If there is one thing that Paul French’s forthcoming book Her Lotus Year should put right about Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, it is that her so-called ‘lotus year’ in China in the 1920s was not the sexual bacchanal that it has been painted as by the prurient and the envious. Instead it was a formative – if exotic – experience that helped shape her into the woman she became. Yet rumours of Wallis’s outré behaviour have been common currency for the past century. Even French’s finely researched publication is unlikely to dispel our fascination with the so-called ‘China dossier’, an apocryphal account of all the wrongdoings that the Duchess got up to, years before she met the future Edward VIII.
Wallis knew that she would always be a scarlet woman as far as the world was concerned
It has become shorthand for the historically illiterate and lazy to compare Wallis to Meghan Markle on the grounds that both were American, married a member of the royal family, and apparently precipitated their spouses’ departure from British society as a result. Yet there is a crucial difference between the two. The Duchess of Sussex does not so much thrive on attention as glut herself on it, with every new initiative vying with the one before to demand headlines, discussion and publicity. The reason for her being so widely disliked is not because she is American, or seen as an arriviste: it is that the world has observed who she is, and made up its own mind.
Wallis, however, was an altogether different case. While the man she married was a truly dismal specimen – petty, vindictive, spoilt, arrogant and pathetic, to use but a few of the kinder labels that he merited – Wallis was considerably more intelligent and self-aware. She was lambasted in the press for her greed and entitlement, and it is undeniably true that she had a penchant for expensive clothing and jewellery that required a literal king to keep her in the style to which she had very quickly become accustomed. Yet this is true of countless royal mistresses through the ages, and none have become as notorious as the woman who eventually became Edward’s wife. Few of them had the descriptions thrown at her that she has suffered – everything from a gold-digging Jezebel to a hermaphrodite.
Wallis could be her own worst enemy at times. Reading through her correspondence with Edward for my most recent book, Power and Glory, there is a keen appreciation of money and status that many would find distasteful, even grasping. But there is also a keen wit that makes her seem a distinctly contemporary and sympathetic figure. I especially enjoy her euphemism for drunkenness – ‘feeling no pain’ – which is worthy of her contemporary Dorothy Parker.
The accusation that she was responsible for Edward abdicating the throne, and thereby precipitating a constitutional crisis, is deeply unfair. Letters and documents exist that prove that she was desperate not to bring about such a situation, and indeed offered to end her relationship with the King for good in order to avert disaster. Yet he was so obsessed by her that he informed her that ‘of course, you can do whatever you wish. You can go wherever you want – to China, Labrador, or the South Seas. But wherever you go, I will follow you’.
She was trapped, and spent the rest of her life as an adornment to her notorious husband, smiling through gritted teeth as she was snubbed by the British aristocracy. Edward spent years trying, and failing, to get her the title of ‘Her Royal Highness’ that he craved for her, but she was never as concerned about this bauble as he was. Instead, Wallis knew that she would always be a scarlet woman as far as the world was concerned. She made the best of the situation, even down to composing a self-justifying memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons, in which she attempted to set out her side of the story. Millions read it, and few were convinced.
Wallis Simpson will always be shorthand for a certain kind of woman – a grasping, manipulative and sexually dominant figure who men castigate in public and fantasise about behind closed doors. But this is a reductive reading of a fascinating and unfairly maligned figure. Misogyny has played a large part in her dismissal by society, and while her repellent husband has not had the kicking he so richly deserves, she has been tarred, feathered and hung out to dry. A century on from her ‘lotus year’, it is time to reassess Wallis not as a wicked temptress but as an intelligent, ambitious woman who found herself caught in an impossible situation. Unfortunately, legends die hard, and so do reputations – even unfair ones.
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