The King Who Had to Go Page 10

  Concerns were even graver in Downing Street, where Wilson was particularly incensed at the King’s behaviour over the opening of the Aberdeen Infirmary, which he saw as a dangerous provocation of public opinion. Wilson did not specifically mention the press coverage of the incident in his notes, but seems to have recognised that the King’s affair could no longer be kept secret. Worse, he began to believe ‘that before very long public opinion would be provoked to an outburst’.12 Wilson’s fears that Mrs Simpson would provoke public disorder were extreme and exaggerated and it is difficult to find anyone who shared them to anything like the same extent. There is no sign that Baldwin shared them at all and Wilson gives no hard supporting evidence, say reports from Police Chief Constables. He was not shy of disclosing intelligence material when it backed up his case elsewhere. It is easy to guess why Wilson was so sensitive on this topic. He had made his name as an industrial negotiator before the First World War, when strikes had become so violent that the army had to be called in to keep the peace. Potential mob violence was real enough to him and stood in stark contrast to the vague anxieties expressed elsewhere, which blended moral and social outrage with a sense of British prestige somehow being damaged. Wilson’s fear that there would be a violent public reaction against Mrs Simpson continued throughout the crisis. It was so extreme that he imagined that any breach in the press silence would trigger violence. When Wilson briefed Baldwin on the same day as his conversation with Hardinge, his warnings were even starker: ‘Opinion was developing throughout the country in a way that might have unfavourable reactions upon the position of the King.’ The time-bomb of Mrs Simpson’s divorce case was also set to explode.

  There are a handful of pointers to the possibility that Whitehall might somehow have got advance warning of the divorce case. Wilson’s notes avoid giving a precise date by jumping from discussions of the King’s ‘association’ with Mrs Simpson straight to the news of the divorce case reaching the newspapers. Baldwin’s arrangements for resuming his duties on his return from Blickling were changed at the last moment. Chamberlain complained to his sister on 11 October that he had learned only from the newspapers that Baldwin was returning to Downing Street the following day, a considerable acceleration of his original plan to base himself at Chequers and only come to London for Cabinet meetings.13 When Chamberlain probed Hankey on the reason for this change, he was evasive. The civil servants certainly withheld firm news of the divorce case from Baldwin when he arrived in Downing Street, so the same might well have applied to advance warning of the case, even more so if this had been acquired by unavowable means. One potential source of a leak was Mrs Simpson’s solicitor, Theodore Goddard, who went on to display distinctly ambiguous loyalties towards his client and the government.

  Baldwin did not immediately commit himself to intervene with the King when he spoke to Wilson, but he did agree that Wilson should be put in direct contact with the royal household.14 This strengthened Wilson’s personal role and deeply affected how the government handled the affair. The individual allocation of tasks as a crisis unfolds is not just a mundane matter of chance and careerism. It is part of a process that bakes sets of prejudices and instincts into the way the crisis is handled. After two months of enforced inactivity in the face of the King’s dangerous and reckless behaviour, Wilson was now in a position to begin to treat the matter with the urgency that it deserved. Baldwin was still held back from tackling the King directly by the constitutional niceties of the position, but it was now acknowledged that there was a severe threat to national stability, which called for exceptional measures.

  The day after the audience, Wilson had lunch with Hardinge, which seems to have been the first substantial conversation between the two men. They were both deeply perturbed about the King and desperately anxious that something should be done; to begin with at least, they worked to achieve this. This was a significant recasting of the pattern of contact between the royal household and Downing Street. In the past, the Prime Minister himself had generally spoken directly to the sovereign’s private secretary on matters of importance, but Wilson’s position in Downing Street was a novelty and the whole situation was unusual in the extreme. Given the gravity of the issue and the likely complexity of the questions that would have to be dealt with, it would have been unwise to rely on a single high-level channel of communication, so there was a strong practical argument for creating another one. The move was perfectly legitimate and justifiable, although it is striking that Baldwin should have given the task to a civil servant and not a senior minister. It helps explain why it was only some weeks later that politicians other than the Prime Minister became involved. It gives rise to suspicion that Wilson himself suggested the move and that his notes misstated the facts by claiming that the lunch was ‘[a]t the Prime Minister’s suggestion’.15 An extra channel of communication to the King was not a bad idea, but the weak relationship between the King and Hardinge compromised it. When Wilson came to produce an account of the crisis after the abdication, it is barely surprising that he eliminated the lunch and his subsequent dialogue with Hardinge from the definitive version.

  Bringing Wilson into contact with Hardinge was a quite ordinary piece of crisis management, but Wilson and Baldwin agreed another move that was far more radical. MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, was tasked with putting the King under surveillance. The unchallenged and legitimate head of state was to be treated as a potential threat to national security. Wilson’s bland description of the move in his notes both understates colossally the significance of the move and provides a clue as to how the conversation between the Prime Minister and Wilson actually went: ‘The Prime Minister decided to make certain enquiries with a view to determining how best to approach the King on the subject.’ 16 It is one of the points where Wilson’s notes contradict themselves clumsily, and unintentionally point towards something that they were trying to conceal. As written, the notes imply that the MI5 operation was conceived to brief the Prime Minister for a single conversation with the King, but the remainder of the notes contain many references to a steady flow of intelligence on the King’s camp. The notion of a limited MI5 involvement with a single, precise goal has the flavour of the thin end of a dishonest wedge that Wilson might have used to prise open the Prime Minister’s scruples over spying on his King. There is no evidence that Baldwin was briefed on the MI5 or any other intelligence operation as the crisis unfolded, so it is perfectly possible that these were essentially intended for the civil servants. The best guess is that Sir Vernon Kell, the head of MI5, reported orally to Fisher or Wilson and they drew their own conclusions and passed these or the raw intelligence on as they saw fit. The MI5 operation was almost certainly Wilson’s initiative; nothing that Baldwin wrote or said afterwards suggests that he was even aware of the information that it was supplying, and there is clear evidence that he had little sympathy for the intelligence-led approach himself. Dugdale’s wife wrote: ‘S.B. showed signs of his half Highland ancestry by being very suspicious of him [Dugdale] and Horace Wilson, for they did much delving into the gangster side of this affair; the seamy side not politic for the P.M. to know about.’17

  Established just before the First World War to defend Britain against foreign, mainly German, espionage, MI5’s role had expanded into fighting, mainly Soviet, subversion; its existence was not publicly acknowledged and it operated under minimal supervision with no formal terms of reference, even secret ones. It had been founded in 1909 under Kell’s leadership, and both the organisation and the man had become trusted features of the Whitehall landscape. MI5’s internal history went rather further than Wilson’s notes in acknowledging the part that it played in the abdication with a blend of pride that it had been entrusted with so sensitive a task and an implicit recognition of the paradox that it involved.

  There have been, however, on rare occasions more important matters, the investigation of which has been entrusted to the Security Service as a special measure. For example, certain de
licate enquiries were made under the Prime Minister’s directions in connection with the abdication of King Edward VIII. These were matters touching on the constitution and ultimate issues of sovereignty and were very far removed from any question of guarding the King’s realm from penetration by external enemies or of rebellion by a section of the King’s subjects. They involved its innermost integrity and the enquiries were entrusted to the Security Service because no other suitable machinery existed for the purpose while its head, Sir Vernon Kell, had during a long period of service earned the respect and confidence of the highest authorities.18

  If MI5 was not targeting foreign powers or treasonous Britons, that left only the King himself as the target. The head of state was a short step away from being classed as an enemy of the state. Quite who MI5 ranked as ‘the highest authorities’ is unstated, but the term points to a broad respect for Kell that ran the length of Whitehall to the men who had the task of dealing with the King, notably Wilson. The head of the civil service, Sir Warren Fisher, was also one of the group handling the flow of intelligence from MI5. Whitehall was on the side of the angels fighting the dark forces of Buckingham Palace.

  Ten years before, Baldwin and Wilson had worked in close partnership to address a major crisis with a large constitutional dimension. In 1926, they had faced the General Strike, when outright political revolution was in the air. In both cases there was a clear threat to national stability, but there were vast differences between the two as exercises in political calculation and management: what happened in the General Strike depended on choices by many individuals and organisations; what happened in the abdication crisis depended overwhelmingly on a single individual. There was also a clear threat of external subversion in the General Strike from the Soviet Union, which openly supported militants, so secret intelligence was a vital tool for the government.19 It was necessary and inevitable that the government should use the intelligence services to cope with the General Strike; the same cannot be said of the abdication. The stakes were high, but the use of covert intelligence against the King cast the crisis – at least from Wilson’s standpoint – in a confrontational pattern almost from the start. It was a classic example of how the intelligence dimension of an episode can play a far more active part in how it develops than merely through the information it provides. Treating the King as the threat to stability meant that anyone who seemed to support him would be tarred with the same brush. If an intelligence service is tasked with combating a particular threat, it is inevitable that its responses will focus on that threat and in doing so will magnify the threat.

  Whatever its origins and motives, the MI5 operation had barely begun when the crisis passed the point of no return. On the evening of the day after Baldwin’s first audience with the King, the news of the divorce case reached Fleet Street, presumably as someone at Ipswich Assizes tipped off a journalistic contact that the case had been entered for a hearing. This placed the affair in the public domain even though the British press maintained its self-imposed embargo on the King and Mrs Simpson. Wilson’s comment that ‘it would no longer be possible to avoid press comment and public discussion’ underestimated the self-restraint of Fleet Street, but reveals the mindset of the civil servants who were dominating the government response to the affair. Provided it could be addressed secretly by the small group already well in the know, there was little risk; the risk began once the ignorant and irresponsible got in on the act. It was a short step from public awareness to mob violence. The all-out crisis had begun.

  NOTES

  1. NA PREM 1/466

  2. Jones, A Diary with Letters, pp 236–7

  3. Baldwin to Brett Young, 31 August, reproduced in Williamson & Baldwin, Baldwin Papers, p. 381

  4. Crathorne papers, Baldwin to Thomas Dugdale, 11 August; Baldwin to Nancy Dugdale, 25 January 1941

  5. Jones, A Diary with Letters, pp 266–7

  6. Windham Baldwin papers, 3/3/9, note dated 10/5/61

  7. Jones, A Diary with Letters, p. 266

  8. Recollection of Florence Copeland, head cook at Blickling Hall, displayed on National Trust information board

  9. Hardinge, ‘Before The Abdication’ letter to The Times, 29 November 1955

  10. NA PREM 1/466

  11. NA PREM 1/466

  12. NA PREM 1/466

  13. Chamberlain to Ida, 11 October

  14. NA PREM 1/466, NA KV 4/1

  15. NA PREM 1/466 Draft

  16. NA PREM 1/466

  17. Dugdale diary

  18. NA KV 4/1

  19. Andrew, Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, pp 125f; Perkins, A Very British Strike: 3 May–12 May 1926, Chapter 3

  HIDDEN CRISIS

  CHAPTER 5

  PROVOKING AN OUTBURST

  * * *

  In particular, the action of the King in inviting Mrs. Simpson (without Mr. Simpson) to go to Balmoral Castle, and even more his action in meeting her train at Aberdeen Station on the very day when he said he would not have time to open the Aberdeen Infirmary, had led to the most unfavourable comment throughout Scotland. It seemed clear that before very long public opinion would be provoked to an outburst.

  SIR HORACE WILSON, ABDICATION NOTES1

  THE DEFINITE NEWS of the divorce case, which broke publicly on the evening of Thursday 15 October, transformed the affair from a scandal into a crisis. It opened the hideous possibility that the King might marry Mrs Simpson and not just keep her as a scandalous mistress. At this stage, the possibility was abstract and remote, but it was still enough to cause near panic. Throughout the crisis it was taken as axiomatic that she was simply unthinkable as a royal wife. At no point did anyone in authority try to analyse her pros and cons, or, as it would doubtless have appeared, try to establish whether she had any redeeming features. She had an array of disadvantages. First and foremost, she was divorced. Divorce was only just becoming acceptable at all and divorcees were excluded from much of respectable Society. They were not received at Court. Double divorcees were exceedingly rare.

  The status of divorcees was larded with double standards and hypocrisy. Divorce was not an absolute bar to acceptability in high Society, as is sometimes supposed, although the most rigorous standards would have been applied to the King’s wife. Nancy Astor, Britain’s first sitting woman MP, was a divorcee, but this did not hurt her social position. Divorce was even tolerable in Downing Street, as Tommy Dugdale, Baldwin’s parliamentary private secretary, was kept in position even though he married a divorcee just before the crisis broke. Sir Warren Fisher was one of Mrs Simpson’s most committed opponents, but he did not object to the principle of divorce and had shown unusual courage in sheltering divorced colleagues from ostracism. Under the social norms of the day, divorcees had to work their passage back into acceptability through a healthy period of decorous inconspicuousness. The King’s ever-less discreet behaviour with Mrs Simpson was the opposite of anything that might have won her rehabilitation in conservative eyes.

  There were other considerations working against Mrs Simpson. She had established herself in British high Society, but at its frivolous and hedonistic end, rather than the conservative and aristocratic world that neighboured the Court. Her patroness, Emerald Cunard, was despised by the likes of Sir John Reith, and she was tarred with the same brush. She seemed to be a woman who had come from nowhere. Very few British observers were in a position to judge the lineage of old Baltimore families like Mrs Simpson’s. Perversely, American women who entered British Society were expected to have large and recently earned family fortunes and were tolerated in direct proportion to their wealth. Here Mrs Simpson had nothing to offer. In an age when sexual morality and social consciousness were deeply intertwined, her advance through Society appeared as immorality rewarded, even to the vast majority who had not seen the lurid police reports. Mrs Simpson was routinely described as a second (or even third) rate woman. This was a moral judgement. The wife of Labour politician Jimmy Thomas refused to be introduced to a �
�whore’.2

  National origin also told against her. She was routinely referred to contemptuously as an American, although it is harder to detect what else lay behind this. It was an era where national and racial stereotypes were accepted unquestioningly, but it is hard to find instances in which Mrs Simpson was accused of a specific national flaw apart from one moment in the crisis when her exaggeration of the number of threatening letters she received was ascribed to ‘American megalomania’. When the crisis broke publicly, even the usually liberal newspaper the Manchester Guardian editorialised venomously that the King was ‘anxious to become the third husband of a lady of American birth who became a British subject by her second marriage’.3

  On the positive side of the ledger, Mrs Simpson had made Edward cut down his drinking, which was appreciated by his mother, who had feared drink would become a serious problem and render him ridiculous. His secretary ‘Tommy’ Lascelles had been put off by his drinking too, but there is no evidence that concern had been widespread. Otherwise, Mrs Simpson had almost no redeeming features. She undertook no charitable or cultural activities that might have diluted the image of a woman purely focused on Society.

  The news of the divorce case was so alarming that the civil servants decided, in Warren Fisher’s words, that ‘this was so serious that H. Wilson was to go to Chequers to see the P.M. & arrange with him to see the King on Sunday & tell him that the proceedings must be stopped’.4 Even by Fisher’s demanding standards this was high-handed. The civil servants had sat on the news for at least a day and a half before even telling the Prime Minister, and on their own authority briefed a senior minister about it the day before they planned to tell the Prime Minister.5 The word ‘arrange’ appears to be barely a euphemism for ‘instruct’; it was soon being said at the top level of government that the job had been ‘assigned’ to the Prime Minister.6 Two senior civil servants had decided between them how the matter should be handled and intended to tell the Prime Minister where his duty lay. In turn, the Prime Minister was to tell the sovereign to intervene in a legal action between two of his subjects with whom he had no other formal connection. Fisher’s ability to make up the constitutional rules as he went along had clearly not weakened over the years. He had given no thought to what would happen if the King refused meekly to obey a peremptory instruction from Baldwin. Neither Fisher nor Wilson had more than a passing acquaintance with the King, but the idea that Baldwin, who knew him well, might be better able to judge how to handle a matter of extreme delicacy does not seem to have occurred to them. This is marked by the same simplistic mindset evident in the decision to bring in MI5. The King was little better than a delinquent and unreliable subordinate of the Prime Minister who could and should be treated roughly when he stepped out of line. Of course, the King’s own cavalier and irresponsible behaviour invited such a response, but the imperious tone that Fisher and Wilson thought appropriate was hardly the way to start a constructive dialogue. It baked another layer of antagonism into the conception of the problem held by the civil servants.