The Sad Final Years Of Wallis Simpson – HT

 

 

 

On April 24th, 1986, in a shuttered house in Paris, a woman died alone. No visitors, no voice. She had lost that years before. Her wedding ring had grown too loose for her arthritic fingers to hold. She was 89 years old, and she was, by any measure, the most talked about woman of the 20th century. A king had abandoned his throne for her, surrendered his crown, his country, his birthright, and stood before the world to say her name as the reason.

 That is the story everyone knows. What no one tells you is what came after the abdication, after the romance, after the headlines moved on and the cameras went dark. What no one tells you is what it actually cost her. Because the woman history remembers as the great romantic prize, the woman a king chose over an empire, spent her final years invisible, voiceless, and completely alone.

 This is that story. This is the sad final years of Wallis Simpson. Chapter 1, Born into Lack. Who was Wallis Warfield before the world knew her name? To understand the end, you have to understand the beginning, because Wallis Simpson’s story doesn’t begin in Buckingham Palace. It doesn’t begin in pearls and champagne, it begins in grief.

 She was born Bessie Wallis Warfield on June 19th, 1896, in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, a small spa town her parents had traveled to in a desperate attempt to cure her father, Teackle Wallis Warfield, of tuberculosis. The cure didn’t work. Her father died just months after her birth, leaving her mother, Alice Montague Warfield, widowed, impoverished, and dependent on the charity of wealthier relatives.

 Let that sit for a moment. Wallis Simpson, the woman who would one day be called the most dangerous woman in Britain, began her life as a charity case. She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, partly supported by her wealthy uncle, Solomon Davies Warfield, who paid for her to attend the Oldfield School, the most expensive girls’ school in the state.

 She was sharp, always impeccably dressed, known for her wit, but she also knew the fragility of her position. She was the poor relation, always close enough to wealth and status to understand it, never secure enough to take it for granted. That early wound, that particular ache of being adjacent to privilege without truly possessing it, would shape everything that followed, the relentless ambition, the obsessive perfectionism, the hunger not just for comfort, but for belonging.

 When you grow up watching from the edges of the room, you spend the rest of your life learning how to move to the center of it. Her first marriage, in November 1916, was to Earl Winfield Spencer, Jr., Win, a United States Navy aviator. It was a poor match. Win Spencer was an alcoholic, and the marriage deteriorated through years of separation and misery.

Their divorce was finalized on December 10th, 1927. Her second marriage, to Anglo-American shipping executive Ernest Aldrich Simpson, took place on July 21st, 1928, at the register office in Chelsea, London. This marriage was more stable, more practical, but Wallis was never a woman made for stability alone.

 She was made for something else. She just hadn’t found it yet. She found it on January 10th, 1931, when she was introduced to the Prince of Wales at Burrough Court. His name was Edward. His nickname, among family, was David, and the world would never be the same. Chapter 2, The Love That Broke a Throne. The relationship between Wallis Simpson and Edward, Prince of Wales, has been told a thousand times, but most tellings get something fundamentally wrong about it.

They frame it as a fairy tale, a romance so powerful it toppled a monarchy. And yes, at its surface, that is what happened, but look closer, and you start to see something more complicated, more human. Edward, known formally as His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, heir apparent to the British crown, was charming, restless, and emotionally fragile in ways the palace did everything to conceal.

 He was 2 years older than Wallis. He had been the world’s most eligible bachelor for years. And yet, there was something in him that was profoundly unmoored. He needed anchoring. He needed someone who would not be dazzled by his title, who would speak plainly to him, challenge him, manage him. Wallis gave him exactly that.

 By the time Edward ascended the throne as King Edward VIII on January 20th, 1936, following the death of his father, King George V, Wallis was already at the center of his life. She was still married to Ernest Simpson. The British establishment was alarmed. The British press, uniquely and deliberately, stayed silent about the affair, while the foreign press ran wild with it.

In July 1936, Wallis filed for divorce from Ernest Simpson. The constitutional machinery began grinding. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made clear the government could not sanction the marriage of the king to a twice-divorced woman. It was constitutionally, socially, and politically impossible. Edward’s response to this was to do something that had never happened in British history.

On December 10th, 1936, after less than 1 year on the throne, King Edward VIII signed the instrument of abdication. The following day, confirmed by the Declaration of Abdication Act, he ceased to be king. That evening, he made a radio broadcast to the nation. He said, and these words were heard around the world, “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.” In an instant, Wallis

Simpson went from a scandalous affair to the reason a king gave up his crown. His brother, Prince Albert, assumed the throne as King George VI. Edward was given the title Duke of Windsor, and so began the exile. Wallis’s divorce from Ernest Simpson was finalized in May 1937. She and Edward were married at the Château de Candé, in France, on June 3rd, 1937.

She became the Duchess of Windsor. But here is the thing history remembers less clearly. The new king, George VI, issued letters patent that, with the unanimous support of the dominion governments, denied Wallis the title of Her Royal Highness. She was a duchess, yes, she was, in the most formal and deliberate sense, kept outside.

 No member of the royal family attended the wedding. The Anglican priest who performed the ceremony was formally reprimanded by the Church of England, and the wound that would fester for the rest of Wallis’s life, the wound of never quite being accepted, never quite belonging, was opened in the very moment she must have believed she had finally arrived.

Chapter 3, A Life Between Ballrooms and Shadows. For the next three and a half decades, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor lived a life that, from the outside, looked like an endless, glamorous holiday, and from the inside, felt increasingly like a gilded exile. They traveled constantly. They entertained lavishly.

 They shuttled between Paris, New York, the South of France, and the Bahamas. Wallis regularly appeared on international lists of the world’s best-dressed women. She wrote her memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons, published in 1956. Though biographer Charles Higham later noted that the book rearranged facts considerably, calling it a kind of self-performed facelift.

 During World War II, Edward was appointed governor of the Bahama Islands by his brother, King George VI, in July 1940, a posting that many interpreted as a way of keeping the Windsors far from the action. They remained there until Edward resigned his post in early 1945. Wallis hated Nassau. She called it our Saint Helena, a reference to Napoleon’s island of exile.

 The metaphor was not accidental, and it needs to be said, and said plainly, because this is history and not hagiography, that during this period, Wallis and Edward were under serious government scrutiny for their apparent sympathies with Nazi Germany. In 1937, without government approval, they visited Germany and were received by Adolf Hitler.

 Both American and British intelligence took note. The full truth of their political sympathies during that period remains a subject of historical debate. And much of what circulates around it involves speculation. What is verified is that the visit happened, that it was deeply ill-advised, and that it permanently damaged their reputation with the British establishment. That is a fact.

 What the visit actually meant in terms of ideology, that is where historians continue to argue. What we know with certainty is that after the war, the Windsors settled back in France, eventually at 4 Rue du Champ d’Entraînement in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. Their home was exquisite. Their social life was relentless.

 But Edward, as the years passed, grew increasingly melancholic. He missed England. He had given up everything. His country, his throne, his identity. And what he had received in return was a life of beautiful, purposeless wandering. In 1967, the couple returned to England for the first time in decades for the unveiling of a memorial plaque by Queen Elizabeth II, marking the centenary of Queen Mary’s birth.

They spoke with Kenneth Harris in an extensive BBC television interview in 1970. And by 1971, Edward had been diagnosed with throat cancer, the consequence, largely, of a lifetime of smoking. Queen Elizabeth II visited the couple at their Paris home in May 1972, just days before Edward’s death. On May 28th, 1972, the Duke of Windsor died.

 He and Wallis had been married for nearly 35 years. And now, at 75 years old, with her health already beginning to fray, arteriosclerosis already causing confusion and mental fog, Wallis Simpson was left alone. Chapter 4, after Edward, the slow disappearance. There is a photograph that tells you everything you need to know about what the Duke of Windsor’s death did to Wallis.

 During the visit to Buckingham Palace for Edward’s funeral in June 1972, a telephoto lens captured Wallis watching the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony, the Queen’s birthday parade, from a window at the palace. She is alone. She is watching something that she will never be part of. The observer who described that image said she looked utterly bereft.

 She was invited to stay at Buckingham Palace during the funeral, a gesture of inclusion that was also inescapably a reminder of everything she had been denied for 35 years. She had lived her whole married life as the woman who was almost royal, almost accepted, almost enough. And now the man whose love had justified all of it was gone.

 She returned to the house in Paris. The parties stopped. The entertaining stopped. The laughter that had once defined her social reputation, the wit, the vivacity, the electric quality that people described when they talked about Wallis Simpson at her best, began to dim. She already had arteriosclerosis at the time of Edward’s death.

This is a verified medical fact from accounts of people close to her. It had been causing mental confusion. As the 1970s progressed, she suffered several falls. She broke her hip. And then she broke it again. By the late 1970s, Wallis Simpson was largely confined to her home. Now, here is where the story takes a turn that is darker than anything a novelist would dare invent.

After Edward’s death, Wallis had granted power of attorney to her French lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum. Blum was a formidable woman by any measure. She had spent years in Hollywood, representing major studios and stars, and had famously negotiated the record divorce settlement for actress Rita Hayworth from the Aga Khan.

 She was sharp, relentless, and utterly devoted, obsessively so, to the Duchess. What happened next remains, even today, one of the most disturbing and contested chapters in this story. And it’s important that you hear it the way a responsible historian would present it, with the facts clearly labeled as facts, and the allegations clearly labeled as allegations.

Chapter 5, the keeper of the cage, Suzanne Blum. In 1980, the London Sunday Times decided to commission a major feature on the aging Duchess of Windsor, who had been almost entirely absent from public life. Lord Snowdon, the society photographer and former husband of Princess Margaret, was sent to take photographs.

 Journalist and novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood was commissioned to write the accompanying article. It seemed at the time like a straightforward assignment. What Blackwood encountered instead was a locked door. And behind it, Suzanne Blum, by 1980, was approximately 83 years old herself, nearly the same age as the Duchess, and still actively practicing law.

She had at some point assumed total control over the Duchess’s life, household, correspondence, visitors, finances, and public image. When Caroline Blackwood arrived in Paris seeking access to the Duchess, Blum refused, categorically, completely. The journalist could not speak to the Duchess, could not see her, could not verify anything about her condition firsthand.

 What she could do was speak to Blum and to the Duchess’s old friends. And what emerged from those conversations was deeply troubling. One of the Duchess’s old friends, described in Blackwood’s account as a certain Austrian baron, had received a phone call from Wallis sometime around 1978. He had found the call alarming enough to travel to Paris to check on her.

He had been refused access by the household under Blum’s orders. He pushed back. He managed, eventually, to be granted a brief glimpse of his old friend. What he saw, according to Blackwood’s account, was described as follows. Wallis had shriveled to less than half her original size, curled up as though reverting to a fetal position. She was unconscious.

 An illness had darkened her skin so dramatically that he said she looked like, in the words reported in the account, a shriveled prune. Now, I want to be transparent with you about something. This account comes from Caroline Blackwood’s book, The Last of the Duchess, which was written in 1980, but not published until 1995, after Blum’s death, because Blum had threatened legal action against anyone who published material critical of her or her client.

 The book is a journalistic account, not a neutral document. Blackwood had strong feelings about Blum. The accounts she gathered from friends of the Duchess were filtered through people who were themselves distressed, upset, and sometimes conflicting in their information. What is verified is this. By 1980, Wallis had lost her ability to speak.

This is confirmed across multiple sources. She was bedridden by the final years of her life. She received no visitors apart from her doctor and nurses. Blum sold items belonging to the Duchess, including valuable possessions, to her own friends at prices below market value. This was documented and later condemned by royal biographer Hugo Vickers, who called Blum what he described as a satanic figure, wearing the mantle of good intention to disguise her inner malevolence.

 Whether Blum acted out of greed, genuine devotion, a pathological identification with her client, or some combination of all three, that remains genuinely unclear. What is clear is that whatever control she exercised kept Wallis isolated from the world during the last decade of her life. What is also clear is that when Caroline Blackwood was working on her article in 1980, Blum gave her wildly contradictory information.

 In one conversation, she was told the Duchess was in a coma. In another, she was told the Duchess was sitting cheerfully by the window, listening to Cole Porter records and chatting animatedly. These accounts were irreconcilable. Blackwood also reported that an Italian photographer, using a telephoto lens, managed to capture photographs through the window of the Duchess’s bedroom, images that showed a deeply pitiful situation, far from Blum’s descriptions of vitality and health.

 Blum, for her part, told Blackwood with apparent seriousness, if she wrote one derogatory word, Bloom would not sue her. She would kill her. This is the world Wallis Simpson’s final chapter unfolded in. Chapter 6, what was left behind, the estate, the jewels, the love letters. Wallis Simpson had lived extravagantly.

The jewels alone, the collection of extraordinary pieces Edward had commissioned and given to her over decades, were legendary. They were famous in the world of haute joaillerie. They told the story of a man who had nothing left to give but everything he owned and gave it all. By the time she was bedridden in the Bois de Boulogne, those jewels were still nominally hers, but who truly controlled them was a separate question.

As Bloom held power of attorney, items from the Windsor estate were quietly being sold. The full accounting of what happened to those possessions during the final years of Wallis’s life remains incomplete. What happened after her death is better documented. Most of Wallis’s estate, valued at approximately 5 million, was left to the Pasteur Institute, the French medical research foundation.

This was widely interpreted as a tribute to France, which had given her and Edward a home when England would not. The royal family received no major bequests. There were also the love letters. Wallis had left instructions that a series of her private love letters to Edward be published after her death. On April 28th, 1986, 4 days after she died, the London Mail serialized them in a special pullout supplement.

 These were intimate, personal. They were evidence of something that the world had debated for decades. Was the love between Wallis and Edward real? Was it a passion deep enough to justify what it cost? The letters suggested yes. Whatever you might think of the choices they made, whatever you might feel about the political shadows that hung over their wartime behavior, whatever complexity surrounds the true nature of their relationship in its final decades, the letters, by most accounts, read as genuine.

And here is something the world often forgets, buried under all the scandal and judgment, by the time Edward died in May 1972, he and had been married for nearly 35 years, longer than most marriages, through exile and poverty scares and wars and public humiliation and private heartbreak, they had stayed. In the final pages of her memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons, Wallis had written, “Any woman who has been loved as I have been loved and who too has loved has experienced life in its fullness.

” Whether she still believed that as she lay alone in her room in Paris, unable to speak, is something no one will ever know. Chapter 7, April 24th, 1986, the end at the Bois de Boulogne. On April 24th, 1986, at her home at 4 Route du Champ d’Entraînement in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, died.

 She was 89 years old. She died approximately 2 months before what would have been her 90th birthday. The cause of death was bronchial pneumonia, as reported by the Washington Post. According to the Guardian’s obituary, her final years had been consumed by strokes, mental derangement, and grief at the loss of her husband, who had died 14 years before.

 The paper noted that her fingers had reportedly become too arthritic to support her wedding ring. She died without the “Her Most Excellent Majesty” title she had been denied since 1937. She died having been largely invisible to the world for more than a decade. She died in a country that was not hers by birth, in a home that had been provided for her, attended by a doctor and nurses, receiving no visitors, having lost her voice years before.

 Diana, Lady Mosley, one of Wallis’s close friends, gave a quote at the time of the Duchess’s death that has lodged in history with a kind of brutal honesty. She said, “It wasn’t really a life at all. I’m delighted to hear she has died. I wish she’d died many years ago.” That is a jarring thing to read, but read it again with the understanding of what Lady Mosley meant.

She was not saying she wanted Wallis dead out of malice. She was saying that what Wallis had endured in those final years, the immobility, the silence, the isolation, the loss, was so far beyond living that death was a mercy. The years-long, shuttered, voiceless existence in that Paris villa was not life. And Lady Mosley, who loved her, had wanted it to end long before it did.

 On April 27th, Wallis’s remains were flown from Paris to RAF Benson by an aircraft of the Queen’s Flight. A seven-car cortege escorted the coffin. Flags flew at half-mast on government buildings. Floral tributes arrived from around the world. A period of mourning was observed from April 25th to April 29th, 1986.

Chapter 8, the funeral, the grave, and what history owes her. The funeral of Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, was held on April 29th, 1986, at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. 175 mourners attended the ceremony. Among them, members of the British royal family, including Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Prince and Princess of Wales, Charles and Diana, Princess Anne, Princess Alice of Gloucester, and others.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Denis Thatcher, were present. The leader of the opposition, Neil Kinnock, attended. The US Ambassador, Charles H. Price II, was there. And Diana, Lady Mosley, who had said she was delighted the Duchess had finally died, was also present. Because even that blunt sentiment had been born of love.

 Those who were not there, Princess Margaret, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, the palace noted they had barely known Wallis. The service lasted 28 minutes. It was conducted by the Dean of Windsor. Per Wallis’s own wishes, there was no funeral address, no eulogy, no direct references to the Duchess during the ceremony.

 Only once, in a prayer, did the Canon of Westminster refer to her as our sister. Think about that. This woman, who had reshaped the history of the British monarchy, who had been on every front page in the world, who had been loved and hated and mythologized and condemned, was given a funeral in which no one spoke about her, in which she was referred to once, briefly, as a sister, because that was what she had wanted.

 The woman who had spent her entire life being discussed by others finally chose, in death, to make them stay silent. Her polished English oak coffin, lined with lead, was carried by eight Welsh Guards. On top of it, a single wreath from Queen Elizabeth II, white, orange, and yellow lilies, picked at Windsor Castle.

 The silver plaque on her casket read, “Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, 1896-1986.” After the service, as her coffin was carried out of St. George’s Chapel, the music played was Edward Elgar’s Nimrod, one of the most moving pieces in all of British classical music, the piece the British play when they are mourning something they love, something lost.

 The burial was private, attended by only 15 people, the Queen, Prince Philip, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Dowager Countess of Dudley, two royal household aides, the Dean of Windsor, and seven members of Wallis’s personal household. The Queen Mother did not stand at the graveside, on the advice of Queen Elizabeth II.

And then, at the royal burial ground at Frogmore, beside Windsor Castle, the ground where English royalty has rested for generations, Wallis Simpson was laid to rest next to her husband, Edward, Duke of Windsor, exactly as he had wished. They had been apart for 14 years. They were together again.

 The Princess of Wales, Diana, said afterwards that it was the only time she had ever seen the Queen weep. The woman who had been denied a royal title for 50 years was given a royal burial. The family that had shut her out for half a century stood at her grave. And the woman who had caused the most consequential constitutional crisis in 20th century Britain was carried to her rest to the sound of Elgar, in a country that had spent decades trying to pretend she didn’t exist.

Closing, what we owe the complicated ones. Here is what I want you to take away from this story, not as a lesson about royalty or scandal or even history, but as a reflection on something more elemental. Wallis Simpson was not a simple woman. She was not a villain and she was not a victim. Though she was at various points made to play both roles by a world that needed to put her somewhere.

 She was a deeply complicated human being formed by early loss and relentless ambition. Capable of extraordinary social brilliance and of breathtaking political misjudgment. The Nazi Germany visit of 1937 cannot be erased from her biography. Neither can the genuine devotion of 35 years of marriage. What happened to her at the end, the isolation, the silencing, the invisible years in that shuttered house in Paris was in some ways a final act of what her life had always been.

A woman who existed at the edges of power. Close enough to feel its warmth, never allowed fully inside. She died having never been called her she died having never been truly embraced by the institution whose history she had indelibly altered. She died voiceless in every sense for years before her body followed.

But consider this, 130 years after her birth, we are still talking about her. The Queen wept at her funeral. Princess Diana said she had never seen that before. The love letters were published and people read them. The jewels went to auction and raised millions. Her story was made into films, into dramas, into books, into plays.

 And the woman who wrote her own memoir spent pages rearranging the facts because even she knew that the raw truth of who she was and what she had wanted was more than the world would easily contain. Wallis Simpson asked at her funeral for no eulogies. No addresses. No one to stand and speak about her life.

 So let this be the eulogy she never allowed. She was born into nothing. She clawed her way into everything. She lost it or had it taken one piece at a time. And in the end, she was laid beside the man who had given up the world for her under English soil, under English skies as Nimrod played and it deserves to be told honestly. With its beauty and its shadows both intact.