On the 11th of October 1937, a former King of England stepped off a train in Berlin to begin a two-week tour of Nazi Germany. Edward, who had abandoned the British throne less than a year earlier so he could marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, was now being entertained by the most dangerous regime in Europe. Over the following days, he and Wallis toured factories, dined with Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, met propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, and spent time with Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command. The visit ended with a personal audience with Adolf Hitler at his Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden.
It would be another three years before the world understood how sinister this trip truly was. None of this had seemed remotely possible in the late nineteenth century when Wallis Simpson entered the world. She was born Bessie Wallis Warfield on the 19th of June 1896 at the Monterey Inn in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, into a prominent Baltimore business family. Her father was a flower merchant who had once financed a campaign to become mayor of Baltimore, though he lost.
Wallis’s childhood was difficult. Her father died of tuberculosis in November 1896, less than six months after her birth, and her mother’s relationship with her own family was strained, possibly because Wallis had been born out of wedlock. For much of her youth, Wallis and her mother depended on the charity of her uncle, Solomon Warfield. Wallis grew into an intelligent young woman who excelled at school, and in November 1916 she married Earl Winfield Spencer Jr.
, a US Navy pilot she had met only six months earlier in Florida. The marriage was unhappy. Spencer was an alcoholic who occasionally flew while drunk and once crashed into the sea, escaping largely unharmed. By the late 1910s the relationship had fractured, and although the couple remained married until 1927, they saw little of each other as Wallis traveled through China, Hong Kong, Paris, and elsewhere.
Eight months after her divorce was finalized, she married Ernest Aldrich Simpson, an American shipping executive with extensive business interests in Britain. They settled in London, but the marriage quickly soured, and both were unfaithful. It produced no children, nor would any of Wallis’s other unions. It was during this second marriage that Wallis met Edward, Prince of Wales, in January 1931.
They remained acquainted, but their relationship appears to have become sexual only in 1934, while Wallis remained legally married to Ernest. As soon as the affair came to light, it was deemed a serious problem by the royal family and the British government. Divorce was still deeply controversial, and the prospect of the heir to the throne marrying an American woman who had divorced her first husband and was committing adultery in her second marriage was regarded as scandalous. In 1935, the British secret services and the Metropolitan Police opened a dossier on Wallis.
The controversy erupted in 1936 when Edward’s father, King George V, died and Edward ascended the throne as King Edward VIII. He intended to marry Wallis, who had filed for divorce from Ernest and reportedly told friends she expected to become queen. The government had other plans. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and his ministers began quietly preparing Edward’s younger brother Albert to take the throne if the crisis exploded.
When Edward made clear he would press ahead with the marriage, Baldwin’s government responded that British society would not tolerate Wallis as queen. On the 11th of December 1936, less than eleven months after his accession, Edward abdicated. Albert became King George VI. The new government was anxious that the former king and his soon-to-be bride disappear from British public life as completely as possible.
Edward and Wallis were given the titles Duke and Duchess of Windsor, along with an enormous annual pension and the means to live comfortably abroad. They finally married in the south of France on the 3rd of June 1937, shortly after Wallis obtained her divorce from Ernest, and then settled in Paris. The former monarch, however, was not content with retirement. With Wallis’s support, he seemed determined to carve out a new position for himself as an unofficial ambassador of British royal interests abroad.
As part of that effort, he accepted an invitation from Dr. Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, to visit Nazi Germany in the autumn of 1937. The British government was not pleased. During their two-week stay, the Windsors were wined and dined by leading Nazis, and the visit closed with their personal audience with Hitler.
Wallis and Edward returned to Paris as Europe lurched toward war. Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938 and Czechoslovakia a year later. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war. The Windsors continued to live in Paris, believing they were safe from the front lines, but when the German invasion of France came in the early summer of 1940, it brought a blistering Nazi victory.
Within weeks, German tank divisions were closing on Paris. Wallis and Edward fled south, crossed into Spain, and went on to Portugal, settling in Lisbon. There followed one of the most controversial and peculiar episodes of their lives. The Nazi regime was conspiring to lure the couple back into Spain, where they intended to detain them and use them as bargaining chips against Britain, and Wallis and Edward, unaware of that plan, may themselves have been plotting treason.
In Lisbon, they stayed at the house of Ricardo Espírito Santo, a Portuguese banker with extensive business connections in Germany who was suspected by British intelligence of having contacts with Hitler. Correspondence between Edward and Santo suggested that Edward may have been scheming for a possible return to the British throne under a victorious Nazi government. The evidence is not conclusive, and the full truth remains unknown, but the possibility that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were conspiring with the Nazis to become king and queen again, half a decade after Edward’s abdication, has never fully been resolved. Just a few weeks later, the British government arranged passage for the couple to the Bahamas, where Edward was given the position of governor for the duration of the war.
The appointment kept them out of Britain, and whatever plans they may have devised with the Nazis crumbled as Germany began losing the war from the winter of 1941 onward. After the war, the Windsors resumed their life as royal exiles in Paris. Fleeting bits of evidence about their apparent alliance with the Nazis continued to surface, and their October 1937 meeting with Hitler cast a shadow over them for the rest of their lives. They retained a kind of celebrity status in Paris and on visits to the United States in the 1950s.
Edward’s health declined in the 1960s from a lifelong habit of chain smoking and a family predisposition to lung problems. He died in Paris in May 1972 at the age of 77. His body was returned to England for a royal funeral, where the British public displayed a surprising show of grief for the monarch who had reigned for less than a year. Wallis lived on in France, supported by her late husband’s estate and an allowance from Queen Elizabeth II.
Her own health declined, and in the late 1970s she developed dementia. By 1980 she had lost the ability to speak, and her final years were spent housebound and mentally deteriorating. She died in Paris on the 24th of April 1986 at the age of 89. Her funeral was held at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, and she was buried beside Edward near the castle.
The scandal that had once shaken the British monarchy ended quietly, in two graves on English soil.