The King Who Had to Go Read online

  Although she refused to stop the divorce, Fisher and Goddard believed that Mrs Simpson had agreed to leave the country. This was a major comfort to Fisher, but quite how they came to this conclusion is one of the smaller, but still significant, mysteries of the abdication. Fisher further seems to have taken this as some kind of formal and binding commitment given to the top level of British government and, again, it is far from clear why he did so. The best account of the conversation is indirect and far from conclusive. According to Chamberlain’s diary, Fisher reported to him Goddard’s version of his conversation with Mrs Simpson: that ‘after the [divorce] proceedings were over he was going to get Mrs Simpson away to France for six weeks and thereafter he would try and persuade her to spend as much time abroad as possible’. Nothing is mentioned about how Mrs Simpson took this suggestion and there is no sign that she had made any plans to leave the country at this point. When, weeks later, she did leave for France, circumstances had changed radically. The crisis had broken publicly and she was shattered by the publicity and fearful for her own safety. Accommodation had to be found at short notice.

  It would have been quite routine for Goddard to advise Mrs Simpson to go abroad. This was the only part of what he tried to persuade her to do that was not manifestly driven by his conversation with Fisher. Leaving the country was a quite normal method of escaping the baleful attentions of the King’s Proctor after the decree nisi. Divorce was a luxury product in those days and it could almost be assumed that a petitioner would have the money for a prolonged stay abroad. This also meshed nicely with the social mores of the time, which attached the greater scandal to proceedings in open court. Unless Goddard had disclosed to Mrs Simpson on whose behalf he was talking – for which there is no evidence at all – whatever she said about the idea of going to France would merely have been a response to her lawyer’s advice. She may simply have been answering evasively until she could discuss the question with the King. Many years later, her long-standing private secretary commented that she ‘occasionally gives the impression she has said yes, when in fact she has said no’.28 Perhaps it was as simple as this. She was not to know that what she told her lawyer would be fed back to the highest levels of the bureaucracy and the government, and treated as a binding commitment.

  The balance of probability is that Goddard simply overestimated his influence on his client and expected her to follow his advice. After his failure to persuade Mrs Simpson to drop the divorce entirely, Goddard might also have felt under some pressure to offer some consolation to Fisher and thus exaggerated the definiteness of what Mrs Simpson told him. In turn, Fisher took this all at face value and drew some very rosy conclusions. Wilson might have been more cautious, and he described what Mrs Simpson said to Goddard as ‘the assurances which I had understood had been given through Theodore Goddard to the effect that Mrs. Simpson had grasped the realities of the position and was likely to go away’ [author’s italics].29 But this was written weeks after these hopes had been shattered, and he might simply have wanted to protect his own reputation.

  Whatever reservations Wilson might have had, they were not shared with Fisher, who spent the following week in a happy glow of achievement at having defused the crisis, certainly in the short term and perhaps permanently if Mrs Simpson did indeed ‘fade out’. Fisher did not keep this to himself and extended the rickety edifice that he had built on these unsolid foundations when he passed on his new-found confidence to Neville Chamberlain, who was equally uncritical. Fisher further boosted Chamberlain’s spirits with a titbit from the flow of MI5 intelligence, telling him ‘very secretly that the K[ing] knew of this interview’.30 From this, Chamberlain drew the conclusion that the King accepted the idea of Mrs Simpson leaving the country. On the basis of very scant evidence indeed, Fisher and Chamberlain had come to believe that after the scandals of the summer, the King and Mrs Simpson would behave with all the discretion that their position demanded.

  The civil servants could also take some comfort from something else that Mrs Simpson told Goddard, which proved to be entirely misleading, although here the blame falls squarely on her. She claimed to him that she would never contemplate marrying the King, which might, just, have been the literal truth about her own thinking, but suppressed the far more important fact that the King was determined to marry her.31

  Fisher was able to ease Chamberlain’s mind on a quite different question. He had been fretting at the possibility that the King might marry Mrs Simpson morganatically, that is without her becoming Queen and keeping any hypothetical children out of the line of succession.32 It was an established practice amongst the royalty of Continental Europe, although it was usually adopted when a member of a royal family married someone not of royal blood. Many if not most people of the period would have been familiar with the morganatic marriage between Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria–Hungary, and Countess Sophie Chotek, a perfectly respectable lady but just not royal, who went on to be famously murdered together in Sarajevo. Chamberlain had seen a ‘dangerous possibility’ that the formula might be applied to Mrs Simpson, but Fisher had researched the question and could tell Chamberlain that ‘any woman who the King marries is ipso facto Queen Consort’.33 Chamberlain displayed a touching faith in the immutability of current practice if it suited his tastes and concluded that this made a morganatic marriage ‘out of the question’.

  NOTES

  1. NA PREM 1/466

  2. Sitwell, Rat Week, p.30

  3. NA PREM 1/446, Constitutional Crisis: Attitude of the British Press

  4. Chamberlain diary, 25 October

  5. Chamberlain to Hilda, 17 October

  6. Chamberlain to Ida, 24 October

  7. Chamberlain diary, 25 October

  8. Hardinge, Loyal to Three Kings, pp 117–18

  9. Chamberlain to Hilda, 17 October

  10. Chamberlain to Hilda, 4 April; Chamberlain to Ida, 13 April

  11. Citrine, Men and Work, p. 326

  12. Schmidt, Statist auf Diplomatischer Bühne, 1923–45, p. 376

  13. NA PREM 1/466

  14. NA PREM 1/466

  15. NA CAB 23/68 meeting of 27 November

  16. NA PREM 1/466

  17. PREM NA PREM 1/466

  18. Hardinge, Loyal to Three Kings, p. 119

  19. Hardinge, Loyal to Three Kings, p. 119

  20. Chamberlain diary, 25 October

  21. Goddard narrative

  22. NA PREM 1/466

  23. Monckton narrative

  24. NA CAB 127/372, Bridges to Lascelles, 17 December 1945

  25. Goddard narrative

  26. Chamberlain diary, 26 October

  27. Chamberlain diary, 26 October

  28. Vickers, Behind Closed Doors, p. 13

  29. NA PREM 1/466

  30. Chamberlain diary, 26 October

  31. Chamberlain diary, 26 October

  32. Chamberlain diary, 26 October

  33. Chamberlain diary, 26 October

  CHAPTER 6

  A REAL JOLT

  * * *

  Things had gone back. Mrs. S. had spent the week-end at Fort Belvedere. [Baldwin] thought it was necessary to give the King a real jolt to bring him to realise the situation.

  NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, DIARY, 2 NOVEMBER 1936

  WHEN MRS SIMPSON’S divorce case was heard in Ipswich on Tuesday 27 October, the world’s press was out in force, but there were no unpleasant surprises for the government or the King. Nothing was mentioned in court to link her to the King. The case was reported briefly and factually in the British newspapers as though it were a quite unexceptional divorce. There was no mention of the King. Beaverbrook was credited with having ‘engineered the gentlemen’s agreement with the Press Lords’.1 Inevitably, the foreign press gave the story extensive coverage with no restraints on mentioning the connection between the King and Mrs Simpson, parodied in the legendary headline ‘King’s Moll Renoed in Wolsley’s Home Town’, which was enthusiastically circulated in British So
ciety showing how scandalously vulgar the elite found it all.2 To the powers that be it was also an unpleasant foretaste of what could happen if the story reached the British press.

  The court hearing itself went smoothly on the pattern of most similar undefended divorce cases, although there were enough unusual features to excite some suspicions. It was never explained satisfactorily why the case was not heard in London, where Mrs Simpson lived. Instead it was heard as a ‘country’ case, a supposedly cheaper and more convenient way of conducting a divorce case that had recently been introduced. This logic was undermined because the case could not be heard at Maidenhead, the court closest to Bray where Ernest Simpson’s adultery had occurred at the Hotel de Paris, and thus most accessible for the witnesses. The best alternative was in Ipswich, which in some eyes had been chosen because it was supposedly remote from London. Any notion that the case was being heard in Ipswich to minimise publicity and cost was torpedoed by Goddard’s choice of barrister to present the case, Sir Norman Birkett KC, one of the country’s most prominent (and expensive) courtroom advocates. The feature of the case that the judge, Mr Justice Hawke, was most irked about, however, was the uncertainty over the identity of the woman found in bed with Ernest Simpson. She was in fact Mrs Simpson’s former friend Mary Raffray, who went on to marry Ernest Simpson. His reluctance to disclose her identity was a gentlemanly instinct but apt to be misconstrued, especially in such a high-profile case. It was usual for a couple to agree – illegally – to divorce and arrange for one to be ‘caught’ in bed with someone else hired for the purpose. Typically, they were young women willing to earn a modest amount of money in a faintly insalubrious fashion. Keeping quiet as to the co-respondent’s true identities was part of the deal. As the British press had yet to break its silence at that point, there was practically no comment, although the details were well enough known to lead a good many members of the public to write to the legal authorities to complain two months later when the King’s involvement became public. Perhaps curiously, the hardliners did not complain about any of this, although one senior Cabinet member, Ramsay MacDonald, did complain that the case was a ‘stretch of law & justice’ and believed that it would be a scandal if the King’s Proctor did not intervene.3 This appears to be nothing more than outrage at routine illegality.

  The British press behaved itself; the King did not. Within days of the divorce case it was clear that the cosy fantasy that Fisher and Chamberlain had erected on the flimsy foundations of Goddard’s conversation with Mrs Simpson and their misreading of the MI5 report had collapsed. Not merely did Mrs Simpson remain on the British side of the Channel, but the couple did not behave even with the reticence and decorum customary for people anxious to transform the half divorce of a decree nisi into a full divorce. Mrs Simpson spent the weekend after the divorce case at Fort Belvedere and dined twice with the King in London. Hardinge was plunged into a mood of deep pessimism and now feared that the King would have to abdicate.4 He brought the bad news of the King’s behaviour to Baldwin at Downing Street on Monday 2 November.5 There was even worse to come, as Fisher discovered when he dined with Goddard on the Tuesday. Mrs Simpson had made it clear to him that she had no intention of leaving the country; her ‘assurances … had had to be withdrawn’ by inference after she had put the idea to the King. Moreover, the King had forbidden her ‘to see anyone on the subject again’.6 The idea of getting Mrs Simpson out of the country that Goddard and Fisher had cooked up together had proved to be a tactical blunder. As was to become even more painfully clear, the King reacted furiously against the proposal, which he found extremely offensive and demeaning.

  The first attempt to resolve the crisis by talking to Mrs Simpson had ended in a fiasco. It had been handled at best incompetently and with minimal consideration or forethought. The dialogue was conducted through an intermediary who had only a brief and limited relationship with Mrs Simpson. The blame lies squarely with Fisher, although Wilson shares some of it. There is, of course, no certainty that if the government’s contact with Mrs Simpson had been handled any differently, the outcome would have been any happier, but an astute intermediary or one who knew her well could have spotted that she had motives of her own, which could have been played on to defuse the crisis. She was far less committed to the idea of marriage than the King, and it might even have been unwelcome to her. There is no reason to suppose that an elegant and well-funded withdrawal from the relationship would have distressed her. She also shared the government’s horror of public scandal. She was deeply disturbed by the massive publicity over the Nahlin cruise and had a powerful motive to behave in ways that did not attract press attention. Even if it had not been possible to persuade her to give up the King at this stage, she could easily have been persuaded to make the King behave discreetly.

  Mrs Simpson’s decision to remain in Britain made Fisher appear a fool several times over. He had drawn a falsely optimistic conclusion from what Goddard had told him and then passed this on to Chamberlain. Fisher had read too much into the MI5 report that the King knew of the conversation between Mrs Simpson and Goddard, and he thought that it meant the King approved the plan. Fisher and Goddard had been exposed as prisoners of their own excessive optimism, but naturally they blamed Mrs Simpson. Goddard saw her behaviour as a rank breach of trust – ‘he has lost all faith in her’ – and Fisher and Chamberlain shared this view.7

  There is no sign that Baldwin had been swallowed into Fisher’s bubble of delusional hope, or that he suffered the same degree of shock when it burst, but he was sufficiently concerned by the turn of events to muse on more robust action than had been taken so far. On 2 November he told Chamberlain that ‘He thought it was necessary to give the King a real jolt to bring him to realise the situation’ and thought that it might even be delivered through a discreet press campaign by ‘the more responsible newspapers’.8 In the event nothing occurred, which suggests that Baldwin may have been more interested in persuading Chamberlain that he was prepared to take some resolute action. In reality, he still saw the six-month gap between granting the decree nisi and the decree absolute as a breathing space.9

  As the next step in the divorce proceedings would not, in the ordinary course, be reached for six months, and as he was most anxious that the King should have every possible opportunity for reflection, the Prime Minister decided that it was better to give time for the views he had expressed to the King on 20 October to have their effect on the King’s mind.10

  Baldwin did, though, take one practical step that, arguably, he should have taken months before. He sought professional advice on his legal options in an unprecedented constitutional position. The government’s senior law officer, Attorney General Sir Donald Somervell, dealt rapidly and easily with two of the points that had arisen: the government had to approve the King’s choice of a bride, and an abdication could simply be effected through an Act of Parliament.11 Somervell accepted that the only written law covering the King’s marriage barred him from marrying a Catholic, but firmly stated that ‘the marriage of a King was of such concern to the State that it would be an unconstitutional act for a King to marry contrary to the advice of his ministers’. Baldwin also wanted his opinion on a much less obvious issue, which was bubbling beneath the surface: the possibility that the King’s Proctor might intervene in Mrs Simpson’s divorce. Someone in government thought this provided a potential tool to end the government’s difficulties at a stroke by torpedoing her divorce and eliminating the risk that she and the King might marry.12 Somervell saw two immense flaws in this idea, one subtly constitutional and the other common sense. There is a well-established but little-known doctrine that the British monarch cannot be subjected to action in his or her own courts. When Somervell made the automatic assumption that the King was the only person with whom Mrs Simpson could be accused of ‘misconduct’, he did not believe that it was an accusation that could be brought to court. Perhaps more tellingly, Somervell knew that if the constitutional point were wrong and a court
case did ensue, it would be squalid:

  I had no doubt a feeling that whatever was to be the solution to the problem the King’s Proctor appearing with a bevy of valets and chambermaids before Merriman [the President of the Divorce Court] to prove that the reigning Monarch had been seen going down the passage etc. was not the right one.13

  For the time being, Somervell’s advice removed the thought of bringing in the King’s Proctor as a way of cutting the Gordian knot, but this was far from the last anyone was to hear of the scheme.

  Few would have questioned Somervell’s advice that the King’s marriage fell squarely in the area of topics on which the Prime Minister had a right to advise the King, but it was a far more contentious question whether he could or should advise the King on his private life, in practice on his relationship with Mrs Simpson. This aspect of the problem was passed on to Sir Maurice Gwyer, the senior Parliamentary Counsel, who was junior to Somervell in the hierarchy of law officers, but an expert on constitutional law. He had edited the standard legal text book on the subject.