King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

Amiens, gave him an excellent dinner with much wine, and entrusted him to the experienced hands of a French prostitute called Paulette. ‘She brushed aside his extraordinary shyness,’ recorded Lord Esher, to whom the Prince recounted a censored version of his experience.⁴ Paulette herself was permanently attached to an officer of the Royal Flying Corps and only on loan to the Prince for that and a few subsequent evenings, but she did her job with tact and skill. ‘A heavenly little woman of the kind,’ the Prince described her.⁵ From that moment, sex became one of the Prince’s most urgent preoccupations. ‘Oh! to set eyes on one of the darlings again,’ he wrote in anguish from the front in France, ‘how one does miss them, and I don’t think of anything but women now, tho what’s the use?’⁶ At Sandringham, in January 1917, they sang in the drawing room after dinner and the Prince then settled down to his crochet work. ‘What an occupation for a fellow on leave!!’ he complained in his diary. Shooting pheasants was as empty a pastime as patience or crocheting: ‘I can’t raise much enthusiasm over … anything except women!!’⁷

      His new pursuit sometimes proved hazardous. In Paris, in July 1917, he spent ‘3 days bliss’ which disturbed him so profoundly that he was quite unable to settle down and write letters for several days afterwards: ‘It’s fearful what a change in my habits 48 hours of the married life in Paris has wrought.’⁸ Unfortunately his inability to write letters did not extend to Maggy, the object of his passions, and when he tried to disentangle himself he found that his emotional effusions were held against him. ‘I got a regular stinker from her this evening …’ he ruefully told Joey Legh. ‘Oh! those bloody letters, and what a fool I was not to take your advice over a year ago!! How I curse myself now, tho’ if only I can square this case it will be the last one, as she’s the only pol I’ve really written to and the last!! … I’m afraid she’s the £100,000 or nothing type, tho’ I must say I’m disappointed and didn’t think she’d turn nasty: of course the whole trouble is my letters and she’s not burnt one!!’⁹ The Prince never lost his touching belief that if one asked a woman to burn a letter, she would infallibly do so. Some of his correspondents seem to have done so, more did not. Maggy, however, proved that he had been right in his first judgment of her; having given her delinquent lover a nasty fright she let the matter drop.

      Paulette and Maggy were excellent fun for a night or two. He was long in losing his taste for these diversions and planned to continue them once the war was over. But he did not delude himself that such affairs had anything to do with love, still less with matrimony. Until Mrs Simpson entered and monopolized his life he never found casual sex incompatible with a grand passion; indeed the first seemed sometimes positively to enhance the second. From the age of twenty-two or so until the day he died he was never out of love, occasionally with two women at the same time, far more often obsessively with one.

      His first great love, almost certainly unconsummated, was for Marion Coke, wife of Viscount ‘Tommy’ Coke, heir to the Earl of Leicester. Small and vivacious, fond of much laughter, song and dance, she provided a delectable relief after the sombre splendours of the Palace. At first it was ‘Marion is a little dear’, always ready for a ‘delightful talk’; then she became ‘a little darling and I’m afraid I love her’; then, ‘Marion is heavenly and I love her more and more’.¹⁰ In 1917, by which time he had discovered that women were not solely for delightful talks, he became more ardent. ‘Dear Lady Coke’ had long given way to ‘Dear Marion’, now she became ‘My dearest Marion’. (‘By the way, of course I burn all your letters as I’m sure you do mine,’ he concluded one such letter,¹¹ though Marion proved as unreliable as Maggy when it came to this searching test.) ‘How can I express to you all I feel about it or thank you for everything?’ he asked after his leave in London had proved particularly enjoyable. ‘C’est impossible, tho’ you know how much I long to and do in my thoughts. You have been too angelically kind to me for words and have absolutely changed my life; it is so wonderful to feel I have someone I can really confide in as you have let me do!! In your own words, “You now have your little M C” absolutely expresses my feelings and it does make all the difference as you may imagine.’¹²

      The 5th Earl of Leicester told Frances Donaldson that his father had once warned the Prince of Wales not to see so much of his wife.¹³ Certainly if Lady Coke had fallen in with the Prince’s lunatic scheme to join him and Claud Hamilton in Paris, her husband would have had good cause to complain. She was far too sensible, however. Twelve years older than the Prince, she knew that her role was principally that of confidante and comforter.

      When he visited Bombay some years later his equerry, Bruce Ogilvy, noted his failure to flirt with any of the half dozen attractive girls provided to entertain him, and wrote in his diary, ‘I think that what he liked was being “Mothered”.’¹⁴ ‘Liked’ is too weak a word, he craved for it, could hardly live without it. That a young man unable to establish a warm relationship with his own mother should seek a substitute elsewhere is so much a psychological cliché as to deserve to be treated with grave suspicion. At the end of the war he had in fact grown close to the Queen. But whether because of deprivation as a child or for some other reason, it was not enough. He looked for maternal qualities in every woman he knew well, and Marion Coke dutifully mothered him. She remained a prominent figure in his life until the advent of Freda Dudley Ward in the spring of 1918 drove all other women temporarily from his mind.

      She did not reign alone, however. The Prince of Wales, in the last years of war, came closer to marriage than he was to for another fifteen years. Even with the memory of his Parisian idyll fresh in his mind he wrote in his diary, ‘How I long for some leave to see Marion again and P!!!!’ Before he left London in May 1917 he bade ‘tender farewells’ to Lady Coke, and ‘fond farewells’ to P.¹⁵ P was Portia – Lady Sybil – Cadogan, one of the five daughters of Earl Cadogan. She was unlike most of the women he loved in that she was a large and clumsy girl; handsome rather than pretty, a powerful personality, as enthusiastic a dancer as Marion Coke but with less of her charm and spontaneous gaiety. She was a close friend of and later a maid of honour to Princess Mary and the Prince first got to know her at Windsor in the spring of 1915. They played golf together and talked endlessly; within a few days he was writing in his diary, ‘She was looking more lovely and attractive than ever and we had a delightful talk; I am really smitten now!!’¹⁶ They began to correspond (Portia Cadogan was one of those who seems to have heeded his injunction to burn his letters) and Princess Mary, who was delighted to act as go-between, sent her brother a signed photograph of his beloved. Prince Albert, who seems also to have been attracted by her,¹⁷ lent a hand in the romance as well. ‘I am enclosing a letter from the “Angel” Portia … ’ he wrote. ‘I am always going to forward her letters on to you now.’¹⁸

      The romance came to a peak early in 1916. While in London in January he contrived to see her most days and nights. On 5 January, after driving half a dozen times round St James’s Park and enjoying a protracted farewell at her house, he recorded that he had had ‘the best night I have had since the war began’. A fortnight later it was, without qualification, ‘the best night I have ever had’. They dined at the Carlton, went to a musical at the Gaiety, and then danced for two hours to the gramophone. ‘It was divine, particularly as I’m madly in love with her!! Oh, if only – But I must be careful even in a diary.’ A fortnight later again they ‘fixed up certain things’ and the following night the Prince returned surreptitiously to Portia’s house after formally dropping her off at the front door. ‘She let me in and we sat talking till after 1.30. What a joyous 2 hours alone with my “angel”. How the time did fly; we talked about every sort of thing; better not to mention what!! … What it is to be in love!!’¹⁹

      That matrimony was one of the ‘things’ discussed cannot be proved but seems more than likely. What happened then is hard to establish. The romance continued in full fury and even at the beginning of 1917 he could still remark that ‘it was wonderful to see HER again’. But on that same wonderful night he and Claud Hamilton dropped Portia off at her home at 12.30 and then went on to a party where Marion Coke was awaiting them: ‘I took sweet little Marion home and she bid me a tender farewell.’²⁰ Whether Portia Cadogan took offence at having to share her admirer’s