Britain’s Edward VIII Abdicated for ‘Woman I Love’ : Duchess of Windsor, 89, Dies in Paris

PARIS —  Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson, the American divorcee for whom King Edward VIII gave up the British throne in 1936, died Thursday without achieving what had become an obsession with her--recognition as “her royal highness.”

The Duchess of Windsor, the title she was granted after her third marriage, was 89 and had lived quietly in her home near Paris since her husband’s death in 1972. Sources here, requesting anonymity, said she died of bronchial pneumonia.

She had been hospitalized intermittently for the last several years with a variety of ailments and had been bedridden for most of the last five years. She reportedly was paralyzed from the waist down at her death.

A statement from Buckingham Palace announced her death “with deep regret.” It said that one of Queen Elizabeth II’s personal aircraft will be sent to pick up the body and that the duchess will be buried in the private Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore Garden in Windsor Great Park. She will lie under a spreading plane tree next to her husband and within sight of Windsor Castle, where she was never welcomed as a member of the family.

(Reuters news agency, quoting Harold Brooks-Baker, director of Burke’s Peerage, the chronicler of the aristocracy, said the funeral arrangements were made by the duke before his death. Brooks-Baker described the deal as “a straightforward piece of blackmail.”

(The duke and duchess had bought a plot in a Baltimore, Md. cemetery in 1957 and the duke told his niece, the queen, that unless his wife could be interred in royal ground, he would be buried with her in the United States.

(Queen Elizabeth had either to agree to a joint burial at Windsor or face the prospect of the former King of Britain and Emperor of India lying forever in a public American graveyard, Reuters quoted Brooks-Baker as saying.)

The queen and the Royal Family will don black and observe five days of mourning for the duchess. They are expected to attend her funeral Tuesday.

In Tribute to the Duke

“She (the queen) will do it in tribute to him . . . her uncle . . . not for her,” said a source who asked to remain anonymous.

Whatever their reasoning, the Royal Family will lavish more attention on the duchess in death than they ever did in life.

For nearly five decades--through Elizabeth’s own and her father’s reign--British royalty refused to accord the twice-divorced Baltimore society belle the same distinction her husband enjoyed by birth.

It was all part of the price the couple paid for putting love before duty.

For the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who lived gilded-butterfly lives after his abdication and their marriage, this ongoing royal snub loomed as large as life itself.

Mrs. Simpson, a divorcee, a commoner and at 41 probably beyond child-bearing age, was adjudged by the Church of England and the British people an unfit mate for their young king, then also 42.

Her liaison with the Prince of Wales had been kept secret for several years. It became public after Edward succeeded to the throne in 1936 on the death of his father, and it divided the government, the royal household and the empire.

It “was to lead in five short years to a terrible conclusion of which I had not the slightest intimation,” the duchess wrote in her autobiography, “The Heart Has Its Reasons.”

Huge crowds, for and against the love affair, gathered outside Buckingham Palace. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin threatened to resign, and the Church of England was outraged.

The prime ministers of South Africa, Canada and Australia, then Crown dominions, threatened to secede.

‘The Woman I Love’

Winston Churchill and others battled to prevent Baldwin from forcing the king into a corner. But Baldwin finally gave the bachelor king a ultimatum: Choose Mrs. Simpson or the throne. Edward chose the former and in a moving radio address to his subjects and carried throughout the world on Dec. 11, 1936, said:

“I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love.”

On that note he gave up his 325-day reign and crossed the English Channel into an exile that lasted until his death.

Mrs. Simpson wept bitterly as she listened to the broadcast at the home of a friend in Cannes, on the French Riviera.

“I found myself whispering, as to another self, that nothing so incredible, so monstrous, could possibly have happened,” she wrote in her autobiography.

Edward left England for Austria immediately after the radio address. Mrs. Simpson remained in Cannes awaiting her divorce from American-born shipping magnate Ernest Simpson, which became final May 3, 1937.

The lovers were reunited in the Chateau of Cande, near Tours in France’s Loire Valley, and were married June 3.

Friend Brings Bad News

On the eve of that marriage, a friend of the duke arrived from London with more blunt, bad news.

A “deprivation act” had been rushed through Parliament. It decreed that the Duke of Windsor was “entitled to hold and enjoy for himself only the title, style or attribute of royal highness” and that “his wife or descendants, if any, shall not hold said title, style or attribute.”

So Bessie Wallis Warfield, born into Baltimore society June 19, 1896, became the Duchess of Windsor without ever becoming “her royal highness” except to her husband and her servants.

It was the largest but certainly not the first of her tragedies and disappointments.

Her father had died of tuberculosis when she was an infant and, although he was of a well-to-do family, he left little money. She and her mother lived precariously on the financial resources of relatives.

In 1916, as a debutante on a visit to the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, she met Lt. Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., a naval aviator. After a swift courtship, they were married, but her handsome, dashing husband had a drinking problem. It was an on-and-off marriage until he was assigned to China, where she joined him for a last effort at reconciliation. It failed, and they were divorced in 1927.

Second Marriage in 1928

Back in the United States, she met Simpson, an Anglophile American and a Harvard graduate who had fought with the Coldstream Guards in World War I and had become a British citizen. He was wealthy, fluent in French and recently divorced. They married in 1928 and settled in London.

Soon they were active in London society, and at a weekend house party in November, 1930, Mrs. Simpson met the Prince of Wales, “the world’s most eligible bachelor.”

By her own account, she adopted a somewhat mocking tone with the prince at that first meeting, and this set her apart from the deferential females he often encountered. They met again, and soon he was recommending the Simpsons to other hostesses.

Soon, the prince was in love with Mrs. Simpson, whose husband seemed to accept the situation. On Jan. 20, 1936, King George V died, and the prince succeeded to the throne as Edward VIII.

Soon afterward, the king and Simpson met for lunch and the king formally declared his wish to marry Simpson’s wife. Simpson agreed to an uncontested divorce.

‘Certainly No Beauty’

“I was certainly no beauty,” the duchess later wrote. “Perhaps I was one of the first to penetrate his inner loneliness.”

From the moment the Simpson divorce action was filed, the king’s obsession with her dominated his reign. There was a brief surge of popular support as he abdicated, but this came mainly from America and elsewhere outside Britain.

It ebbed as the former king and his bride lived quietly in exile for several months in the shadow of the approaching war.

Their conduct just before and during World War II virtually obliterated any sympathy they might have retained. The duke was a Germanophile. His first place of refuge when he went into exile to await Mrs. Simpson’s divorce was Austria, where the couple later went for their honeymoon.

They both spoke German and would exchange private remarks in German on social occasions. In a surprising display of political naivete, they accepted an invitation to visit Nazi Germany, where they were entertained by Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. That was in October, 1938, and the German invasion of Poland was less than a year away.

Neo-Fascist Businessman

They then arranged a visit to the United States, under the sponsorship of a wealthy neo-Fascist businessman named Charles Bedeaux, who had loaned them the Loire Valley chateau for their wedding.

But so great was the outcry in the American labor movement--Bedeaux had made millions all over the world with time-and-motion studies for using labor in a “speed-up-and-stretch-out” system--that the visit was canceled at the last moment.

In June, 1940, after France had fallen and the duke and duchess had made their way to Lisbon, Prime Minister Churchill messaged the British Embassy there that he would dispatch a seaplane to fly them to London. But the duke demanded to know first what job he would be given on his return to England, and he demanded that his wife be received there as “her royal highness.”

By now the British intelligence services were aware of a German plot to kidnap the duke and duchess or entice them back to Spain, or perhaps to Austria, as potential collaborators and useful political hostages. The duke, however, refused to budge from Lisbon.

Finally, Churchill arranged for the duke to be appointed governor of the Bahamas, and the couple was virtually ordered to sail on an American passenger ship, in a suite of six cabins with a private deck.

The duke then insisted that Churchill demobilize from the army his old valet, who had been drafted. The valet and a maid for the duchess were flown to Lisbon to sail with them.

They spent the next four years in the Bahamas. Writing to friends from there, the duchess frequently crossed out “Bahamas” on her private stationery and wrote in “Elba” or “St. Helena”--references to the Mediterranean and mid-Atlantic islands on which Britain had confined the French Emperor Napoleon in the previous century.

Returned to France

After the war, the couple returned to France, where the French government gave them, for a token rent, a luxurious mansion on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. There they moved not in circles of power or importance, but in cafe society, entertaining for the sake of entertainment.

The Windsors had few friends in the upper crust of French society. They moved in a world of dress designers, entertainers, idle rich and American social climbers who were ready to offer them expensive accommodations on their regular visits to the United States.

Even this dried up in the 1960s when the duke’s health began to fail and the big transatlantic ocean liners were taken out of service. The duchess detested flying, refusing to fly anywhere if it could be avoided. But she flew to London for her husband’s funeral after his death from throat cancer May 28, 1972, in an aircraft provided by Queen Elizabeth.

It was not until the duke’s funeral that the duchess was received at Windsor Castle, and then she drove straight from the graveside to the airport as if to emphasize that her relations with her husband’s family remained no more than formal.

Was Wallis Warfield really in love with the duke--or did she merely love the title, the glamour, the feminine achievement of conquering the heart of the world’s most eligible bachelor? The record has been sifted and reworked endlessly, but the truth has died with her.

There is no question, however, that the duke was totally and passionately in love with her. No man could have given up more to prove it than he did.

As for her, society photographer and designer Cecil Beaton once said, “She loved him but was not in love with him.”

Her royal highness or not, it was a marriage doomed to succeed.

Times staff writer Burt A. Folkart contributed to this article from Los Angeles.