The King Who Had to Go Read online

  The King took immediate advantage of the permission Baldwin had granted him to speak to Hoare and Duff Cooper, whom he summoned to the palace for the following day. Of the two, Hoare was by far the heavier hitter. He was ten years older than Duff Cooper and had been elected to Parliament before the First World War, in which he went on to serve as a senior intelligence operative. He had bribed Mussolini to support Italy’s entry to the war on the Allied side. He was a leading figure amongst the Carlton House plotters against Lloyd George, which practically ensured him a place at the political top table. His chief drawback in the eyes of the other Conservative leaders was that he was known to be close to Beaverbrook. He also had a wider reputation for untrustworthiness fuelled by the unfortunate coincidence that a popular card game of the time, Slippery Sam, supplied an easy and telling nickname. He was one of the ministers who had a degree of social contact with the King. During his short period out of office after carrying the can for the debacle over the Hoare–Laval pact, Hoare had tried to cultivate the King and Mrs Simpson, and the King had invited him to shoot at Sandringham in October.20 Hoare was then First Lord of the Admiralty and the King was deeply interested in the affairs of the Royal Navy, which had brought him into closer contact with Hoare than with other senior ministers. Hoare was anyway too astute a politician to see any advantage in backing the King, and made this entirely clear when they met that morning. Like Baldwin, Hoare left the conversation with the impression that abdication was inevitable. The King was far more direct in stating his determination to marry Mrs Simpson than in stating his difference in opinion with Baldwin on public opinion.

  The King had a marginally more encouraging conversation with Duff Cooper that afternoon. Duff Cooper was almost the only person who thought that it might be possible for the King to marry Mrs Simpson, but it would depend on a cautious and patient programme, ‘that, given time, while it would be very difficult, it might not prove impossible’.21 The King should spend the next few months establishing himself on the throne and let Mrs Simpson slip out of the public eye for a year or more, by which time public opinion might have shifted to tolerance of a marriage. This was not enough for the King, who revealed the full extravagance and unreality of his own thinking. He had developed an idée fixe that it would be dishonest to take the coronation vows to uphold the principles of the Church of England whilst intending to breach them himself, and would countenance nothing but marrying before his coronation. Quite how this would have been less honest than taking the vows having breached them already is not a question he appears to have asked himself. It is possible that this guff masked an image that Edward had been nursing in his mind for a long time: that of a joint coronation ceremony as a surrogate state wedding. When he told Ernest Simpson and Rickatson-Hatt that he intended to marry Mrs Simpson in February, he appeared to be driven by such a vision: ‘Do you really think that I would be crowned without Wallis by my side?’22 He made it clear to Duff Cooper that the idea of any morganatic halfway house was unacceptable: ‘Wallis is going to be Queen or nothing’. Duff Cooper got the impression that the King wanted to marry before his coronation and told him directly that the idea was ‘plainly impossible’. The most superficial examination of what would have been involved shows that Duff Cooper was almost certainly correct. Only a few Anglican churches would marry divorcees, and they had a tawdry reputation. There would also have been only a couple of weeks at most between Mrs Simpson’s divorce becoming final and the coronation. Quite apart from any consideration of Mrs Simpson’s suitability, the marriage would have appeared indecently hasty. Yet there is an ambiguous passage in one draft of the Duke of Windsor’s memoirs that suggests he thought it was possible: ‘W therefore could not expect to obtain her freedom until April 27, 1937 … With my coronation set for May 12, this seemed to allow ample time for me to work things out. But I was mistaken.’23

  Over the next few days the King talked to his mother and his three surviving brothers and seems to have said the same as he had to Baldwin and the two ministers: that he absolutely intended to marry Mrs Simpson. Whatever the ministers might have said to him, the King still believed he could do so and remain on the throne. According to one account, he believed that the fortnight between Mrs Simpson’s decree absolute and his coronation gave sufficient time to get married. He is reported as telling his mother: ‘I’m going to marry Mrs. Simpson on April 27 and be crowned on May 12.’24 Like Duff Cooper, she assumed that this was impossible and told him: ‘But my dear David you cannot do any such thing.’ The King acknowledged that he would abdicate to marry Mrs Simpson if necessary, but clung to his optimistic view. When he told the Duke of Kent that he was going to marry, his brother was unwise enough to doubt that she was fit to sit on the throne. The King made it clear that he did not contemplate a morganatic halfway house or anything like it.

  Duke: What will she call herself?

  King: Call herself? What do you think? ‘Queen of England’, of course!

  Duke: She’s going to be Queen?

  King: Yes and Empress of India – the whole bag of tricks.25

  To his brother, the King was ‘cock-a-hoop, gay, happy and confident’.26 However unrealistic as it might seem now, the King thought that there was at least a chance of pulling off the plan in its full extravagant scope. In April, he had succeeded in including provision for a Queen in the Civil List allowance paid to the royal family from public funds even though there was no talk of him marrying at that stage.27 With hindsight, this was a manoeuvre designed to pre-empt any attempt by the politicians to use money to head him off from marrying Mrs Simpson. From the other side of the table, the picture looked very different.

  The audience of 16 November had a mixed effect on Baldwin. On the one hand, he had been appalled at the depth of the King’s infatuation with Mrs Simpson. As he told the Chief Whip that night, ‘I have heard such things from my King tonight as I never thought to hear. I am going to bed.’28 On the other hand, he could see a distant prospect of an outcome that provided a solution to his long-held fears about Edward’s suitability for the throne. By chance, one of the first people Baldwin met after the audience was Duff Cooper, whom he told about what he still saw as the King’s intention to abdicate, and went on to muse that the Duke of York might indeed be better fitted to kingship than his brother, ‘just like his father’.29 Baldwin was in a similar tentatively optimistic mood when he briefed Chamberlain the following morning as to what had gone on.30 Baldwin could see the appeal of a smooth changeover, although he did not entirely exclude the possibility that the King might change his mind. He also recognised the vital point that if the King abdicated, it would have to be clearly of his own volition. This set the pattern for his dialogue with the King through the remaining weeks, when less patient men were desperate to pile pressure on the King. It was Chamberlain who was more concerned about the risks.

  S.B. observed it might be the easiest way out provided it was clearly understood that it was a voluntary act on the part of H.M. I said might we […] not try to induce him to reconsider his decision in view of the dangers involved in a change. S.B. said we must consider all that but I thought he was relieved at the prospect of getting through without a row.31

  Baldwin’s appointments over the couple of days following his conversation with the King suggest that he was preparing to deal with the practical details that abdication would involve. He saw Queen Mary, the Duke of York and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Nothing was recorded of these conversations, but the fact that Wilson mentioned them in his notes shows that they concerned the King’s affairs. By contrast there is no sign that Baldwin made any political preparations for an abdication. He does not seem to have told Chamberlain or any of his other Cabinet colleagues about these conversations. Chamberlain complained: ‘The position described above remained the same all last week. S.B. informed me that the K. had told his brothers & the Queen but he did not apparently think it necessary to call any meeting of ministers or to see the K. again.’32 There is no im
mediately obvious explanation for this. The most probable explanation is that his visceral sense of timing told him that the time was not quite ripe or that he thought that the King might still change his mind. He had told Wilson that he thought that the King’s visit to south Wales at the end of the week would genuinely inspire ‘kingly’ thoughts and a consequent change in his view of his responsibilities.33 To some extent this was a pretext for delay, but Baldwin was correct in expecting the visit to be a momentous event.

  Once again Chamberlain was left fuming at Baldwin’s inaction. Once again he started to gather matters into his own hands. This time he crossed something of a Rubicon in terms of the proprieties of how ministers should work with civil servants. When he had plotted with Fisher, Chamberlain at least had the excuse that he was nominally Fisher’s political boss as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and fully entitled to seek his advice. Fisher’s old pretensions to work for the Prime Minister alone could be set aside. There was no such justification when ‘Feeling uneasy about this rather dilatory procedure I had a long talk with Horace Wilson on the time table and the work of presentation’.34 It is unclear who took the initiative – Wilson’s notes unsurprisingly make no reference to this conversation – but it is a safe bet that Wilson shared Chamberlain’s desire for action. Chamberlain had entirely forgotten the caution at the thought of change that he had expressed to Baldwin when he had been told that the King was prepared to abdicate. He also seemed to have forgotten that the King had expressly asked that only a restricted number of ministers be told. He and Wilson had come to the view that it would be best if the King left with minimum comment or prior explanation. The ‘presentation’ that he discussed with Wilson was the presentation of an accomplished fact. As he put it later, ‘…I had hoped at one time that it would be possible to effect the whole transition by a sort of coup d’etat with no public discussion of the pros & cons…’35 Or, as Wilson wrote in his notes, ‘…it was hoped that some way would be found out of the difficulty without publicity’. Unlike Baldwin, who understood that the key consideration was that the King should only abdicate by his own will, the hardliners wanted abdication to be forced through quickly and in absolute secrecy.

  Chamberlain and Wilson wanted to set the seal on the hardliners’ apparent triumph; the King had been treated firmly and had bowed to the voice of reason. It merely remained to translate the acknowledgement into a formal concession before the King had second thoughts. Even if they had been right, they were too late. By the time that Chamberlain and Wilson planned the King’s disappearance into obscurity, things had moved on. If it had ever existed, the chance of quietly removing the King had vanished.

  NOTES

  1. A King’s Story, p. 328

  2. Bryan & Murphy, The Windsor Story, p. 217

  3. A King’s Story, pp 327f

  4. Bryan & Murphy, The Windsor Story, pp 217f

  5. Monckton narrative

  6. BBK G/6/27

  7. BBK G/6/4, telegram, Monckton to Beaverbrook, 16 November

  8. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 37

  9. Duff Cooper diaries; Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 37

  10. Hardinge, Loyal to Three Kings, p. 138; PREM 1/466

  11. King’s account of the audience, A King’s Story, pp 331–3, Baldwin’s NA CAB 23/86

  12. Chamberlain diary, first entry, second volume, n.d. but 18–23 November

  13. BBK G/6/27, draft memoirs

  14. NA PREM 1/466

  15. Duff Cooper diaries

  16. Dugdale diary

  17. Stanley Baldwin papers, add. papers, Lucy Baldwin memorandum, 17 November

  18. Chamberlain diary, first entry, second volume, n.d. but 18–23 November

  19. Stanley Baldwin papers, add. papers, Lucy Baldwin memorandum, 17 November

  20. Templewood papers, IX/7 Abdication notes

  21. Duff Cooper diaries

  22. Monckton, additional note, 13 August 1940

  23. BBK G/6/27

  24. Shawcross, Queen Mother, p. 372 fn.

  25. Channon diaries, 1 August 1938

  26. Channon diaries, 1 August 1938

  27. The Times, 29 April

  28. Margesson, quoted in Middlemas & Barnes, Baldwin, p. 996

  29. Duff Cooper diaries

  30. Chamberlain diary, first entry, second volume, n.d. but 18–23 November

  31. Chamberlain diary, first entry, second volume, n.d. but 18–23 November

  32. Chamberlain diary

  33. NA PREM 1/466

  34. Chamberlain diary, 25 November

  35. Chamberlain to Ida, 8 December

  CHAPTER 8

  THE UNDERWORLD GANGSTER ELEMENT

  * * *

  All the while the plot thickened and the underworld gangster element (touched with an Arabian Nights’ nightmare entertainment) gathered strength.

  NANCY DUGDALE, DIARY

  BALDWIN HAD WANTED to defer the crucial conversation with the King until after a long-planned royal visit to the mining areas of south Wales, which were still recovering from the brutal ravages of the depression. He hoped that this trip would inspire ‘kingly thoughts’ in Edward and make the King more amenable to reminders of his royal duty. It was the last outing for the ‘reform of Prince Hal’ school of optimism. The visit certainly proved to be a glorious farewell to Edward’s kingship. It showed him at his best, evidently moved by the plight of his subjects and fully engaged with them. He was received rapturously. His simple statement ‘Something must be done’ instantly struck a chord as an instinct of basic humanity moved by gruesome economic reality. It is a sad coda to his reign that his call produced no more than a highly successful newspaper subscription fund to buy toys for the children of the unemployed, which were doubtless welcome but hardly a solution to the deep-rooted industrial problems of the region.

  On his return to London, the King was engulfed by the more pressing problem caused by his desire to marry Mrs Simpson. Here his flaws dominated, making it painfully obvious that widespread doubts as to his fitness for a responsible job were accurate. He was impatient, headstrong and unreflecting. He flitted from one expedient to the next. He expected his friends to offer unconditional loyalty, but was deaf to their advice. He got the support he deserved. The only figures prepared to come out in support of him were at the fringes, driven by sometimes questionable motives. Extraordinarily, the hardliners at Downing Street were so deeply in thrall to paranoia and defective intelligence that they persuaded themselves that the resulting mess added up to a serious threat to constitutional stability.

  The first outside attempt to get the King out of his difficulties by a manoeuvre, began behind his back whilst he was away in Wales. His friend Esmond Harmsworth thought that he had identified a way to allow the King to marry Mrs Simpson and to remain on the throne, but it was one that the King had already explicitly rejected: a morganatic marriage, one in which Mrs Simpson married the King but did not become Queen.1 There was nothing particularly new in the idea of a morganatic marriage; it had been swirling around on both the government and the King’s side as an abstract possibility for some time.2 It offered the prospect of overcoming Mrs Simpson’s unsuitability by tolerating her as the King’s wife but not as the Queen. There was no established tradition of the practice in Britain, but it was far from unheard of.

  Harmsworth was a friend to both of the couple, and recognised that the best prospect of trying for a morganatic marriage lay in winning Mrs Simpson over to the idea and letting her do the work of persuading the King to change his mind. On the second day of the King’s visit to Wales, he invited her to lunch at Claridge’s and put the idea of a morganatic marriage to her. In her memoirs, Mrs Simpson claimed that it came to her as something unexpected and unfamiliar, although she admitted a dim memory of a Hapsburg connection. Harmsworth had armed himself with a considerable amount of historical research on the topic of morganatic marriages and was ready
for the challenge. Whatever her true basis of prior knowledge might have been, Mrs Simpson was sufficiently impressed by Harmsworth’s pitch for the idea that she set to work on the King over dinner the following day when he had returned from Wales and over the weekend.3 According to Beaverbrook’s hostile account, she actively preferred a morganatic marriage to becoming Queen under any circumstances.4 Her persuasion worked and the King agreed to put the idea forward to the government via Harmsworth, even though Walter Monckton warned him that the prospects of success were slim. Monckton had seen immediately an aspect to the plan that Harmsworth had either overlooked entirely or underestimated massively. A morganatic marriage would almost certainly require special legislation, and it would take the full support of the government to pass it.

  Harmsworth had chosen his moment well to attack the King’s scruples. Baldwin’s blunt statement that marrying Mrs Simpson was not acceptable and the King’s failure to win any real support from Duff Cooper and none at all from Hoare had brought home to him that his original game plan had been an abject failure. The powers that be were not simply going to stand aside and wait for him to present them with marriage to Mrs Simpson as a fait accompli; for once, he was not going to be allowed to ‘get away with it’. As he put it in his memoirs: ‘…at this stage I was ready to welcome any reasonable suggestion that offered hope of allowing me to marry on the Throne without precipitating a political struggle.’5 According to Mrs Simpson, he was rather more direct: ‘I’ll try anything in the spot I’m in now.’6 Either way, it was hardly a ringing endorsement of the proposal.

  In the eyes of the government, the whole morganatic scheme had a murky aspect from the start. Newspapers in the US, notably ones belonging to William Randolph Hearst’s resolutely Anglophobe publishing empire, had been running stories that seemed to imply insider knowledge of the morganatic proposal even before Harmsworth had mentioned the idea to Baldwin, and some mentioned that Mrs Simpson was to become a Duchess rather than Queen. The US press articles could be traced back to the Simpsons themselves. One part of the intelligence operation against her and the King about which the least has come into the public domain, was the interception of international telegrams. It appears that Post Office clerks given cables to send simply passed these on to the Home Office, if they appeared sensitive.7 The supposedly private company responsible for Britain’s international cable traffic, Cable & Wireless Ltd., was secretly controlled by the government, and operated its network as an arm of the state. It had numerous connections to the state’s security apparatus. The government knew for a fact that Mrs Simpson was exchanging cables with the Hearst group.8 Baldwin told Bruce that ‘Mr. Simpson has an alliance with Hearst to write the thing up on the basis of a marriage of the King with an American subject would cement Anglo-American relations’.9 MI5 further reported that Hearst was paying for the information it was being fed. It was not an appealing picture of crude mercenary motives combined with an attempt to pressure the government through a hostile foreign press organisation.