King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ there is a taint in the blood of her mother’s family.’²⁸ Her comment related, presumably, to an alleged strain of madness in the St Clair-Erskine family which was much gossiped about at the time, rather than to the somewhat chequered career of Rosemary’s uncle, Lord Rosslyn. ‘I didn’t mean I was really struck,’ the Prince hurriedly protested. ‘You need have no fear of my having any designs on her!!’²⁹ Probably he protested a little too much; he certainly paid Rosemary marked attentions during the first months of 1918. Lady Rosemary does not seem to have been overwhelmed by these enticing prospects. ‘What a good thing I never contemplated marrying the Prince of Wales merely for the sake of the glamour,’ she wrote to her mother after her own marriage to the future Lord Dudley. Now she had ‘got all that as well as Eric’.³⁰ At all events, any incipient romance was checked when that February he met the first of the two great loves of his life, Freda Dudley Ward.

      They met by chance some time in February 1918, when the Prince was at a dance in Belgrave Square and Mrs Dudley Ward, with her escort of the evening, took shelter in the doorway when an air raid warning sounded. The couple were invited in, the Prince was immediately attracted to the interloper and danced with her for the rest of the evening. Next day he wrote to ‘Mrs Dudley Ward’ to suggest a further meeting. Freda’s mother-in-law, with whom she was staying, first assumed that the letter must be for her, then that it referred to her unmarried daughter. She invited the Prince to tea and tried to send Freda out for the occasion, but her well-meaning efforts were thwarted and the happy couple were soon reunited. The association was to last some fifteen years.

      Freda – Winifred, to give her the full name by which she was never known – Dudley Ward was small, elegant and exceptionally pretty. Some people underestimated her, but no one seems to have disliked her. She was intelligent and no worse educated than most British ladies of the time, funny, lively, a passionate and accomplished dancer, a good golfer and tennis player. A strong personality, she contrived to appear feminine and frail; Cynthia Asquith’s somewhat contemptuous description, ‘a pretty little fluff’,³¹ was a complete misjudgment of a woman whose independence of mind was no less striking than her tact and discretion.

      A few weeks younger than the Prince of Wales, she was of bourgeois stock; her father, Colonel Charles Birkin, was a prosperous lace-manufacturer from Nottingham. When only nineteen she married William Dudley Ward, ‘Duddie’, a Liberal member of parliament and kinsman of the Earl of Dudley. Dudley Ward was sixteen years older than his wife; no doubt he had loved Freda when he married her but by 1918 the couple led largely separate lives. An affair between his wife and the heir to the throne, provided it was conducted with due decorum, would have seemed to him acceptable, even commendable. He could be confident that, with Freda in charge of the liaison, it would never be less than decorous.

      Though the Prince quickly made it obvious that he was over-whelmingly attracted by Freda, the relationship had little chance to burgeon until he came back to London early in 1919. For the next four years or so it was all-consuming. No letters survive from this early period but the Prince had a compulsive need to pour out his heart on paper and in 1921 and 1922 he was writing to her at least once a day whenever they were separated, and often when they were not. One day in August 1922 he wrote to her at 9 a.m., noon, 6 p.m. and 11.30 p.m., also fitting in a long telephone call just before dinner. The first surviving letter is dated 18 November 1920. ‘Fredie darling, beloved à moi,’ it read, ‘I feel ever, ever so much better since our little talk on the phone this evening, sweetheart; you just can’t think what a huge comfort it was to your little David just to hear your divine little voice again which I wanted to hear so much this morning. I’m terribly lonely tonight my Fredie darling and it maddens me to be away from TOI; it seems all wrong somehow when we love each other as we do.’ At 2 a.m., before he went to bed, he dashed off another brief note: ‘I must tell you once again how far more crazily and madly and overwhelmingly I love you love you my Fredie darling, and how utterly down and out I am tonight at the thought of not seeing you for 12 bloody days.’³²

      These letters strike the notes which would become familiar to anyone who studied the correspondence in full: genuine and passionate devotion marred by a strident self-pity that bores and sometimes repels. In almost every letter he bemoans his uniquely unhappy lot: the miseries of being Prince of Wales, trapped in a routine that was wearisome and futile, surrounded by hostile relations and treacherous servants, starved of the company of the one person who could have made him happy. It is indeed an unhappy condition to be in love with a married woman, and still more so when there seems no possible way by which the situation can be improved; but it must have taken all Freda Dudley Ward’s resolution to provide the constant consolation and reassurance that was demanded by her lover. Endlessly he poured out to her his fears and woes. ‘Fredie darling, I love you love you now beyond all understanding and all I can say is bless you, bless you, for being so sweet and divine and tender and sympathique to your David last night and for saving him, mon amour. And you know that the truth is I was on the verge of a mental disaster or whatever you like to call it … that might have been permanent.’³³ He knew that his insatiable demands for reassurance were unreasonably taxing and apologized constantly for his weakness – ‘You have made me feel so terribly badly as regards my foul grousing and unpardonable glooms’³⁴ – but he could no more have cut off the flow of desolation than he could have ended the relationship.

      Freda Dudley Ward, as nobody else was able to do before the advent of Mrs Simpson, gave him the strength he needed. She alone could cheer him up when he was in the blackest depression, could cajole or bully him back to the path of duty. Without her he could manage, but at a fearful cost to his nerves and to conspicuously less good effect. When on his foreign tours, he constantly inveighed against the cruel fate that separated them and agonized over the strain of keeping going without her support. His tone was sometimes hysterical, but essentially he wrote no more than the truth.

      She was an excellent influence on him. She made him drink and smoke less – though herself a chain smoker; she encouraged him to do what he was best at; she laughed him out of his occasional absurdities. She fostered his genuine concern for the injustices of society and tried, to less good effect, to broaden his intellectual horizons. Once she gave him a copy of Wuthering Heights to read. ‘Who is this woman Bront?’ he asked dubiously.’³⁵ She told him home truths in a way nobody else did, yet never forfeited his total confidence. ‘Self-pity is a most degrading thing,’ he wrote, ‘and you’ve driven all mine right away and about time too. I know I’m hopelessly spoilt and therefore discontented … I’m so grateful to you for showing me myself … and it’s the first time I had a look at “the brute” for months!! But now I can see how utterly ridiculous and futile he is, and I’ll try and reform him a bit in Canada.’ And then a cry of pain: ‘If only I didn’t feel so lonely nowadays.’³⁶

      Great though her influence was, she was reticent in using it and never did so to her own advantage. The Prince’s Comptroller, Sydney Greville, once reported a scare over the Prince ‘rushing off to appoint a nominee of Mrs Dudley Ward’ as equerry,’³⁷ but there is no other suggestion that she interfered in the running of the royal household. On the contrary, all the Prince’s staff liked her and welcomed her; ‘one of the best friends he ever had in his life,’ Bruce Ogilvy described her.³⁸

      As she was to discover herself in due course, there was only room for one great love in the Prince’s life. Any previous claimant to the title was ruthlessly discarded. Portia Stanley appeared at a shooting party at Sandringham. ‘I stood no rot from her,’ reported the Prince. ‘She only stood with me at one drive and that was because she asked to and it was tricky to say NO. I loathe that woman, and it maddens me her showing herself in here like this.’³⁹ He was fiercely jealous of any rival. Freda’s admirer of long standing was Lord Pembroke’s younger brother, Michael Herbert. The Prince was in torment whenever he knew that the two were likely to meet. She wrote to him from Lady Desborough’s home to report that, though Herbert was in the house party, she had seen little of him. ‘Good! good! and more! more!’ applauded СКАЧАТЬ