The American Duchess. Anna Pasternak

Belvedere, is regarded as a high honour. Many of the members of what is known in New York as the “international set” are accepted in London, and shuttle back and forth between England and America.’

      During the summer of 1932, Wallis, who suffered from a physically nervous disposition – she felt her stresses in her stomach – had to return from a much anticipated trip to France and Austria with Ernest, due to a stomach ulcer. She later wrote: ‘I suppose that the ulcer came from nerves, as I always kept the day-to-day tensions of living bottled up inside me.’ Beneath her confident, sharp-shooting facade, Wallis nursed a frailty she was at literal pains to conceal. That autumn, Wallis and Ernest were twice invited to the Fort; once for tea and once for the weekend. By December, Wallis was in bed again as her stomach problems had flared up, in spite of careful attention to her diet. Her doctor advised her to drink only whisky or water for six months.

From early 1933, the Simpsons received more frequent invitations to the Fort. Wallis wrote to Aunt Bessie from Belvedere on Sunday 29 January. ‘It is cold for England now and since arriving here we have been skating out on the water with the Duke and Duchess of York.† Isn’t it a scream! Also you can imagine me out on the ice but due to having roller skated I have not been too bad. The Prince presented T[helma] and self with skates etc.’

      Wallis’s bond with Thelma was strengthening. She wrote to Mary Kirk: ‘A friend of mine, Thelma Furness, is the Prince of Wales’s girl and I chaperone her when she goes out to Fort Belvedere to stay with him.’ Wallis described her surprise when Thelma arrived to drive her to the Fort, with long struts strapped to the side of the car. Thelma ‘just laughed and said that I would find out later’. It was after dinner that she found out. ‘The three of us came into the sitting room for coffee. On either side of the fireplace, where a grand fire was blazing, stood a comfortable chair and beside each chair stood something that looked like an artist’s easel. When I went closer and looked I found that each of these held a canvas on which was an unfinished piece of embroidery. When we had finished our coffee Thelma and the prince settled themselves down to work and I, sitting between them, was asked to read from a book Thelma handed me.’

      Thelma encouraged the prince’s love of petit point. His first solo effort was a paperweight which he made for Queen Mary. It depicted the royal crown above her initials, ‘M. R.’, in gold. The prince had it mounted on a silver base and when finished, it was beautiful. He then progressed to sewing a backgammon table cover for Thelma.

      The prince had a thoughtful, generous side. Every Christmas he bought all the staff at York House and the Fort a Christmas present. This meant buying and wrapping many hundreds of gifts. An eccentricity of his was to involve all his weekend guests during the run-up to Christmas in sessions of after-dinner wrapping. ‘All the guests became an informal task force,’ recalled Thelma. ‘Scissors, paper, ribbon, string were issued to each and the production line started rolling. The prince got down on the floor with his paper and ribbon and manfully struggled through three or four parcels. The results were hardly reassuring; the corners sagged ominously and the ribbons were apparently tied with some sort of knot he had learned to use in securing hawsers during his naval days.’ Thelma tactfully suggested that he would be of the greatest help if he cut the paper for them and this became the prince’s special task. ‘I can still see the group sprawled on the floor: Prince George flourishing rolls of ribbon, Wallis Simpson keeping up an animated chatter from one corner, while Ernest stolidly ground out package after package with astonishing skill and artistry.’

      Wallis sailed for New York that March, 1933, thanks to a generous cheque for $500 from Aunt Bessie. When Wallis received it the previous December, she had written immediately to her aunt from Knole, where she and Ernest were weekending. ‘Dearest Aunt Bessie, I am staggered by the size of the cheque and have sensation of being a millionairess. You know you should not have sent it and I shall be killed by generosity! I have sworn I shall not pay a bill with it or buy anything for the flat as I have done with your other presents. This I shall invest in myself.’

      On this visit to America, Wallis was keen to tour, visiting old friends and family. Ernest was due to join her, as his business interests took him to New York, while Wallis would also see friends in Baltimore. The Mauretania had barely left the Isle of Wight in its wake when a messenger came dashing up with a radiogram. It was a bon voyage message from the prince, signed ‘Edward P’, wishing Wallis a safe crossing and speedy return. Word spread on the ship that Mrs Simpson had received a personal message from the Prince of Wales. ‘The attention was flattering,’ Wallis recalled. ‘I enjoyed every minute of it.’

      Wallis’s time in Washington coincided with the famous first ‘hundred days’ of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, when he presented a series of initiatives to Congress to counter the effects of the Great Depression, including the abandonment of the Gold Standard. Wallis’s mind was on other matters, however, and she made no reference in her letters to American politics. She returned to Europe in May aboard the RMS Olympic (Ernest met her at Cherbourg), and on the seventeenth wrote to Bessie, thanking her for her generosity. ‘Darling – What can I ever say to make you know how much I appreciate your giving me this marvellous trip and then a dress and coat besides? Maybe you realise that I am enough like my mother to be completely inadequate at expressing my feelings when I feel the most. I’m afraid I then generally joke the most. I love you better than anyone in the world and will always be on hand when you need me.’

      On her return from America, Wallis’s relationship with the Prince of Wales entered a new phase, despite Wallis writing to her aunt that ‘Thelma is still the Princess of Wales’. She and Ernest were accepted into the inner circle of the prince’s friends, mixing with his brothers, Prince George and the Duke of York. The Simpsons were regulars at the Fort, they accompanied Edward to nightclubs in London – he was an habitué of the Embassy Club on Bond Street – and the prince dined often at Bryanston Court. Ernest, a staunch monarchist and social climber, was proud of Wallis and the way she had been accepted into this rarefied crowd. He believed in deferential reverence to the Prince of Wales, initially basking in reflected glory at his wife’s burgeoning closeness to the future monarch, as William Dudley Ward had once done. ‘Ernest was initially delighted with Wallis’s royal foray,’ recalled Ernest’s nephew, Alex Kerr-Smiley. ‘He benefited from the royal connection. The Prince of Wales had some tweed especially woven. It was made into an overcoat for him. My great uncle admired it and the Prince of Wales said: “My dear chap, there is some tweed left over. You may have it.” Ernest had an identical overcoat made up and there is a rude family story saying that he actually swapped his wife for an overcoat.’

      Initially, though, Ernest refuted rumours that he was a cuckold. Ernest had applied for admission to a Masonic Lodge, presided over by Sir Maurice Jenks, a former Lord Mayor of London. His candidature was supported by the Prince of Wales. When Ernest was refused entry, Edward naturally demanded an explanation. The heir apparent was boldly told that it was against the Masonic law for the husband of his mistress to be admitted. The prince gave his word that this was not the situation and Ernest’s candidature was accepted. With Ernest’s entrée to the Masonic Lodge came introductions to a rich and influential coterie of friends.

      ‘The game of royal mistress, or the royal favourite, had its own set of rules and Ernest played his part,’ said John Julius Norwich. ‘Both Wallis and Ernest benefited from the arrangement.’ Of her association with the Prince of Wales – ‘a figure of popular legend and the quintessence of youthful charm’ – Wallis was ‘glad to be even a minor satellite in the company revolving around him’. Yet she, like her husband, misunderstood the prince’s growing admiration for her. ‘If the prince was in any way drawn to me I was unaware of his interest,’ she said. ‘Thelma was always there, and often Prince George, whom I found on closer acquaintance to be altogether as attractive as his brother. He played the piano very well, knew all the latest jazz, and loved to bang away at the keys while the rest of us danced after dinner in the octagonal hall.’

      Prince George was closest to Edward of all his siblings and had worried the heir to the throne considerably. After he left the navy, George took up residence in York House. Artistic and impressionable, he succumbed easily to