The Peoples King by Susan Williams Read Free Book Online

private life, many Europeans and most Americans were fed endless (if not always accurate) snippets of news. So were Canadians, as many American newspapers were distributed across the border.
    In August 1936, readers of American newspapers (and of the British Cavalcade) gasped when they saw a photograph of the King and Wallis together on a little boat while on holiday in Yugoslavia. Wallis was tenderly touching Edward's left arm and he, in an open-necked sports shirt, leant towards her attentively. This was just one of many photographs suggesting an intimate friendship between Edward and Wallis. A woman from Edmonton in Canada told King Edward in a letter that 'When looking over the different portraits in the papers of you and your friend Mrs Simpson' she had been delighted by 'your million dollar smile with your friend on your Holiday.' 8
    The mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, who in 1936 was a twenty-four-year-old student at Princeton University, New Jersey, sent his mother in England some newspaper cuttings about Mrs Simpson. 'I don't suppose you have even heard of her,' he wrote, 'but some days it has been "front page stuff" here.' 9 Such reports never appeared in publications available in Britain. Wholesale distributors of foreign newspapers and magazines, said Deedes, were apprehensive of libel, because Mrs Simpson was still the wife of Ernest Simpson - 'They therefore cut or blacked out passages in overseas publications which could give offence.' 10 References to Wallis were so thoroughly censored that the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson rose in the House of Commons to ask why American papers and magazines arriving in England had so many paragraphs and pages clipped out.
    Wallis's background was markedly different from Edward's. She was born Bessie Wallis Warfield in 1896 in Blue Ridge Summit, Penn­sylvania, and grew up in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. The War-fields belonged to one of the oldest families in the state and were proud of being a Southern family - Wallis's grandmother was said to have possessed an undying hatred for anybody born north of the Mason- Dixon line. 11 Wallis was a striking Southern belle, with dark hair, a smooth creamy skin and huge brown eyes. She was of average height but very slim, which earned her the nickname 'Skinny'. 12 Her child­hood was a loving one, but it was made difficult by financial hardship. Her father had died just months before she was born, leaving her mother, Alice, struggling to make ends meet. Her uncle Saul, a well-off banker, often helped the family out, but her mother and her mother's sister, Mrs Bessie Merryman, found it necessary for a time to take paying guests into their home - a three-storey brownstone with a weather-beaten facade on Biddle Street in Baltimore. Wallis 'spent her youth in a boarding-house', reported the Los Angeles Times. 'Two men of lean pocketbooks rented rooms there by the week and had their meals at the family dinner table." 3
    When Alice married a man with some money, Wallis was sent in 1912 to an exclusive boarding school; but when her stepfather died the family fell once again on hard times, and she was brought home. Mrs Merryman - whom Wallis called 'Aunt Bessie' - was a constant and loving figure from Wallis's earliest years, and Edward was to describe her later as 'the wise and gentle woman who had raised her from childhood." 4
    In 1916 Wallis married Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer, Jr, a pilot in the US Navy who was known as 'Win'. She soon discovered that Win was prone to bouts of heavy drinking which led to brutal behaviour. Whole days might pass with him speaking barely a word to her, except to accuse her of being a flirt and ignoring him. He started to lock her up in a room while he went out. One afternoon, Wallis recounted,
    Win locked me in the bathroom of our apartment. For hours, I heard no sound from beyond the door. Whether Win had gone out or whether he was still in the apartment ... I could not tell. I tried to