Right royal Nazi wedding

How bizarre the wedding of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson on 3rd June 1937 was.

There were almost no guests. A renegade priest hosted the ceremony. The Royal Family boycotted it.

And the man who hosted the lavish affair was a Nazi collaborator. He later asked for a Faustian deal with the Duke which would damn him for ever.

One of the few guests who attended, the Duke’s fixer Walter Monckton, later said, ‘It was a strange wedding for one who had been six months before King of England and Emperor of India and dominions beyond the seas.’

After the abdication on 11th December 1936, the Duke and Wallis were unable to see each other for six months –otherwise her decree nisi would have been invalidated.

When they were finally reunited in early May, Wallis supposedly said, ‘Darling, it’s been so long, I can hardly believe that it’s you, and I’m here.’

They may have wished to live happily ever after, but there were numerous difficulties. Letters patent issued by George VI on 28th May 1937 allowed Edward to retain his title HRH the Duke of Windsor.

They also stated, ‘however, that his wife and descendants, if any, shall not hold the said title of attribute.’ She would for ever be a second-class citizen.

When the Duke discovered the snub, courtesy of Monckton, he shouted, ‘This is a nice wedding present!’ He blamed his mother, Queen Mary, who observed protocol rigidly. He sneered that her letters to him read as if they were to ‘a young man who is stopping for a while in a foreign country to learn the language’.

George VI, egged on by his wife, Queen Elizabeth, was equally resolute.

He forbade any of the members of the Royal Household from attending the wedding, on the grounds that it would be wrong to sanctify an event that wasn’t held under the auspices of the Church of England.

The man who would marry them was a real curiosity.

Robert Jardine, a vicar in Darlington, was a publicityseeker and self-described ‘fighting parson’. He contacted the Duke’s solicitor, A G Allen, to offer his services. Jardine said that, ‘with God’s help, I am fighting for the happiness of my one-time earthly King’.

He made his way to the Château de Candé in France, where the wedding was to be held. It was the home of the Franco-American industrialist Charles Bedaux, who had generously offered to host the ceremony. Jardine officiated, saying that ‘quietness and an atmosphere of spiritual power marked the entire service’.

Jardine was waved off by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor with gifts of a slice of wedding cake and a pair of cufflinks. When he returned to Darlington, he found himself notorious, and his ecclesiastical career never recovered.

The ceremony was sparsely attended: the guests were vastly outnumbered by journalists.

Randolph Churchill, one of the few present, found himself operating in both camps, nipping from the press enclosure to the château and back again.

Bedaux and his wife, Fern, ensured that the hospitality Edward and Wallis enjoyed was, quite literally, fit for a king. There was no immediate charge for the wedding – but Bedaux’s intentions soon became clear.

He was a millionaire businessman who had made his fortune with a worldwide system of workers’ efficiency – the Bedaux system – but was concerned that his interests in Nazi Germany were being stymied. Not only did he have to pay regular bribes to the German state, but his business now fell under their control.

Bedaux, who later obtained both German citizenship and the honorary rank of Sonderführer on the outbreak of war – protecting his interests –organised a visit for Edward and Wallis to Germany in October 1937.

During that visit, the Duke had a private audience with Hitler. They were ostensibly in the country to see the economic improvements wrought by the Nazi regime.

But it was designed by Bedaux to show the regime with which he wished to ingratiate himself that he was a man of substance and power. As a younger man, he had been a big-game hunter. Now the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were the most impressive trophies he had acquired.

It all went awry. Bedaux killed himself in 1944 when he was arrested by the Americans for treason. And the German tour meant Edward and Wallis were finished.

Had the strangest of royal weddings never taken place, their decline in reputation may never have taken place, and they might now be regarded with affection. Instead, the events of 3rd June 1937 damned them – and Bedaux – for ever.

Alexander Larman’s The Windsors at War: The Nazi Threat to the Crown is published on 9th March (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)