Untitled: The Real Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. Anna Pasternak
with a prized invitation for the Simpsons to stay as his guests for the weekend at Fort Belvedere, his country residence in Surrey. In 1930 the king had given Edward a grace-and-favour property on Crown lands, bordering Windsor Great Park. This ‘castellated conglomeration’ had been built in the eighteenth century by William, Duke of Cumberland, third son of George II. Eighty years later, the architect, Sir Jeffry Wyatville, added a high tower which gave the impression of an ancient castle in a forest. From the moment he saw it, Edward adored this ‘pseudo-Gothic hodge-podge’, despite its wild, untended garden and excess of gloomy yew trees. Fort Belvedere became his first proper home; his only other residence, York House, was more like an office. Edward poured all his energies into doing up ‘The Fort’, as it became known.
‘It was a child’s idea of a fort,’ said Lady Diana Cooper. ‘The house is an enchanting folly and only needs fifty red soldiers stood between the battlements to make it into a Walt Disney coloured symphony toy.’ Of her host, she said: ‘The comfort could not be greater, nor the desire on his part for guests to be happy, free and unembarrassed. Surely a new atmosphere for Courts?’
Edward renovated the inside, modernising with gusto – creating spaces entirely different from the musty royal houses of his childhood which had made him feel so unwell he could not eat. Each bedroom had its own bathroom – unheard of then in British country houses – and he added showers, a steam bath in the basement, built-in cupboards and central heating. Outside, he felled the yew trees to let in light and air. A muddy lily pond below the battlements was transformed into a swimming pool and acres of dank laurel were cleared for rare rhododendrons. Winding paths cut through fir and birch trees adding to the attractive woodland setting. He also improved and developed the Cedar Walk, a sweeping avenue lined by ancient cedar trees stretching from below the terrace to the edge of his property, which became one of his favourite places to walk. Later he added a private aerodrome in the grounds (he was patron of the London Flying Club in 1935) and would ferry friends in and out of Belvedere in his de Havilland Dragon Rapide biplane, which he had painted in the colours of the Brigade of Guards.
‘The prince was himself’ at the Fort, Thelma, Lady Furness, wrote in her memoirs. ‘He was free from any obligation to maintain the formalities of his official position. He pottered in the garden, pruned his trees, blew on his bagpipes. We entertained a great deal, but our guests were always the people we liked to have around – there were no dignitaries, no representatives of State and Empire.’ Of the Fort, Edward said: ‘I came to love it as I loved no other material thing – perhaps because it was so much my own creation.’ Guests were pressed into arduous physical labour; hacking out undergrowth and pruning trees. Edward also discovered a love of Windsor Castle, six miles away, of which he had said as a boy ‘the ancient walls seemed to exude disapproval’. Now his reverence grew for the immense grey pile which Samuel Pepys once described as ‘the most romantic castle that is in the world’. Edward would take weekend guests to browse the library and show off the Rubens and Van Dycks in the state apartments on Sunday afternoons.
The Fort became the prince’s sanctuary, a place where he could dispense with private secretaries and equerries. He considerately refused to keep staff up late at night, despite the early hours that he often enjoyed and if he returned home at dawn, let himself into the property with his own latch key. Unthinkably modern for a future monarch.
Wallis and Ernest set out for the Fort late on the Saturday afternoon, timing their pace to arrive, as invited, at six. It was dark when the car crunched up the gravel driveway. Before they could come to a stop, the prince had opened the door and was supervising the unloading of the luggage, a habit he enjoyed. Unlike the grandeur of Knole, the Kent home of the Sackvilles to which the Simpsons had previously been invited as weekend guests, the Fort struck them as remarkably relaxed. The prince led them into the octagonal hall, which had a black and white marble floor and eight bright yellow leather chairs in the eight corners. The drawing room, also octagonal, was more traditional; pine panelling, yellow velvet curtains, Canalettos and Chippendale furniture. The prince insisted on showing his guests to their room on the second floor. Diana Cooper wrote of her bedroom when staying there: ‘The stationery is disappointingly humble – not so the conditions. I am in a pink bedroom, pink-sheeted, pink Venetian-blinded, pink soaped, white-telephoned and pink-and-white maided.’ She did not comment on the gaudy Prince of Wales’s feathers engraved into every bed’s headboard.
When Wallis and Ernest arrived downstairs for cocktails, they were surprised to see the prince sitting on a sofa, his head bent over a large flat screen. His right hand plied a needle from which trailed a long coloured thread. At his feet were his two cairn terriers, Cora and Jaggs. Catching Wallis’s look of incredulity at the sight of the Prince of Wales doing needlepoint, he laughed, rising to greet her. ‘This is my secret vice,’ he explained, ‘the only one, in any case, I am at any pains to conceal.’
He explained to Wallis that he had learned to crochet from his mother as a young boy. At half past six each evening at Sandringham, Edward and his siblings were called in from the school room and sent to their mother’s boudoir where they would sit at her knee, while she crocheted or embroidered. Queen Mary taught them gros point, which Edward kept up, and perfected while recovering from a riding accident. He returned to this hobby during his time on the Western front in France. On long car journeys he crocheted to kill time. He later said that he was ‘understandably discreet about my hobby at first. It would hardly have done for the story to get around that a major general in the British Army had been seen bowling along the roads behind the Maginot Line crocheting.’
While the women all wore simple evening dresses, Edward sported a kilt in Balmoral tartan and produced a small cigarette case from his silver sporran. After cocktails, the small party went through to the dining room – the wood-panelled room seating only ten – where they ate oysters from the Duchy of Cornwall oyster beds, followed by roast beef and salad, pudding and a savoury. After coffee in the drawing room, Edward taught Wallis to play a card game called Red Dog, while others attempted a complicated jigsaw puzzle that was laid out on a long table in front of the main window. Dancing followed in the hallway. Suddenly, the prince tired. Before going to bed, he announced the rules of the Fort: ‘There are none. Stay up as late as you want. Get up when you want. For me this is a place of rest and change, I go to bed early and get up early so that I can work in the garden.’
The following morning, when the maid bought Wallis breakfast to her room, she was informed that His Royal Highness had finished his an hour before and was in the garden. When the Simpsons entered the drawing room, they saw the prince on the terrace outside in baggy plus fours, a thick sweater, hair tousled, hacking at the wild undergrowth with a machete-like billhook, dogs at his heels. Ernest Simpson, not a natural athlete, was ill-equipped to respond to the prince’s insistence that all guests help him wage war against the dreaded laurel bushes. ‘It’s not exactly a command,’ a fellow guest informed Ernest, ‘but I’ve never known anybody to refuse.’ Crossing the lawn, brandishing murderous-looking weapons, the house party resembled more a band of revolutionaries ready to do battle than an elite group of guests staying with the Prince of Wales at his country retreat. After two wearying hours in the winter chill the guests returned for a fortifying hot and cold buffet lunch laid out in the dining room. That afternoon, the prince took Wallis and Ernest around his home, even showing them his bedroom, on the ground floor, off the hall. It was spacious and charming with red chintz curtains framing spectacular views of his beloved garden.
Later that afternoon, the prince went for a tour outside with his gardener. When he returned, he disappeared to the basement. Thelma explained to a perplexed Wallis that at the same time every day he liked to take a steam bath, and was as proud of having installed this as he was of his central heating. He later appeared wearing a bright yellow polo neck, his face flushed red, yet ‘radiating utter contentment’.
As an original thank-you note, Wallis and Ernest composed the prince a jaunty poem on their return to Bryanston Court. As etiquette demanded, it was signed by Wallis only.
Sir –
Bear with me and do not curse
This poor attempt at thanks in verse.
Our weekend at ‘Fort Belvedere’
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