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million in today’s money], the charge on the royal estates [Sandringham and Balmoral]
and so on…’ 11 The Duke himself, as he admitted, saw money as his insurance against
revolution. ‘I belong to a profession that has been losing ground for centuries.’ What he
failed to add was that Wallis’s ideas of the standard of living befitting an ex-King cost a
great deal of money. When Queen Mary’s biographer, James Pope-Hennessy, visited
them at their French country home, Le Moulin des Tuileries, in the late 1950s, he found
that ‘Every conceivable luxury and creature comfort is brought, called on, conscripted,
to produce a perfection of sybaritic living.’
The King had to fund these expensive family arrangements out of his private income,
the money, rumoured to be close on £1million, which George V had settled on each of
his sons and the sums which as King he received from the Duchy of Lancaster. ‘George VI
didn’t have a bean,’ a courtier declared with cheerful exaggeration. While this might not
have been strictly true, the sums which he had had to hand over to his brother, and
would have to continue to provide on an annual basis, made a large hole in both his
capital and his income. It seems to be at this moment that George VI came to an
agreement with Chamberlain, who had succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister after the
Coronation, not to pay tax on his private income; the justification for this concession
presumably being that the cost of paying off the Duke of Windsor was to be borne by
him personally and not, as originally promised, by the public through the Civil List. The
fiscal arrangement between the King and the Government was kept secret and remained
so as far as the public and even the politicians were concerned until more than fifty
years later, when Elizabeth agreed to rescind it in the face of popular outcry.
It was to be well over a year before the details of the handing-over of Balmoral and
Sandringham were settled; at one point Edward threatened not to allow the King to use
them. There was a nasty scene over George V’s fabulous stamp collection, which was,
however, discovered to be Crown and not private property. An unbridgeable gulf was
created by the King’s refusal to allow Wallis to take the title of Royal Highness on her
marriage to the Duke, a decision seen by the Windsors and by many experts as both
illegal and unfair. The King to his dying day refused to reconsider it, arguing that her
becoming a Royal Highness would ‘make nonsense of the Abdication’ when the people
of the Dominions had specifically rejected the suggestion that she should become either
Queen or a member of the royal family. In any case, he argued firmly, as King he was
the ‘fount of honour’, the source of all ennoblement, and that was that. The Duke of
Windsor was deeply affronted by this public snubbing of his wife; he never forgave his
brother, and more particularly he never forgave his brother’s wife, or his mother, both
of whom he blamed for the decision.
Elizabeth would have known of her uncle’s marriage, but she would have remained
unaware of the details of the post-Abdication family quarrels until she came to the
throne. They were to remain firmly under official wraps until revealed by the Windsors’
historian, Michael Bloch, in the 1980s. Nor was she at the time aware of the extent to
which her father was haunted by his brother. While the family was staying at Balmoral
in October 1937, Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British Ambassador in Washington, arrived at