Wallis
Simpson: new divorce details revealed in solicitor's notes
Robert
Egerton recalled case as ‘a judicial farce’ in 47-page private memoir shown to
the Guardian
Owen
Bowcott Legal affairs correspondent
@owenbowcott
Sun 22 Dec
2019 12.42 GMTLast modified on Sun 22 Dec 2019 17.50 GMT
Wallis
Simpson’s controversial divorce, which freed her to marry Edward VIII, was
initially defeated because the hotel chosen for the staged adultery was too
exclusive, according to a private memoir.
Papers held
by the family of Robert Egerton, a pioneering solicitor involved in the
celebrated 1936 case, provide an extraordinary “below stairs” account of what
he described as a “judicial farce” during the abdication crisis.
His 47-page
portrait of the affair, seen by the Guardian, exposes how the high-society
Hotel de Paris in Bray, Berkshire, sacked three of its staff for giving
evidence about guests.
Egerton was
experienced in what he called the “dirty business” of organising separations
under the era’s restrictive divorce laws. By coincidence, his chronicle emerges
as parliament is finally due to introduce no-fault divorce through the delayed
divorce, dissolution and separation bill.
As a young
lawyer, he trained after Cambridge University with the London law firm Theodore
Goddard & Co, which represented the American socialite Mrs Simpson in her
divorce from her second husband, Ernest Simpson.
Egerton,
who later became a leading campaigner for the establishment of legal aid, wrote
up his personal reminiscences of the “most famous romance of the century”
towards the end of his life.
His involvement,
he recalled, began one Friday when he was told to cancel any arrangements he
had for the weekend and pack a bag for a “very good hotel”. Mr Simpson, he was
told, had taken a room with the “‘woman named’ – the technical description of
the woman with whom adultery was alleged in a divorce petition”.
Normally an
“enquiry agent” would “call around with photographs, inspect the register and
take a statement, which would eventually satisfy the court’s requirements for
an unopposed decree nisi.”
In this
case, Egerton explained, the “beautifully stage-managed production” at the
hotel hit a snag when the staff “refused all cooperation” to the enquiry agent
and he “came away defeated”.
The
Thames-side Hotel de Paris was renowned for its exuberant cabaret and parties
for “Bright Young Things”. As Egerton recorded: “This was one of those
expensive hotels which was patronised by society and other wealthy people who
did not want the public to know where they were to be found or who their
companion was.”
There was,
however, “tremendous pressure to get the divorce through without delay and
before the self-imposed restraint of British newspapers was abandoned”.
The law
firm’s managing clerk, Barron, was swiftly mobilised. When he arrived he met
similar resistance from hotel management. Barron demanded to see the hotel
register.
“‘We don’t
keep a register’, said the manager. ‘You know that you are required by law to
keep a register,’ replied Barron, ‘and if what you said is true, you will be
convicted of deliberately flouting the law and for an obvious reason which will
make an interesting report in the newspapers.’
“Once it
had become obvious that publicity of one kind or another could not be avoided,
the hotel gave Barron access to the staff and he came away with statements from
the hotel porter, a waiter and the floor waiter who had served breakfast in bed
to Mr Simpson and a woman who was not Mrs Simpson.”
Desperate
to avoid “unsavoury publicity” the Hotel de Paris subsequently sacked the three
men, leaving the law firm to pay for accommodation and support for their key
witnesses.
Barron and
Egerton were dispatched to the Hotel de Paris again “to warn the management …
against trying to do anything which would impede the divorce and to impress
everyone concerned with the lavish funds which were being generously dispensed
to those who aided Mrs Simpson.”
Even then
the divorce faced legal challenges. “To keep up the pretence that undefended
divorces were not ‘put up’ jobs (which most of them were),” Egerton explained,
“the court expected to be assured that the three Cs – connivance, collusion and
condonation – were not involved in the case.”
She had to
insist she had never misbehaved. “It will surprise many people that Mrs Simpson
should have, in effect, denied that she had committed adultery with the King,”
Egerton observed.
“… He was
passionately in love with Mrs Simpson and, with reckless disregard of the
consequences, had secured her company on a cruise and at Balmoral. Who could be
blamed for assuming that there had been sexual intercourse?”
Divorce
proceedings were fixed for 27 October 1936 at Ipswich assize court. Egerton and
Barron collected the three sacked staff and took them to a hotel in Colchester.
The night before the hearing, they had to search the town for one of the
waiters, who wandered off to find more drink.
Early the
next morning, a car collected them and they managed to slip into court
unnoticed through a side door. “Theodore Goddard quietly shepherded Mrs Simpson
to a seat near the witness box,” Egerton noted, before journalists arrived. The
hotel staff gave their “perfectly adequate evidence”.
The judge,
Mr Justice Hawke, awarded costs against Mr Simpson but he clearly, Egerton
believed, “would have liked to find a way out of presiding over what was
palpably a judicial farce.
“He had not
liked what he saw of Mrs Simpson in the box, particularly, no doubt, her claim
that the chance discovery of her husband’s infidelity had driven her to write
[a] legally concocted letter expelling him from their home.”
Theodore
Goddard was never knighted. Egerton suggested it was because he was “slightly
tainted by the devious measures that had been taken in the course of the
divorce”.
Mrs
Simpson, he concluded, was “a hard woman”. As lawyers, he added, “we were well
aware at the time of the humbug and sleaziness which inevitably result from
divorce law.
“They
tarnish the grandeur of the fact that a man renounced the world’s greatest
privileges and duties for love of a woman but perhaps a great romance has to
assume nobility of character which is seldom found in real life.”
How fascinating that Egerton was sensitive/intelligent enough to become a leading campaigner for the establishment of legal aid.
ReplyDeleteYet the same man was silly enough to call the King's case the “most famous romance of the century” in his personal reminiscences. As besotted as Edward VIII was, few suggested Wallis wanted to sleep with Edward. In fact she probably felt she made a big mistake going ahead with her third marriage.