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Edward emerge, followed by Peregrine Brownlow, his Lord-in-Waiting. At once, Channon wrote in his diary, he could see that the King was in a cheerful mood - 'no doubt a reaction from his depressing Welsh tour, two dreadfully sad days in the distressed areas.' 1 But Edward's happiness was far more likely the prospect of seeing another of the dinner guests - Mrs Wallis Simpson, an American. Although she was married to another man, she was the centre of Edward's life, and he ached for her whenever they were apart. 'My own beloved Wallis,' he wrote in 1935 in one of many devoted notes, 'I love you more & more & more & more . . . I haven't seen you once today and I can't take it. I love you.' 2 He had missed her badly in South Wales, and it was not Buckingham Palace he had wanted to telephone from the train at Usk - it was Wallis.
    Edward had found qualities in Mrs Simpson, believed Winston Churchill, that were as necessary to his happiness as the air he breathed. Those who knew him well and watched him closely noticed that many little tricks and fidgetings of nervousness fell away from him. He was a completed being instead of a sick and harassed soul. 3
    They were not youngsters - he was forty-two, she was forty - and their easy ways with each other reflected a natural and relaxed com­panionship. But there was a chemistry between them, too, that was electric and seemed to separate them from the rest of the world. Photographed unawares while they were on holiday in Italy, their tender embrace was caught on film. Edward leaned forward to Wallis, pressing his left cheek against her own and possessively embracing her body with his left arm; her face was creased with laughter and pleasure. Edward's behaviour towards Wallis was watched with curiosity by the people around him. 'Every few minutes,' wrote Victor Cazalet, a Tory MP, after watching them at a dinner together, 'he gazes at her and a happiness and radiance fill his countenance such as make you have a lump in your throat.' 4 He was utterly devoted. One weekend in 1936, Charles Lambe noticed that as they came in from a walk in the garden,
    The King and Mrs S entered the front door first, and he at once went on his knees to take off her galoshes. As the passage was thus blocked, the rest of us stood contemplating the spectacle, she tickled to death and mildly remonstrative, he, earnest and intent, muttering slightly to himself but oblivious of us. 5
    As the year 1936 neared its end, few people in Britain had even heard of Wallis Simpson; those who had heard of her belonged to the tiny social circle surrounding the royal family. She was carefully excluded from the newsreels and from the pages of the press. The only exception was the magazine Cavalcade, which in the summer of 1936 defiantly printed photographs of Edward and Wallis on holiday together and made veiled references to their relationship. 'The plain truth', wrote Bill Deedes, later to be editor of the Daily Telegraph but then a young journalist, 'is that newspapers showed more deference to the Royal Family in those days . . . There was also a far greater distance kept between Royalty's close circle of friends and the rest of us. Gossip was harder to obtain.' 6 H. A. Gwynne, editor of the Morning Post, which he described as 'the staunchest supporter of monarchical institutions', sent a letter to the Prime Minister warning that any break in '"The Great Silence'" would deal 'a deadly blow to Monarchy'.
    On such 'a delicate matter as this,' he said, 'the Press should follow the Government and not dictate to it.' He warned, however, that some sections of the press, especially the 'sensational newspapers', were getting very restive. 7
    But it was only in Britain, as well as most of the Empire, that the affair between Edward and Wallis was a closely guarded secret. The American and European media were under far fewer constraints than British journalists were. So while the people of Britain remained quite unaware of the King's