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Wallis appeared all over the world, but not in Britain. The royal family at home were
wretched, but kept up appearances. When the King visited Queen Mary on his return to
England, she simply asked him whether he had found it ‘warm in the Adriatic’.
So far, despite the King’s obvious infatuation, Queen Mary had refrained from raising
the subject with him. She told Lady Airlie:
I have not liked to talk to David about his affair with Mrs Simpson, in the first place because I don’t want to
give the impression of interfering in his private life, and also because he is the most obstinate of all my sons.
To oppose him over doing anything is only to make him more determined to do it. At present he is utterly
infatuated, but my great hope is that violent infatuations usually wear off… 14
In any case, personal discussions were not the rule in the royal family, as Lord
Harewood attested. ‘I think they [his parents] found it as hard to talk in a serious yet
personal vein to us as we did to them,’ he wrote. Talking about the family at the time of
the Abdication, he said:
People kept much more private and much more quiet about things like that and were much more able to
bottle up their feelings. I think the whole of my mother’s family tended to bottle up their feelings very
much. To the point of being a fault… it was a tradition not to discuss anything awkward… But that went
much wider than just that family. It was general in a way that we find difficult to realise now. 15
Loelia Ponsonby described her mother as taking it as axiomatic that ‘Reserve is one of
the Cardinal Virtues synonymous with Decency’ and that, as a result, when she, Loelia,
grew up she was unable to articulate her feelings. These strict codes of behaviour were
to survive within the royal family and the royal household long after they had been
abandoned elsewhere and, indeed, were to shape Elizabeth’s own attitudes when she
had to face similar family crises in the course of her reign.
The Yorks were at Birkhall as usual in August, but this year the hostess at Balmoral
was not Queen Mary but Wallis Simpson, occupying the Queen’s suite; the Duchess of
York had a distinctly frosty exchange with Wallis at a Balmoral dinner-party. Elizabeth
remained at Birkhall, an eighteenth-century house on the Balmoral estate which was still
lit by oil lamps, and went out for tea and games with their near neighbours, the
Hardinges, children of Sir Alec Hardinge (later an active participant in the campaign to
dissuade the King from marrying Wallis). As a gesture of defiance to the new regime
and to underline their loyalty to the old traditions, the Yorks invited Archbishop Lang, a
guest of the late King’s at Balmoral for the past twenty-five years but definitely persona
non grata with the new King, to stay. The Duke of York was unhappy and anxious that
September, in despair about his brother’s behaviour. On the 23rd he and the Duchess had
been asked to deputize for the King at the opening of the new Aberdeen Infirmary; the
King had cried off on the grounds that he was still in mourning for his father, but the
real reason for his refusal to attend was made only too clear when he was seen, thinly
disguised by driving goggles, meeting Wallis at Aberdeen station just as the Yorks were
engaged in the opening ceremony. The resulting photographs outraged not just the