I remember we were all sitting at the table tia Maria brought the food and uncle
Posted in General on 11. Aug, 2010
I remember, we were all sitting at the table, tia Maria brought the food and uncle Pedro started singing to her because she’d made good pasta. Loads of things started to click.” All the same, two lots of cultural baggage, two very strong identities… “Frighteningly so! Trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes in our house is impossible. It makes for a really nice crack, though.”‘Downtime’ is now on general release. Happy days: King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson pictured at Balmoral with Kitty Rogers, left, whose villa near Cannes was used by Wallis Simpson as a refuge during the abdication crisis.
It was from there that she heard Edward’s speech on the radio
In splendid isolation: in the end the couple had no one to photograph but each other. The day after the funeral the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Cosmo Lang, called at the Palace. His speech was elliptical but when he left the air was heavy with portent and the new King was left in no doubt of the prelate’s disapproval of his relationship with Mrs Simpson, who had already been married not once but twice.Edward turned to his public duties. He set in motion drastic economies in the royal estates, while causing misgivings in official quarters by his casual attitude to state papers. The public, however, neither knew nor cared about such matters. His openness to the cares of the people, combined with the easy manner he had cultivated among British troops in France during the war, made him a popular King.
He toured distressed areas in Wales and was cheered in the Mall by the Jarrow hunger marchers at the end of their trek to the capital.At first his relationship with Mrs Simpson continued discreetly. He called at her flat in Bryanston Court every evening, and at weekends she joined him at The Fort with closer members of his private circle. But then, one evening in March, Ernest Simpson requested an audience with the King. After an uneasy round of preliminaries he declared that Wallis would have to choose between them. At the conclusion of the evening Ernest had agreed to divorce Wallis on condition that the King married her and remained faithful to her.
By July the Simpsons had separated and by August divorce proceedings were underway. Before long Mrs Simpson’s relationship with the King had become a topic of dinner conversation for every newspaper reader. Only the British press remained silent on the subject out of a sense of loyalty.At the end of September Wallis and her friends Kitty and Herman Rogers were among the guests invited to join the King at Balmoral. The photograph of Kitty with Wallis and Edward overleaf dates from then.
It was the last happy interlude the couple were to know for some time.The next month the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, raised the question of Mrs Simpson. The integrity of the monarchy was under threat from this private friendship with a divorcee, he said. He asked the King to persuade her to end her divorce proceedings Edward refused. At the end of the month a decree nisi was duly granted.The mood at the Fort became more subdued. Fewer guests were invited and the couple withdrew into themselves. The photographs from the period show isolated solitary figures; their only company was each other, and each was the other’s photographer November was fraught with tension. The King’s personal secretary, Major Alexander Hardinge, dropped a bombshell of a personal letter advising the King to send Mrs Simpson abroad.