Jewelry

Wallis Simpson, Lord Mountbatten, and an Unresolved Royal Jewelry Feud - Vanity Fair

As many features and reports from this very magazine might let you know, the British royal family is no stranger to controversy. But until a few decades ago, they did their best to litigate all arguments behind closed doors. We know everything there is to know about Prince Charles’s longtime romance with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall or the drama that erupted when Princess Margaret married a photographer, but every so often, news of a controversy that raged on decades ago will finally come to the fore. Last week, Lady Pamela Hicks appeared on a podcast to speak about one drama that was never totally resolved: the fight between her father, Lord Louis Mountbatten, and Wallis Simpson, the wife of his cousin, former King Edward VIII.

Now that the podcast boom has taken over, it was only a matter of time before the extended royal family started joining in. India Hicks, a former model who is 678th in line for the throne, started one last month and has convinced her mother, Pamela, to join in and share stories about what it was like to grow up alongside her cousin, Prince Philip or to be a bridesmaid at Queen Elizabeth’s wedding. Pamela, 90, clearly isn’t concerned about burning any bridges, because she opened up about a feud for what might be the first time.

Talking about some of her more fond memories of Wallis, Pamela begins to recall something she’s not quite as fond of:

We had a real battle, because when the Duke of Windsor abdicated and went into exile, he took as his private possessions one or two things—actually beautiful little boxes—that were his father’s or grandfather’s. My father thought he shouldn’t have taken those because they became state things. My father fought an endless battle to try to get Wallis to hand those back. He never succeeded because by that time she had descended into dementia, and she had that terrible lawyer who ruled her life.

India, apparently sensing that they had entered some questionable territory, was quick to redirect her mother. “I was just going to get back into the deeper things in life, like the chef and food, not dementia or a terrifying lawyer,” she said.

The lawyer Pamela was discussing is most likely Suzanne Blum, who was given power of attorney for Wallis in 1973, a year after Edward’s death, and later organized an auction of many of her belongings at Sotheby’s after Wallis’s death in 1986. Around the time that Mountbatten began asking about the jewels, her health was deteriorating, and she suffered from what biographer Anna Pasternak called “lapses of senility,” in her recent book The Real Wallis Simpson. Other biographers have claimed that before his death, Edward had warned Wallis to be careful around Mountbatten. He was never able to recover the jewels, and in 1979, he died as the result of an IRA bombing on a ship. (He was a mentor to Prince Charles, whose grandson, Prince Louis is said to be named after the late earl.)