The King Who Had to Go Read online

  The speech succeeded magnificently, ‘the most impressive and persuasive that Baldwin ever made’, in the words of one Cabinet minister, and ‘a supreme example of his artistry’.16 Tributes streamed in from every side, but to Baldwin they were only the confirmation of something that his actor’s instinct had told him already. He knew that he had crowned his entire political career. Nicolson detected ‘that intoxication that comes to a man, even a tired man, after a triumphant success’ when Baldwin told him: ‘“Yes, it was a success I know it. It was almost wholly unprepared. I had a success, my dear Nicolson, at the moment I most needed it. Now is the time to go.”’ 17 He had not just steered the country though an existential crisis, but he had found the right words and the right tone to set out what had happened to put the whole episode behind it. Within months, if not weeks, Edward was fading from people’s memories. Many, if not most, people close to the action wrote accounts of something they sensed would be the most dramatic event in their lives, but this is a mark of how rapidly the crisis was being swallowed into history. The debate itself was closed. It shows the effectiveness of Baldwin’s performance in the House of Commons that his narrative has stood the test of time and has never seriously been questioned. The lines that he drew under the events of the crisis have held. Over the years since, further, sometimes very important, details have emerged, but if anything, they have been felt to confirm the basic truth of what Baldwin said that day.

  Baldwin’s speech was not merely a triumph in itself, it was a stunning turnaround in his own fortunes. In the year before the crisis, Baldwin’s premiership had been in deep trouble. He was widely criticised for the poor handling of a series of diplomatic episodes beginning with the Hoare–Laval affair, in which the Foreign Secretary had resigned as a scapegoat for a clumsy and cynical attempt to do a deal with France condoning Fascist Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia. The government’s temporising responses to Nazi remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the outbreak of civil war in Spain were equally unimpressive. Baldwin had contrived to appear both dishonest and uncommitted over Britain’s modest rearmament programme. The economy’s recovery from the Great Slump was still painfully slow. A popular minister had been forced to resign over a leak of Budget secrets. By the previous summer, Baldwin had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown and had taken a rest-cure of two months, almost completely cut off from his duties.

  One man who would have been delighted to know that Baldwin had told Nicolson that it was time for him to go was Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and de facto Baldwin’s deputy. Like so many politicians in his position, he spent his days fuming at what he disliked in the way the Prime Minister did the job, and yearning for the day when he could take over and do it properly. He acknowledged grudgingly that Baldwin ‘had reaped a rich harvest of credit which has carried him to the pinnacle of his career’.18 Chamberlain was vain and resented praise of Baldwin. He had peevishly predicted that Baldwin would ‘acquire great kudos, some of which he will have earned’.19 It was a telling qualification; Chamberlain would not have been happy that Baldwin appeared to take the whole credit for bringing the crisis safely to its conclusion. He felt that he had been instrumental in prodding Baldwin into action and he had certainly been the consistent champion of vigorous action inside government.

  Another of the MPs listening to Baldwin was in deep misery, not just at the loss of the King but at the wreckage of his own prospects. The week before Baldwin’s speech, Winston Churchill had appeared to be poised, finally, to bring his political career back on track after the long miserable years of the early 1930s, when his successive misjudgements had taken him out of government and to the fringes of mainstream politics. The previous Thursday, he had been the dominant figure at a huge public meeting in the Albert Hall, which launched a campaign under the name of ‘The Arms and the Covenant’, embracing the whole political spectrum in a call for determined rearmament by Britain to give teeth to the League of Nations’ feeble resistance to the fascist dictators. Had all gone well, it would have finally alerted the British people to the danger of these dictators and the need to draw back from the anti-war instincts that had ruled their hearts since the slaughter of the First World War, and for which Baldwin had been so effective a spokesman. But Churchill had ruined his moment. Driven by a combination of genuine sympathetic loyalty to the King and unreflecting opportunism, he had been the only political heavyweight to break with the government’s line on handling the crisis. It had been a disaster. The King had sought his help the previous Friday evening, but had completely ignored the trenchant advice which Churchill had given. Even worse, when Churchill had spoken in the House of Commons on the Tuesday evening, pleading for the King to be given more time to consider his position, he had been shouted down and unable to finish his speech. He had ‘undone in five minutes the patient reconstruction work of two years’.20 Afterwards, he was so depressed that he told a friend that his political career was over.

  By Thursday, Churchill knew that he was fighting for his political survival. He sat hunched through Baldwin’s speech, anxious that the Prime Minister might hammer the final nail into his coffin.21 After the leaders of the other major parties had delivered their pieces, endorsing Baldwin’s words, Churchill rose to speak to a House still seething with indignation and hostility for what some in government saw as outright gangsterish behaviour during the crisis. To many MPs, Baldwin’s reference to an abhorrent King’s Party was aimed squarely at Churchill and his associates. This time, Churchill judged the mood of his fellow MPs correctly and, in the words of one of them who had criticised him savagely a few days before, ‘…in an admirably phrased little speech executed a strategical retreat’.22 It was just enough, and another MP, who was better disposed towards Churchill, thought he had ‘…regained a good deal of the sympathy he had lost’.23 But the strategic damage had been done. Any hopes that he would soon lead a movement that brought Britain round to robust opposition to Hitler were fading. The French Embassy in London, ever alert for its national security, confessed it was ‘worried at his loss of ground’.24

  Churchill’s unintended act of political suicide had not helped the King in any way, but it had sparked the only noticeable wobble in the government’s handling of the crisis. Before speaking to Churchill on the Friday evening, the King had asked the Prime Minister’s permission to do so, or at least told him that he was going to do so in a way that, just, gave Baldwin an opportunity to protest. Baldwin did nothing and let the meeting take place, but the following morning he seemed to have had second thoughts. He said to Sir Horace Wilson, ‘I have made my first blunder’, and when he went into a Cabinet meeting soon afterwards, he said the same thing to his colleagues.25 Wilson and the assembled ministers successively hastened to assure Baldwin that he was wrong to say so and had done the right thing, doubtless as Baldwin had wanted them to say. This episode stayed in people’s minds even though the fear that seemed to have taken hold of Baldwin proved to have been unjustified; Churchill’s intervention never for a moment threatened to derail the government’s handling and, in fact, diminished him as a political opponent. However insincere it might have been, Baldwin’s confession that he had made a mistake gave a glimpse of the self-doubt that anyone carrying his level of responsibility could not help feeling, operating as he was in a situation where a false move could have had calamitous consequences. Duff Cooper, the War Minister, had probably been more deeply involved in the crisis as a personal friend of the King. He joined the throng offering his congratulations to Baldwin on his speech, but also felt that he should assure him personally ‘…how right you were to agree to the King seeing Winston’. Baldwin was so swept away in the ecstasy of triumph that he let the mask of pretence slip and he hinted to Duff Cooper at the internal battles he had had to fight. He laughed ‘very knowingly’ and told Duff Cooper, ‘I never doubted that I was right for a minute. I am only a simple lad, you know, Duff, but there were reasons why I thought it best to put it to the Cabinet i
n the way I did.’ 26 Not only had Baldwin had to juggle with all the King’s problems, but he had also had to manage ministers and his civil service entourage. This gentle confession had barely left his lips when Baldwin realised that he had overstepped a line: ‘But suddenly he felt that he had gone too far, the laugh faded, and he hurried on down the corridor in solemn silence.’ 27 As far as Baldwin was concerned, the internal battles that he had had to fight during the crisis were now to be consigned to the dustbin of history; they were wounds that should be left to heal themselves. And so they were for a long time afterwards.

  NOTES

  1. Dugdale diary

  2. Nicolson diaries, 10 December

  3. Boca, She Might Have Been Queen, p. 115 quoting Duff Cooper

  4. Dugdale diary

  5. Templewood, Nine Troubled Years, p. 221

  6. Channon diaries, 10 December

  7. Nicolson diaries, 10 December

  8. Hansard, 10 December

  9. Dugdale diary

  10. Nicolson diaries, 10 December

  11. Hansard, 10 December

  12. Jones, A Diary with Letters, p. 293

  13. Amery diaries, 10 December; Nicolson diaries, 10 December

  14. Chamberlain diary, 6 December

  15. The National Archives [hereafter NA], CAB 23/68

  16. Templewood, Nine Troubled Years, p. 221

  17. Nicolson diaries, 10 December

  18. Chamberlain to Hilda, 13 December

  19. Chamberlain to Ida, 8 December

  20. Nicolson diaries, 10 December

  21. Channon diaries, 10 December

  22. Amery diary quoted in Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. V, p. 827

  23. Duff Cooper diaries

  24. Bruce Lockhart diaries, 10 December

  25. NA CAB 1/466; NA CAB 23/68

  26. Duff Cooper diaries

  27. Duff Cooper review of G. M. Young’s Baldwin in Daily Mail, 14 November 1952

  HIDDEN SCANDAL

  CHAPTER 1

  THE BOY WILL RUIN HIMSELF

  * * *

  After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in twelve months

  GEORGE V TO STANLEY BALDWIN1

  TO THE OUTSIDE world Edward, Prince of Wales and future King Edward VIII, had the air of a golden boy. He was youthful, good-looking and glamorous, a keen sportsman and pilot. He had devastating charm, which melted even hardened observers. He appeared open and engaged. He was the first member of the royal family to have extensive direct contact with the public in Britain and abroad; he became the first celebrity royal. There was no trace of social consciousness in his contacts with people across the whole class spectrum and he had obvious and genuine sympathy for the many people still suffering from the deep economic problems of interwar Britain. He felt a special affinity with the huge number of men who had fought in the First World War. He embraced all things American – then even more than today the benchmark for the modern society. As an eligible bachelor, he exercised a powerful fascination at a human level. He talked freely, easily and without any apparent condescension. He was a clear contrast to the stern and conservative image of his father, King George V. He seemed like a breath of fresh air.

  Edward’s shining public image masked a far less happy picture in his family. His father clung firmly to the norms of the Victorian era into which he had been born – stern, formal and conservative – and this coloured his ideas of education. His oft-quoted dictum ‘My father was afraid of his mother; I was afraid of my father and I am damned well going to make sure that my children are afraid of me’ is probably apocryphal, but he treated his sons with the same strict discipline that he had applied to his crew when he was a Royal Navy officer. This was fairly common for the period, but it left him with no serious adult relationship with any of them. The failure was most conspicuous with Edward, who chafed against his father’s attempts to impose his will. The question of dress was a particular bone of contention, outwardly trivial but symbolic of two widely different world views. George V was obsessed with a dress code of great complexity and formality that he himself followed as though it were Holy Writ and which he wanted Edward to follow with the same devotion. He never tired of criticising Edward – often publicly – for breaking the rules, even in inconspicuous details. He also objected to his son’s choice of friends and courtiers, notably the Irish cavalryman ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, whom he held responsible for Edward’s dangerously aggressive horse riding.2

  At the heart of their disagreement lay a very fundamental point. Edward could not accept that his royal status demanded a full-time vocation. Like a reluctant salaried worker, he divided his life into his job, where he was subject to some constraints, and his private life, where he was subject to none. He aspired to be a royal during the week, but an entirely private individual at the weekend. Whilst other members of the royal family were driven by a strong sense of duty to perform their work, he often seemed to do it grudgingly and under complaint. Again his father was at least partly to blame for giving Edward practically no choice but to undertake gruelling tours of the Empire, notably one to India which he disliked greatly.

  Edward’s touring programme was something of a double-edged weapon. He was widely received with mass, near-hysterical adulation. It was a personal triumph especially when he responded well, but like many celebrities he failed to understand the fickleness of the sentiments behind the reaction. Worse, as the years went on he came to take a good reception for granted and, admittedly often out of tiredness as well, behaved perfunctorily and unpunctually. This was noticed. As Prime Minister, David Lloyd George had taken the Prince’s side against his father over the India journey in the early 1920s, but by 1934 had to take him firmly in hand to prevent him offending the people of Caernarfon with his cavalier behaviour.3

  Edward’s private life also dismayed his father. It was in distinct contrast to George V’s marriage to the formidable Mary of Teck, which was irreproachably faithful and also the product of what seemed like the dynastic calculations of a bygone age. She had been his elder brother’s fiancée, but George had unhesitatingly married her when his brother died. She adopted the same credo of unflinching respect for royal duty as her husband. Edward remained obstinately a bachelor and this seemed to his parents a great missed opportunity. There was a simple pragmatic aspect to the question: the lack of a wife was seen widely as a distinct handicap for someone who would bear the burdens of kingship. Being the most yearned-for bachelor in the world might have fuelled the celebrity hysteria around Edward, but marriage might have brought more solid benefits. Successful marriages had dramatically improved the lives of two of George V’s younger sons, as well as giving a powerful boost to the public image of the royal family. The Duke of York had married a strong and loyal woman from the upper reaches of Britain’s aristocracy, who did much to rescue him from the handicaps of a crippling stammer, a violent temper and a deep sense of his own inferiority. The marriage had also ensured the royal succession with a pair of healthy and attractive daughters. The Duke of Kent’s marriage to the glamorous Princess Marina marked a clear turn away from the sexual promiscuity and drug-taking of his youth.

  By contrast, Edward’s personal life was the source of potential scandal or even worse that lay beneath the glamorous bachelor image. One affair in particular offered a dire warning of the dangers. As an officer in the Grenadier Guards on the Western Front during the First World War he had conducted a lengthy liaison with Marguerite Alibert, a superior Parisian prostitute, to whom he wrote ardent love letters, which she held onto with the habitual foresight of her profession. She went on to marry an Egyptian prince but, in 1923, she shot him dead in London. She was acquitted of murder and there is some evidence that she was able to buy the verdict by handing over these letters.4 Had any hint of the relationship between Edward and Marguerite reached the wider public at the time of her trial, the scandal would have been immense, and infinitely worse had any part of the story emerged of how his letters had been retrieve
d. After the war, his behaviour calmed down somewhat, but he was stuck on the sexual merry-go-round of the shiftless upper classes, vividly depicted in the plays of Noël Coward and novels of Evelyn Waugh. Through the 1920s, he maintained a long-term and discreet affair with Mrs Freda Dudley Ward, the wife of an MP. It provided him with a degree of stability but did not deter him from a string of casual seductions, often undertaken with a flagrant lack of discretion. In 1930, Edward had replaced Mrs Ward with the American-born Lady Furness in another illicit but entirely conventional relationship. His father was so upset at this latest sign that his heir had no plans to conform to conventional notions of family life that he tried a long man-to-man conversation with his son in 1932. George V warned him that the revelation of his adulterous affairs would hurt his popularity and tried to convince him of the advantages of marriage. George V overreached himself and took Edward to task for his social circle as well. Afterwards, Edward claimed to accept that his father’s strictures on his private life were fair, but resented deeply his remarks on his personal friends. He continued as before on both the sexual and friendship fronts. Thereafter, his father had lapsed into gloomy predictions of the damage that his son would wreak when he succeeded to the throne.