The Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s royal welcome at the White House,
Every US President loves the royals and this week’s visitor to Windsor Castle is no exception.
Donald Trump will be welcomed with the full pomp and panoply Britain delivers so well – and he’ll lap up every minute of it.
That doesn’t mean that back in America our royals still can’t be viewed with suspicion – enemies of the state, even – just as the Duke of Windsor was during World War II.
On the face of it America was ready to show its traditionally cordial welcome to the exiled ex-king when he arrived in the Bahamas in 1940.
Indeed, soon after his appointment as Governor, legendary president Franklin D Roosevelt came to call, tying up his ship the USS Tuscaloosa on Eleuthera island and inviting the duke aboard to lunch.
The two men got on well, and Roosevelt proposed that the Duke and Duchess should visit the White House the following autumn. Edward and Wallis duly showed up in September 1941, again for lunch, and were treated – well, like royalty.
The president arranged a lively party of 14 with drinks beforehand, and a tour of the White House after. The Windsors left just before 3pm, cockahoop with the welcome they’d received.
What the couple didn’t know was that, weeks before, Roosevelt had ordered his head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, to have them tailed. From the moment they arrived in Nassau the Windsors had hated it, and used every opportunity in the following months to hop over to the American mainland, just 150 miles away.
It made the President uneasy.
On their next trip to Miami, the duke and duchess were tailed by the FBI to see what mischief they were making. They’d arrived on the luxury yacht owned by Swedish mogul Axel Wenner-Gren, believed to be a Nazi spy.
That, and the Windsors’ ill-fated pre-war trip to Germany where they met Adolf Hitler, was enough to convince Roosevelt that at best, the Windsors were security risk and at worst, enemy agents.
The surveillance file, now available and a lengthy read at nearly 300 pages, is a hilarious account of FBI ineptitude: starved of information, and for a time kept well away from the group which surrounded the royal couple, the spies weren’t averse to making stuff up.
And when that failed, they stuffed their dossiers with letters from cranks and eccentrics who were convinced the Windsors and their friends were about to destroy America’s way of life.
The FBI men discovered it isn’t easy to get close to royalty and, frightened of being uncovered, hung back in the shadows. It was only when they put the finger on resident British aristocrat Alastair Mackintosh they were able to make the breakthrough into the royal circle.
Mackintosh was the nearest thing the Duke of Windsor had to a male friend in the States. Once part of the royal circle, he’d been equerry to Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter Princess Beatrice, as well as ADC to the Viceroy of India, the Marquess of Willingdon. His credentials were impeccable.
By the time the Windsors arrived in Miami in 1940, Mackintosh was the toast of Palm Beach, the sun-kissed millionaires’ playground where he’d opened a club called the Alibi and, as an upper-crust Englishman once married to Hollywood star Constance Talmadge, was hugely in demand by the snobbish Palm Beach crowd.
Mackintosh had reason to be grateful to the US authorities for granting him permanent residency and making a fortune out of his well-heeled customers. So when the FBI came knocking, he let them in – guiding them to places where they could be close to the Windsors and listen in to their conversations without drawing attention to themselves.
Looked at one way, this was a terrible betrayal of an old friendship – but Mackintosh had no option.
But the results were hardly James Bond material. One agent, without a shred of evidence, claimed the Duchess had an affair with a high-ranking Nazi, Joachim von Ribbentrop (even though several authors have subsequently tried to establish this as fact, it’s never been proved).
Another agent, E.A.Tamm, insisted that Wallis was still in touch with Ribbentrop in 1940 and passing back information to the Nazi High Command. It was sheer make-believe.
One more agent noted that Wallis sent her clothes to a dry cleaner in New York “and the possibility arises that the transferring of messages through the clothes may be taking place.” A hapless gofer was given the job of logging every single telephone call made out of the 30-bedroom Everglades Club where the Windsors were staying – just in case one of the calls was to a Nazi agent.
It all came to nothing. However flawed they may have been, the Windsors weren’t traitors – either to Britain or to the USA.
But it was unsettling for the couple who after a time came to realise just what was going on – that they were being spied on by Washington, but also by London.
One evening back in Nassau the pair were piped in to dinner by a Scottish piper. “After being seated the Duchess made some remark to a dinner guest,” writes author Andrew Lownie.
“She then turned to the piper and said ‘You can report that back to Downing Street” – which indicated to everyone present they thought the piper was some kind of spy.”
The upshot was that President Roosevelt wasted much time and precious resources on the Windsors trying to prove something that was unprovable.
That was then, and this is now – and America has a new President just as keen on our royal family as Roosevelt ever was. It raises the question, does Donald Trump view our runaway royal Prince Harry in the same way Roosevelt viewed the other one, the Duke of Windsor?
Harry and Meghan have a far less cordial relationship with Trump. Meghan called out the notoriously thin-skinned president as being “msyogynistic”, and he responded by calling her “Nasty. I am not a fan of hers.”
Trump, surprisingly loyal to the Crown, declared when the couple made their 2020 Megxit move, “They have betrayed the Queen.”
In recent months the President is said to be have been taking a close personal interest in the investigation into Harry’s US visa application, and whether he declared [as he did his memoir Spare] that he’d taken drugs – a no-no for foreign applicants seeking residency.
It would only take a word from The Donald to FBI boss Kash Patel to set the wheels in motion.
The agency would put the couple under close surveillance at their Montecito home and go through the couple’s bank accounts and IRS declarations to see whether they’re paying the correct amount of tax – up to 37% on those millions earned from Netflix – where their money is coming from, and who in the outside world they’re in contact with.
The FBI would even approach Meghan and Harry’s friends – just as they did with Windsor chum Alastair Mackintosh and another close buddy, William Rhinelander Stewart. Maybe they’ve started already, we may never know – and certainly not for many years to come.
There’s something else, closer to home, that should be worrisome for Harry. In 1935, King George V instructed the security services to tail the then Prince of Wales because of his outlandish behaviour and the company he kept.
At the King’s behest, Scotland Yard’s top investigator Superintendant Albert Canning was put in charge of following the prince and winkling every last detail of his life from the royal’s friends and acquaintances. The king felt his son was doing irreparable damage to the royal brand.
Despite that decidedly equivocal meeting between Charles and Harry last week, is that how the present king secretly feels?
Given the precedent set by his great-grandfather and the undeniable damage done by Meghan and Harry since Megxit, has Charles had a quiet word with his cloak-and-dagger friends to ‘keep an eye’ on the renegade couple?
Or are the FBI doing it for him?
