Now one of last century's greatest romances has its own tawdry twist. Sixty-six years after Edward's abdication, secret police reports from that time reveal Simpson, while still married to her second husband, was two-timing the future king with a handsome married car salesman. Guy Marcus Trundle "is described as a very charming adventurer, very good-looking, well-bred and an excellent dancer," one report states. "He meets Mrs. Simpson quite openly at informal social gatherings as a personal friend, but secret meetings are made by appointment when intimate relations take place."
Quaintly worded as it is, the revelation has tongues wagging again in Britain, where some members of the old guard have never forgiven Simpson for sparking the constitutional crisis that cost Edward his throne. The 120 documents—released under a new law that makes royal records available after 30 years, rather than 100—show that secret police spied on the king and his lover, and that Edward reportedly paid off Simpson's husband and even offered him the possibility of a title to smooth her divorce and clear the way for their marriage in 1937. "This confirms in a lot of people's minds what they always suspected about Simpson," says royal biographer Brian Hoey, "although it looks like she even cuckolded the man who gave up an empire for her."
Edward, then the 36-year-old Prince of Wales, met socialite Simpson, 34, at a house party in the English countryside in January 1931. She had followed her Anglo-American husband, Ernest, a shipping executive, to London, but her reputation, it seems, preceded her. Detectives, who began snooping on her in the early '30s, included in her file letters from citizens of Baltimore who labeled her "a gold digger" and a "prostitute." But the prince was smitten. After the pair visited a London antiques store, the owner told detectives, "The lady seemed to have POW [Prince of Wales] under her thumb."
By the mid-'30s, however, Simpson had become involved with Trundle, the son of an Anglican vicar who had fallen on hard times during the Depression. Simpson gave him "money...as well as expensive presents," according to the surveillance reports. Meanwhile, as the romance with Edward intensified, Ernest allegedly received nearly $12 million in today's money for agreeing to a divorce.
His problems didn't end there. Edward, who became nominal head of the Church of England when he acceded to the throne in 1936, faced an uphill battle in convincing the public that their king could marry a divorced commoner. According to the files, he drafted an emotional radio address that said, among other things, "Without her I have been a very lonely man. With her I shall have a home and all the companionship and mutual sympathy and understanding which married life can bring." (Prince Charles, who could face an equally tough crowd if he tries to marry Camilla Parker Bowles, might take note.) But Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin refused to let him speak his mind; instead, on Dec. 11, 1936, Edward VIII passed the throne to his brother, Queen Elizabeth's father, George VI, with the simple excuse that he wanted to marry "the woman I love."
Even after Edward and Wallis wed in exile in France in 1937, police back home worried the pair would be a continued embarrassment to Britain, particularly after the couple, now the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, visited Hitler's Germany just months after their marriage. Yet apparently, having them overseas was far preferable to having them back on British soil, as George VI insisted in a 1938 letter in the files in which he noted drily that his mother, Queen Mary, and wife, the late Queen Mother, had no "desire to meet the Duchess." Indeed, the royal family received Wallis Simpson only twice: at her husband's funeral in 1972—and again in '86, at her own.
Patrick Rogers
Juliet Butler and Ellen Tumposky in London
- Contributors:
- Juliet Butler,
- Ellen Tumposky.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
