Diana's Nightmare - The Family (38 page)

'What the Special Branch had on the Duke of Kent at the time doesn't bear thinking about,' said the titled Chelsea lady. 'Nightmare! And his brother! There was a big party at St James's Palace in aid of the King Edward VII Hospital and the Duke of Gloucester was there ROARING drunk. I mean, it was unbelievable, but he produced two very nice children.'

Diana also knew that the Queen Mother's marriage had not always been as happy as fond memories painted it. 'The image is that they had this idyllic marriage,' said the titled Chelsea lady. 'During the Blitz, she was a very, very good wife. But they often had dinner in separate rooms at the Palace because they were on "non-speak". The King had a terrible temper and would suddenly burst into fits of rage, which his family called his "gnashes". He would quite lose control of himself, but most of the time he was a civilised man who adored his wife and family. If one actually analyses it, she has just been a very good royal. She hasn't got this extra dimension that Diana has suddenly dug up from somewhere, this spiritual thing.'

Like Diana, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was born before her father inherited his earldom. 'He celebrated so much that he forgot to register the birth,' said the royal historian. 'To this day, the Queen Mother doesn't know where she was born.' When she was four, her father became Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. He took over Glamis Castle, the Scottish ancestral home, complete with ghosts, that went with the title. Ten miles north of Dundee, the red sandstone castle was the scene of King Duncan's murder in
Macbeth.
The third earl retained the last jester in Scotland, unsportingly dispensing with his services after he made the mistake of proposing to his daughter.

Elizabeth Angela Marguerite had been her parents' ninth child, but one daughter had died in childhood and only two girls, Mary and Rose, now survived. Thus the Queen Mother had two elder sisters and, also like Diana, she had a baby brother.

When World War I broke out, Glamis Castle was converted into a Red Cross hospital for wounded soldiers brought in from the trenches. Lady Elizabeth, fourteen at the time but already exhibiting a home-spun star quality, visited the packed wards. Her presence was so uplifting that one patient called her 'a Scottish Florence Nightingale'. 'It's easy to imagine Lady Diana in the same role,' said the royal historian. 'She looked after her sisters and younger brother like a little mother, and was always tending wounded birds and animals.'

But like Diana, the Queen Mother had the protective instincts of a lioness beneath a friendly smile. 'The claws came out the moment she sensed the presence of a dangerous adversary. When she knew she had to fight, it was to the death,' said the titled Chelsea lady. 'In the case of Wallis Simpson, literally to the death.' This was the side of Charles's grandmother that Diana feared most. She recognised exactly the same feelings in herself.

THE woman known to the world as Mrs Simpson was conceived in deception, delivered in deceit and lived all her life surrounded by lies. She was born Bessie Wallis Warfield on 19 June, 1895 (not 1896 as she liked to claim), just 362 days after Edward, or David as he was called, the eldest son of the then Duke and Duchess of York, later King George V and Queen Mary.

Edward's mother, the impoverished Princess Mary of Teck, had previously been engaged to George's brother, Prince Eddy, whose sexual behaviour was so bizarre that he was at one time a suspect in the hunt for Jack the Ripper. When he died suddenly of pneumonia, his fiancee sensibly married his younger brother and became a mainstay of the monarchy for half a century.

Whereas Edward made his appearance at the White Lodge in Richmond, Surrey, Wallis arrived, protesting noisily, at Square Cottage, a rough-hewn cabin at Blue Ridge Summit on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. Her birth was kept a secret because she was born out of wedlock. Wallis's mother, an obliging blonde called Alice Montague, had conducted a secret affair with Teackle Warfield, the tubercular fourth son of a grandiose but fading Baltimore family. She became pregnant even though Teackle was forbidden to have sex because of the danger of infection.

To keep the birth secret, Bessie Wallis was not even baptised and, when she was confirmed into the Episcopalian faith, her baptism record was falsified. This meant that two of her three marriages, including her union with the Duke of Windsor, would have been invalid in the eyes of the Church if the secret had come out. It was only one of many secrets she tried to hide from the world.

When the Queen Mother was born somewhere in London on 4 August, 1900, five-year-old Wallis was living with her widowed grandmother, Anna Warfield, in a four-storey terraced house in Baltimore. Her father had married Alice a few months after his daughter's birth, but the stigma of illegitimacy remained. An atrocious snob (the family boasted about its connections with British aristocracy), Anna ran her household according to a very strict regime. Wallis learned from an early age that servants could be abused, threatened and, if necessary, deprived of their livelihood. She developed the arrogance of someone who, although privileged, knew that something wasn't quite right. Conversations stopped abruptly when she entered a room. Servants gave her meaningful, insolent looks. She developed a thick skin, burying the shame deep inside.

Even as a young child, Wallis was obsessed with the fashion and manners of high society, particularly the far-away world of the English royals. She developed a schoolgirl crush on the Prince of Wales, a golden-haired Adonis who stared rakishly from the magazines she collected. Other girls of her generation might have had innocent dreams of marrying a prince. Not Wallis. Her obsession nagged at her mercilessly.

In retaliation, she developed a teasing manner with young male admirers. 'Nobody ever called me beautiful or even pretty,' she said with withering honesty. 'My jaw was clearly too big and too pointed to be classic. My hair was straight when the laws of compensation might at least have provided curls.' But she had entrancing violet eyes (Wallis Blue, as the colour was later called) and she knew how to make the best of herself. Just five feet tall and neither rich nor attractive, she learned to bend men to her will. She threw tantrums to get her own way, then charmed her beau into believing that he was marvellous until a better prospect came along.

When she was nineteen, she had the misfortune to meet a young man who was even more wilful, selfish, arrogant and dangerous than herself, an airman called Earl Spencer (no relation). 'He was laughing but there was a suggestion of inner force and vitality that struck me instantly,' she recalled. He was, in fact, cruel and tough, a pugnacious drunk and a secret bisexual who liked to dress up in women's clothes. Wallis was fatally attracted to him.

Wallis Warfield and 'Win' Spencer Junior, as he was called after his second name Winfield, were married in November 1916 and their turbulent eleven-year union turned Wallis into a scheming, man-hating vamp. Often drunk and abusive, Win Spencer accused his wife of adultery and, to eliminate the risk of secret liaisons, left her sobbing behind locked doors at their home near a naval base in San Diego. She could do nothing right. Even her cooking drove him into a frenzy.

Wallis cheered up when the Prince of Wales, en route to Australia aboard HMS
Renown
with Louis Mountbatten, arrived in the Californian port on a goodwill visit in April 1920. David, Dickie and Prince George had just set up a male
menage a trois
at York House, a large apartment in St James's Palace. David and Dickie were suspected of being lovers, and George later enjoyed an affair with one of Dickie's close friends, Noel Coward. David's favourite pastime was knitting. 'They were all genuinely bisexual - it's only in the late twentieth century that if you go to bed with a man you're gay,' said the royal historian. 'The norm among upper class English men is that they swing both ways.'

The tour was also intended to separate David from Freda Dudley Ward, one of the married women he preferred over available single girls of his own class. To adoring royalists, however, the Prince of Wales was the world's most eligible bachelor, a brave, attractive, intelligent young soldier who would one day make a fine king.

Like his brothers, he had suffered at the hands of the drunken father he so desperately wanted to impress. George V inspected his sons as if they were midshipmen on the quarterdeck, ordering pockets to be sown up if a young hand strayed from its proper place. One reason Bertie stammered so badly was that he had been forced to switch from writing with his left hand to his right. David, however, did not lack self-confidence. He was progressive and, for a while, seemed blessed with a social conscience.

As he disembarked in San Diego, he knew nothing of Wallis's existence, and her girlish dream of meeting her Prince eluded her in the most hurtful way. She and her husband were deliberately excluded from any of the social events the Prince attended with top brass and local dignitaries. Consigned to the fringes, Wallis blamed Win, and she was probably right. His boorish, drunken behaviour had alienated even the most tolerant of his commanding officers. Wallis could only glimpse Edward, cool and shining in neatly-pressed tropical whites, as he shook hands with distinguished guests at a mayoral ball at the Hotel Coronado. Only a dozen paces separated them but, cordoned off as she was and craning to see over the heads of the excited throng, he was as untouchable and unavailable as ever. The Prince departed early, and Wallis noted the gossip that he spent the rest of the night in the anything-goes nightspots of Tijuana.

A few weeks later, a meeting of great significance to Wallis took place in the heart of London society. It would, ultimately, shape the destiny of Britain's modern monarchy and cause her years of grief. The Season was recovering its momentum after the austerity of war and, during a dance given by Lord and Lady Farquhar at 7 Grosvenor Square, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was formally introduced to Prince Albert. Royal sentimentalists claimed that the two had met as children when five-year-old Elizabeth, noticing how shy the King's grandson was, had fed him the crystallised cherries off her sugar cake.

In Mayfair, Bertie was much taken by the exquisite young debutante on his arm and was soon writing to his mother: 'The more I see of her, the more I like her.' But she turned him down twice, only accepting his proposal a year later after he took her for a walk in her favourite woods near her family's country house in Hertfordshire. The Duke and Duchess of York, as they became, were married at Westminster Abbey on 23 April, 1923.

Wallis visited England for the first time soon after the Yorks returned to London from their honeymoon at Glamis Castle. Devouring the Court Circular in
The Times,
she read that Elizabeth had made her first appearance as a member of the Royal Family. Unmissable in pictures of the occasion, an RAF pageant at Hendon airfield, was the young Duchess's smile, the famous bow-lipped beam that would become her trademark. One day Wallis would refer to her, insultingly, as 'Cookie'.

More interesting to Wallis was the latest news about the peripatetic Prince of Wales, who was making a second visit to Canada as part of his global tour of Britain's imperial possessions. None of the newspaper reports mentioned anything about the high jinks the Prince and his companions got up to on this trip or on his previous journey to the Southern Hemisphere. During a dinner party in Australia, for example, the Prince's Chief of Staff, Admiral Sir Lionel Halsey, decided to dress up in a skirt and pinafore. As spirits rose, blankets, mattresses and squeezed oranges were thrown around the house and water drenched the weeping hostess's valuable oriental carpet. At other parties, David stripped the trousers off a Guards officer, rode around the room in a pram at breakneck speed and threw pillows like rugby balls until they split open. His favourite party piece was to entertain the ladies by drawing pigs on a piece of paper while his eyes were shut. All these events were recorded in the
Diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten 1920-1922.
it is very difficult to keep David cheerful,' sighed Lord Louis.

The Prince was still completely out of reach, but Wallis had at least touched base with his world of sombre, grey palaces, archly gothic hotels and quaint customs. She now understood the English a little better. She was unimpressed. She was, however, intrigued by a notable social reform, the Matrimonial Causes Act, under which women could divorce their husbands for adultery. This enlightened piece of legislation, which she would need to draw upon one day, gave her cause to examine her own mockery of a marriage. Win was often unfaithful, sometimes deserting her for other men. Her pride wounded, Wallis developed the severe, angular appearance which, along with her striking violet-blue eyes, became her own trademark. She resolved to use her husband's naval contacts to further herself, certain of only one thing: she wasn't going to end up a loser like him.

When Win was posted to gunboat patrol duty in the South China Seas, Wallis seized her chance. She joined him in Hong Kong, where he took her to one of the Crown Colony's singing houses, a high-class brothel in Repulse Bay. It was there, and later in Shanghai, that the future Duchess of Windsor learned the skills for which she became notorious. Entranced, she observed prostitutes beguiling their rich, over-fed and often drugged clients with the art of oriental love-making. Wallis took part in threesomes and studied the techniques.

It was through this experience that she was later to gain her sexual hold over Edward. For good reason, the Duchess referred to him by the unkind pet name of 'Little Man'. 'The royal surgeon who examined him told me his penis was so small he couldn't have normal sexual relations,' said the royal medical source. 'Wallis Simpson had learned a prostitute's trick when she worked in a Chinese brothel. She placed allum, a mineral used in tanning hides, in her vagina to make it tight. She was the first woman Edward could make love to in the normal way and it gave her enormous power.'

The China Report, which was compiled by the British secret service after King George V exclaimed: 'Who
is
this woman?' in 1935, revealed that Wallis indulged in what were called 'perverse practices' in these luxurious establishments during 1924-25. 'They (the prostitutes) were known as the Fang Yung dispensers, adept in techniques in which the woman induced her male partner into deep relaxation through massage over every part of the body, using the tips of the fingers,' recorded royal author John Parker. 'By this method, prolonged sexual arousement of the male is achieved.'