Perhaps it was the hour, but reading That Woman late last night caused me to realize that the story of Wallis Simpson and David Windsor is basically a whodunit, with the corpus delecti an empty throne. An abdication is certainly a kind of death, when you think about it — which you don’t, because abdications are sensationally uncommon and aren’t really much like one another, much less anything else. What happened between 1934 and 1936? Who else was involved in David’s ultimate decision to abandon his throne so that he could marry Wallis? What did Wallis really think about it? These questions may not be of world-historical importance, but we don’t ask them out of garden-variety prurience. The Abdication is something of an unsolved murder mystery, and that’s why, in the hands of a compelling writer, it makes a gripping yarn.

For decades — from the crisis itself until just the other day, it seems — the “crime” was attributed entirely to Wallis. Represented as a sexual predator and an adventuress, the daughter of decayed Baltimore gentry was presumed to have pinned her social ambitions to the most glamorous victim imaginable, the heir to the King of England. She tossed over her husband, Ernest Simpson (and who knew, by the way, that Simpson was a Jew?), and she made David toss over his other lady friends, Freda Dudley Ward and Thelma, Viscountess Furness. Once married to David, Wallis drove him on a relentless course of globetrotting entertainments and jewelry-buying sprees — paltry compensation for the vanished throne.

A different Wallis has been emerging of late. I have no idea why. It could be the letters that feature so prominently at the climax of Madonna’s W./E. It could be the natural pendulum of sympathy, which can be counted on to swing back and forth a few times in the aftermath of shocking events. This new Wallis is a party girl who got in over her head. Worn down by a history of precarious finances, she was immobilized by David’s lavish generosity — a new development for him, by the way, one that she seems to have been the first to inspire. Anne Sebba, who is certainly a compelling writer, sees a dilemma, not a strategy:

Still convinced that this was an infatuation that would pass, she told him that his ‘behaviour last night made me realise how very alone I shall be some day — and because I love you I don’t seem to have the strength to protect myself from your youthfulness.” If she was not deemed good enough for Felipe Espil when she was a decade younger, surely it was only a matter of time before the heir to the British throne tossed her in the same way? Frozen with anxiety, she could not move. The Prince responded by giving her more gifts of money and jewelry, further sapping her resolve to walk away. It would not be out of character to imagine that Wallis was making a mental calculation of what she would need if she were to be abandoned by both men.

This conforms to the portrait that Madonna paints. It is not the conduct of a bold schemer but rather that of a trapped pet. And it vitiates the claim that Wallis was the “murderer” of King Edward VIII. So, if she wasn’t, who was? Whodunit? I don’t expect Sebba’s book to solve the mystery, but it promises to point detectives in a different direction. More about that anon; I’m only on page 137.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2012 at 9:17 am.