Wallis Simpson

1896 – 1986 · Generation XXXVI · Duchess of Windsor · House of Windsor

Bessie Wallis Warfield was born on 19 June 1896 at Blue Ridge Summit, a Pennsylvania resort just over the Maryland line, where her Baltimore parents, Teackle Wallis Warfield and Alice Montague, were spending the summer. Her father died of tuberculosis that November, and for years she and her mother lived on the charity of wealthier relatives, above all her father’s bachelor brother Solomon Davies Warfield. In time mother and daughter settled in a home of their own in Baltimore, and in 1908 her mother married John Freeman Rasin. Her uncle paid for her to attend Oldfields, the most expensive girls’ school in Maryland, and at some point in her youth she dropped the name Bessie.

In 1916 she married Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., a US Navy aviator she had met at Pensacola. He drank heavily, the couple separated more than once, and she spent over a year in China before they divorced in December 1927. By then she was involved with Ernest Simpson, an Anglo-American shipping executive and former Coldstream Guards officer, and they married at the Chelsea register office in London in July 1928. The Simpsons moved in fashionable society, and through Thelma, Viscountess Furness, then the mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales, Wallis was introduced to the prince in January 1931. In 1934 she displaced Lady Furness in his affections, and by the end of that year he was wholly devoted to her.

Edward became king on 20 January 1936, and it was quickly clear to the court and the government that he meant to marry her. The obstacles were formidable. The Church of England, of which the king was Supreme Governor, would not then remarry divorced people whose former spouses were alive, and the British and Dominion governments judged a twice-divorced woman unacceptable as queen. Wallis obtained a provisional divorce from Ernest Simpson in October 1936. Edward proposed a morganatic marriage, in which she would not become queen, but the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, and the prime ministers of Australia, Canada and South Africa rejected it. When the story broke in the British press in early December, Wallis fled to friends near Cannes and publicly offered to give Edward up. He would not accept it, and on 10 December 1936 he signed the Instrument of Abdication.

Edward, created Duke of Windsor by his brother George VI, married Wallis on 3 June 1937 at the Château de Candé in France. No member of his family attended, and letters patent denied her the style of Royal Highness that her husband kept, a slight she bitterly resented. Later in 1937 the couple visited Germany without the British government’s approval and met Hitler at the Berghof. Many people in government and society suspected the couple of Nazi sympathies, a suspicion that lasted through the war and beyond, and the visit tended to strengthen it. Wallis herself ridiculed the idea that she was a German agent. When France fell in 1940 they escaped through Spain to Portugal, and that August Edward took up the post of governor of the Bahamas. For five years Wallis was the governor’s consort in Nassau, where she was president of the local Red Cross, worked for infant welfare and helped to care for the survivors of ships sunk in the Caribbean.

After the war the Windsors settled in France, from 1952 in a house in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris lent by the city, and spent their time between Europe and the United States as fixtures of international society. In 1967 the couple joined them in London for the unveiling of a plaque to Queen Mary, and Elizabeth II visited them in Paris shortly before Edward died of throat cancer in 1972. Wallis lived on in the Paris house, increasingly frail and withdrawn, and died there on 24 April 1986, aged eighty-nine. After a funeral at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, attended by the Queen, she was buried beside Edward in the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore, near Windsor Castle. Her memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons, had appeared in 1956. The couple had no children.

Place in the family

• Wallis Simpson married King Edward VIII, an uncle of Queen Elizabeth II.

Images

• Wallis at six months old in the arms of her mother, Alice Montague Warfield, 1896 (Unknown photographer, public domain)
• The Duchess and Duke of Windsor with President Richard Nixon, April 1970 (White House Photo Office, public domain)

One of 53 people of House of Windsor (from 1917) in this archive. The present house — it renamed itself Windsor in 1917, setting aside the German title Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Read more on Wikipedia

Partners

• Married King Edward VIII (1894 – 1972) in 1937

Life

• 1896 — Born
• 1937 — Married Edward VIII
• 1986 — Died

Sources

1. Wallis Simpson · Wikipedia
2. Edward VIII (r. Jan–Dec 1936) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
3. Wallis Simpson · Encyclopaedia Britannica
4. Wallis Warfield Simpson: Baltimore’s Would-Be Queen · Maryland Center for History and Culture