The Duchess of Windsor, who shook the British monarchy and inspired the children’s playground song, “Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs Simpson’s pinched our king,” will be buried privately on Tuesday beside the husband who gave up a throne and empire for her.



Her death yesterday came two months short of her 90th birthday and only eight months before the 50th anniversary of King Edward VIII’s abdication to marry her.

It also came three days after the Queen’s 60th birthday celebrations. If the Duchess’s life had gone differently - and if in particular she had not been a divorcee as well as an American commoner - she could well have been the Queen Mother watching a child of her own receive tributes as sovereign.



Instead, she died childless, with no close surviving relatives, at the couple’s exile home in Paris. Her end followed a long twilight of strokes, mental derangement and grief at the loss of her husband 14 years ago.

Her fingers had reportedly become too arthritic to support her wedding ring. Cole Porter records from her 1930s heyday were played in her bedroom in an effort to revive her memory.

“It wasn’t really a life at all,” her close friend, Lady Diana Mosley, said yesterday. “I’m delighted to hear she has died. I wish she’d died many years ago.”

Another friend, Lady Diana Cooper, now aged 92, remembered the Duchess “as the soul of discretion when I first knew her and she was living with the king. She was perfectly discreet and I was very fond of her. The king worshipped her.”

The Duchess’s body will be flown by an aircraft of the Queen’s Flight to RAF Benson, Oxfordshire, and buried near Queen Victoria’s royal mausoleum at Frogmore, within sight of Windsor Castle.

The Queen and other members of the royal family are expected to attend. A period of family mourning was announced from noon today until after the funeral on Tuesday, when flags on government buildings will fly at half mast.

The 36-year rift between the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and the rest of the family centred on the stress which the succession placed on his younger brother, King George VI, who died in 1952.

It was formally healed shortly before the Duke’s death in 1972. The Duchess was briefly the Queen’s guest in London for the funeral.

But she was said by Paris friends yesterday to have been obsessed by her wish to find some further understanding or sympathy from the family.

All she had been offered was the right to be buried at Frogmore.



Buckingham Palace reacted coolly last night to a plea in a press statement from Burke’s Peerage “hoping and indeed anticipating” that the Duchess should be given in death the title ‘Her Royal Highness’ which was denied to her in life.

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