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On her birthday each year, the little girl waited expectantly for one particular parcel. Inside the wrapping paper was a jewellery box, and within that a single perfect pearl. “The idea was that she would have a necklace by the time that she was grown up,” the child’s mother Freda DudleyWard once explained. The wife of Liberal MP William Dudley Ward, the Anglo-American textile heiress had been a royal mistress from just after the First World War until 1929. The pearls were a present to her daughter from the man who had been her lover, the then Prince of Wales and future Edward VIII.
“Before meeting Wallis Simpson, the Prince was known to have had many affairs,” says his biographer, Andrew Lownie. But he had stayed on good terms with Freda, a friend and confidante, even after their liaison ended and he took up with the former actress Thelma Furness, wife of the shipping magnate Marmaduke, Viscount Furness.
However, when Furness introduced him to US divorcee Simpson in January 1931 – his passion for whom would later trigger the abdication crisis – the gifts of pearls abruptly stopped.
“Freda only learnt she had been dropped when the Buckingham Palace switchboard refused to put her calls through,” says Lownie.
What hurt Freda most was Edward’s behaviour towards her two daughters, Penelope and Angela. “She said he had been like a father to them, but that as soon as he met Wallis Simpson he cancelled the order with the jeweller,” Lownie continues.
“She thought it was shocking that he would take away a tiny pearl necklace from a child.”
Shocking, but perhaps not surprising in light of his other assignations with women and, it is believed, men.
“Before meeting Wallis, the Prince was known to have had many affairsand there have been claims of illegitimate children even though, officially, he died without an heir.
The future King – who became the Duke of Windsor after his abdication – always followed his own desires, it seems, regardless of the consequences, conducting his relationships in a clandestine manner.
One such affair, says Lownie, was with French seamstress Marie-Leonie Graftieaux, which was alleged to have produced a son, Pierre-Edouard, born in 1916.
But during his own research, Lownie discovered claims for at least four other illegitimate children.The historian’s bestselling biography will be published in paperback this spring to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Duke of Windsor’s death in May 1972.A Channel 4 documentary based on his research will be broadcast to tie in with it. Frederick Evans, born in 1918, mother claimed his concert pianist mother, Lillian Bartlett, had an affair with the Prince.
“His birth was registered as the son of a Welsh miner, James Evans, and she told the Prince of the boy and he responded with financial support,” says Lownie.
He also claims that, while staying at the Dunedin Club on his 1920 New Zealand tour, the Prince impregnated a servant who went on to have a son.
The boy was paid a remittance from London, and nicknamed “King”, due to his resemblance to the Prince of Wales’ father, George V, says Lownie. “He even wore the royal beard.”
There are also rumours that Edwina Drummond, born in April 1920, was fathered by the Prince ofWales, her godfather. Edward and his brother, Bertie, the future George VI, were regular visitors at her father’s home, Pitsford Hall in Northamptonshire.
“Edwina’s father, George Drummond, is supposed to have caught his wife Kathleen with the Prince of Wales in a compromising position in the stables of their family home and said, ‘Sir, I will share my wine and man horses with any man, but I will share my wife with no man’.”
Drummond’s second wife, Honora, claimed that whereas Edwina’s three sisters inherited their father’s aquiline nose, she had a turned-up nose like the Prince.
“A more convincing case can be made for the actor Timothy Seely, whose mother, Vera, was the sister of Freda Dudley Ward,” asserts Lownie.
“This is interesting, as Seely was born in 1935, after the affair with Wallis had begun, but we know from Special Branch reports that the Prince of Wales was not monogamous – he was enjoying an affair with an Austrian Princess at the same time.”
He had been best man at Vera’s wedding to Jimmy Seely in 1925 and often stayed with the Seelys in Nottinghamshire.
“The family later played down the story, and refused to talk about it but, after the Duke’s death, Seely was contacted by the Duke’s lawyers,” says Lownie, who himself approached the Seelys in August 2020.
He received an email from Timothy’s wife Camilla: “Over the years, various authors/reporters have contacted Tim but the response was always the same, he is not interested. He is immensely discreet… We would not wish to be even a small part of yet more unworthy stories concerning The Royal Family.”
But for all this womanising, questions remain about the Duke’s sexuality.
In the archives at Churchill College, Cambridge, Lownie discovered draft notes for an unpublished memoir written by Anne Seagrim who worked for the Windsors in the 1950s.
She wrote that Frances Donaldson’s 1974 biography of Edward VIII – heralded as the definitive work at the time – had missed “the essential point about his character: his fundamental uncertainty about his sexuality, his ability to be a heterosexual man. He was fundamentally afraid of women.”
Many of the Windsors’ friends were gay. They included the writer Somerset Maugham, the playwright and composer Noël Coward, decorator John McMullan and an American, Harvey Ladew, who often escorted the Duchess to parties. However, of the Duke is said never to have appeared particularly comfortable when in the company of gay men.
Coward once told the American novelist and screenwriter Truman Capote, who was openly gay: “The Duke, however well he pretends not to hate me, he does, though. Because I’m queer and he’s queer but, unlike him, I don’t pretend not to be.”
Once again, there was a furtive nature to his sexuality that suggests he may have been trying to hide the truth, even from himself.
In the pre-war diaries of Henry “Chips” Channon, finally published in their unexpurgated form last year, the prolific Americanborn politician wrote of the Prince in 1936: “I’ve always thought that EdwardVIII suffers from sexual repression of another nature… Certainly, too, he has always surrounded himself with extremely attractive men. One knows almost in advance the type of men he would like – Fruity Metcalfe, Dicky [Lord Louis] Mountbatten…Bruce Ogilvy, and even these he dropped as they aged.”
In a 2004 edition of his biography of Wallis, author Charles Higham revealed that the Duke’s former equerry Sir Dudley Forwood had told him that Edward “Fruity” Metcalfe, an Indian army officer and close friend of Edward, “was an active homosexual and that he had a physical affair with the Prince of Wales”.
Metcalfe was best man at Edward’s wedding in France to Wallis Simpson on June 3, 1937, and later served as his equerry in Paris until the German invasion of France in 1940.
“The Duke was also the honorary president of the Austrian Sports and Shooting Club, which German police files suggest was a cover for homosexual activities,” notes Lownie.
One of the Duke’s lovers was supposedly Walter Chrysler Jr, son of the founder of the Chrysler Corporation.
“Walter Jr was an art collector, museum benefactor, theatre and film producer, and had probably met the Duke at the Palm Beach Golf Club.”
Though Chrysler was briefly married, in 1944 he had been forced to resign from the Navy after 16 enlisted men had signed affidavits that Chrysler had sex with them, a crime at the time. It was said that during the Second
World War, Chrsyler Jr and the Duke of Windsor had thrown a sex party on a Navy ship docked at Jacksonville, Florida.
Lownie also found evidence that the Duke had made advances to a male florist who had supplied flowers to the New York City apartment where the Duke and Duchess stayed in the 1940s.
“The Abdication remains one of the most traumatic episodes in royal history, and the tension between public obligations and private desires continues to be a significant issue,” says Lownie.
“If Edward’s renunciation of the throne threatened to destroy the monarchy, the country was lucky that his brother, George VI, and his niece, Elizabeth II, saved it.”
