‘We Must Be Brave and Keep Sane’ : Windsors’ Letters Reflect Love, Pain

A day before the funeral for the Duchess of Windsor, the Daily Mail newspaper today began printing secret love letters of the duke and duchess that it said will put their “romance of the century” into new perspective.

“I hide my face but send you all love,” the twice-divorced Wallis Warfield Simpson wrote in one letter to King Edward VIII, who would soon abdicate in 1936 for the woman he loved.

After his abdication but before their marriage, the duke, who was called David by his family, wrote to her in France from his exile in Austria. He said it had been a hard month but that they would soon be able to “sock back at THEM, won’t we darling? . . . Please take care of your precious self for your David like he is doing for a girl because it’s all he’s got left in the World and it’s all that he wants.”

The Mail said the duchess was determined that after her death publication of the letters would challenge opinion that labeled her an adventuress who seduced a king into abandoning his duty and his throne.

In one letter he wrote, “I feel like bursting tonight with love and such a longing to hold you tighter than I ever have before.”

But the first copyright installment of letters shed little new light on the 1936 abdication or the relationship between the king and the woman from Baltimore.

In one of the most interesting excerpts today, Simpson wrote to the king: “Darling Sweetheart, sometimes I feel as though my heart would burst if I didn’t see you--but we must be brave and keep sane for a few more months. I am so distressed over the way your brother has behaved. . . .

She was referring to the brother who would become King George VI upon the abdication of Edward.