King Edward VIII. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ women dull and unattractive, and she professed to be upset if he seemed to favour one or other of them. She wrote crossly when he was seen at the Grafton Galleries with Edwina Mountbatten. ‘I’m sorry if I annoyed you …’ he wrote penitently, ‘though I hate your putting it that Edwina took me. Darling, no bloody woman takes me anywhere and it was Dickie who suggested it and I couldn’t see any harm … But I’m sorry my sweetheart, though please don’t think that I’m led around by other women.’⁴¹ In these first hectic years, indeed, to all effects there was no other woman. His intimates continued to hope otherwise. In Canada at the end of 1919 Claud Hamilton believed he might propose to the lady who was subsequently to marry Joey Legh – ‘if only “it” would happen, it would be the most wonderful thing in the world and save the British Empire’.⁴² But such hopes were illusory. When he visited Kyoto during his tour of Japan the geishas wanted to take the rings off his hand. He let them remove the signet ring ‘but naturally not yours my sweetheart and it took me quite a time to assure them that I wasn’t engaged!! If only they knew how very heavily married I am, darling angel.’⁴³

      He found in Freda Dudley Ward’s home the family life that was lacking – or that he convinced himself was lacking – at court. He loved her two daughters, and would call in to see them even when their mother was away. ‘The babies were in marvellous shape,’ he wrote after one such visit, ‘and I can never tell you what they didn’t do to me, from binding me up on the floor with ribbands and pulling my hair etc etc. I do adore those divine little girls of yours, sweetheart, and love playing with 2 wee editions of Fredie!!’⁴⁴ They for their part treated him as a much-loved uncle and pined for his visits. Towards the end of the Second World War the elder daughter, Angela Laycock, wrote to him: ‘It is so many years since I last saw you that I suppose I can no longer start my letters “Darling Little Prince” though that is how I should like to begin … You can’t imagine how much I miss you still, after all this time. You see, my childhood is so full of happy, happy memories and you are bound up in all of them.’⁴⁵

      His own siblings abetted the romance. Princess Mary forwarded the letters which he wrote to Freda almost every day from France, slipping out to post them when her French governess had her back turned.⁴⁶ Prince Albert kept the home fires burning when his brother was on tour: ‘She is miserable now without you and feels quite lost … I will look after Freda for you to the best of my ability.’⁴⁷

      Not surprisingly, the King and Queen were less enthusiastic about their son’s liaison. The King had never met Mrs Dudley Ward and considered her social background made her inappropriate as a friend for his eldest son, let alone anything more intimate. Though time modified his attitude, his first assumption was that she was a pernicious influence and should be cut out of the Prince’s life. ‘Papa seems to think that anything you do which he doesn’t like has been influenced by Fredie,’ warned Prince Albert. ‘This of course is due to the great popularity which you have everywhere, and Papa is merely jealous.’⁴⁸ The Queen was quick to indignation if she thought that her son was allowing his mistress to distract him from the course of duty. On one occasion he asked if he might miss a court function. Queen Mary knew that he wanted instead to go to a dance which Freda Dudley Ward was attending. ‘I was aghast when I read your letter,’ she wrote. ‘It would be very rude to us were you not to come tonight.’ ‘A pretty hot letter!!’ was the Prince’s rueful comment when he passed it on to Mrs Dudley Ward.⁴⁹ Such rebukes did not shake his affection for the Queen. ‘My mother is sweet to me and so sensible,’ he told Freda; ‘there’s really no rot about her although she is a martinette. But that is her upbringing and no fault of hers, and she really is a wonderful woman.’⁵⁰ But inevitably this new, all-important association eroded the relationship which had been built up between mother and son. ‘Curious David does not confide in you any more,’ commented the King in 1922. ‘I suppose he only does so to her.’⁵¹

      What evidence there is suggests that, for the first eighteen months or so of their affair, Freda Dudley Ward cared as deeply for the Prince as he for her. It could not endure at such intensity. Mrs Dudley Ward needed someone who was more regularly in her life than the itinerant Prince, whose friendship posed less social problems, who was more sophisticated and less doting. He was made miserable when, in the summer of 1920, Freda tried to cool down his ardour and to put the relationship on to a new, more platonic basis. ‘So you have heard from Fredie at last,’ the recently created Duke of York wrote to him. ‘It must have depressed you and worried you a good deal, I know, but whatever she says I know you will listen to.’⁵²

      Michael Herbert remained a threat. For a time Mrs Dudley Ward kept her two admirers in uneasy balance; each grudgingly acquiescing in the claims of the other. Then in 1922, when the Prince was in the Far East, there was talk of divorce. ‘What I can’t get at is when you intend to divorce Duddie, my beloved,’ wrote the puzzled Prince. ‘Will it all be going on when I return or do you intend to wait till we can discuss it all, or what? Also, are you going to divorce him or is he going to divorce you?’ The thought that disturbed him most was that, once free, Freda might marry Herbert or somebody else. ‘I can’t bear the thought that our lives should have to be in any way different to what they’ve been for the last 4 years.’ If the divorce was to go through, then it would obviously be essential that he keep well out of the limelight: ‘… if I’m in the way for the present you will tell me, won’t you? … I’m making the very biggest sacrifice that I’ll ever make in my whole life by writing to you what I am tonight my sweet Freda, and I’m crying a bit, though as I love you love you I do want so to help you too. It is so so terribly hard and cruel to be away from you at a time of crisis.’⁵³

      Talk of a divorce blew over and by the time he had reached Japan he had reassured himself that their love affair would survive unimpaired. He wrote from Kyoto to tell her ‘how I’ve missed you and pined for TOI my precious beloved, and how I’m always wanting TOI and yearning for you!! And I know from your letters that you’ve felt the same, Fredie, and the fact that both still feel as mad as we ever did is a real test, isn’t it, darling angel?’⁵⁴ He deluded himself. She was devoted to him, loyal to him, but she no longer loved him madly. When he got back to England later that year, it was to find that the reputation of her children was advanced as a reason for their seeing less of each other. Reluctantly he accepted the excuse: ‘We are indeed a hunted and pathetic little couple, aren’t we, Fredie, but nobody can stop us loving each other.’⁵⁵

      The unhappiness and frustration caused by Freda Dudley Ward’s coolness towards him drove him to seek solace in drink, night clubs and the ostentatious pursuit of other women. Many of the accounts of the Prince of Wales misbehaving in public stem from this period. In the spring of 1923 it seems to have come to a head. Freda must have stated bluntly that their relationship could never be what it had been and that he would have to content himself with friendship. ‘I’m at last beginning to realize what I’ve lost through going quite quite mad … in April,’ he wrote despairingly, ‘though I suppose it’s too late now … Oh! Fredie – I just don’t understand a thing about life except that it’s all d—d hard and foul and cruel, and I’m so depressed and puzzled about it all.’⁵⁶

      To solace his woes he indulged in a brief fling with Audrey Coats, a girl who as Audrey James had played havoc with a wide swathe of London society. Mr Coats, however, was evidently less complaisant than Mr Dudley Ward. ‘Never have I had such an exciting week as this,’ the Prince told Freda from a house party at Drummond Castle, in which the Coatses were among the guests, ‘and the air is electric and it’s all too tricky for words. I’m quite exhausted and shall be lucky if I escape without the hell of a row …’ But though he found Mrs Coats attractive and enjoyed his affair with her, he was being entirely sincere when he told his true love: ‘I’m not madly in love and never will be again, and she’ll never mean a fraction to me of what you do.’⁵⁷ There were to be many such meaner beauties of the night but the moon of Freda Dudley Ward reigned supreme, and was to continue to do so until all other luminaries were dimmed by the СКАЧАТЬ