Wallis Simpson - Third Marriage: Duchess of Windsor

Third Marriage: Duchess of Windsor

Wallis and Edward married one month later on 3 June 1937 at the Château de Candé, lent to them by French millionaire Charles Bedaux. The date would have been King George V's 72nd birthday; Queen Mary thought the wedding had been scheduled for then as a deliberate slight. No member of the British Royal Family attended. Wallis wore a "Wallis blue" Mainbocher wedding dress. Edward presented her with a stunning "Marriage Contract Bracelet" designed by Van Cleef & Arpels of Paris as a wedding gift. It was designed in the shape of a garter. It featured an invisible setting with a cluster of cushioned-shaped sapphire gemstones at the center of a wide diamond and platinum bracelet. The marriage produced no children. In November, Ernest Simpson married Mary Kirk.

Edward was created Duke of Windsor by his brother, the new George VI. However, letters patent, passed by the new King and unanimously supported by the Dominion governments, prevented Wallis, now the Duchess of Windsor, from sharing her husband's style of "Royal Highness". The new King's firm view, that the Duchess should not be given a royal title, was shared by Queen Mary and George's wife, Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother). At first, the Royal Family did not accept the Duchess and would not receive her formally, although the former king sometimes met his mother and siblings after his abdication. Some biographers have suggested that Queen Elizabeth, Edward's sister-in-law, remained bitter towards Wallis for her role in bringing George VI to the throne (which she may have seen as a factor in George VI's early death) and for prematurely behaving as Edward's consort when she was his mistress. But these claims were denied by Queen Elizabeth's close friends; for example, the Duke of Grafton wrote that she "never said anything nasty about the Duchess of Windsor, except to say she really hadn't got a clue what she was dealing with." On the other hand, the Duchess of Windsor referred to Queen Elizabeth as "Mrs Temple" and "Cookie", alluding to her solid figure and fondness for food, and to her daughter, Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II), as "Shirley", as in Shirley Temple. The Duchess bitterly resented the denial of the royal title and the refusal of the Duke's relatives to accept her as part of the family. Within the household of the Duke and Duchess, the style "Her Royal Highness" was used by those who were close to the couple.

According to the wife of former British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, Diana Mitford, who knew both Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of Windsor but was only friendly with the latter, the Queen's antipathy toward her sister-in-law may have resulted from jealousy. Lady Mosley wrote to her sister, the Duchess of Devonshire, after the death of the Duke of Windsor, "probably the theory of their contemporaries that Cake was rather in love with him (as a girl) & took second best, may account for much."

The Duke and Duchess lived in France in the pre-war years. In 1937, they made a high profile visit to Germany and met Adolf Hitler at his Berchtesgaden retreat. After the visit, Hitler said of Wallis, "she would have made a good Queen". The visit tended to corroborate the strong suspicions of many in government and society that the Duchess was a German agent, a claim that she ridiculed in her letters to the Duke. U.S. FBI files compiled in the 1930s also portray her as a possible Nazi sympathiser. Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg told the FBI that she and leading Nazi Joachim von Ribbentrop had been lovers in London. There were even rather improbable reports during World War II that she kept a signed photograph of Ribbentrop on her bedside table, and had continued to pass details to him even during the invasion of France.