Background

Wallis Simpson was born on June 19, 1896 (some sources say that she was born in 1895), in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. She was the daughter of Teackle Wallis and Alice Warfield. Her father died of tuberculosis only a few months after she was born, and for most of Simpson's childhood, she and her mother survived on the charity of Simpson's wealthy uncle, Solomon Warfield.

Education

Wallis Simpson attended the Oldfields School in Cockeysville.

Career

At the age of twenty, Wallis Simpson married her first husband, a Navy lieutenant named Earl Winfield Spencer. Their marriage did not go well, and they eventually divorced. Only months after the divorce became final, Simpson, with no other means of support, married her second husband, London-based shipbroker Ernest Aldrich Simpson.

It was through her second husband that Wallis Simpson was presented at court and met the future King Edward VIII. Although their relationship was widely reported in the foreign press and certainly known to many upper-class Britons, the British press maintained a policy of not reporting on the private lives of their royalty, so the mass of the British population was not aware of it. However, when Edward did not break off the affair when he ascended to the throne, their relationship became legitimate news, as well as a cause of great consternation to some members of the British ruling class. Edward, as king, was also head of the Church of England, and it was considered that the head of a church ought to display a higher standard of morality.

The scandal became a crisis when Wallis Simpson's husband granted her a divorce in the fall of 1936, to become official in the spring of 1937. When Edward found out about it, he told the prime minister that he was going to marry Simpson. The prime minister told Edward that as the head of the Church of England, he could not marry a divorcee, and the rest of the royal family, not to say the majority of the British public, agreed. Faced with such opposition, on December 10, 1936, Edward gave up his crown rather than give up the woman he loved.

The couple were married the following summer and became the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the title conferred on the ex-monarch, by his brother and successor, the new King George VI. They settled at a villa in France, and although the two were forced to live abroad, mostly in the Bahamas, for the duration of World War II, they spent most of the rest of their lives living and entertaining in France. When Edward died in 1972, she lived, generally, out of the public eye.

Wallis Simpson also was a writer. Her first book was Some Favorite Southern Recipes of the Duchess of Windsor. Simpson's autobiography The Heart Has Its Reasons: The Memoirs of the Duchess of Windsor received much comment and was a bestseller in its day. It was often compared to her husband's own book, A King's Story: The Memoirs of H.R.H. the Duke of Windsor. Both books emphasize the romantic elements of their relationship. The year that Simpson died, a collection of letters edited by biographer Michael Bloch, who also penned several volumes about the Windsors, was published. Wallis & Edward: Letters, 1931-1937: The Intimate Correspondence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, consisted mostly of letters written by the Duchess to her American aunt during the mid-1930s, when the abdication crisis in Britain was at its height, although the book also includes some notes from Edward to Wallis.

Achievements

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  Wallis Simpson was well known as Prince Edward Duke of Windsor's wife, who gave up the English throne to marry her. In 1936 Time magazine honored her a Woman of the Year. It was the first time the magazine had ever given its Man of the Year award to a woman. At that time, Simpson became the most-talked-about, written-about, headlined, and interest-compelling person in the world.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Some Favorite Southern Recipes of The Duchess of Windsor

    (This discriminating selection by the Duchess of Windsor c...)

    1942
  • Wallis and Edward, Letters 1931-1937

    (The book was edited by Michael Bloch.)

    1986
  • The Heart Has Its Reasons 1956

Views

Quotations: "You can never be too rich or too thin."

Connections

Wallis Simpson's first husband was Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. They married on November 8, 1916, and divorced in 1927. Then she married Ernest Aldrich Simpson on July 21, 1928. They divorced in 1937. Wallis Simpson's last husband was Edward, Duke of Windsor. They married on June 3, 1937.

Father:

Teackle Wallis Warfield

Mother:

Alice Warfield

Alice Warfield's maiden name was Montague.

husband:

Ernest Aldrich Simpson

Ernest Aldrich Simpson was Wallis Simpson's second husband. They divorced in 1937. Simpson was a shipbroker in the family firm, Simpson, Spence & Young.

husband:

Earl Winfield Spencer Jr.

Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. was Wallis Simpson's first husband. They divorced in 1927. Spencer was an American United States Navy pilot.

husband:

Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor

Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, was Wallis Simpson's third husband. He was an English Prince of Wales and the king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the British dominions and emperor of India from January 20 to December 10, 1936.

References

• The American Duchess
  2019
• The Duchess of Windsor
  1980
• Wallis in Love
  2018
• That Woman
  2011