Adolf Hitler, Wallis Simpson, Edward VIII and the alleged alliance

Was Edward VIII really a Nazi sympathiser and traitor? Celebrity biographer Andrew Morton has tried to find out.

The duke and duchess of Windsor meet Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1937.

Ernest Simpson, cuckolded husband of Wallis Simpson, mistress of Edward, prince of Wales, was cruelly but brilliantly described by 1930s London society as ‘‘the patriot who laid down his wife for his king’’.

Simpson was far from unique, as the young prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, enjoyed liaisons with more than a few of the wives in his social circle at Fort Belvedere and across the empire. One of his lovers, Freda Dudley Ward, bore a remarkable resemblance to Wallis Simpson, originally from Baltimore and destined to rock Britain’s House of Windsor to its foundations.

For Wallis captivated Edward and, as is notoriously known, the king forfeited his crown and abdicated in December 1936 to marry his twice-divorced American companion.

One can speculate about Wallis’s appeal to Edward and biographer Andrew Morton permits himself to do so, including a reference to a ‘‘China dossier’’ about her years in Shanghai. If the China dossier ever existed, supposedly compiled for prime minister Stanley Baldwin and King George V, it has never surfaced to enable scrutiny.

The title of Morton’s book, 17 Carnations, represents an ultimate speculation, as it’s based on the claim that the Nazi ambassador to Britain, later Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, regularly sent Wallis Simpson 17 carnations, representing the number of times the pair had slept together. But Morton cannot even be sure if the flowers were carnations. Perhaps they were roses? Speculative suggestions recur in this book. At times the gossamer threads break easily, and embarrassingly, when tested.

Morton is a celebrity biographer of note, having been catapulted into prominence with the bestselling Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words. That book did break new ground, unlike 17 Carnations, which reveals little not canvassed in Philip Ziegler’s authoritative, if generous, 1991 biography, King Edward VIII.

For all of this, Morton’s book is often enjoyable, if infuriating, as he skips along treacherous roads with a cast of characters infamous and indolent. Edward VIII was born to a life of wealth and ease, untroubled by concerns that beset most of his fellow Britons, or citizens of the dominions or subjects of the empire. All his life, he sought to maintain his lavish, tax-free lifestyle.

Morton describes a normal day in the life of HRH the Prince of Wales:

He would typically rise not much more before eleven and have a light breakfast before a game of golf — he became captain of Walton Heath Golf Club in 1935.

After cocktails at seven o’clock on the dot, followed by dinner, he would take in a nightclub — most Thursdays he was at the Embassy Club on Bond Street — until the early hours. By his own admission he would often pull rank and ask his younger brothers to undertake official engagements he had previously agreed to perform.

This exacting schedule doubtless prepared him well to succeed to the throne, about which he always seemed ambivalent and reluctant, regarding the monarch’s role as merely a job rather than a calling.

It is fortunate that Edward was not king during World War II, given the importance of ­George VI’s stoic determination in rallying public opinion during Britain’s finest hour in 1940.

Undeniably, following abdication and exile in France, Edward emerged as at best a defeatist and at worst a Nazi sympathiser.

Certainly the Germans believed that had Edward remained king, there might have been no war. Hitler, having met Simpson, by then duchess of Windsor, at Berchtesgaden in 1937, believed she would have made a good queen. In their strategic assessment, the Nazis made a serious misjudgment, as usually they did, of the power of the British monarchy.

However, the Germans did understand Edward, who continuously sought the role of independent peacemaker, after the fall of France in 1940. In flirting with appeasers and outright Nazi sympathisers, such as businessman Charles Bedaux, Edward came close to treason. John Lukacs emphasises in his outstanding Five Days in London: May 1940 how critical it was to British morale for there to be no suggestion of any negotiated settlement with Hitler, as was being argued by foreign secretary Lord Halifax.

But was Edward a traitor? This is doubtful, even though the duke and duchess mixed freely with Nazi sympathisers in London, grouped in the Cunard circle, both before the war and after its end, in Paris. Among their postwar friends were Oswald and Diana Mosley, of the British Union of Fascists, imprisoned as potential British collaborators during the conflict.

But the allegation that the duke of Windsor was engaged in espionage while attached to the British military mission in France in 1940 stretches credulity. Morton relies on speculation that the indiscreet duke may have passed military intelligence on French defences through Bedaux, and this caused Hitler to change German battle plans.

This is nonsense. The German battle plan to invade France and the Low Countries in May 1940 originally looked like the Schlieffen concept of 1914. It was the direct intervention of Hitler’s most insightful commander, Erich von Manstein, who designed the ‘‘sickle cut’’, that sent Guderian’s Panzers through the Ardennes and on to the English Channel, cutting the Allied armies in two.

Morton’s account of the duke and duchess fleeing France to Spain and Portugal is more engaging. But this terrain, especially the abortive attempt of Walther Schellenberg of the SD to kidnap them and take them to Berlin, was far better covered in Michael Bloch’s Operation Willi (1984).

Nor is there much that is new in the story of the attempts of the royal family to retrieve family correspondence from postwar Germany, as part of what became a British government attempt to suppress the ‘‘Windsor file’’, consisting of German documents relating to the duke’s wartime defeatism and pro-Nazi meanderings.

Morton writes with an obvious interest in his subject matter, tempered by frequent disdain. He has produced a biographical sketch that entertains but that is marred by dubious speculation and overshadowed by deeper, more convincing historical analysis.

Stephen Loosley is chairman of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Canberra.

17 Carnations: The Windsors, the Nazis and the Cover-Up

By Andrew Morton

Michael O’Mara, 370pp, $24.95