38656356325923

gesture of defiance against his father, the late King’s birthday as the date of his
marriage. Not one member of the Duke of Windsor’s family and only seven English
friends attended the wedding of the man who only six months earlier had been the
idolized King-Emperor. The King had forbidden his brothers to go to the wedding and
Lord Louis Mountbatten, once the bridegroom’s great friend, had thought it politic to
decline.
The King and his brother were by now barely on speaking terms, the relationship
having gone downhill with astonishing rapidity since the night of their emotional
farewell in December. George VI had subsequently discovered that the Duke had lied to
him over the amount of money at his disposal and that he had something like £1 million
salted away as savings on his income from the Duchy of Cornwall, money which by
rights should have gone with the Crown. The King’s temper was not improved on
finding that part of the interest on this sum which should have been his had been made
over to Wallis. A bitter family quarrel ensued. The King had promised as part of the
Abdication arrangement that the Duke should be paid an allowance of £25,000 on the
Civil List, but after the revelation of the huge proportions of the Duke’s nest-egg, both
Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, usually on
opposing sides, advised the King to pay the sum himself in order to avoid a
parliamentary discussion of the subject. ‘The moment this [the Duke’s £1 million
savings] is disclosed,’ Churchill wrote to Chamberlain, ‘the Labour Party could hardly
help drawing the moral of the very large savings which it is possible for Royal persons
to make, and to argue that the existing Civil List should be reduced.’ Chamberlain, for
once, agreed, thus avoiding, as he told his sister Ida, ‘a discussion which would
thoroughly discredit the Duke himself but would not fail to give another jolt to the
Monarchy’. The King, therefore, reluctantly agreed to pay the allowance out of his
private purse. He had also to buy out the Duke’s interests in Balmoral and Sandringham,
which, being family as opposed to Crown property, Edward had inherited as eldest son.
After much wrangling the total valuation of the properties was settled at £289,853; this,
invested in War Loan, produced £10,144 per annum which was paid to foreign residents
tax free. The King would top this up with a further £11,000 a year, an allowance which
would cease on his death.
Windsor supporters charged him with treating his brother meanly, but it is significant
that when the King’s official biographer, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, saw the papers
concerning the affair, he told the diarist Robert Bruce Lockhart ‘how, as Duke of
Windsor, Edward was inveterately greedy of money and made great demands on his
brother, King George VI – demands which the King fulfilled at considerable sacrifice to
himself… how insistent the Duke was on his demands and how little gratitude he
showed when his extravagance was paid for by the King’. Wheeler-Bennett’s book was
published in 1958, but none of this information appeared in it. Elizabeth II, with the
reputation of the royal family to consider, no doubt preferred it to remain out of the
public domain. In August 1949 Churchill told Lord Beaverbrook that the Duke of
Windsor had a tax-free ‘income of £100,000 a year from England [something like £4–5