The King Who Had to Go Page 13

  The opinion that Gwyer delivered on 5 November was everything that the hardliners could have hoped for.14 It sets out a doctrine that the sovereign is ultimately powerless against the politicians. Not merely did it deprive Baldwin of the argument against taking action that he had been repeating since the summer, but it told him that it was his duty to take action:

  It would be the constitutional right and duty of Ministers to advise the King to abandon a course of conduct which, though it fell exclusively within the sphere of his private life … lowered the Monarch in the estimation of his people …

  Ministers have to act as interpreters of public opinion; and if they are satisfied that public opinion generally is strongly behind the advice which they think that they ought to give, I cannot doubt that constitutional principle not only empowers, but requires, them to tender it.15

  After concluding that it was for ministers to decide whether any particular issue were grave enough for ministers to apply the ‘ultimate sanction’ of resignation, Gwyer went well beyond a straightforward legal analysis of what he believed the government could do. He also examined the political options involved and argued that ministers would not tender advice under these circumstances unless they had ‘secured the concurrence of the leaders of the Opposition’. This would compel the King ‘either to accept the advice tendered to him or to abdicate’. Put simply, the politicians could sack the monarch if he or she disagreed with them. Gwyer rounded off his opinion by covering the final base and addressed the ugly possibility that the King might simply flee the country as James II had done in 1688. In that case, Parliament could declare the throne vacant and hand it to the next in line of succession.

  Even before Gwyer had delivered his opinion, Fisher and Wilson had set in motion what Baldwin’s biographers described as ‘a most striking exercise of back-stage power’ aimed at forcing his hand.16 The civil servants were in the grip of an overwhelming belief that the crisis was so urgent that normal rules could be set aside. Under the shock of what they saw as Mrs Simpson’s broken promise, Fisher and Wilson despaired of persuading the Prime Minister to act ruthlessly, and set out to engineer a Cabinet revolt against the Prime Minister’s policy of inaction. They called on Chamberlain on the afternoon of 4 November and began by breaking the bad news about the King’s behaviour that they had gathered from Goddard, some of which Chamberlain already knew from talking to Baldwin.17 It was not hard to persuade Chamberlain that the hour for action had come or that he was the man for the hour. They began by working on Chamberlain with snippets from the MI5 reports claiming that the ‘K had spoken with amusement of his interview with S.B. & it wd. be of no use for him to see him again’. They followed this up with the rather more surprising claim that Goddard thought that he (Chamberlain) was the only man who might be able to prevent the King from taking ‘some rash action’, presumably marrying Mrs Simpson.18 Chamberlain was so happy to be told that the King mocked Baldwin but respected him that he did not question the highly dubious proposition that the King was discussing individual Cabinet ministers with Mrs Simpson and that she, in turn, was gossiping to her solicitor about this.

  Amongst Chamberlain’s various flaws was ludicrous vanity, which made him a soft target for this kind of operation. His letters to his sisters take a childish delight in anything that he thought showed him in a better light than other men. Fisher and Wilson hit their target squarely. A week later, Chamberlain was reporting to his sister Goddard’s supposed assessment of his unique influence over the King that he had learned from Fisher, with some additional embellishment, suitably flattering to his sense of self-worth: that ‘some very near [to the King] say it is of no use to repeat the warning unless it is given by the C[hancellor] of E[xchequer] for whom, they say H.M. has a wholesome respect’.19 Fisher seems to have given an exaggerated account of Goddard’s relationship with the King. Fisher and Wilson had been building on foundations laid some months before by the unnamed individual with his ‘unimpeachable’ source, who had talked up Chamberlain’s belief that he was the man to tackle the King, and talked down the relationship between Baldwin and the King.20 The general similarity of the two sets of comments leaves the suspicion that Fisher was the origin of both, and that he had been sufficiently far-sighted to bolster Chamberlain’s confidence in his superior qualifications as King-tamer well in advance of deciding that he was required to mount a revolt against Baldwin’s approach.

  Gwyer’s opinion added fuel to the fire by providing a constitutional blank cheque for precisely the kind of action that the hardliners were pushing for.21 When Fisher sent Chamberlain a copy, he, hardly surprisingly, felt it was ‘a masterly letter’.22 Not only did it tell the Prime Minister that he had the power to advise the King on his personal life, but told him it was his duty to do so. It was precisely such a duty that the hardliners accused Baldwin of shirking. Frustration with the King’s behaviour and Baldwin’s temporising had reached such a pitch that the hardliners began to push for a step of unprecedented constitutional ambition. Not merely did the civil servants encourage the Chancellor to mount a revolt against the Prime Minister, but they had already decided what the revolt should achieve: the Prime Minister was to order the King to end his relationship with Mrs Simpson; ‘that the K. be formally advised to reorder his private life in writing & then seen by S.B. myself [Chamberlain], the speaker & Halifax’.23 Wilson was driven by his vision of the ‘growing resentment of the public at the thought of the King’s association with Mrs. Simpson’.24 Wilson was not deterred by the absence of obvious signs of this, but fell back on detecting the mysterious force of ‘quiet and non-vocal opinion … against the King’s proposal’.25 Quite what the King was supposed to be proposing at this stage is far from clear. Wilson may simply have muddled his chronology and been referring to the proposal for a morganatic marriage, which did not arise for another fortnight. Chamberlain seems to have had no qualms about being given a programme of political action by civil servants and immediately fell in with the plan precisely as set out by Fisher and Wilson. The civil servants were despatched to draft the advice to the King, and Chamberlain went to see Baldwin to tell him how the crisis should be handled. Baldwin again temporised with the remarkably lame view that any move should be postponed until after the opening debate of the upcoming Parliamentary session.26 However, he raised no objection to a meeting with the group of ministers proposed by Fisher as a delegation to the King together with Sir John Simon and Ramsay MacDonald. It is not clear who suggested adding these two, but they were not natural allies of Baldwin’s policy of delay.

  The civil servants’ next move forced the pace yet again and greatly lessened whatever hope there might have been of finding an amicable solution between the King and the government. In parallel to intriguing with Chamberlain to force the Prime Minister to give the King an ultimatum, they moved on to apply indirect pressure on the King through his private secretary, Alec Hardinge, who for a week or so became one of the key figures in the crisis. It is uncertain whether this began entirely on the civil servants’ initiative or whether the Prime Minister had some intimation that Hardinge was being primed. As might have happened with the approach to Mrs Simpson through Goddard, Baldwin may have been working to avoid taking any demonstrable responsibility for a potentially contentious step. The initial contacts were so sensitive that Hardinge’s wife masked the identities of Fisher and Wilson from any accidental reader of her diary under the imaginary title of ‘the High Co. liaison officers’.27 Hardinge was given – firmly off-the-record – a picture of how things were developing. The civil servants’ account was so distorted as to be almost fiction: the whole government – Baldwin included by implication – had reached the point of exasperation, so a constitutional crisis was imminent; the ‘Government are not prepared to carry on’.28 The civil servants did not disclose that Baldwin had not fallen in with the hardliners’ desire to send the King an ultimatum, and on Saturday 7 November they showed Hardinge the draft advice they had prepared on Chamberlain�
�s instructions, but claimed that they had prepared it ‘for the Prime Minister’, which stretches truth to the breaking point.29 Moreover, the draft demanded that the King terminate his relationship with Mrs Simpson forthwith, which had never been one of Baldwin’s goals. Whilst the Prime Minister would have been content for the King to conduct a discreet liaison with a ‘respectable whore’, the hardliners wanted the relationship to end entirely. Ostensibly, they wanted Hardinge’s comments, but more likely they hoped that he would pass the word to the King that the time was close for him to make the crucial choice.

  The civil servants added an extra layer of spurious urgency by claiming that formal intervention by the King’s Proctor in Mrs Simpson’s divorce was in imminent prospect. Here intervention was being spun as a threat and not an opportunity: it would bring the King’s name into open court and destroy the public silence on the affair. Again, they were far ahead of reality. Only two people had written to the King’s Proctor at that date, only one of whom made anything approaching a specific allegation, and neither stated any intention of filing a formal affidavit.30 Nonetheless, Hardinge was told that two affidavits had already been filed. Either the civil servants’ imagination had run away with them or they were lying outright. Hardinge took the assertion at face value, and the threat of intervention preyed on him as much as the threat of a constitutional crisis.

  Hardinge was horrified. He spotted immediately that threat of formal advice to the King would have been the prelude to abdication and was something that Baldwin had carefully avoided thus far. He also saw the weakness of the government’s case for advising the King on ‘a mere association with a woman’.31 It is unlikely that he had seen Gwyer’s hawkish analysis of the government’s rights and duties, so he took the common-sense view that the government should not use its constitutional power to force the King to drop a mistress completely just because the affair caused a scandal. At first the civil servants declined Hardinge’s urging to ‘tone down the draft and make the approach a more informal one’, but they did accept the idea that Chamberlain should mediate on the dispute.32 If, as is suggested in his wife’s memoir, it was Hardinge who proposed Chamberlain, Fisher and Wilson must have rubbed their hands in secret glee. Hardinge seems to have been entirely unaware that Chamberlain was not only already deeply engaged but was already convinced that an ultimatum was indeed required and was highly unlikely to dissent from the civil servants’ views.

  In the event Fisher did take up Hardinge’s idea of an informal approach, albeit in an entirely token form. He sent his draft of an informal letter to Chamberlain with a covering letter that passed it off as a mere refinement of the plan rather than an attempt to fend off a constitutional crisis. He also sent the draft of a letter of formal advice, together with a copy of Gwyer’s uncompromising advice that it was the government’s duty to take stern measures:

  Alec Hardinge came to see me this morning, very privately, with a suggestion which is, I think, well worth consideration.

  The interview of 20 Oct. [between the King and Baldwin] was a pleasant chatty affair which failed (naturally enough) to leave any impression; indeed might well have lent itself to the inference that the visitor [Baldwin] was not really taking a very serious view.

  Therefore, before the ultimatum we have been considering is launched, shd. there not be an intermediate stage, half way in form between the first causerie & the full formality. With this idea in mind A.H. sketched out the enclosed which strikes me as rather good. Of course if it proved fruitless, the final document, & audience, wd. follow.

  [in margin at end of letter] Of course I assured Hardinge that he has not been in the picture

  Yours ever

  WARREN

  The ‘intermediate’ letter was only informal in the sense that it threatened the King with formal advice.33 Otherwise, it was an insultingly phrased denunciation of the King’s conduct and a peremptory instruction to send Mrs Simpson out of the country. Fisher’s statement that Hardinge had ‘sketched’ it out is dubious and was more likely intended to serve as grounds for claiming that steps were taken only after consultation with the King’s private secretary. It would have allowed the government to claim that its first written communication with the King on the topic of Mrs Simpson had not been formal advice. Fisher’s comment that ‘I assured Hardinge that he has not been in the picture’ is further proof of the sensitivity of the dialogue, with a distinct hint that Fisher was trying to dilute responsibility for what was going on. It opens the possibility that Fisher himself might not have been authorised to talk to Hardinge and was keen to keep this under wraps. There is little evidence that Baldwin used speciously off-the-record briefings himself.

  Chamberlain and the civil servants had been so consumed by their belief that only tough action would work that they had lost touch with political reality. After a single informal and inconclusive conversation between the King and the Prime Minister on the topic of Mrs Simpson, they wanted the government to take the most extreme action available to it. Chamberlain did revise the ‘informal’ draft extensively, toning down some of its more blatantly confrontational language, but the substance was unchanged. It is tempting to speculate that the drafts were written with the deliberate intention of provoking the King into refusing the advice. At all events their author had no hesitation at the thought of forcing the King’s abdication. When Baldwin eventually saw a copy of the draft, he showed it to his crony J. C. C. Davidson, who was appalled: ‘If his memorandum had ever seen the light of day it would have destroyed public confidence in the Government … I was terrified that, if we had another constitutional crisis after S. B. went, Chamberlain would have handled it in the same blundering, insensitive manner.’ 34

  As well as indirectly inviting the Prime Minister to put a pistol at the King’s head, Wilson and Fisher fed Chamberlain the same alarmist story that they had given to Hardinge: that intervention by the King’s Proctor was imminent. They were not quite so lucky with Chamberlain. Unlike Hardinge, he appears to have probed Fisher on the factual basis for the statement in the draft, ‘that already two affidavits have been put in by outside parties requiring the intervention of the King’s Proctor’.35 Fisher must have backed down and Chamberlain amended the draft to read ‘two affidavits by outside parties are being prepared for submission’.36 Even this formulation was incorrect; neither of the first two letter-writers filed an affidavit and the only formal intervention was not made until over three weeks later and never got as far as an affidavit. Had the Prime Minister signed even the amended draft of the ‘informal’ letter, he would have laid himself open to an accusation of lying to the King.

  In the days following his conversation with Fisher and Wilson, Chamberlain set out to brief his cabal of hardline ministers for the meeting with Baldwin. He began with Halifax, Leader of the House of Lords, Lord Privy Seal and the archetype of the respectable Tory grandee, and moved onto Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary.37 He was sure enough that they would support him that he showed them the drafts in advance. Halifax and Simon were men of whom Chamberlain thoroughly approved and they were to become leading lights in the government he formed the following year when he took over as Prime Minister. Just to make doubly sure of the outcome of the meeting, the idea of including the Speaker was dropped and a reliably hardline minister was added to the list: Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade, another spent political force, but whom Baldwin respected for his position amongst the nonconformist churches, a bastion of far stricter morality than the Church of England. This still left Baldwin in a minority of one with his conciliatory and patient line towards the King. The little group met for the first time on Wednesday 11 November, but this seems to have been no more than a preliminary discussion, and the substantial meeting was set for the morning of Friday 13 November. If all went to Chamberlain’s plan, Baldwin would be steam-rollered into sending the ultimatum.

  Baldwin was also coming under pressure from other directions. On Thursday 12 November he had receiv
ed a letter from Howell Gwynne, the editor of Britain’s staidest newspaper the Morning Chronicle and the longest-serving national newspaper editor.38 As the doyen of Fleet Street he was by default the obvious conduit for mainstream newspapers to pass on their opinions to Downing Street. According to the letter, Gwynne’s colleagues had warned him that it was increasingly difficult for them to maintain the ‘Great Silence’ on the King and Mrs Simpson. Nothing in particular had happened to challenge the press’ self-censorship and Gwynne provided no evidence regarding which of his colleagues were concerned, so it is suspicious that his letter should have coincided almost exactly with the cabal’s big push. In a rather different way he was sending the same message as the hardliners: time was running out for the Prime Minister to keep deferring resolute action. For the time being, Gwynne was content to advise other editors to maintain silence, but ultimately the government had to give a lead. How large a part Gwynne’s letter played in spurring Baldwin into action can only be guessed, but it was treated seriously enough for Baldwin to agree to see Gwynne at Downing Street the following afternoon. There was still a faint hope of settling everything in discreet silence, so it was worth a small effort to preserve.

  Consultations with representatives of the Dominions were also pointing toward tough action. Under the Statute of Westminster of 1931, the Dominions had acquired significant autonomy. In particular, any change in the relationship with the Crown required their approval. In practice they would follow the lead of the mother country, but this could not be taken for granted. Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada, happened to be visiting Britain and agreed that a marriage with Mrs Simpson could break up the Empire.39 Mackenzie King claimed that he had spoken forthrightly to the King about the state of feeling in his country. This claim proved to be fictional, as Wilson ruthlessly exposed, but the conservative sentiment in Canada was real enough. The Australian High Commissioner and former Prime Minister Stanley Bruce visited Baldwin at Chequers whilst efforts to chivvy Baldwin into action were at their most intense. Bruce recognised that the audience of 20 October had been a failure and wanted Baldwin to put the question directly to the King as to whether he wanted to marry Mrs Simpson, and to threaten to resign if he said yes.40