The King Who Had to Go Read online

  The weekend after the news of the divorce, Baldwin was subjected to sustained attempts to convince him to persuade the King to make Mrs Simpson abandon her case. Wilson went to Chequers and finally told the Prime Minister what the civil servants had known for at least two days: that Mrs Simpson had formally begun divorce proceedings.7 The pressure was stepped up when Baldwin went on to a very grand house party at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park, the home of Lord Fitzalan, staunch Catholic and Tory grandee. Fitzalan’s nephew, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Marquess of Salisbury added further aristocratic and political weight, which was rounded off by the respectable press baron, Lord Kemsley. All shared deep disquiet about the King. The party was completed by Hardinge, who had been asked to Cumberland Lodge after writing to the Prime Minister on the Friday expressing his anxiety. He put his case to Baldwin in a private conversation after lunch on the Saturday.8 Baldwin crumbled under this massed assault and tried to arrange an audience with the King on the Sunday morning. In the event this proved impossible, because the King was engaged in a dangerous, illicit and inevitably secret visit to Mrs Simpson in Felixstowe, where she was staying temporarily to qualify for jurisdiction under the Ipswich Assizes. Eventually an audience was fixed for the Tuesday morning.

  During the interlude, Fisher stepped up his efforts to put his own stamp on how the crisis was handled in another way: by cultivating an ally for his hardline approach at the top level of politics. Fisher’s formal job was Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, so Neville Chamberlain was notionally his direct political master and the ideal candidate for the job. He was a persistent critic of Baldwin’s seemingly passive approach to problems, which he castigated as mere idleness, and shared the civil servants’ inclination towards a hard and proactive line with the King. He was an ideal ally in the Cabinet. Like Baldwin, he had come to the top level of politics relatively late in life when the Carlton House coup upset the existing Conservative hierarchy. He had been born into a great albeit short-lived political dynasty, but had seemed doomed to play a minor role, vainly trying to rebuild the family’s finances in a miserable sisal farming experiment in the Bahamas, then superintending the municipal affairs of the family stronghold in Birmingham. He had become Chancellor of the Exchequer in the national government in 1931, bearing much of the administrative workload, whilst the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald took diplomacy and Baldwin took domestic politics. He was an assiduous and successful administrator, but took minimal interest in the human side of politics. It is easy to understand why Fisher held him in high regard. Once he had decided what the correct policy was, he worked tirelessly and unrelentingly to implement it. Anyone who disagreed was treated as an idiotic obstacle or worse. He was the most likely successor to Baldwin.

  On his own authority, Fisher began to brief Chamberlain almost at the outset of the crisis. Fisher told Chamberlain about Mrs Simpson’s divorce case very soon after he learned about it himself and even before he told the Prime Minister.9 Fisher was also happy to encourage Chamberlain in the belief that he (Chamberlain) would do a better job of defending national stability from an erring sovereign. For some months, Chamberlain had nourished the rather questionable idea that he was better qualified than Baldwin to handle the King. A few weeks after the accession, he had been told both that the King ‘had “formed a high opinion of his Chancellor’s good sense and ability and I hope that it is so, as it may be useful”’ but, according to an ‘unimpeachable’ source, could not ‘“bear to sit in the same room as Baldwin”’.10 The King certainly found his Prime Minister’s manner irksome sometimes, but his supposedly high opinion of Chamberlain is corroborated nowhere. On the one recorded occasion in which the King mentioned Chamberlain, it was simply as a reliable ally of the Prime Minister. Chamberlain was both childishly vain and jealous of Baldwin, so whoever brought him these stories had clearly found a receptive audience. He was also amenable to the idea fed to him by Fisher that Baldwin was neglecting his duty by not taking a more resolute and proactive stance with the King.

  Baldwin finally saw the King at Fort Belvedere on the morning of Tuesday 20 October. It was by any standards a momentous encounter: the Prime Minister faced the challenge of persuading a self-willed and stubborn sovereign to recognise that his personal conduct was putting his throne at risk. It is hardly surprising that Baldwin felt the need of a drink strongly enough to ask the King for whisky and soda. The conversation itself proved to be an anti-climax and its results fell well short of the dramatic reversal in his behaviour that Fisher imagined could be achieved. The King politely heard out his Prime Minister as he showed him samples of the foreign newspaper articles that were causing so much alarm, but he refused to intervene in what he described as a private matter between Mrs Simpson and her husband. The closest that they came to confrontation was when Baldwin told the King, ‘I don’t believe you can go on like this and get away with it.’11 Baldwin had deliberately picked the phrase ‘get away with it’, knowing that it was one of the King’s favourite expressions, and he touched enough of a nerve for the King to ask Baldwin what he meant by it. Here Baldwin pulled a punch and told the King that he was referring to how Mrs Simpson had been promoted socially; he did not mention the risk of marriage, and the exchange left no impression on the King. It is unclear whether the King fully appreciated the depth of public and political unease in Britain and the Empire that Baldwin set out; he certainly did not acknowledge it in his conversation. Either the King was so wrapped up with Mrs Simpson that he was simply impervious to any negative aspect to the relationship or he was pursuing a strategy, conscious or otherwise, of delaying any serious discussion until he was in a position to present the government with marriage as a fait accompli. Both would explain the King’s nonchalance, and it is far from certain that Baldwin would have penetrated the carapace by adopting a harsher tone. As it was, the King appears to have misread Baldwin’s quite genuine expression of sympathy with the human dimension of his predicament as a sign of readiness to accept the King’s solution. It could have seemed to the King that he was going to ‘get away with it’ once again.

  Baldwin may have stopped short of speaking to the King brutally because he overestimated the King’s opinion of him. One of the drawbacks of the King’s devastating charm was that it tempted people on whom it was being used to believe that they enjoyed his friendship and esteem. This included very senior politicians, notably Baldwin and Winston Churchill. Even Adolf Hitler was not immune and imagined political sympathy on the part of the then Duke of Windsor.12 More junior men who had long been in his service and had been presented with ample proof of the selfishness underneath the charm also found it hard to resist. In reality, the King was driven to distraction by Baldwin’s tic of flicking out his fingers and cracking the joints, which he claimed to have first noticed on the Canadian trip nine years before. The only human who counted for anything to him at a personal level was Wallis Simpson.

  Wilson was uniquely well informed about the audience. Soon after coming back from the Fort, Baldwin gave Wilson his side of the story. Wilson seems to have been the very first person to hear it. He also heard how the King thought that the talk had gone. MI5 proved to be remarkably efficient and reported the King’s version of the conversation to Wilson soon after he had heard Baldwin’s account of it.13 As the King’s phones were not tapped until the final days of the crisis, this suggests that MI5 was either monumentally lucky or already possessed a line to a potential agent or agents with good access to what the King was saying when it was given the job of investigating him. MI5’s success was not just a flash in the pan, as the flow of reports continued throughout the crisis.

  Wilson was immediately struck by a gulf between the two versions of the conversation, and this left him ‘very much perturbed’.14 MI5 told Wilson that the King felt ‘the interview had been very friendly indeed and, that far from endeavouring to oppose the King’s wishes, the Prime Minister had shown every sympathy with the King’s personal difficulties’. This was cert
ainly not the message that Baldwin had told Wilson that he had delivered to the King: ‘that he was embarking on a course of action which would affront the people of the country and would arouse their opposition’. Astoundingly, Wilson’s first instinct was to put the discrepancy between the two accounts down to Baldwin’s version being incomplete or inaccurate. Wilson appears here to be an early adherent to the cult of secret intelligence, which assumes that information obtained surreptitiously is automatically more accurate than information given voluntarily. In effect, MI5 was spying on the Prime Minister as well as the King, and Wilson was more inclined to trust its report of a conversation, covertly and indirectly obtained from one notoriously erratic participant, than one freely given to him by the other participant, the Prime Minister. Wilson’s notes suggest he held so low an opinion of the Prime Minister that he assumed that Baldwin had pulled his punches with the King:

  At the time it looked as if the Prime Minister might perhaps have been so anxious not to break the contact between the King and himself as to have given the impression that he, the Prime Minister, did not take a grave view of the consequences of the continuance of the King’s association with Mrs. Simpson.

  Wilson’s confidence in the Prime Minister’s willingness to do the necessary dirty work was shaken.

  Wilson’s idea of what dirty work was needed also went well beyond Baldwin’s: it was harsher and more absolute. Baldwin merely wanted the divorce stopped and to warn the King against ‘a continuance of the present state of affairs’, flaunting Mrs Simpson semi-publicly,15 but Wilson went far further: ‘It was sufficient therefore for the Prime Minister to convey to the King the impression … that in his opinion the people just would not tolerate Mrs. Simpson.’16 From the outset, Wilson believed that the only solution was for the King to dismiss her entirely; the possibility that the problem might be defused by the King behaving with far greater discretion in his relationship did not seem to merit consideration. Wilson might have judged that the King was simply incapable of such discretion, but it looks much more as though he was projecting his own preconceptions of what was acceptable or not and thus narrowing the options that he thought were available to the Prime Minister.

  After the crisis, Wilson admitted that the discrepancy between Baldwin’s account and the King’s own (via MI5) arose because ‘the King’s infatuation for Mrs. Simpson was such as to make him quite oblivious of the realities of the situation and to make him incapable of seeing any other considerations in their proper perspective’.17 At the time, though, he and Fisher concluded that the dialogue between the King and the Prime Minister alone was not able to head off the crisis. They set out to put pressure on Mrs Simpson herself to abandon her divorce case. An emphatic message should be sent to her warning her ‘of the dangerous situation which might arise once a decree nisi had been granted’.18 Down the years, senior civil servants have found themselves discreetly undertaking a variety of sensitive missions on behalf of the government, but few can have been as sensitive as this. There is a great question mark over Baldwin’s involvement in it. He gave a number of ostensibly indiscreet but, in reality, carefully selective, oral accounts of the crisis, but none of them mentioned the approach to Mrs Simpson. This does not mean that the Prime Minister had no intimation. Wilson’s notes on the crisis carefully mention when the Prime Minister approved a potentially contentious step, but they do not discuss the genesis of the approach via Theodore Goddard, Mrs Simpson’s solicitor, at all. The best guess is that Baldwin gave some very tacit endorsement to a move that the civil servants themselves strongly believed was necessary. When the scheme ultimately failed, Wilson did inform Baldwin. As the exercise involved a highly questionable attempt to use a citizen’s lawyer to influence her behaviour, there was every reason for Baldwin to have wanted to avoid being linked to it and Wilson would also have wanted to play down the government’s role.

  The civil servants’ first step was to see if the channel of communication with the royal household established by Wilson’s lunch with Hardinge could be used, and they sounded him out on sending a warning to Mrs Simpson.19 Hardinge had no relationship to speak of with her and nothing came of this. The civil servants then cast around for another way to get their message to Mrs Simpson. Fisher even considered seriously speaking to Mrs Simpson himself.20 Sadly, this idea came to nothing and we can only imagine the epicene Edwardian-era British civil servant trying to explain to a hard-edged and mercenary American-born socialite that it was her civic duty to abandon the juiciest piece of prey that was ever likely to come her way. Short of building a line of contact through Mrs Simpson’s social circle, which was quite alien to the civil servants, this left Fisher with almost no alternative. On Saturday 24 October, Fisher summoned Goddard to see him.21

  Goddard played a decidedly ambiguous part in the abdication. It is perhaps an indication of the sensitivity of the topic that nothing resembling the ‘personal and confidential note’ about Goddard to which Wilson referred in his notes has been released publicly.22 He was introduced to Mrs Simpson by Walter Monckton, a highly successful lawyer and friend of the King from their days together at Oxford, and one of his legal advisers.23 Monckton also operated in rarefied spheres of governmental work as an adviser on Imperial constitutional issues to one of India’s princely rulers. Goddard was, though, only Monckton’s second choice for the job, and his first choice gives a rather better clue as to what Monckton thought was appropriate. At the time, Theobald Mathew was the son of an eminent lawyer and a well-established City solicitor who went on to serve for twenty years as Director of Public Prosecutions, during which he enthusiastically promoted thorough enforcement of the law against homosexuality and pornography. Mathew was a devout Catholic, which might explain why he declined the job. Goddard was a self-made man and far less of an Establishment figure than Mathew, but he proved to be entirely reliable from the government point of view. He was no stranger to the sensitive world where politics and the law met, having acted for the Dominions Secretary Jimmy Thomas in the judicial inquiry into the leak of Budget secrets during the spring of 1936 that led to Thomas’s disgrace. He advised Mrs Simpson on the technical aspects of her divorce, but did not develop any broader or more personal relationship with her. By contrast, he did become a friend of Fisher, who tried to obtain a knighthood for him ten years after the abdication on the grounds of his services to the government during the crisis.24

  Of course it is not often that a solicitor finds himself acting for the sovereign’s lover in a divorce case, but it is still striking that Goddard should have accepted the invitation to talk to Fisher without, apparently, asking his client beforehand. Almost from the start of his conversation with Fisher, Goddard was at pains to emphasise that patriotism coloured his view of the affair. In his account of this episode, Goddard carefully avoids specifying what Fisher asked him to do when he called him in; Goddard clearly understood the dubious ethics of even countenancing a request from a third party, however mighty, to persuade his client to drop a case, and claims to have resisted doing what Fisher asked.25 Fisher called in Wilson, Vansittart and other colleagues, presumably including Hankey, to back him up. Goddard later claimed that he managed to convince all of them except Wilson that it was none of his business to advise Mrs Simpson on any hypothetical plans for marriage she might entertain after divorce. This is at best an incomplete description of what happened. Working back from reports of the conversation and Goddard’s own incomplete account, it appears that what Fisher asked Goddard to do was not only to persuade Mrs Simpson to withdraw her divorce petition, but also to drop any idea of marrying the King and to leave the country.26 Goddard had placed himself in a false position. His sole concern should have been to advise his client what was in her best interests, yet the criterion for his advice seemed to be the national interest or at least what he and Fisher thought was the national interest. There is no indication that he disclosed to Mrs Simpson that he was also speaking for the top level of the civil service. She did not mentio
n the incident at all, even indirectly in her memoirs, maintaining the fiction that almost everything had come as a complete surprise to her.

  The conversation with Mrs Simpson was not a comforting experience for Goddard.27 She told him bluntly that she was totally committed to the divorce, for which she put the entire blame on her husband. Goddard was even more firmly rebuffed on the question of her marrying the King. When he was unwise enough to ‘express his own vision of the damage to the throne if a marriage shd. take place (and Goddard told W that as an Englishman he felt this v. strongly & expressed it as strongly as he felt)’ he was treated to Mrs Simpson at her worst. She ‘blazed out at him What do you take me for [?]. I would never think of it. I am trying to help him. Can you deny that I have helped him[?]’ She stopped short of denying that the King wanted to marry her, but wanted to head discussion away from the topic by concentrating on how she was helping him, boasting that she had made him give up drinking spirits in favour of light beer only. At this stage she might genuinely have thought that marriage was not a serious possibility despite what the King had told her back in May when planning the dinner at York House. Her next comment does suggest that she saw herself as no more than a temporary feature in his life: ‘[s]ome day I shall just fade out & be prepared to go’. Goddard was convinced she was sincere. The King’s track record certainly would not have suggested that he was inclined towards long-term commitment. This provided a measure of hope to compensate for the disappointments of the interview, which he had to report to the civil servants. It proved to be an entirely false hope and, worse, the disappointment that followed further poisoned the hardliners’ view of Mrs Simpson.