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From Wondery, I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. And this is British Scandal. Now, although it sounds like two different people have been shipped in to do this job, which, to be honest, our days were numbered, so we thought it would happen. In fact, I've just lost my voice inconveniently at the same time that you have. I had a wisdom tooth removed and they weren't entirely honest about the recovery period. Which is not an issue in an audio medium, is it?
So Matt, it is the end of our series, The Abdication, and we've finally done what we've been aiming to do for many months now and throw the royals into the big pit of British scandal. This has been, I'm sure you'll agree, a veritable feast of pomp and circumstance.
Yeah, I mean, you can't help the irresistible parallels between Wallis Simpson and Diana, but even more Meghan Markle. So it's incredible that this story keeps repeating itself in the modern European story of a woman who marries into the royal family and then is treated very badly. And the mind-blowing Nazi element to this, which is incredible, where you've got a former king...
hanging around with Adolf Hitler and allowing himself to be courted by the Nazi party at a time when Winston Churchill is rightfully concerned about information being passed into enemy hands. And at one point, arguably, information being divulged to the other side. So there are so many incredible things about it. And it's unbelievable that that information about Edward and his links to Hitler didn't come to light till just a few years ago. And today we're going to speak to the author that did just that.
Andrew Lowney is a literary agent and biographer who wrote The Traitor King, which used unexplored archive material to uncover the truth about Edward and Wallace's relationship and their ties to Nazism. He joins us next. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.
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Andrew, welcome to British Scandal. You've written some fascinating biographies of prominent Englishmen, including Edward's cousin and close friend, Lord Mountbatten. What initially drew you to begin researching Edward?
I decided to write on royal biography because after The Crown, there was an international audience for royal biography. Clearly, there's a lot of material always in the news. People are fascinated by the royal family. And after Mountbatten, I thought Edward and Wallace Simpson were the most interesting figures. They're what I would call the rogue royals that always interest me. And I'd always been intrigued by the fact that most books on Edward and Wallace ended more
more or less, with the abdication in 1936, even though she lived for another 50 years and he for another 36. And so I decided I would look at that period after 36. And I'd always had this hunch that the stories about him being an innocent dupe for the Nazis were...
bit far short of the mark, that actually there was more to it. And as I dug deeper and looked at archives, particularly archives abroad, because pretty much the archives here have been dry cleaned, my hunch was sustained that the Duke had actively intrigued with the Germans during the war. He was a Nazi sympathizer. And the myth of the king who gave up his crown for the woman he loved was exactly that. There was no truth to it whatsoever.
Wow. I mean, there's plenty to talk about there. Let's just start with the character of the Duke. There's an amazing, brutal description of him in Harold Nicholson's diary. I wonder if you'd share that description with us and tell us whether you agree with it.
Well, the description in Harold Nicholson is that he's a man without a soul. And I think that's absolutely right. There were real concerns about him even before he came to the throne about his lack of public duty, his desire to interfere with constitutional matters, his sympathies for the Germans, his indiscretions.
And one of the things that emerged by looking at him in his post-monarch's role is he a man with no great interests. He liked gardening, he dabbled in the stock exchange, and he played golf. And that's about it. He had no intellectual interests, he had no inner life, he had no moral center. I mean, one of the things that most surprised me in the research of the book was just his finality and his financial corruption and his greed and his stinginess.
So I think Nicholson got him right. But there are plenty of other descriptions from other diarists of the period, and they were very useful sources to me because, of course, this is the gossip of the time from people who knew him and the people he was working with. And again, one of the two great sources for the book were the diaries of
Tommy Lascelles, who was the King's private secretary and who'd worked for Edward, and an MI5 officer called Guy Liddell, who was able to give the full account of some captured German documents which documented the treachery of the Duke during the war. This is amazing, Andrew, because often biographers warm to their subjects. They often write a biography to defend an individual, but it sounds like you've had quite the opposite experience. Yes.
Yeah, I think one has a changing relationship with your subject. I mean, the first book I did was on John Buchan, a man I greatly admired, and I think who had been introduced in a lot of the books. So there I did have an agenda, and that was to set the record straight.
which I suppose is always my agenda, to try and tell the truth about the past and to correct some of the, I suppose, the created narrative that we have. And what's interesting is, of course, people respond in very different ways to books. Some people think you've been too kind. Others say you've been too harsh.
Now, with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, I came to it with a completely open mind. I didn't really have a view about them at all. But the more I dug, I have to say, the more obnoxious they became. I suspect out on a limb because most royal biographers tend to be sympathetic to royals. They tend to rely on tidbits being passed to them by courtiers and therefore not to irritate their sources.
and they have a much more deferential approach. I hope that because I'm not strictly speaking a royal biographer, I'm just a biographer who tries to find good subjects, and subjects that are well-known but perhaps have new things to say about them, that I can be a little bit more detached. So, you know, of course there's always this tension with the narrative they want to construct and the real narrative that historians have a responsibility to tell.
Of course, we can't talk about Edward without talking about a relationship that defined him. So can we focus on that initial period with Wallace? What initially attracted him to her and was it mutual?
Well, they met in 1931. There wasn't, in a sense, public notice of the relationship until really 1936. She was perfectly happy in her marriage with Ernest Simpson, but she enjoyed the attention of the Duke. He gave her jewels. He introduced her to interesting people. She was on the make, and so she was very happy to be the king's mistress. I mean, they always claimed that they didn't sleep together before they married, but I don't think that's correct.
For him, she was a sort of mother figure. He'd had a very emotionally deprived childhood. Queen Mary, it was said, had ice running through her veins rather than blood. And all
All his relationships, and he had a series of married woman lovers, were mother figures to him. And that's what he liked. He was a sort of boy-man. He never really grew up emotionally or physically. He had very little body hair, for example. He shaved only occasionally. He wrote to these girlfriends in baby talk. And Wallace filled that role. She bossed him around, which is what he liked.
and just made him feel complete, as Churchill said. So he was obsessed with her. She grew tired of him and wanted out. But by that time, she was too deeply in. And so there she was, stuck with this guy for the rest of her life. And there was growing resentment and anger. She took lovers elsewhere. She took out her frustrations against him. But the more awful she was to him, the more he loved her. She was the loser in this whole thing.
And what were the motivations of Wallis throughout the relationship? And was she still in love with her ex-husband, Ernest? Yes, she remained in love, I think, with Ernest, particularly when he fell in love with her best friend, Mary Rafferty Kirk, and married her. They continued to correspond. So I think, you know, she...
She was the loser in this whole thing. The Duke continued to be obsessed with her and think she was wonderful and would feel lost if she wasn't even in the room. And she basically organized his life. His life had always been organized before he had to abdicate. And she took on that role of the palace staff.
It was a pretty empty life for her. I mean, the only point where she has any real sort of validation of purpose is when they're posted as the governor and governess of the Bahamas. And she takes on a role with the children's clinic and with the RAF canteen on the base there. And she sort of does some good work while he basically just plays golf and gets drunk.
So they were actually not totally suited. And I think it's very interesting that the story has always been that he died in her arms in 1972, when the reality was that though they had bedrooms two doors apart, she never once visited him in the last two weeks of his life, even though he had been crying out for her.
Wow. That is quite shocking. One of the images that we're fed a lot about Wallis Simpson is that she pulled the strings. There was this illusion of power that she was the kind of puppet master and Edward followed her lead. But of course, the 1930s and 40s, not famously a great time to be a woman if you wanted autonomy. So is that another myth that we've been peddled?
No, she was definitely the boss in the relationship. I mean, she organized everything. He just went along with it. But I think you're right that at the time, she'd just been divorced twice. So really, she had nowhere to go. Her whole circle was around his friends. A lot of her friends had gone. So, you know, the best she could do was to make the best of it and to stick with this guy and to try and build her own separate life, which she did to a certain extent.
What was public opinion on the relationship between Edward and Wallace as it developed? And did it differ at home from abroad? Yes, yes, it did vary. I mean, they were always more popular in the States than here. When they went to the States, there were often big crowds cheering them because they bought into the myth. But there was also a lot of criticism, particularly during the war, with their extravagant behaviour. They travelled with 80 pieces of luggage.
They needed lorries, for example, to transport it between the hotels. It had to be stored down hotel corridors because their suites weren't large enough. There were comments about them not paying their bills, about charging to go to parties. So there was quite a lot of criticism behind the scenes, and a lot of the stuff was being reported back publicly.
to the British. It's interesting looking at the Royal Archives that George VI was monitoring this the whole time. He was getting reports from intelligence personnel, from politicians and courtiers. And also during the war, we're able to see the postal censorship records. And these were basically letters being opened to check that there was nothing being said or to find spies. And that
reveals how indiscreet the governor and his wife were in the Bahamas. They still pined for a German government. They were very rude about the royal family and Churchill. And so all these letters were kept on file and paint them as a pretty disobliging pair and very disloyal. As you said, there's this pervasive cultural belief of a great love affair between them.
The Duchess herself is reported to have summed up her life in a sentence. You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance. So is it the press that have created this idea or did they mythologize themselves? Where does it come from?
Well, it comes from the abdication speech, which was written by Winston Churchill, the famous line, I've given up the crown for the woman I love, which was true to a certain extent, though he'd sort of been maneuvered off the throne by Baldwin and Lascelles and others because they knew he was totally unsuitable to be king. And this was a very useful description.
device an excuse. But I think it was then sustained by a careful curation of the legend. They sued people who wrote critical things about them. They worked with tame biographers who gave this rather saccharine view of the relationship. So they sustained it themselves.
But it became a burden. And you can see sometimes when they are interviewed in television, particularly a famous interview in 1970 with Kenneth Harris, where, I mean, she's definitely pulling the strings. He looks to her for reassurance and she actually answers many of the questions. But there's a wistfulness about them both and a rather elegiac quality to the interview. In fact, he died shortly afterwards.
And you just see it in the sadness of their eyes that this is not a happy relationship.
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His relationship with Nazism is deeply concerning and the darkest element of this story, really. Can you give our listeners a bit of context about the British monarchy's connection to Germany and why Edward felt so German? Yeah.
Yes. I mean, we've got to remember his mother was a German princess. He was 14th, 16th German. He spoke fluent German. He spent a lot of his holidays as a boy in Germany. He also believed in strong government, in the unity of the Anglo-Saxon nations to
basically worked together, that the real threat came from the Soviet Union and not indeed from Germany. He was very close to two cousins, Prince Philip of Hesse and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, both of whom became Nazi generals. And there was a lot of contact between the German cousins and the British royal family. A lot of that stuff's been covered up because a lot of that material is in the royal archives and hasn't been seen.
but to you know there was close correspondence for example with Queen Mary and also with the Duke of Kent who was killed during the war and the Nazis realized that the best way to influence the British was through their German relations
And that's exactly what they did. People like Saxe-Coburg and Hess were used as intermediaries to put pressure on the prince and then the king. So he, for example, tried to change the Anglo-German naval agreement to 35. He downplayed the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936. And this was what was concerning the British political establishment, that there was this influence and he was
susceptible to it. And of course, the royal family was quite appeasement driven. I mean, there was George VI actually taking Chamberlain onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the Munich trip. But I think by 1939, everyone was clear that Germany would have to be stopped and we'd have to stand up and fight. And here was the Duke making broadcasts on the eve of the war to Germany, broadcasts actually, which was banned here by the BBC.
I mean, at the most generous, he was being incredibly naive. But he then came back in January 1940 and intrigued against Chamberlain in a plot to try and restore a peace party here, even when we were at war. He betrayed the French military defenses to a known German spy, a man called Charles Bedder, who had lent him his chateau for his wedding in 1937. And then he...
when he was in Lisbon in 1940 in the summer waiting to come back to Britain he deliberately delayed his time there he spent a lot of time going in and out of the German embassy discussing with German officials the role of puppet king if the Germans actually managed to invade Britain or that we sued for people
which was a strong likelihood before Dunkirk, and driven, of course, by the fact they were also offering him large sums of money. And this is undeniable. We have the accounts in people's diaries, people who worked for him. The special protection officer was reporting back on him.
and even when he was sent to the Bahamas, he was threatened with court-martial by Churchill, and then Churchill sent him off to the Bahamas to get him out of the way. Even on his way to the Bahamas, he was communicating with the German agents in code, saying, I'm ready to come back whenever the moment arises. I mean, this was a capital offense. So I don't think it was
any doubt whatsoever about his treachery. In fact, when evidence of it was discovered after the war in captured German documents, the correspondence between the Spanish and German ambassadors to Berlin, Churchill and Eisenhower tried to suppress this material. In fact, they only delayed publication until 1957. But it was
that this was all basically made up by the ambassadors. But all that material, and there's lots of it, is corroborated by accounts from other sources as well. So, you know, there was a huge cover-up after the war to protect the Duke's feelings, and Churchill was part of this, because clearly it would have been highly embarrassing just after the war to discover that the former king had been in league with the enemy.
It's completely extraordinary. Going back to something that you said there, Andrew, of course, Edward had these sort of sentimental feelings towards Germany and German-ness. But what about ideology? Was there something about Hitler's image of Germany that appealed to him?
Yes, I mean, he liked strong government. He had done a tour of Germany, a very public visit in October 1937 as part of the deal for his wedding venue. And, you know, he had praised the Nazis. He gave Nazi salutes. He visited concentration camps. He inspected SS troops. He had no illusions about the nature of the regime.
And indeed, one of the concerns at the abdication was that he was a focal point for Oswald Mosley's fascists. And there were huge demonstrations around the abdication. On the night he announced it, and then the next day, a huge meeting in Shoreditch, dressed by Mosley. And so there was a lot of monitoring of exactly what his relationship was with the fascists. And he remained friendly with Mosley to the end of his life. To the end of his life, he said that Hitler had been a good chap. And he was very strongly anti-Semitic.
So I don't think there could be any doubt that he was sympathetic to the Nazis in every possible way. This was nothing to do with appeasement or preventing another war. It was because he felt they had the right ideas.
As well as that ideological connection and the sense of personal heritage to Germany, there's also another element, isn't there, which is the flattery and the feeling that he could be king again. And thinking of that tour they take to Germany in 1937, from the perspective of the Duke and Duchess, what do you think was the motivation behind that specific trip?
Yeah, no, that's a very good question. I think what happened is after he'd given up the throne, he realized that he rather regretted it and he wanted to big himself up to Wallace. And he did this by showering her with jewels, by giving her anything that she wanted, but also by trying to raise his stature. So the tour of Germany in 37 was in effect the royal tour that she might have had if she'd been queen. And
I think throughout his life he was constantly trying to impress her and the best way he could do that was by engaging with the Germans. She herself was very sympathetic to the Nazis. She was a close friend of Ribbentrop and possibly a lover. And the Germans realized this. They actually sent a spy called Stavros.
Stephanie von Hollenhauer, to take the next apartment to her in Bryanston Square to work on Wallace and therefore through Wallace to work on the King. So they were targeted pretty early on in the early 30s and they responded to it. They were flattered. You know, he was a man who was used to being flattered, not always...
told the truth about things and that of course went slightly after the abdication and the Germans filled that void where everyone else was freezing him out and not taking much interest in him. They were paying attention to him and that of course was very attractive to him. The images from that tour must have been pretty explosive. What was the reaction to them and to the trip in general at home? How did the press react?
Well, it was both the press and the officials. He hadn't warned his brother or indeed government officials at all about the tour, even though it was going to be highly controversial. And so they were appalled when they discovered literally weeks before it began. He was monitored very carefully, particularly by local diplomats and consuls, and they wrote reports back.
And there was a great concern about how much support he should be given, whether he should be met in Germany, etc., or just left as very much a private visit. The press coverage was mixed. Some people pretended that it had been fine, it had all been very innocent. He was just going to industrial plants and seeing how Germany was rebuilding itself. But I think a lot of people were very critical, and he hoped to go to America unannounced,
after that to a similar tour and he had to cancel that because of the opposition from organized labor and from others. And so I think the feeling was once was enough, he'd done enough damage and they were going to put their foot down. But yeah, there was a lot of criticism from the press as well. They felt this was very unfortunate. He should be taking a low profile and not upstaging his brother and not...
embarrassing the government and the way he was. So at the time, there was a mixture of accusing him of naivety and willfulness and being deliberately provocative. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.
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So much of his relationship with the Nazis was out in the open, but it wasn't until the discovery of the German documents that revealed the extent of Edward's involvement. Could you tell us a bit about how, why and where they were discovered? Yeah.
Yes, I mean, I take issue with the fact that it was well known. I don't think it was well known. You know, a lot of it was suppressed. You know, for example, people wouldn't have known about his engagement with the Germans in the summer of 1940. That material was all in private diaries and telegrams and things. That wasn't reported on the press, really.
But I think the real blow, as you say, came in the spring of 1945 with the discovery near Marburg of 70 tons of German foreign office documents. Now, these are supposed to have been destroyed before the Allies advanced. But the man responsible, who'd actually been at Oxford, called von Losch,
decided these were important historical documents. They were his calling card to getting out to the West. And so he burned only the boxes and buried the files in the forest. And when it was possible to do so, American troops were led to the site and dug it up.
and that's why the americans have the material not the british and that was the problem the british would have destroyed the stuff the americans saw this was useful material for war crime trials and indeed for the writing of history and to the battle after the war becomes one between american historians determined to tell the story of of the war properly and publish these documents and officialdom who determined to suppress them because they're embarrassing revelations about
involvement of people like Windsor. And in fact, there is a famous file called the Windsor File, which documents all this stuff. Now, much of the stuff was published eventually in 1957, though, as I say, it was a huge spin operation to play it down. But some of the stuff we assumed had been destroyed. Now, I've found some of the documents are
which had been missing in the Royal Archives. So they'd been collecting them and were fully aware. In fact, George VI was briefed as he came off the VE Day celebrations in May 1945 about the discovery. So the Royal Archives, which I think everyone assumed would never be open to researchers, but is now, I've been the first person to get access to his file, have some wonderful secrets. And I continue to do research there. I'm back there again this week.
They have 40 boxes and I'm able to do about four boxes a day. I'm allowed once a month. So it's quite a long process. But it is yielding some very interesting material, which has been long suppressed. In what you've told us, it's very easy to possibly dismiss Edward as a golfing, unreliable, you know, self-indulgent write-off. But it's undeniable, isn't it, that he did actively help Germany with their war effort? Yes.
Yes, absolutely. I mean, he betrayed the French war plans. He was communicating with the enemy in code during the war. He tried to contact the American isolationists to keep them out of the war. The Germans, in return, took care of his house in Paris and south of France. They actually sent him linen and crockery and stuff that he needed.
uh... you know they they were doing him favors it would have done in favor of if he hadn't been doing them favors so i think it's pretty clear and so i think we sometimes dismiss people who have a public image of being rather pathetic or room unfocused and actually they can be very effective
And of course, the Duke was a useful idiot. The Germans could play on him and he was quite happy to be played by them. It suited his purposes. There was a certain personal revolt against the establishment who he'd felt had knifed him about his brother, who he was jealous of. And so there were a real mixture of both political and personal elements to this rebellion. I'm sure in the research of your book, you discovered many amazing documents. Does any one in particular stand out as the most astonishing?
Well, I mean, there were lots. I think one was recently in the Royal Archives to find the lines to take to deal with the Duke of Windsor and the captured German documents, the arguments for and against. There's another document in relation to the code that he sent to
to the Germans in August 1940, saying that he was prepared to come back if he was still required. And then there's a line where Tommy Lassell writes to James Popenice, who was a biographer of Queen Mary. Popenice says, is there any truth in this, the fact that he was basically working with the Nazis? And Lassell writes back, I'm afraid it's true. I mean, this was the confirmation, the smoking gun evidence I was looking for. But the thing is,
filled with revelations. Only one of the special branch files on Edward and Wallace has actually survived. But the extraordinary thing is that King George V ordered MI5 to keep surveillance on Wallace and his own son. And they revealed, even before they were married, they were both having affairs with other people, him with an Austrian princess and she with a used car salesman called Guy Trundle.
And these files were kept shut until the Queen Mother's death and released in 2004. But I talked to the man responsible for weeding them, and he said there were lots of files. We've only just released one as a token. So that's a pretty devastating file with these revelations of his love affairs.
exists. There must have been others. And I found, for example, in FBI files, a former lover of his trying to blackmail him. There's another case in Paris in 1937 of attempts to blackmail him over some letters he wrote to a lover in Austria. And indeed, I think possibly correspondence with Prince Philip of Hesse. So time and time again, the evidence is that the primary sources are there if one looks hard enough. And so that's what's exciting. This story is
It's 80 years old, but we're still finding new material to explain what happened. Seeing that memo, though, and it's one of the most shocking parts of the story where Edward tells the Germans that increased bombing of England is the way to win, encouraging the destruction of the city in which his entire family lives, seeing that memo must have been a special moment.
Yes, absolutely. That's pretty damning. I think what's also interesting is the way that he covered up a murder in the Bahamas when he was governor there by posting the commissioner of police to another island and bringing in some bent coppers to investigate. Now, that material isn't in the British archives. I found it in the archives in the Bahamas where there were mirror copies of the files.
And I think what's so chilling is it shows how, basically, the files here have been weeded to cover up any embarrassment. But sometimes it's very difficult to do that completely because they're always copied somewhere else. But, you know, I think it is very frightening that we have a public record act which requires all documents to be placed in the National Archives after 20 years. And that isn't happening. Many documents are destroyed without any record being kept of their destruction.
Many archives are still retained, and we just don't know because they're not even in the inventory. So this is part of my argument, that the history that we think we know is not really the real history.
As you say, there are these primary sources available. You've also said that some of these sources are destroyed or concealed. So what does that tell us if this crucial part of history is being covered up or at least not revealed in its full until now? What does that tell us about the establishment?
Well, all my books, in a sense, have an element of establishment cover-up that they will always try and cover up and they often get away with it. I mean, they have got away with it and I'm afraid one of the worrying things is that there is this protection for the royal family and the bad apples and that continues and, you know, I think it's
dangerous clearly with contemporary politics. We've got big concerns about transparency of some of the procurement arrangements, particularly for PPE. But I think it's very worrying that we have files, for example, going back to Queen Victoria's period, which has still not been released. You know, I think we need to know the truth of what happened in the past rather than covering up because people are rich and powerful. Well, what can this story teach us about Britain today? And are there any truths about the monarchy exposed in this story that still ring true?
Well, I think the lesson is that we need to be a more open and transparent society. We're not a fully formed democracy. We're not a republic because of these cover-ups. And I think we need to have a much more mature relationship in terms of our dealings with the royal family. If they are to win our trust, we don't want stories like this emerging 80 years later. I think they need to be much more open about things. And I think the fact that the Royal Archives is being open now is an encouraging sign of a greater openness.
But I think, you know, we do not live in a totally open society. And, you know, I hope that citizens and politicians will speak up and challenge this. The problem is this is niche stuff. People don't realize how important these things are. But these are an abuse of power. It's about academic freedom. And it's about curating a completely false legend. It's back to creating the myths of the great love affair, which never existed.
And I think people are entitled to the truth about history. Which brings us back to where we started, Andrew. Thank you so much. This has been completely fascinating. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you for asking me. Next week, Matt's taking the reins for a juicy scandal that rocked Britain in the 70s. Yes, I'm going to tell you about a man with two names, two lives and a faked death that shocked the world. It's the story of the MP who disappeared, John Stonehouse. I cannot wait.
This is the final episode in our series, The Abdication. If you'd like to know more about this story, you can read King Edward VIII by Philip Ziegler, Duchess, The Story of Wallace Warfield Windsor by Stephen Birmingham, The Crown in Crisis, Countdown to Abdication by Alexander Larman, and Traitor King, The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor by Andrew Lowney.
I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. This episode was produced by Millie Chu. Our senior producer is Joe Sykes. Our executive producers are Jenny Lower-Beckman, Stephanie Jens, and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Wondery.
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