EDWARD AND WALLIS - PART 2 As I read on in utter amazement at the intimate tone of these 15 unpublished letters, written to a man she was supposed to hate, I discovered a desperately unhappy woman terrified of being physically attacked – she was receiving alarming letters threatening her life, including bomb warnings – and full of anxiety about her future. Another letter to Ernest dated November 30 1936, a day full of portent as Crystal Palace burned down, outlined her determination to escape the country, “perhaps for ever” if she could. She knew she would have to lie to the King about where she was going (“Telling him the old search for hats’ story”), as he had threatened suicide if she left him. But remaining in England, where she had been dubbed by some “the Yankee Harlot”, was intolerable. Even Prime Minister Baldwin, who had urged Edward to keep Wallis as a mistress (just not to marry her), thought there was a real danger of her being attacked. Soon after this, Wallis did leave the country – for France – but only because the King had sent her away for her own safety, not for the total escape she craved. Even then her letters to Ernest continued.She apologises to Ernest for not buying him a Christmas present as she cannot escape from her “prison”. Following their divorce in May 1937, Wallis continued writing to Ernest – even on her honeymoon from Schloss Wasserleonburg in Austria, telling him: “I think of us so much though I try not to.” There is also a letter to Ernest from her famous trip to Germany, where she shook hands with Hitler. “Wherever you are, you can be sure that never a day goes by without some hours’ thought of you,” she writes, reassuring her former husband that he is in her “eanum” prayers at night. Eanum was a word used by Wallis and Edward, part of their invented lovers’ language. Yet the fact that Wallis used it to Ernest, along with the reference they both used to the King as “Peter Pan”, indicates that they discussed and privately ridiculed the King’s childish behaviour. After two hours of scribbling, I was in another world. Suddenly, I had heard the real voice of my subject, not the one that politicians or the royal family wished the public to hear. She was not necessarily any nicer, but she was much easier to understand as a flawed individual who had made a terrible mistake. Wallis and Ernest had met in New York in 1927 while Wallis was waiting for her divorce to come through from her first husband, Lt Win Spencer, a US naval pilot. Ernest, although married at the time with a young daughter, was instantly smitten. Wallis didn’t feel passionately about him but agreed to the marriage, which took place the following year, because, at 32, she was no longer young and he was, as she pointed out to her mother, kind and good-looking.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 13:07:58 +0000
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