Duke and Duchess of Windsor (1894-1972) and (1895-1986)

[Russophile]

"A King's Story: The Memoirs of the Duke of Windsor"

Is a good place to start.

 

[scooter]

I just bought this book. I will let you know when I finish it!

 

[randomlyKeira]

I had never heard before that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were "exiled", was that official, self-inflicted, or unofficial in political sense?

I would imagine that in a way a self-inflicted exile would seem appropriet, they probably weren't the most loved people in the country after the abdication, but really couldn't imagine an official exile in modern times. The only place modernly that I've heard of an exile is in Monaco to Prince Rainier's nephew (I believe). But in England, where the monarchy seems to be walking on eggshells as to not be de-throned and are trying to seem as modern as possible, I just couldn't imagine it...

 

[Russophile]

From what I remember it was self-imposed, but Queen Mary didn't help matters any and neither did Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

 

[Elspeth]

I think it is very important not to underestimate the importance of his mother and his family in the scheme of things.

They made it clear that they did not consider David's lifestyle suitable for a King but that could have changed, indeed would have changed, had he become King. Wallis however was not negotiable. They saw her as immoral, licentious and totally unfit to become Queen, more importantly, there existed a deeply held loathing on the part of the royals, and total comtempt on the part of Wallis.

There was something very personal about it. The Duchess of York and Wallis didn't get along. Queen Mary's dislike was more along the lines of duty and sacrifice; the Duchess's dislike had a strong personal element. I think it's terrible that she was allowed to indulge this vindictiveness till practically the end of Wallis's life and then pretend to be friendly with her when it was too late to make any difference, but that's another matter.

The King and Queen and the York family were all practicing christians who believed in honour and duty. David's entire lifestyle was anathema to them. Wallis was the last straw. An immoral soon to be twice divorced woman whose infidelities were well known to the King and Queen, as were David's and her political views.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy the "practising Christian" stuff. The Duchess of York didn't have any problems with Thelma Furness - a divorced and remarried woman - being David's mistress; in fact they apparently got along quite well. A genuine practising Christian wouldn't have been any happier about that than about his relationship with Wallis. It was partly personal dislike and partly the notion that while someone like Wallis was mistress material she wasn't wife material. David was actually trying to do the honest thing, and he was being told that he should find a suitable wife and keep Wallis as a mistress. Not really practising-Christian standards, unless I'm missing something.

Think about it. The Prince of Wales set was exciting, dashing, romantic and risque. The Yorks were playing happy families and enjoying it. The chasm between the two lifestyles was really too wide to be bridged.

I have thought about it.

Imho David believed he could have it all. But when push came to shove he knew he could never be King with Wallis and without the help and support of his family. That being the case he threatened to abdicate. I don't think he thought for a moment that they would agree. After all abdication was just not to be thought of and he believed they would relent and let him have it all. Sort of like holding your breath until you turn blue.

Oh, I don't know. If it's true that he really didn't want to be King, he might not have been that bothered about abdication. All through his marriage he was mostly concerned about Wallis's status, not his own.

IMHO the POW was an overindulged libertine whose past caught up with him big time. Instead of showing backbone he bottled out.

Britain and the Commonweath are the better for it.

That's probably true, although I don't think he's the only one at fault.

 

[Elspeth]

I had never heard before that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were "exiled", was that official, self-inflicted, or unofficial in political sense?

It was unofficial and it apparently wasn't made clear to David that his exile would be permanent although the King and his private secretaries were writing to each other very early on along the lines that David must never be allowed to come back.

Legally they couldn't have stopped him coming back, but he refused to return while his wife was cold-shouldered by the royal family, and the royal family made it clear they were never going to accept her. There was also the matter of an annual payment being made to him by the King (and also I believe continued at some level by the Queen after she took the throne); I think it was made plain to him that if he tried to move back to England, the payments would stop. I'd have to look that up, though.

So it was really a case of making it impossible for him to do anything but stay away and then claim that it was voluntary on his part.

 

[randomlyKeira]

Wow. Thank you for that information. I never could have imagined something like that. And people say that Royalty isn't sophisticated anymore...

 

[branchg]

So I wonder if the queen could leave Sandringham to Edward or Anne if she wanted to?

I doubt it. After the precedent of the Abdication, it's likely the properties were put into a special trust that states only The Sovereign can own them.

So, in other words, the King is dead, long live the King. If you abdicate or are removed from the throne by Parliament, the properties immediately pass to the new Sovereign.

 

[iowabelle]

I absolutely agree. He could surely have fallen in love with someone more suitable? He and Prince Charles are extremely selfish.

Attaining Grace
bookaddiction

I don't know that you can make yourself fall in love with a certain kind of person, but PoW/Windsor certainly had plenty of opportunities to meet appropriate royals/aristocrats -- and he always attached himself to married women of the kind that Queen Mary could not have approved. I think he was a disaster waiting to happen ... and he had only 2 other choices, live alone or live quietly with a mistress. IMO he wasn't capable of self-sacrifice.

 

[randomlyKeira]

Wow. In my personal opinion, Royals have been sacrificing true love since the institution was founded, so it would have been easy to forgo love and mary another royal to please the country, but I think that doing what he did was probably very hard, true, selfish, but imagine what it must have been like to know that you were deserting your entire family, and that the possibility that your actions could throw your country into revolution. I may be more sensitive than david was, but I personally would not have been able to deal with that guilt, nor with the fact that I had given up my entire life to serve people I didn't even know. For someone without a strong mind, the pressure of sacrificing your entire life could lead to many things, mental breakdown is one, and I think that he saw Wallis as his way out of his one-track life. Anyone told from the time that they're born that they must act a certain way, and that they could ever only have this precise job could feel very trapped, and IMHO I think that even if he did love Wallis, she was his freedom from that life...

 

[Russophile]

IMO, it's been changing.

 

[LadyCat]

Wow. In my personal opinion, Royals have been sacrificing true love since the institution was founded....

Well not quite that long. Albert and Queen Victoria wanted their children to find royal spouses, and in most cases this happened with the exception of Princess Louise (IIRC), but they also wanted their children to have love matches.

Cat

 

[Russophile]

Indeed! I'm reading Christopher Warwick's: Ella, and it talks about Princess Alice and Prince Louis being a love match, though it was difficult for Alice she being far superior intellectually.

 

[Elspeth]

They could have been warned by the example of Austrian emperor Ferdinand I. and his nephew Franz Joseph I. When Ferdinand abdicated he accepted that there could not be two emperors in Vienna and moved to Prague but he kept the complete private possessions of the Head of the House of Habsburg, as he had inherited it personally from his father on emperor Franz's death.
So for the first years of his reign Franz Joseph was rather poor and had really difficulties fulfilling his wife Sisi's wishes for horses, estates and jewellery. When his uncle died (but he lived long!), the dire straits ended because Ferdinand left the wealth to Franz Joseph.

On his death in 1916, Franz Joseph left part of this wealth to his two daughters and to his granddaughter by crown prince Rudolf. Archduchess Elisabeth had left the Imperial House on her marriage to a mere prince, her aunt Archduchess Gisela had married a Bavarian prince and her other aunt Archduchess Valerie signed the resignation from the Imperial House in 1920, so all three could keep their estates in Austria (including the Kaiservilla in Ischl). While the new reigning branch of Karl and Otto started rather poor and lost the rest of it after WWI....

So I wonder if the queen could leave Sandringham to Edward or Anne if she wanted to?

It's possible, but there'd be some fairly hefty taxes to pay. Leaving even personal property to the next monarch avoids estate taxes.

 

[Elspeth]

I don't know that you can make yourself fall in love with a certain kind of person, but PoW/Windsor certainly had plenty of opportunities to meet appropriate royals/aristocrats -- and he always attached himself to married women of the kind that Queen Mary could not have approved. I think he was a disaster waiting to happen ... and he had only 2 other choices, live alone or live quietly with a mistress. IMO he wasn't capable of self-sacrifice.

I think this is why it was always tacitly understood that royals could also have mistresses, because historically they weren't necessarily expected to get along with their wives as people, just to marry the person picked out by the monarch for them and produce children. The mistresses were for companionship because they didn't get that from their wives. David didn't seem to want to go along with the idea, and in his defence, there really weren't any reasons to insist on dynastic matches at that time in history.

 

[Moonmaiden23]

MARG...take a bow!! You sure laid it all out there, and I don't disagree with a single word! This tactic of threatening not to do your duty if you don't get your way with your choice of bride has been taken up by a couple of modern
day Crown Princes-whom I won't name here. Suffice it to say I think this is very selfish and short sighted behavior, and I am soooo happy the Royal Family and the Establishment did not cave to David's demands.

George VI was a great wartime King and a blessing to the Commonwealth, IMO.

 

[Moonmaiden23]

I have just finished a biography of Diana Mosley and I had no idea that she had done a biography of the DoW but I am not surprised. Diana and her odious husband Sir Oswald Mosley were great admirers of Adolf Hitler as were the Duke and Duchess. So they did have THAT in common.

 

[Amelia]

The late Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, has not been deemed worthy of a commemorative blue plaque on her former London home.English Heritage, the government agency that runs the blue plaque scheme, has rejected the plan because of controversial and unproved allegations that she had a secret affair with Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's ambassador to London, and gave him details of British troop movements.

Mrs Simpson not worthy of blue plaque - Telegraph

 

[Menarue]

I have just finished a biography of Diana Mosley and I had no idea that she had done a biography of the DoW but I am not surprised. Diana and her odious husband Sir Oswald Mosley were great admirers of Adolf Hitler as were the Duke and Duchess. So they did have THAT in common.

The Duke of Windsor wanted to improve the plight of the miners, when he was promising them that he would do this he was already planning to abdicate and must have known he could never do anything. At the same time he was buying immense jewellery for Wallis and cutting down on his staff´s wages. He spent his whole life "crying the poor mouth" and spending a fortune on his and his wife´s frivolous life.

 

[Moonmaiden23]

I always wondered how the Duke was able to afford the Duchess's spectacular jewellry collection and wardrobe if he was as hard up as he was always claiming to be...the auction held after Wallis's death revealed some trinkets worthy of Ali Baba's treasure cove.

Also that magnificent mansion they kept in France-was it the Bois de Boulogne?" and the servants and the lavish lifestyle...their parties and style of entertaining are the stuff of legend.

I want to be a POOR PERSON like that!!

 

[Elspeth]

Mrs Simpson not worthy of blue plaque - Telegraph

Oh, wonderful. Denying something on the basis of unproved allegations. Sigh.

 

[Russophile]

Also that magnificent mansion they kept in France-was it the Bois de Boulogne?" and the servants and the lavish lifestyle...their parties and style of entertaining are the stuff of legend.

If I remember correctly, the mansion was a grace and favor place by the country of France which is why Wallis left the money from the sale of her gorgeous collection to the Pasteur institute.

 

[branchg]

Many of the jewels he acquired were paid for when he was still King and had access to the revenues from the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall. He also possessed a substantial private fortune (about $30 million in today's dollars) from years of being the heir and Duke of Cornwall.

After the Abdication, The Duke wisely invested his fortune with the help of very savvy American friends, which also paid off quite well. He also earned substantial sums of money from his memoirs, as did The Duchess a few years later.

However, in The Duke's final years, their spending caught up with them and by the time he died in 1972, his fortune was said to be much diminished to about $2 million. The Duchess sold The Mill about a year after his death for $1 million, so she had a reasonable amount of liquid assets as a widow.

As The Duchess aged and became sicker, her medical bills and the cost of her household became very expensive and eventually she ran out of money. Maitre Blum quietly sold items from the mansion to raise cash until The Queen contacted her around 1980 to tell her she would take care of the finances.

 

[MARG]

The Duke of Windsor wanted to improve the plight of the miners, when he was promising them that he would do this he was already planning to abdicate and must have known he could never do anything. At the same time he was buying immense jewellery for Wallis and cutting down on his staff´s wages. He spent his whole life "crying the poor mouth" and spending a fortune on his and his wife´s frivolous life.

It seems that the Duke of Winsor was a hollow man. He calculatedly courted the simpathy of his subjects, e.g. sympathising with the plight of the miners. The fact that he neither would nor could do anything for them was irrelevant. They were merely pawns, his perceived loyal subject to whom he could fall back on if necessary. Frankly his overall style was dishonourable. His sole focus was himself and Wallis and he had no scruples about lying to his family about his accumulated fortune and ripping off both his Brother and his Country over the sale of properties that were implicitly the property of the King of England and securing an obscenely large allowance to compensate for his "poverty".

How absolutely ghastly for the BRF when they found the depth of his deceit and dishonesty, remembering that in that age the concept of honour really meant something (in a way that we, today, yearn for), and David had displayed a degree of moral bankruptcy previously unheard of and yet we ascribe the antipathy that the BRF regarded him as unwarranted.

The Queen Mother and even the Queen herself have been accused of vindictiveness at worst and pettyness at best in their dealings with the Windsors. However, with the Windsor's track record of lying about their finances, it is little wonder that the Queen only came to the Duchess' aid over medical bills when it was proved that she had no money left.

The fact that the Winsors had managed to sqaunder such an amazing fortune on self-indulgence would not have generated much sympathy within the BRF. The feeling of utter betrayal on all levels must have made the King, Queen Mother, and Queen Elizabeth more than a little bitter. The important thing to note is that they did not make any of these matters public. Death, time and the declassification of information has provided the majority of factual "insight" that we regard this issue. The BRF held their peace and let the "public" think what they wanted to. Anything was preferable to exposing the shameful truth.

 

[Warren]

How absolutely ghastly for the BRF when they found the depth of his deceit and dishonesty... David had displayed a degree of moral bankruptcy...

So you're not a fan then Marg?

 

[Menarue]

I agree with all that is said about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, they were self indulgent spoiled do nothings. I have read every book, including their own biographies and I find that I most definitely dislike both of them. That said, I think they should have put a plaque at the door of Bryanston Court. She did make history and many people would like to look at "where it all started".

 

[MARG]

So you're not a fan then Marg?

Ya think?

 

[Jeniann]

The fact that they cited Michael Bloch to defend her only makes her look worse. Of course he's going to say she wasn't sleeping with von Ribbentrop; he thinks she died a virgin and was really a hermaphrodite! The guy is completely insane yet he considers himself the Windsor's chief "defender". I think if Wallis was alive to see some of the things he's written about her she'd tell him to shut up because he's really not helping.

 

[brandon]

Well stated comment.

Indeed it is, making the woman "Princess Consort" is giving her much more attention than she ever deserved. She should be Queen by common law at the very least, although they seem to pick and choose when it suits them of course and according to the personality involved, e.g., the Duchess of Windsor was denied her HRH that would otherwise be hers by the King's LP on the Duke's title. So just as Wallis should have been HRH, so should the Duchess of Cornwall be Queen just as any other wife of a king has the counterpart title, both by courtesy, custom and common law. Approbation, liking or anything else about the person involved should have nothing to do with it, just those three factors. Of course there is that saying someone mentioned in another thread on this topic recently about being careful about what you wish too hard for, and a lot more than just wishing was done in this instance.

 

[Monika_]

Brandon....

Interesting point about the Duchess of Windsor. I think that was one of the questions that arose when it was announced that Camilla would be styled 'HRH.'