New letters do little to improve Wallis Simpson image

Anybody who enjoyed the recent hit film, The King’s Speech, will know that George VI became monarch in Britain when his brother, King Edward VIII abdicated in order to marry the twice divorced American, Wallis Simpson. In the film, Simpson is played as a cold, calculating woman.

Channel 4’s documentary, The Secret Letters (Wednesday 9pm), aimed to give a new angle on the story of this woman who stole the king’s heart. According to the programmes blurb, a cache of previously undiscovered letters, uncovered by Simpson’s biographer Anne Sebba, had the potential ‘to rewrite history’.

Although it was billed as an ‘explosive film’, I wasn’t convinced. The letters, most of them written by Wallis Simpson to Ernest, the husband she divorced to marry Edward, show a woman who embarked on an affair with a king for social purposes, only to find she was out of her depth.

Wallis Simpson was a product of her time, a woman who saw marriage as a route to prosperity and had married her second husband, Ernest Simpson, partly for that reason. The two had moved to London, where their social circle included the king’s then mistress.

Soon Wallis Simpson replaced that mistress, something Ernest seems to have accepted. It was part of their social climbing scheme, and she felt confident that the king would soon find someone younger to replace her . . . but he didn’t. He wanted to marry her and a train of events was set in place that she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – deviate from.  

The programme quoted from, and showed us letters in which she claimed she was still deeply in love with her husband and wanted to escape from the king’s clutches. Maybe that was true. But, it could also be possible that a woman, faced with the consequences of her actions, was simply afraid of the next step.

The letters were fascinating in that they revealed how the woman who became the Duchess of Windsor regarded the English having ‘stuffy minds’. The also show Edward as an immature, spoilt man who was besotted by this woman who frequently treated him with disdain.

The Secret Letters was a good yarn, but claims that the discovery of these letters would change the course of history are plain daft. That was exemplified by the excited way in which Anne Sebba offered her analysis of the letters, as though the significance of them would otherwise be lost on us.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.