The American Duchess. Anna Pasternak

lingerie boutique off Berkeley Square in London in the mid-1930s, recalled that when Wallis shopped, ‘she knew exactly what she wanted’. One day, in autumn 1936, just before the king’s abdication, Wallis ordered three exquisite nightgowns to be made in three weeks. ‘First, there was one in white satin copied from Vionnet, all on the bias, that you just pulled down over your head,’ said Vreeland. ‘Then there was one I’d bought the original of in Paris from a marvellous Russian woman. The whole neck of this nightgown was made of petals, which was too extraordinary, because they were put in on the bias, and when you moved they rippled. Then the third nightgown was a wonderful pale blue crêpe de Chine.’

      Years after the abdication, Elsa Maxwell asked Wallis why she devoted so much time and attention to her clothes. Was it not a frivolous pursuit when she had so many other responsibilities and her extravagance merely invited criticism? Wallis replied candidly: ‘My husband gave up everything for me. I’m not a beautiful woman. I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is to try and dress better than anyone else. If everyone looks at me when I enter a room, my husband can feel proud of me. That’s my chief responsibility.’

‘Wallis was a much more artistic creature than people thought,’ said Nicky Haslam. ‘She liked beautiful things and had a keen eye.’ Haslam, who worked on American Vogue in the 1960s, was introduced to Wallis in New York by the magazine’s social editor, Margaret Case. ‘We were seated at a booth at the back of the Colony restaurant in New York, on the best banquette, and in walked the duchess,’ he recalled. ‘Every single head turned to look at her and cutlery literally dropped. She was wearing an impossibly wide pink angora Chanel tweed with a black grosgrain bow at her nape. At the end of a wonderful lunch, she took a discreet peek at her watch, which was tied to her bag on a delicate chain. It was Fulco Verdura* who told her that it was common for women to wear a watch.’

      Having the sartorial edge hugely increased Wallis’s confidence. Of her first meeting with the Prince of Wales at Melton Mowbray, she said her clothes would give her ‘the added assurance that came from the knowledge that in the dress was a little white satin label bearing the word Molyneux’.

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      It was her sister-in-law, Maud, who suggested that Wallis should be presented at court on 10 June 1931. Ernest Simpson’s rank as a captain with the Coldstream Guards gave him the requisite social status, but Wallis was reluctant to go. Once again, as for her debutante ball in her youth, she did not have the funds to buy the splendid clothes the occasion demanded. However, Wallis’s friends persuaded her that she would be foolish to turn down the generous offer of her girlfriend, Mildred Andersen, to present her. ‘Determined to get through the ceremony in the most economical manner,’ she wore the dress that Connie Thaw herself had worn to be presented, while Thelma Furness lent her the train, feathers and fan. She treated herself to a large aquamarine cross and white kid three-quarter-length gloves, writing to her Aunt Bessie that her aquamarine jewellery looked ‘really lovely on the white dress’.

      Of the magnificent pageantry of the event, what impressed Wallis ‘to the point of awe’ was the grandeur that invested King George V and Queen Mary, sitting side by side in full regalia on identical gilt thrones on their red dais. Standing behind the two thrones were the Prince of Wales and his great-uncle, the Duke of Connaught. Ernest Simpson, in his uniform of the Coldstream Guards, looked on proudly as Wallis and Mildred performed deep curtsies to the sovereign, then to the queen. The Prince of Wales later recalled of Wallis: ‘When her turn came to curtsey, first to my father and then to my mother, I was struck by the grace of her carriage and the natural dignity of her movements.’ After the ceremony, Wallis was standing with Ernest in the adjoining state apartment, in the front row, watching as the king and queen walked slowly by, followed by other members of the royal family. As the Prince of Wales passed her, Wallis overheard him say to his uncle: ‘Uncle Arthur, something ought to be done about the lights. They make all the women look ghastly.’

      That evening, at a party hosted by Thelma Furness, Wallis met the Prince of Wales again. Over a glass of champagne, he complimented Wallis on her gown. ‘“But, Sir,” she responded with a straight face, “I understood that you thought we all looked ghastly.”’ The prince ‘was startled’, Wallis noted with some satisfaction. ‘Then he smiled. “I had no idea my voice carried so far”.’

      The prince was captivated. No British woman would have dreamed of speaking to him in such a direct and provocative way. ‘In character, Wallis was, and still remains, complex and elusive,’ he wrote of that encounter. ‘From the first I looked upon her as the most independent woman I had ever met.’

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      Prince Edward was born on 23 June 1894 at White Lodge, Richmond Park, the home of his parents, the Duke and Duchess of York. An extraordinary prophecy was made about the great-grandson and godson of Queen Victoria, the queen then aged seventy-five and in the fifty-seventh year of her reign. The socialist pioneer Keir Hardie rose in the House of Commons to shatter the polite rejoicing about the royal birth. Instead, he hollered: ‘This boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation … in due course … he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and the end of it all will be that the country will be called upon to pay the bill.’ As a predictor of Edward’s royal destiny, the Scot proved uncannily prescient.

      Baptised by the Archbishop of Canterbury from a golden bowl of holy water from the River Jordan, in the presence of Queen Victoria, ‘David’, as his family always called him, would experience a strict, unhappy and largely loveless childhood. His mother showed little maternal warmth to her six children. While her husband, who in 1910 became King George V, was even more severe. A dogged disciplinarian, with rigid rules on dress and protocol, he ensured that any errant childish behaviour was bullied and beaten out of his offspring. ‘My father was the most terrible father, most terrible father you can imagine,’ Edward’s brother, Prince Henry, later said. ‘He believed in God, in the invincibility of the Royal Navy, and the essential rightness of whatever was British,’ said Edward. Handwritten on his father’s desk were the words that Edward was made to memorise as a young boy: ‘I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.’ These were the lines of an early nineteenth-century American Quaker, Stephen Grellet.

      As a sense of duty and responsibility cleaved through every aspect of his royal bearing, the Duke of York made Edward fully aware of the influence of his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Her children and grandchildren ruled the courts of Europe. Her eldest daughter, Victoria, was the Dowager Empress of Germany; Kaiser Wilhelm II was the queen’s grandson, and the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, was her grandson by marriage. The empire over which Queen Victoria ruled was the most powerful in the world; it embraced a quarter of the earth’s surface and nearly a quarter of its population. On her death in 1901, this empire passed to her eldest son Edward VII and then to George. An empire Edward VIII would inherit, albeit briefly.

      As Edward later wrote of his childhood: ‘For better or worse, royalty is excluded from the more settled forms of domesticity … The mere circumstances of my father’s position interposed an impalpable barrier that inhibited the closer continuing intimacy of conventional family life.’ Despite having five siblings, and being particularly close to Bertie and later, George, his younger brother by eight years, Edward recalled that: ‘We were lonely in a curious way.’ Denied association with other children their own age and home-educated by uninspiring tutors, behind the turreted facades of the royal households, there was emotional sterility. ‘Christmas at Sandringham,’ Edward reflected, ‘was Dickens in a Cartier setting.’ The writer James Pope-Hennessy described Sandringham as ‘a hideous house with a horrible atmosphere in parts, and in others no atmosphere at all. It was like a visit to a morgue.’ The Hon. Margaret Wyndham, who served as Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Mary from 1938, recalled: ‘At Sandringham if the king were present they put on Garter ribbons, tiaras and diamonds for every family dinner even without guests.’