The King Who Had to Go Page 14
The pressure that the hardliners had been building up finally found a release valve and escaped in a way that unarguably delivered a ‘real jolt’ to the King. This fell to Hardinge. Since the previous week, he had been agonising over how to deal with the risk that Fisher’s ultimatum would be issued in its full high-handed and tactless glory, almost inevitably triggering a full-blown constitutional crisis. Hardinge’s thoughts seem to have crystallised when Baldwin called him to Downing Street after dinner on the evening of Thursday 12 November, supposedly to ask him whether there had been any change in the King’s relationship with Mrs Simpson.41 Perhaps Baldwin had won himself two days’ reprieve when he first met the cabal the previous day by raising the possibility that the King’s behaviour might just have improved over the previous week. Such a vanishingly faint hope cannot have been Baldwin’s only reason for speaking to Hardinge again – he wanted him to warn the King just how serious the situation was. Hardinge was left with the impression that the story of an imminent constitutional crisis was entirely accurate. Baldwin confirmed to him that the group of ministers was meeting the following day and Hardinge seems to have assumed wrongly that they were meeting to ratify a decision to send formal advice that had already been taken in practice. There had always been a risk, albeit distant and hypothetical, that the government might resign, but summoning Hardinge to Downing Street for a late-night conference signalled that there was something more urgent happening. Baldwin was exploiting Chamberlain’s initiative in organising the ministers’ meeting to provide a narrative of impending conflict.
After an anxious night, Hardinge sat down to compose a letter to the King to try to persuade him to defuse the crisis. He talked over the question with two of his juniors in the royal household, ‘Tommy’ Lascelles and Sir Godfrey Thomas, who had a much longer and closer acquaintanceship with the King.42 They endorsed the need to warn the King and how it should be done. In comparison with the work of Fisher and Chamberlain, Hardinge’s letter is a masterpiece of tact and conciliation.43 It gave as much weight to the risk that the press would break its silence as anything else, but it carried a warning of impending constitutional crisis by going straight from mentioning the minister’s meeting that day to ‘the resignation of the Government – an eventuality which can by no means be excluded…’
The only possible solution was for the King to send Mrs Simpson abroad forthwith. Hardinge’s letter fell short of demanding that the King terminate the relationship entirely, as the civil servants wanted, but otherwise gave the King the same message as Fisher’s drafts. Hardinge concluded with a postscript about his shooting plans for the weekend and where he could be contacted.
The risk that the press would break its silence was a powerful factor in Hardinge’s decision to write. He feared intervention by the King’s Proctor because of the publicity it would bring. On the morning he wrote the letter he spoke to Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, who told him he would break the story once there was no doubt that the King wanted to marry Mrs Simpson.44 Even though this was well ahead of the game at this point, Hardinge attempted to restrain him and showed him his letter as proof that resolute measures were in hand and that it would be better to give them time to bear fruit.
Ever afterwards, Hardinge took full responsibility for the letter and its contents and insisted that it was entirely his own initiative, protecting Lascelles and Thomas as well as the civil servants. His wife played down the government’s involvement to the point of disappearance in her memoir. This stretches the truth. Baldwin was aware that Hardinge planned to warn the King and he certainly gave explicit approval for him to tell the King that ministers were meeting to discuss his case. Helen Hardinge’s memoir states that her husband had gone to Downing Street on the Friday ‘[t]o find out if the Prime Minister had any objection to his passing on to the King the information which he had given my husband in the strictest confidence the night before’.45
She does not explicitly confirm that Downing Street cleared the despatch of the letter, although this is implied. She also omitted from her memoir the fact that Hardinge had been told – presumably by Wilson – that his letter was also discussed at the meeting of ministers, implying further depth in government approval.46 Neither of the ministers who left accounts of the meeting mention the letter or anything like it, which creates a suspicion that Hardinge was misled. Intriguingly, Wilson makes a point in his notes of stating that no record was made of the meeting as it was ‘secret in character’, which begs the question as to why it should have been more confidential than any other discussion within government.47
What is far from clear is whether Baldwin actually saw the letter before it was sent rather than simply approving the principle of telling the King about the meeting of ministers. There is no evidence that he ever saw the actual text of the letter then or afterwards, and it is uncertain that this was quite the message that he hoped would be delivered. The direct ultimatum implied in Hardinge’s letter was far away from Baldwin’s approach throughout the crisis. When Baldwin finally saw Fisher’s drafts, he recognised that they were no more than a ‘curt ultimatum’, which he summarily suppressed.48 Moreover Baldwin’s sole recorded reference to Hardinge’s letter mentioned only the fact of a meeting of ministers: ‘The King has been told there has practically been a Cabinet meeting to consider his case…’49 Baldwin may have thought that the fact of the ministers’ meeting in itself should have given the King sufficient proof of how serious things were.
The two available accounts appear to contradict each other as to whether Baldwin saw Hardinge’s letter. According to Hardinge, ‘I did not see him [Baldwin] personally but I showed a copy of the letter to one of his staff’, manifestly Wilson.50 Wilson’s notes say:
This letter was written by Major Hardinge on Friday, 13 November. He brought it to the Prime Minister, enquiring whether Mr. Baldwin saw any objection to his reference to possible action by Ministers. I was present when Major Hardinge saw the Prime Minister. It was pointed out that Major Hardinge was accepting considerable responsibility in communicating with the King on the lines proposed.51
But like everything that Wilson wrote, it is well to read the passage very carefully. He does not state outright that Baldwin saw the letter and the phrase ‘possible action by Ministers’ is studiedly ambiguous: it could refer to anything from their holding a meeting simply to discuss the situation, to actual resignation. Wilson had no scruples about muddling the sequence of events elsewhere in his notes, and may well have merged fragments of two different conversations taken out of order: one between just himself and Hardinge on the Friday when he gave his warning, and the other on the Thursday evening with Baldwin there as well, when the idea of a letter was discussed in principle. This is borne out by the draft version of Wilson’s notes, which differs from the final version in stating that it was he and not Baldwin who advised Hardinge: ‘I was present when Major Hardinge saw the Prime Minister and pointed out that Major Hardinge was accepting a considerable responsibility in communicating with the King on the lines proposed.’52 It is far more likely that a civil servant would have given the King’s private secretary such blunt advice only in a private two-way conversation. It strains credulity that the Prime Minister would simply have taken a back seat whilst Wilson talked like this. The final version avoids this trap and gives the warning even more authority by implicitly putting it into the Prime Minister’s mouth.
The danger of an immediate constitutional crisis of which Fisher and Wilson had warned Hardinge was exaggerated to the point of invention. Baldwin squashed with consummate ease the hardliners’ scheme to provoke one. The ministers’ meeting on the morning of Friday 13 November proved a complete damp squib, at least from the point of view of its promoters. Fisher’s draft letters were simply presented to the group; Baldwin, MacDonald and Runciman had not seen them before.53 As an attempt to present Baldwin with a fait accompli, this failed entirely. Chamberlain did not try to insist to Baldwin that the letters be sent. Afterwar
ds, Chamberlain tried to mask – to himself as much as anyone else – this loss of nerve by claiming that all but Baldwin agreed ‘that the situation brooked no delay’.54 Baldwin merely said that he would take the letters to Chequers for further consideration and the drafts were consigned to oblivion. If Hardinge’s letter was in fact discussed at the meeting, the cabal may have held back from insisting that the ultimatum be sent because they saw it as a concrete way in which the King was being sent a clear signal that ministers were deeply concerned. However, neither of the ministers who left accounts of the meeting mention the letter at all. According to Ramsay MacDonald, the meeting decided that Sir John Simon should also see the King’s Proctor about intervention.55 MacDonald had been suspicious of the divorce so this was probably his idea, although it does not appear to have led to any action.
The meeting did serve another purpose. It allowed Baldwin to assure Gwynne when he saw him that afternoon ‘that he and certain of his colleagues had the matter under careful [struck out by hand] consideration’.56 For a couple of days, the Prime Minister had headed off both a ministerial revolt and the conservative press’s urgent demand for a lead. However, it soon proved that this time had been very dearly bought.
The events of the fortnight following the divorce case in Ipswich were probably the most sensitive in the whole abdication crisis. Or, at least, they are the ones that Wilson worked hardest to obfuscate. The government’s response to the crisis was at its most dysfunctional. The civil servants manipulated a senior minister into mounting a revolt against the Prime Minister on the grounds that his approach to the problem was wrong. They also fed a distorted version of the government’s response to the crisis to the King’s private secretary with the ultimately successful hope that this would reach the King. It did reach him in a form that was to all intents and purposes an ultimatum. Baldwin played an ambiguous part in approving Hardinge’s letter; he might have seen the idea as a way of giving the King a ‘real jolt’, but kept himself well away from executing the plan. Wilson had very good reason to ensure that none of this ever became known.
Wilson’s most obvious goal was to pin as much blame as possible on Hardinge. Hardinge is set up as the fall guy, a loose cannon whose headstrong letter sabotages a carefully calculated scheme by Downing Street. The role of the civil servants and Chamberlain vanishes completely. Hardinge is the one individual who is openly and remorselessly criticised throughout Wilson’s notes; they say nothing good of him at all.
It seems doubtful whether the decision to appoint Major Hardinge to succeed Lord Wigram was a wise one. Even if, had there been more time, Major Hardinge could have gained the confidence of the King (about which there must be considerable doubt) he certainly had not done so by the time the storm broke. His feelings seem to have led him to make remarks that were to say the least of it tactless and some of them were said to have been retailed to the King. And his letter of the 13th November – however well intentioned – may very well have made the worst possible impression.57
The portrayal of Hardinge as a lone wolf begins at the start of the crisis. The lunch on 12 October intended to set up a line of communication between Wilson and Hardinge is mentioned in the draft but disappears from the final version as does Hardinge’s visit to Downing Street on 2 November when he told Baldwin of the King’s continued misbehaviour. His letter is presented as coming out of the blue and spoiling a prepared plan to approach the King once his long-planned visit to south Wales had filled his head with ‘Kingly’ thoughts: ‘…action by Major Hardinge, however, led to an acceleration of these plans’ as though waiting until the King’s return from Wales were part of a carefully thought out roadmap and not yet another prevarication by the Prime Minister.
Wilson’s comments about Hardinge’s letter are outstandingly hypocritical considering that he and Fisher had already tried to have Mrs Simpson sent abroad and they were working to persuade the Prime Minister to send the King an even blunter ultimatum. He also accidentally lets slip the mask, in his anxiety to heap the maximum blame on Hardinge. Wilson made a point of spelling out that Hardinge’s call for the King to send Mrs Simpson abroad was his own initiative: that he ‘…added a plea on his own behalf [author’s italics] that the King should ease the situation by arranging for Mrs. Simpson to leave the country’. First, this practically acknowledges that the letter carried a message from the government. If one part of the letter was on Hardinge’s behalf, on whose behalf was the rest of it? Second, Wilson had good reason to disassociate the government from the idea of pressurising the King to send Mrs Simpson abroad. As he and Fisher had discovered through MI5 so painfully a few days before, the King was violently hostile. By contrast, there is no reason why Hardinge should have been aware of this hostility, as he had barely discussed Mrs Simpson with the King and there is no indication that the civil servants had warned him of the sensitivity of the issue. When Wilson saw the copy of Hardinge’s letter, he did not alert him. As the civil servants were aiming for a more radical outcome in the form of a complete termination of the King’s relationship with Mrs Simpson, Wilson may not have thought that it mattered. The hardliners by this stage had no qualms about provoking the King.
Ever afterwards, Hardinge detested Wilson and some years later told Sir John Reith, ‘H. J. Wilson he can’t abide, distrusts him profoundly and says his influence is all wrong’.58 In the language of the time, Fisher and Wilson had carted him, egging him into writing an inflammatory letter to the King on the basis of their wildly and dishonestly exaggerated version of the crisis and, when the letter failed to make the King change his ways, Wilson made him the scapegoat.
Another part of Wilson’s project was to hide what he and Fisher had done and, by extension, the machinations of Chamberlain’s cabal of ministers, which was practically their own creation. In particular he wanted to blur the picture of what happened in the second week of November when the crisis that they had manufactured culminated in Hardinge’s letter. Practically everything in his account distorts events by misstatement, contrived ambiguity, muddied chronology and outright suppression of embarrassing episodes. Predictably enough, all of the civil servants’ private conversations with Hardinge and Chamberlain simply do not feature in his notes at all. The notes come perilously close to an outright lie when Wilson mentions the meetings of the cabal for the first time by implying falsely that the initiative came from Baldwin: ‘the Prime Minister mentioned the matter to some of his senior colleagues’ on 11 and 13 November. The ultimatum is presented as though it were only one of a number of courses of action discussed at the meeting. Baldwin’s disagreement with the cabal rates barely a phrase, and a very anodyne one at that: ‘[t]he Prime Minister’s own view was that the better course…’ Just to head anyone off from inferring a connection between Baldwin’s discussions with the cabal and Hardinge’s letter, Wilson throws a largely irrelevant paragraph about the King’s diary of official engagements into the narrative to split up the paragraphs about the two events.
Wilson also minimises the influence of the pressure from newspaper editors. In the draft, Gwynne expressly told the Prime Minister that the press’s continued silence depended on the government taking resolute action and that the Prime Minister was able to give him comfort on this point. All that survives of this in the final text of Wilson’s notes is that ‘the Prime Minister was considering what it might be possible for him to do’. Even more flagrantly, the whole episode of Gwynne’s letter and subsequent meeting with Baldwin is shifted to the very beginning of the final version of the notes ostensibly as part of a broader discussion of the press’s attitude throughout the crisis and thus widely separated from the account of Hardinge’s letter. It was unlucky for Wilson that the key date was a Friday the 13th and thus noticeable to even a moderately superstitious reader when it appeared at widely separated points in the notes.
Hardinge’s letter and the events that led to it were a closely kept secret, which remained hidden until the then Duke of Windsor published his memo
irs in 1951. The cover-up began whilst the crisis was still at its height. When Baldwin finally discussed the question of the King in Cabinet two weeks later, nothing was mentioned of them at all. A seriously distorted picture of the episode was fed to the King’s lawyer, Walter Monckton, who was playing a vital role in the final phases of the crisis as the link between the King and Downing Street. He was trusted by both sides, but not far enough for Downing Street to disclose the full story. The King had shown Monckton Hardinge’s letter, but Monckton did not make a copy, and took away the false memory that the letter told the King that it was the Cabinet itself that was to discuss the question. He must have queried this point at Downing Street and someone, most likely Wilson, his chief contact there, had told him accurately but misleadingly that the Cabinet had not discussed the question, withholding the crucial fact of the meeting of ministers on Friday 13 November.59 Monckton thus thought that Hardinge’s letter to the King was factually incorrect.