Wallis Simpson

Bessie Wallis Warfield was born on June 19, 1896, at Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, a resort town where her parents were staying in hope that the mountain air would improve her father's health ^[1]. Teackle Wallis Warfield died of tuberculosis a few months after her birth, leaving his widow, Alice Montague Warfield, in reduced circumstances. Mother and daughter settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where they depended heavily on the generosity of relatives, above all her wealthy uncle Solomon Davies Warfield ^[2].

Both the Warfields and the Montagues were old families with standing in Maryland and Virginia society, and Wallis grew up conscious of good breeding paired with little money. Her uncle paid for her education at Oldfields School, a fashionable girls' boarding school near Baltimore, where she finished in 1914 ^[1]. Contemporaries remembered her as sharp, ambitious, and immaculately turned out even on a small allowance.

In 1916, at the age of twenty, she married Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., a United States Navy aviator ^[2]. The marriage was troubled almost from the start. Spencer drank heavily, and long separations followed his postings, including a period when Wallis lived in Washington and later traveled in China while he served in the Far East. The couple divorced in 1927 ^[3].

In 1928 Wallis married Ernest Aldrich Simpson, a shipping executive with British and American roots, and moved with him to London ^[2]. As Mrs. Simpson she built a reputation as an accomplished hostess whose flat in Bryanston Court drew a smart cosmopolitan circle. Her wit was quick, her table celebrated, and her clothes precisely chosen, qualities that opened doors in a society where an American divorcee might otherwise have remained on the margins.

Through her friend Thelma, Viscountess Furness, she was introduced in January 1931 to Edward, Prince of Wales, the heir to the British throne ^[1]. By 1934 the prince was devoted to her, and she had displaced Lady Furness as his companion. Edward showered her with jewels, brought her on cruises and to Fort Belvedere, his country retreat, and made little effort to hide the attachment from his own circle, although the British press kept silent by convention ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Wallis Simpson in 1935 would have received very different answers in London and abroad. American and continental newspapers speculated openly about the prince's American friend, while most British readers had never heard her name. That gap between private knowledge and public silence set the stage for the crisis that followed ^[4].

George V died on January 20, 1936, and the Prince of Wales became King Edward VIII. The new king made clear to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that he intended to marry Wallis once her second divorce was complete, and she was granted a decree nisi from Ernest Simpson in October 1936 ^[1]. The proposal collided with the conventions of church and state. The Church of England, of which the king was Supreme Governor, did not then permit the remarriage of divorced persons with living former spouses, and the governments of Britain and the Dominions refused to accept her as queen ^[4].

Baldwin rejected a compromise under which Wallis would become the king's wife without royal rank, a so-called morganatic marriage, after consulting the Dominion governments ^[4]. The British press broke its silence in early December 1936, and the affair became a national sensation within days. Wallis fled to the south of France to escape the siege of reporters and even issued a statement offering to withdraw from the situation, but Edward would not give her up ^[3].

On December 10, 1936, Edward VIII signed the Instrument of Abdication, renouncing the throne for himself and his descendants, and the next evening he explained in a radio broadcast that he could not carry the burden of kingship without the help and support of the woman he loved ^[1]. His brother succeeded as George VI. No British monarch before or since has voluntarily surrendered the crown, and the episode remains one of the defining Wallis Simpson facts cited by historians of the modern monarchy ^[4].

Her divorce became absolute in May 1937, and on June 3, 1937, Wallis married the former king, by then created Duke of Windsor, at the Chateau de Cande in France ^[2]. No member of the British royal family attended. George VI permitted his brother to retain the style of Royal Highness but denied it to Wallis by letters patent, a decision the duke resented bitterly for the rest of his life ^[3].

The couple settled into a wandering existence among France, the United States, and fashionable resorts. In October 1937 they made a controversial visit to Nazi Germany, where they met Adolf Hitler, a trip that permanently damaged their reputations and fed suspicions about the duke's political sympathies ^[5]. When the Second World War began, the pair left Europe after a brief period in France, and in 1940 the British government appointed the duke Governor of the Bahamas, a posting widely understood as a way of keeping the couple far from the conflict ^[1].

Wallis spent the war years in Nassau, where she worked with the local Red Cross and ran canteens for servicemen, duties she performed capably even as she privately disliked the posting ^[3]. The couple returned to Europe in 1945 and eventually made their principal home in a villa in the Bois de Boulogne on the edge of Paris, leased to them by the city of Paris ^[6].

Any honest account of Wallis Simpson achievements has to reckon with the fact that her fame rested on a marriage rather than a career, yet within the world she inhabited she exercised real influence. She became one of the most photographed and most imitated women of her era, repeatedly named among the world's best dressed, and a favored client of designers including Mainbocher, who created her wedding dress, and later Givenchy and Dior ^[6]. Her jewelry collection, much of it commissioned by the duke from Cartier and Van Cleef and Arpels, became legendary; when Sotheby's auctioned it in Geneva in 1987 it raised roughly fifty million dollars for the Pasteur Institute, many times the estimate ^[7].

Her marriage to the duke lasted thirty five years, until his death, and the two were rarely apart. They entertained constantly, kept pugs, and cultivated an atmosphere of exacting perfection in their houses. Wallis published a memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons, in 1956, giving her own account of the abdication and its aftermath ^[2].

Relations with the royal family remained cold for decades. Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, the wife of George VI, never received her, and the refusal of the HRH style stood as a lasting grievance. A partial thaw came late: Queen Elizabeth II visited the dying duke in Paris in 1972, and Wallis was received by the royal family at his funeral at Windsor that June ^[1].

Widowhood left Wallis increasingly isolated in the Paris villa. Her health declined through the 1970s, and after suffering from arteriosclerosis and other ailments she withdrew almost entirely from public view ^[3]. Her French lawyer, Suzanne Blum, controlled access to her during the final decade, a period that later drew scrutiny from biographers concerned about her treatment and the disposal of her possessions ^[8].

She died at the villa in the Bois de Boulogne on April 24, 1986, at the age of eighty nine ^[1]. She was buried beside the Duke of Windsor at the royal burial ground at Frogmore, within the Home Park of Windsor Castle, with members of the royal family, including Queen Elizabeth II, in attendance ^[2]. The bulk of her estate went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the medical research foundation, in line with her wishes ^[7].

Wallis Simpson forced the British establishment to confront a question it had never faced in modern times: whether a king could put private happiness above the throne. The abdication reshaped the line of succession, placing George VI and then Elizabeth II on the throne, and historians continue to weigh how differently the monarchy, and Britain itself, might have fared under Edward VIII during the Second World War ^[4].

Her reputation has been argued over ever since. Some accounts cast her as a scheming adventuress, others as a scapegoat for a weak and infatuated king, and later biographers, drawing on private letters, have suggested she felt trapped by a romance she could not safely end ^[8]. Government files released decades after the events documented official anxieties about the couple, including wartime concern over their contacts with German representatives, though the extent of any disloyalty remains disputed ^[5].

In popular culture she has been portrayed repeatedly on screen, notably in the film The King's Speech in 2010 and the Netflix series The Crown, keeping the abdication story before new generations ^[6]. Her jewels, her wardrobe, and the phrase attributed to her circle that one can never be too rich or too thin all became part of twentieth century style folklore. Nearly four decades after her death, the woman for whom a king gave up an empire remains one of the most debated figures in modern royal history ^[4].