Wallis Simpson in Essex – Sunday 29th June, 12,00pm (& the tale of Monkhams Hall)

Posted: June 19th, 2025 | No Comments »

I’ll be at the Essex Book Festival on Sunday 29th June, 12,00pm to tell story of Wallis Simpson’s controversial year in China, 1924-1925. The event will be in the amazing Layer Marney Tower near Colchester, built as a statement house by Henry, 1st Lord Marney, Henry VIII’s Lord Privy Seal, in the 1520s.

But I find wherever I got to talk there’s a Wallis link – Baltimore (born there), DC (lived there), NYC (partied there), Hong Kong (lived there too), Shanghai (of course), Beijing (lived there as well) and of course London. I’ve blogged before on Wallis’s links to Felixstowe in Suffolk (here, and I’m speaking there on the 28th) but what about Essex?

Well apparently one of the Prince of Wales’s little bolt holes with Wallis was Monkhams Hall, near Waltham Abbey in Essex, owned by one of Edward’s equerry’s. Sadly it’s been hacked up into apartments now (and is now private, which doesn’t matter as the interiors have all been thoroughly sterilized aesthetically) now but back then the house, built in 1824, was approached along a private, tree-lined driveway that eventually revealed a three winged stately home with gardens and an ornate fish pond.

Here it is now and below in 1938….

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