Did Wallis Simpson steal her OWN jewels for the insurance cash?

On 16 October 1946, Wallis and her husband the Duke of Windsor – the former Edward VIII – had left Ednam Lodge in Berkshire, where they had been staying with friends,  for dinner at Claridge’s hotel in .

In their absence, a daring raid took place at the house, and jewellery of Wallis’s that  worth as much as £25,000 (around £1.3 million today) was stolen, never to be recovered.

It affected both the Duke and Duchess deeply.

Edward later wrote to his brother, King , to describe his visit to Britain – he preferred to reside in either America or after his abdication of 1936 – as an ‘eye-opener’, and mentioned that he had discovered ‘the bitter and costly way that Great Britain is no longer the secure and law-abiding country it used to be.’

On paper, it was an outrageous  and one that remains mysterious to this day. No perpetrator was ever apprehended.

Yet there have been suspicions – both at the time, and after Wallis’s death in 1986 – that this theft from the home of Lord and Lady Dudley was either an inside job, done with the complicity of the cash-strapped Windsors or, alternatively, that the jewels were never stolen at all.

I explored this bizarre story in my new book about the , Power and Glory, and discovered a rich web of deceit, intrigue and wealth – relieved with some black comedy.

The first peculiarity was that, rather than place the jewellery in the house’s securely locked strong room, it had been left in a box under a bed.

Although the room was being watched by the Windsors’ detective, thieves were able to enter the house at around six in the evening, as the detective left for dinner.

The burglars were said to have climbed up a long white rope that was attached to a window in the bedroom of Lady Dudley’s daughter and then went straight into the Duchess’s room, ignored any other items of value there – or elsewhere in the house – gathered the jewel box and left, undetected by anyone.

After Wallis’s maid Joan Martin triggered the alarm, Ednam Lodge was plunged into uproar.

Because of the high-profile nature of the victims, Scotland Yard dispatched their assistant commissioner RM Howe and Chief Inspector John Capstick to the house.

When Edward and Wallis arrived, they behaved with almost exaggerated panic and anger.

In her memoirs, Lady Dudley later wrote of the Duchess that, although she was ‘in a bad way’, she demonstrated ‘an unpleasant and to me unexpected side of her character’, demanding all of the long-standing household servants be ‘put through a kind of a third degree’.

The hostess refused, saying that ‘all of them except one kitchen maid [were] old and devoted staff of long standing.’

Nonetheless, Wallis interrogated the maid as if she had committed the crime, despite the complete lack of any evidence against her.

While Lady Dudley allowed that they were ‘both demented with worry and near to tears’, this was not becoming behavior for a Duchess.

The next day, 18 individual earrings were found scattered about the nearby Sunningdale golf course. Much to Wallis’s continued anger, none of them made for a matching pair.

Fabergé boxes and a string of pearls that had belonged to Queen Alexandra, the Duke’s grandmother, were discarded as if they were simply worthless trinkets.

A selection of the missing jewellery was made, and it was an impressive list:

Rumours soon circulated that the jewellery was worth as much as £250,000, leading Edward to put out a statement in which he said, ‘There is absolutely no truth in the published statement that the value of the jewellery was £250,000.

‘Its value was not more than £20,000 and you can say that I said so. I can understand that the quarter of a million figure makes better reading than £20,000 but £20,000 was the value.’

He sighed to his American friend Robert Young that the crime was ‘a tough break’, both for the ‘substantial financial loss’, and because ‘the sentimental and historical value of some of the objects are far higher.’

He suggested that, ‘I have not yet given up hope of the recovery of bits and pieces of the haul, but we are both feeling pretty sunk about it right now’, and blamed the press for worsening matters, saying ‘the sensational British newspapers have not spared us in capitalising upon our misfortune.’

Nor were the police helpful. Inspector Capstick immediately decided – without any evidence – that the robbery could not have been an inside job, nor that the Duke and Duchess could have had anything to do with it.

Instead, he decided that a 27-year old local man and petty criminal Leslie Holmes was the perpetrator.

He became obsessed with trying to prove Holmes’ guilt, telling the  that ‘The identity of the thief is known to police at this office and although — in 1950 — he was released from a sentence of five years for housebreaking offences we have not, as yet, been able to gain sufficient evidence to charge him with stealing the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s jewellery.

There is little doubt that he has buried the jewellery and I am convinced he is afraid to dispose of it.’

He continued to harass Holmes, begging him to come clean.

For years, Capstick sent Holmes cards, suggesting that the time had come for him to make a clean breast of affairs. Unsurprisingly, he refused.

As his mystified quarry recalled  in 2004: ‘He was a big jovial fellow, always quoting bits of the Bible. He was a very nice chap.

‘I was offered a £4,000 reward to confess and that tempted me. I sometimes thought I should just put a cross on a map.’

Yet by the time Holmes talked about the case, a likely solution had already come into view.

In 1987, Sotheby’s in Geneva held a sale of Wallis’s effects, and at least 30 of the jewels that were supposed to have been stolen were offered at auction.

Leslie Field, the official historian of the royal jewel collection, stated that: ‘I believe the Duchess of Windsor defrauded the insurers by overstating the numbers and identifications of the jewels which had been disposed of,’ and that ‘they had from the beginning been in a strongbox in Paris and remained there.’