Edward’s OTHER WOMEN

Charismatic, charming and dapper, the Prince of Wales (who became Edward VIII and then the Duke of Windsor) caused debutantes to go weak at the knees at the thought of meeting him. His combination of boyish vulnerability and glamour made him immensely popular and an icon of the age. If Edward appeared in a loud checked jacket, half the young men across the country would copy him, thinking that it would make them equally irresistible to women. The frenzy that surrounded him was captured in a popular song of the era: “I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales.”

When the abdication crisis occurred in 1936, it was widely believed that Edward was suffering from an almost pathological obsession with the woman he loved – Wallis Simpson. Only those in his inner circle knew it was not the first time he had experienced an all-consuming love. First Rosemary Leveson-Gower, the girl he wanted to marry; then his long-term married mistress, Freda Dudley Ward; and finally Thelma Furness, his twice-married American lover, who inadvertently paved the way for Wallis. In each love affair, he behaved like a cross between a little boy lost and a spoilt child.

Rosemary

THE WARTIME ROMANCE

In the summer of 1917, a young Red Cross nurse