The King Who Had to Go Read online

  THE KING WHO

  HAD TO GO

  * * *

  Edward VIII, Mrs Simpson and the Hidden Politics of the Abdication Crisis

  ADRIAN PHILLIPS

  To the memory of my parents: Alice and Julius

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  HIDDEN SCANDAL

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1: The Boy Will Ruin Himself

  CHAPTER 2: The Prime Minister and the Super-Civil Servant

  CHAPTER 3: Almost Impossible to Appeal to Reason

  CHAPTER 4: A Job Is Assigned to the Prime Minister

  HIDDEN CRISIS

  * * *

  CHAPTER 5: Provoking an Outburst

  CHAPTER 6: A Real Jolt

  CHAPTER 7: Queen or Nothing

  CHAPTER 8: The Underworld Gangster Element

  CHAPTER 9: The Battle for the Throne

  OPEN CRISIS

  * * *

  CHAPTER 10: A Fireside Chat

  CHAPTER 11: Obsessed to Get Away

  CHAPTER 12: A Pistol at His Head

  CHAPTER 13: My First Blunder

  CHAPTER 14: The Long and Sinister Shadow

  CHAPTER 15: Sunday Morning at Hendon Aerodrome

  CHAPTER 16: A Microcosm of the Cabinet

  OVER THE EDGE

  * * *

  CHAPTER 17: Rather a Facer

  CHAPTER 18: Mission to a Madhouse

  CHAPTER 19: Beyond Recovery

  CHAPTER 20: Lying Like a Gentleman

  CHAPTER 21: A Court of Her Own

  CHAPTER 22: Plenty of People Ready to Knock Her on the Head

  Afterword

  Appendices

  Bibliography

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  * * *

  THIS BOOK HAS taken an unusually long time to write as it gradually evolved from one focused on the top-level machinery of British government in the 1930s to one that examines a single episode, so I owe my thanks to a correspondingly long list of individuals and organisations who have helped me on the way.

  Professor Nick Crowson of Birmingham University took me on as graduate student and shared his immense knowledge of the period as well as introducing me properly to the study of history. The late Sir Martin Gilbert provided limitless inspiration and encouragement when I pursued my research into Sir Horace Wilson. Professor Eunan O’Halpin of Trinity College, Dublin and Professor George Peden of Stirling University guided me through the higher reaches of the British Civil Service. Michael Jago steered me through the intricacies of Labour Party politics. John Campbell shared his huge knowledge of David Lloyd George as well as his generous support and hospitality. Julian Hardinge (Lord Hardinge of Penshurst) very helpfully challenged some of my early preconceptions. My former colleague Bernard (Lord) Donoughue explained clearly the importance of power geography at 10 Downing Street. The opinions and judgements expressed in the book are, of course, entirely my own.

  I am especially grateful to a number of individuals who have allowed me access to papers still in their personal possession: Lord and the late Lady Crathorne, who received me most hospitably at Yarm; the Honourable Lady Murray, her son Alex and her nephew Lord Hardinge for the diary of Helen, Lady Hardinge; and Mrs Annie Pollock, who very kindly showed me the papers of her grandfather, Sir Warren Fisher.

  My thanks go to everyone at the following archives who assisted me in my research: the Churchill Archives Centre, most especially Andrew Riley, who has been unstinting with his time, efforts and advice; the BBC Written Archives Centre, with special thanks to Jeff Walden; the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections at the University of Birmingham, in particular Sue Worrall and Ivana Frlan; the Reuters archive, practically synonymous with John Entwistle; the Bank of England Archives with special thanks to Rachael Muir; Balliol College, Oxford, in particular Anna Sander; the Local Studies Library at Aberdeen in the person of David Oswald; the National Archives at Kew; Bundesarchiv, Koblenz; The House of Lords Record Office: Special Collections at the University Library, Cambridge; and the RAF Museum, Hendon. Terry Mace’s help was invaluable for the photo of the King’s aeroplane.

  The following individuals and institutions have kindly granted me permission to use material under their control: Lord Norwich for his father’s diary; Lord Crathorne for his parents’ papers; the Honourable Lady Murray and Lord Hardinge for the papers of Helen, Lady Hardinge and her Loyal to Three Kings; the BBC Written Archives Centre for Sir John Reith’s diaries; the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, the University of Birmingham for Neville Chamberlain’s papers; and the Parliamentary Archives for material from the Beaverbrook papers. The quotations from the writings of Sir Winston Churchill are reproduced with the permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Winston S. Churchill. © The Estate of Winston S. Churchill. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The author apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  Mrs Jackie Holland sang to me most beautifully the snatch of playground doggerel about Mrs Simpson that she remembered from 1936, and her daughter, Jane Holland, very kindly transcribed it. Mrs Vanessa Donegan made good my ignorance of tactics in contract bridge. Mme Gautier of the Domaine de Candé provided me with the programme of music played at the Duke of Windsor’s wedding to Wallis Warfield (as she had very briefly become again) and M. Proust of Tours Cathedral introduced me to the splendours of the Skinner organ at Candé and explained the intricacies of playing it.

  Laurie De Decker, my editor at Biteback, whipped my manuscript into shape and introduced me to the previously unfamiliar world of the comma. She and everyone else at Biteback gently guided me through the process of bringing my first book from outline to publication.

  Lastly, this book would not have been possible without the help of my wife Sheila, whom I wish to thank for her advice, patience and support.

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  ON THURSDAY 10 December 1936, the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was hurrying to prepare for one of the most important speeches of his political life and one of the most vital speeches ever delivered to the House of Commons. He had to explain how and why King Edward VIII was abdicating after a reign of only eleven months. In January, Edward had become King in the midst of hopes that this glamorous, charming and handsome figure would usher in a new style of monarchy in Britain. After the Victorian-era austerity of his father, George V, he had appeared open and modern. Instead, there had been a worldwide scandal and finally an agonising crisis that had played out in semi-privacy for months before the British press had broken its self-imposed silence the previous Wednesday, catapulting the affair into the full glare of public knowledge and concern. For a week, the whole country had stared into the abyss of a constitutional crisis.

  Time was short for Baldwin because the King’s final and irrevocable decision had only been taken late the evening before. More for the sake of form than anything, the Cabinet had sent the King a message imploring him to reconsider his intention, but he had not and had signed the Instrument of Abdication that morning at his private house, Fort Belvedere, in the grounds of Windsor Castle. Now Baldwin had to give final confirmation to Parliament and the world beyond, that what had been rumoured and feared for months, weeks and days had finally occurred. Even that morning the newspaper headlines in London had only spoken of the possibility of abdication. Baldwin had to find a way of presenting the bitter
reality in a way that minimised the damage and somehow overcame the hurt of those traumatic days. The monarchy was the sacred institution that bound the people of Britain and cemented an Empire that spanned the globe, but its sovereign had decided that he could not carry on because he was not permitted to marry the woman he loved. If Baldwin were to say the wrong thing, the results might be catastrophic. Few had questioned his handling of the crisis whilst it was in progress, but now that it had culminated in the terrible conclusion of abdication, there might be deep and savage recriminations and aftershocks. The leader of the opposition Labour Party had had to fight down the temptation elsewhere in his party to make tactical capital out of the crisis, and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists had campaigned to keep Edward on the throne.

  Baldwin worked on his speech entirely alone. The one thing he had to guide him was a log of the day-to-day events of the crisis prepared for him by his civil service right-hand man, Sir Horace Wilson.1 A modern Prime Minister would have an army of expert advisers analysing every syllable of such a speech, and modern technology would prepare an immaculate text that could be disseminated around the globe at the push of a button. Baldwin relied solely on his own judgement for the words to achieve the near impossible, and scribbled his thoughts on untidy slips of paper. Even by the standards of the day, they did not look impressive; Harold Nicolson, a fastidious and aristocratic government MP, thought they were like pieces of toilet paper ‘…more squalid than a young Labour candidate would dare produce at a Wapping by-election’.2 It was not just the appearance of the notes that betrayed the stress of the moment. As Baldwin moved around 10 Downing Street in distracted concentration, he dropped some of the slips in the passageways. When he finally set off for the House of Commons, he completely forgot to bring the notes with him, and his parliamentary private secretary, Tommy Dugdale, had to dash back to retrieve them.

  Beneath the bluff exterior of a member of the traditional, unreflecting Tory squirearchy that he cultivated assiduously, Baldwin was a highly strung and nervous man, and this was all too obvious to the people around him and who knew him well. It was especially acute before he had to make a major speech. At the other end of the scale, one of his Cabinet ministers told the story of a French woman, who did not know who Baldwin was or what he did, and who had instantly assumed from his demeanour that he was an actor.3 He had an actor’s focus on the upcoming performance and the same irrational dread of actually delivering it. Baldwin had operated at the top level of politics for a decade and a half, and he was an accomplished speaker, who cloaked his art in apparent simplicity. He knew that it was a great gift and that he would need it for his speech that afternoon. It would help him accomplish one last act of public service, with which he could draw the curtain on his career in politics. Baldwin had a strong but usually well-hidden tendency towards self-dramatisation, but it was very much in evidence that day. ‘This is making history, and I’m the only man who can do it,’ he told Dugdale, who observed him switching on his oratorical power as the crucial moment arrived: ‘All his power surges to the surface, his retiring humility leaves him.’4

  The House of Commons was still working its way through an ordinary day’s business when Baldwin arrived. The loss of its monarch was not going to be allowed to disrupt the day-to-day work of running the country. This had even provided some grim light relief for MPs with an eye for life’s ironies when the order paper for the day included the first reading of ‘The Edinburgh Maternity and Simpson Charity Bill’ and ‘The Family Inheritance Bill. Mr. Windsor’.5 The chamber was packed to capacity for what would otherwise have been a routine, weekly Question Time. It would now witness an event that no one wanted to miss. One MP observed pedantically that this was the first abdication in Britain for 537 years.6 Even on this momentous day, there were no concessions for the Prime Minister in the democratic discomfort of the overcrowded chamber. He had to squeeze past the knees of his colleagues to get to his seat.7 The mood amongst the MPs had been one of subdued tension as they waited for this moment, and they cheered Baldwin as he made his way to his place.

  There were final moments of comedy and scene-setting to come. Baldwin had to fumble for the keys to his briefcase before he could extract his scruffy notes and, in dramatic contrast, immaculate sheets of the highest-quality paper marked with the unmistakable red, royal crest, which bore the sombre message from the King. Baldwin had barely time to spread the notes on the Despatch Box in front of him – ‘rather proudly’, Nicolson thought – when normality reasserted itself. There was one final mundane question left for a minister to answer; it was a mind-numbingly dull and trivial enquiry as to how many of the personnel of the Royal Navy had been punished by civilian courts, but it had to be answered.8 The First Lord of the Admiralty, the unpopular and widely distrusted Sir Samuel Hoare, strode ‘pompously’ to the Despatch Box, on which he in turn spread the papers he needed to deliver an appropriately dull reply. He finished and lifted the Admiralty papers, scattering Baldwin’s notes to the floor. The Prime Minister had to scrabble to retrieve them. His daughter Lorna whispered to Dugdale’s wife, who had secured one of the visitor’s tickets that had become as valuable as gold-dust and was sitting next to her in the gallery, ‘Poor father, that’s just like him. He’s so clumsy, he’s dropped things all his life.’ 9

  From then on, the mood was one of deep seriousness. Baldwin walked to the end of the chamber where the Speaker of the House sat, and handed to him on his high dais the message from the King. As the Speaker read out the few paragraphs in which Edward renounced a task which he felt he could not perform efficiently or to his own satisfaction, emotion welled up in the packed chamber. The Speaker himself could not conceal his own emotion, and his voice quavered. Even hardened parliamentarians had to stifle their sobs. Nicolson reflected, ‘I have never known in any assembly such accumulation of pity and terror.’ 10

  The moment had arrived for Baldwin to explain how things had ended this way and to start the process of bringing the nation back to an even keel. The performance he delivered was a masterpiece, but like so many masterpieces, it disguised its supreme artistry under a cloak of the utmost simplicity. He admitted that he had had little time to compose his speech, ‘…so I must tell what I have to tell truthfully, sincerely and plainly with no attempt to dress up or to adorn’.11 The members of one of London’s gentlemen’s clubs were reading the words as they came over the news ticker and contrived to snigger at the idea that truthfulness was a by-product of time pressure, but this did not strike the MPs, who were already in the palm of Baldwin’s hand.12 As he had promised, he delivered a plain account of the events in an even tone with no trace of drama or rhetorical flourish. He even made a capital from the disorder that Hoare had wrought on his notes by pausing every now and again to make sure that the dates he was quoting were correct, occasionally asking the Home Secretary sitting next to him for advice. These asides were so effective that Nicolson mused whether they could have been scripted. The speech was delivered with ‘artless but consummate skill’ and the whole House listened spellbound to the ‘tragic force of its simplicity’.13 By the time he got to the last few paragraphs many were near tears, but he was heard in perfect, rapt attention until the cheers that greeted his call to rally behind the new King at the very end of his speech.

  In reality, there was far more to Baldwin’s speech than a mechanical recital of dates and events. His linear narrative provided the framework for a careful and astute choice of deeper content. Above all, Baldwin had seen the simple but vital need to be as kind about the King as possible. It was not the moment for criticism of any sort. Throughout the speech, Baldwin paid ‘tribute after tribute’ to the King. At every turn, Edward had done what was best for the country and the Empire. There was only the supremely delicate matter of explaining why the King was abdicating. The previous Sunday had been one of the most fraught and darkest moments of the crisis, and Baldwin had been turning over in his mind what he should say if the worst came to the wors
t. It had come to him in a blinding flash:

  I have got the speech I mean to make and I am certain I can get it across. I shall begin this is not a story of conflict between the King & the Cabinet or between crown & the people that I have to unfold; it is the story of conflicting loyalties in a human heart.14

  The King had had to struggle between two conflicting loyalties and that was all he needed to say about the forces taking him from the throne. It did not need to be spelled out that the loyalties were irreconcilable because the King could not be allowed to marry a woman with two living husbands. Mixed in with the flood of compliments about the King, Baldwin added a couple of rapier thrusts at the handful of men who were thought to have tried to exploit the crisis to their own ends. The criticism was neatly placed in the King’s own mouth: ‘Any idea to him of what might be called a King’s Party, was abhorrent.’ The King was alert to the danger ‘that there might be sides taken and factions grow up in a matter where no faction ought to exist’. These were, of course, views to which Baldwin and his government fully subscribed.

  Baldwin emphasised over and over again that there had been no conflict, that the matter had been settled in friendly and open conversations between the King and him as Prime Minister without a trace of disagreement or conflict. Once again, Baldwin was able to find the vital words in what the King had said to him: ‘You and I must settle this together. I will not have anyone interfering.’ Throughout the crisis, Baldwin had stuck to the crucial principle that, whatever happened, it would have to be the King’s decision. Six days previously, he had faced a Cabinet meeting riven by fears of a dark conspiracy to engineer a full-blown constitutional crisis, but he had insisted that ‘[h]e did not want to put a Pistol at the head of the King’.15 Baldwin could – and did – state that he had only asked to see the King on a single occasion during the crisis. Even that admission was wrapped up in a humdrum tale of finding a mutually convenient date for the conversation. Otherwise, it had been the King who took the initiative. In the final stages of the crisis, the accusation had lurked a little beneath the surface that the government was putting pressure on the King. This had to be deflected, whatever truth might lie behind it. The one aspect of the speech that was widely criticised was Baldwin’s frequent mentions of his own role in the crisis. This might have been egotism, but it was also accurate. Not only did Baldwin feel that he himself was making history, but he had also made certain that it was only he who had handled the government’s end of the affair – above all, the dialogue with the King.