himself.
The other half of the record belongs to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, the man who would put the crown on her head. Fisher kept a diary, and it records where the Queen herself stood. Of everyone involved, the Queen would be less willing than anyone to have him there.
Accounts of a meeting about it go further, describing his presence as altogether out of the question, and wholly and entirely undesirable.
Line the two documents up, and the myth comes apart into something more interesting. The government advised him to stay away. The Duke agreed and presented it as tradition.
And the Queen, who is often imagined as reluctant in all this, was by the Archbishop’s account the least willing person in the room.
On June 2, 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, and a pair of striped socks showing above his shoe.
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. According to Ziegler, he produced articles on the monarchy for the Sunday Express and for the American magazine Woman’s Home Companion, and a short book called The Crown and the People covering the years from 1902 to 1953.
The next day, June 3, was the 16th anniversary of his wedding. 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 12 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 30 years. Why was a sick former king, the Queen’s own uncle, recovering in a hotel?
According to Greg King, the Queen had to be persuaded by her private secretary that some gesture was now necessary. The gesture was a visit. On March 15, 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 used the half hour. He 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, near the grave of his favorite brother George, Duke of Kent.
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 March 25, she came back and she said yes, both of them. The service and the plot at Frogmore.
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.
The visits changed the temperature. Other relations began to call. The Princess Royal came, and so did Princess Marina, the widow of the Duke of Kent, who had known Wallis before the abdication.
Wallis curtsied to her, and Marina embraced her. The one family member who stayed away was the Queen Mother, who sent flowers.
Two years later came the first invitation in 30 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.
The Queen Mother had refused at first to go if Wallis was there, and then gave way.
So on June 7, 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.
The Queen Mother said how nice it was to see her and moved on. 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 August 17, 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 February 26, 1969, and it is in the Royal Archives. She would guarantee Wallis an allowance after his death, £5,000 a year, half of what he had asked for, roughly £90,000 in today’s money. 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. The last of the family to see him in good form was the Prince of Wales. Charles called on the Windsors in Paris on October 4, 1970.
There was a party going on, and he did not stay long. By the accounts that survive, he was not impressed.
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 May 18. 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.
The accounts of exactly how he was placed differ. Greg King has him in a wheelchair against his doctor’s advice. Others have him in an armchair or say he could barely leave his bed.
Every account agrees on what happened when the door opened. He stood up. The man who had been King Edward VIII, who had held the throne for less than 11 months and walked away from it, 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 Duchess’s biographer, Anna Pasternak, describes it as summoning every last bit of energy to bow. 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 15 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. Wallis had 36 years of reasons to read coldness into any royal face.
The nurse was an outsider to a quarrel that had run for 36 years. Both of them were in the house. Neither was in the room.
What can be measured is the arrangement. Go back to the letter of 1952, to the line about being invited just once for tea. Twenty years later, 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 May 28, 1972, at about two in the morning. 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.
That morning, Buckingham Palace released a telegram from the Queen to the widow. Her people, the Queen wrote, would always remember him with gratitude and great affection, and she added a line about the 18th. She was so glad that she had been able to see him in Paris ten days ago.
On May 31, his body was flown to England in an aircraft of the Royal Air Force and received at RAF Benson by the Duke of Kent, the son of his late brother George. 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 did not travel with him. She followed on June 2 in an aircraft of the Queen’s Flight, 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 next morning, the court circular recorded her arrival. For the first time, the official record of the royal family acknowledged that the Duchess of Windsor was in the country. She stayed four days.
The Queen received her in her own sitting room. A courtier remembered the arrangements in a sentence that says more than any protocol book. Dinner for the Duchess was given in the Chinese Room.
With anybody else, it would have been in the Queen’s own dining room. Everybody behaved decently, and Charles was helpful, but there was no outpouring of love on either side.
Wallis put it more bluntly. They were polite to her, she said. Polite and kind, especially the Queen.
Royalty is always polite and kind, but they were cold. David always said they were cold.
On June 3, the Queen rode out for Trooping the Colour, her official birthday parade, as she did every year. She did not cancel it. She wore a black armband, and a moment of remembrance for the Duke was added.
Wallis was photographed watching from a window of the palace. June 3 was the 35th anniversary of the wedding at Candé. That evening, she went to Windsor to see his coffin.
The funeral was on June 5 in St. George’s Chapel. Wallis sat among the family she had married into.
Afterwards, at the reception in the private apartments, Mountbatten settled her on a sofa, and 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.
The thaw did not outlive him. In July of 1973, the Queen sent an aircraft to bring Wallis to England to visit the grave and gave her tea afterwards. It was Wallis’s last visit to England.
The Christmas cards that had once come from Lilibet were signed Elizabeth R.
She lived another 14 years, most of them in that house in the Bois de Boulogne, and the last of them blind and bedridden. She died on April 24, 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 her niece by marriage 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 20 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. Every royal family keeps a list of who is asked and who is left at the door. And the list always outlives the quarrel.