Edward VIII, Wallis Simpson & The Abdication Crisis | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘Wallace Simpson made the very elementary mistake of believing that the king had a similar power to the American President. Unfortunately, so did Edward VIII. He believed that he was going to be able to take over the country and more or less run it on the lines he wanted to. He was called the most modernistic man alive by one of his admirers. And also very interesting is that he wants to take over BBC itself. He, at a dinner party one day, he said with robust good humour, that he would fix the question of BBC’s independence. It would be the last thing he did before he went.’
‘Was this just delusion or did he have any grounds for believing that the monarchy either possessed or could regain this sort of power?’
‘Well, something I found out about Edward VIII was that one of his private secretaries Lord Wigram believed that he was actually mentally ill, and put procedures in place for him to be certified if needs be. It was thought they might have had a second George III on their hands. So although posterity hasn't generally agreed with Wigram, there was a sense that I suppose if you look at it now, we’d probably give him some sort of delusion, narcissistic personality disorder or something like that, because he had these insane delusions of grandeur. Okay, he was King Emperor, which is a bit better than most of us going to get’...
‘Initially, there was no great spark between the two of them, but she became part of his social orbit. By the beginning of 1934, he was as obsessed by her as it'd be possible for a human being to be with another one. And there’s two ways of looking at this. The first way of looking at this is he was a deeply lonely man who for the first time in his life had actually met somebody who took him for what he was, rather than being something else. And that's the romantic way of looking at it’...
‘The person rather than the prospective crown?’
‘Absolutely. But she wrote in her autobiography that she had been the first to penetrate his inner loneliness. But without wishing to be crude, I think she penetrated something else entirely. And I think that what it was with Edward was that he was a masochist of the highest, indeed most submissive nature. And a lot of the contemporary accounts of their behavior together, suggested that she took a dominant role far, far beyond what you would have expected, and that he, the King of England was only too happy to appear pathetic and submissive in front of her... of course was always a feature of BDSM relationships, that the submissive partner is encouraged to give something up to prove their adoration to their dom. So why not, if you be King of England, do the most submissive thing of all, give up your friend for your mistress?’...
He would seem to be a trance. Over and over again, it's that specific phrase people used. He was in a trance like state, in a dreamlike state. And he would keep on sentence like, she is the most wonderful woman in the world. Nothing else exists except for her. And you start to think to yourself, what did she done to him? How has she bewitched him? What was her hold over him?
Because he showered her with most extraordinary amounts of money. I mean, even before he became king, he was giving her gifts so worth, well over a hundred thousand pounds a year which was, so so many times the average income as to be absolutely fantastical. But you have to ask what was she like?
And if you see the letters that she was writing to her aunt, and indeed her letters, which she wrote to Ernest Simpson after divorce, you do see a different side of her to the femme fatale of legend. You see a much more human figure and a much more frightened figure. One thing I want to bring out through the book was that she wasn't this ogre which people have often described her as. Yes, she was somebody who enjoyed the finer things in life. Yes, she certainly had mild insecurity. But I think to her credit, when she saw the game was up, she tried desperately to stop Edward leaving the throne. And she really did try to stop the abdication. And he wouldn’t. And because of that, I think that she was stuck with him forever. And I don't believe that the long marriage afterwards was a testament to how deeply in love they were, because the pictures that you see of them, especially later in life, look like they’re vampires emerging into sunlight for the first time...
The time that she spent in China, there's been a lot of discussion about the so called Shanghai dossier, which was said to have been something where she essentially went to the Sing Sing [sp?] houses, which would be upmarket brothels and learned various arts. And of course, the sexual arts are one thing, but what we’re more interested in these Sing Sing houses, was actually teaching women to get men to become obsessed by them. Because obviously, the nature of how these things work in Shanghai and in these other Chinese cities, was that you would have Westerners especially, would become kind of completely enraptured by the courtesans, and they would do anything for them, and the courtesans would deny them release until they show themselves worthy"
