Free The Peoples King by Susan Williams Page B

some of the gossip that was doing the rounds.
    Wallis was seen as simply too lower-class and too poor to qualify for special attention - or, indeed, any attention - from royalty. Edward's adoration only made sense if it was seen as an obsession - as a pathology rather than love. The editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, recorded in his private diary on 2 November a conversation about this with Lord Dawson of Penn, the royal doctor who had attended King George V on his deathbed. Lord Dawson, he wrote, 'was interesting on the subject of HM's obsession from the medical point of view. The Literary Society, with whom I dined that evening, was also absorbed in the same subject (to the complete exclusion of literature!).' 96
    An added difficulty for Wallis was her nationality, because the upper class of Britain tended to look down on arrivals from America. 'The Americans are funny,' said Jean, Lady Hamilton, 'titles go to their heads - Society turns them into mere social machines - sort of climbing tanks - funicular tanks . . ,' 97 Nancy Dugdale, the newly married wife of Thomas Dugdale, Baldwin's Parliamentary Private Secretary and MP for Richmond in Yorkshire, was dismayed by Edward's 'marked preference for American women as opposed to English women'. 98 Wallis decided that the British seemed to cherish a sentiment of settled disapproval towards anything American. She commented in her memoirs later that 'The only contemporary Americans, outside Holly­wood, of whom British women appeared to have heard were named Vanderbilt, Astor, or Morgan. By and large they seemed mildly regret­ful that the continent had ever passed from the control of the Indians.' 99 Nancy Astor made fun of this attitude towards Americans. She was the first woman to sit as an MP in Parliament and was herself an American, from Virginia. Playing charades during Christmas festivi­ties at Cliveden, her family home, she invented 'an upper-crust British woman with prejudices against Abroad and "Emmericans".' 100 None­theless, she objected to Wallis on the grounds of her social inferiority. When Edward invited Wallis and Ernest Simpson to dine at York House in May 1936, Lady Astor was indignant. She told Harold Nicolson that only the best Virginia families should be received at court, and that the effect in Canada and the USA would be deplorable. (Nicolson commented in a letter to his wife that he refrained from the retort that, 'after all, every American is more or less as vulgar as any other American'.) 101
    As well as lacking both title and wealth, and being American, what made Wallis objectionable to the English upper class was that she was divorced. In fact, civil divorce had been legal in Britain since 1858: divorced persons had the right to remarry, and the legally innocent party of a divorce could remarry with the sanction of the Church of England. Some attitudes to divorce in Society circles were enlightened: in 1906 Waldorf Astor had married Nancy Langhorne - the future Lady Astor - who was then a twenty-six-year-old American divorcee with a six-year-old son. Waldorf's father, William Waldorf, had trusted his son's judgement and assured Nancy that, 'If you are good enough for Waldorf, then you will be good enough for me." 02 But overwhelmingly, divorce was a barrier in public life and court circles.
    Wallis had been presented at court in June 1931, but this was allowed only because she had been the innocent party in her divorce. Because of this interdict, 'which rightly or wrongly I regarded as hypocritical,' observed Edward in his memoirs, 'an ever-increasing number of other­wise worthy and blameless men and women were forced to stand apart in a permanent state of obloquy.'
    There were mutterings of horror and indignation when in the sum­mer of 1936 Edward took Wallis on a cruise through the Adriatic aboard the Nahlin. She was one of several select guests, including Lord Sefton, Helen Fitzgerald, Duff Cooper and Lady Diana Cooper, and Lord and Lady