A brick through her window… mounting paranoia… and the threats to Mrs Simpson’s life that pushed Edward VIII to quit the throne. By the Duke of Windsor’s biographer, JANE MARGUERITE TIPPETT

Edward VIII’s abdication on December 11, 1936 was the culmination of a long standoff between king, church and government over Edward’s determination to marry twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson.

Rancorous views about Edward’s private life finally exploded onto the British public stage on December 3, 1936 and consumed the country for nine days, forcing a constitutional showdown that threatened the fabric of national life.

Edward’s willful determination and his single-minded love for an unsuitable consort: these are the forces long considered decisive in what became a defining moment for the British monarchy in the 20th century.

Yet there is an equally influential but overlooked factor in how Edward came to his unprecedented decision: the fear bordering on paranoia that consumed Wallis in the final weeks of his reign.

Convinced that she was a target for the assassin’s bullet, the object of Edward’s all-consuming obsession fled England in the throes of panicky excitement, leaving behind a lonely and pining king who wanted only to be reunited with the woman he loved. loved.

It all started with a rock through a window…

On November 27, 1936, amid escalating rumors about the relationship – and as Edward confronted the issue of marriage with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin – an unknown man threw a rock through the ground-floor window of Wallis’s home at 16 Cumberland Terrace.

Intent on not missing his target, the attacker threw a second stone at Wallis’ neighbor, Lord Salisbury, in case he did not have the correct address.

“A deluded wretch,” is how Max Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express, described the villain to Murphy. But perhaps a consequential loss.

Indeed, the press baron came to believe that the broken windows had been “an even more influential factor than Baldwin in the king’s decision to abdicate without a fight.”

The episode certainly sent Edward into overdrive. He broke off his talks with Baldwin at Buckingham Palace so that he could personally escort Wallis to the safety of his home, Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park.

Wallis, Edward reflected, had been ‘at all times beyond the protection of the king’s person’, and it became essential for him to extend the protective sphere of the royal orbit around her.

Until November 1936, the silent agreement between monarch and media had kept her name firmly out of the British press.

Unburdened by public criticism, Edward had dazzled Wallis by transforming her comfortable middle-class existence with Ernest Simpson into one of unparalleled luxury.

Wallis showered her with expensive jewelry and Parisian haute couture and became one of the fashionable leaders of London society – a position she relished.

‘Everyone succumbs to glamour; challenge anyone to say something different,” she thought later.

Yet the explosion of hostilities epitomized by this single act of violence shattered any illusions Wallis might have had about how the British public would react to her romance with Edward.

Her “physical shyness,” as Beaverbrook described, emerged and fear overwhelmed her.

“It convinced her,” Beaverbrook told her husband’s ghostwriter, Charles JV Murphy, “that the British people were plotting to kill her. Her fears, in turn, aroused his bravery. He rushed to protect her. And in doing so, he found himself taking her side against his own people.”

But even the protection of Fort Belvedere – a miniature fortress located in the oasis of Windsor Great Park – proved insufficient.

Within a week, Wallis’s face, virtually unknown in Britain, appeared in the country’s headlines. The anonymity she had enjoyed was destroyed and her world, as she later described it, “was blown up.”

Familiarity, at least for Wallis, translated into fear – and she became convinced she was a target for assassination.

When she fled to France on the night of December 3, she left the country and a king who, as Beaverbrook emphasized, “had but one thought: to rejoin her.”

On the way to Newhaven, where they were to catch the ferry to France, Wallis’s companion Perry Brownlow noted that she remained in the grip of excitement – determined to escape – for fear that she would suffer bodily harm if she got into Britain to stay.

Her determination proved disastrous, as she had no meaningful communication with Edward and lost all influence. She was a witness rather than a participant in the final hours of the abdication crisis

“I was running for my life,” Wallis exclaimed to Murphy in March 1950 as she described the journey with Brownlow.

Dressed in a bathing suit, on his way to spend the day with glamorous American socialite Jayne Wrightsman, Wallis had made a surprise appearance as Murphy and Edward sat together in ‘the white room overlooking the sea’ in the palatial Palm Beach mansion of the American financier, Robert Jong.

Young was one of the Windsors’ closest friends in America and their frequent host.

Murphy had been helping Edward with the final revisions of his memoirs, which were due to appear in the American photographic magazine Life in May 1950, when Wallis burst in with a sudden and awkward intervention – a complaint about the dangerous and traumatic circumstances of her escape from Britain. and its vengeful population.

After hearing his wife’s dramatic statement, the Duke of Windsor, as Murphy noted, intervened with “a mild reservation”:

“Sweetie, it wasn’t for your life. It wasn’t like that.’

The Duchess, Murphy noted, “looked at him gravely” and replied with unequivocal determination, “I was fleeing for my life.”

The rift between the pair was astonishing and convinced Murphy that the Windsors had “never alone and with in-depth research discussed the circumstances of the abdication.”

At this point, Wallis was at her most fierce and determined – unafraid to contradict her more illustrious husband in what Murphy described as ‘the manner of all confident women’ and fully demonstrating the qualities that Edward himself had identified in her : ‘independent….demanding.’

Yet in the final weeks of 1936 it was fear rather than determination that determined her actions and ultimately, as Murphy and others came to believe, the course of the king’s short reign.

A rock thrown through a window struck fear in a woman also known for her steely determination.

And so the disaster was set in motion.

• Jane Marguerite Tippett is author of Once A King – the lost memoirs of Edward VIII published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £25