The King Who Had to Go Page 4

  A few weeks after the abdication Sir Horace Wilson set down to write a long account of the crisis, setting out the government’s side to the affair. He opened his draft with the episode of Baldwin’s three tasks. It was a crucial point, but it was also a very sensitive thing to disclose, and it begged the massive question of what Baldwin might actually have done to smooth the way for Edward.25 There is almost no evidence that he tried to make Edward improve his behaviour. When Wilson reviewed his draft, it was clear that the admission would lay Baldwin open to the charge that he should have intervened actively with Edward. The whole episode was thus left out of the final version. Many in Baldwin’s political and civil service entourage would not have hesitated to level this kind of charge. Baldwin was the supreme example of the reactive Prime Minister. He had the patience and strong nerves required to postpone hard action until he judged the time was ripe to move. This drove many around him to the utmost frustration. They accused him of not making decisions because he was too idle. They failed to understand that Baldwin took his responsibilities as Prime Minister with immense seriousness, that he recognised the huge risks latent in any course of action and wanted to be as certain as possible that he was doing the right thing. He was all too successful in concealing this inner torment behind a façade of bluff insouciance and, to this day, a reputation for laziness lingers around him. Baldwin’s cautious political style provoked a dangerous overreaction. The people who accused him of idleness came to believe that pre-emptive action, the more vigorous the better, was almost invariably the correct option.

  The new government was not completely inactive, but all that it did about Edward in 1935 was to initiate a far more limited precautionary strategy. The Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police was put on the job of finding out about Mrs Simpson and her husband, Ernest. It was far from the first time that it had handled this kind of task. Since the late nineteenth century it had been protecting members of the royal family from the consequences of their more wayward instincts. Most recently its detectives had helped cover up the many indiscretions in the private life of the Duke of Kent. The fear that Edward’s liaison with Mrs Simpson might cause severe embarrassment or leave him vulnerable to blackmail was a more or less routine reflex for the powers that be. The Marguerite Alibert episode was proof enough of Edward’s capacity for dangerous indiscretion.

  Detectives were sent to sniff around the Simpsons’ household and their previous addresses and they produced a suitably squalid picture.26 Their reports reflect amply the social, moral and racial attitudes of the time. Mr Ernest Simpson was a member of the ‘bounder’ class and openly boasted of the advantages that turning a blind eye to the affair would bring – ludicrously, he imagined he would be given a peerage. He could not even hold his drink. His wife was living far above the couple’s means and was only jealous of other women round the Prince because she feared she would lose out financially. An Austro-Hungarian woman was a particular target. The poor opinion of the couple was reinforced by the fact that they were regarded by some people as Jews. In fact this was true of Ernest, although he himself might have been unaware of it. Most useful of all, the police reported some damning information on Mrs Simpson. Before marrying Ernest, she was accused of having been ‘fond of the company of men’ and of having had many ‘affairs’. We can almost see the twitch of the lace curtain and hear the disapproving hushed whispers of strait-laced neighbours. Even more excitingly, the detectives had heard that she was being unfaithful not only to her husband but to Edward as well. She had a lover called Guy Trundle on the side. Just to complete the unsavoury picture, she was even giving him money. In the parlance of the day, he was her kept man. The stories were detailed and intimate; they suggest that the detectives had informants inside or very close to the Simpson household. The Simpsons did not seem to inspire much loyalty.

  It will probably never be known just how true the police reports were apart from Edward’s cash gifts to Mrs Simpson, for which there is evidence elsewhere. What matters in trying to understand how the crisis evolved is that no one in authority doubted the accusations, and they coloured the already hostile view of Mrs Simpson held within government. She appeared to have the lowest morals imaginable. It hardly needed to be spelled out that, by the standards of the time, Mrs Simpson was little better than a prostitute and her husband little better than her pimp. Sex was a cash commodity and she was recycling her income from Edward to indulge in Trundle. When the previously unthinkable idea of a marriage between Edward and Mrs Simpson did arise, this helps explain why a good number of people did not expect that it would last. It was another very potent reason to oppose the marriage, which one hardline minister believed ‘could only end in disillusionment and disgust’.27 The Trundle story also gave the government their own tool for discreet blackmail or at least a means of blackening Mrs Simpson’s already dubious image.

  The Special Branch detectives seem to have stretched the truth so as to present as unfavourable a picture as possible. They made much of the Simpsons’ friendship with the Society hostess Emerald Cunard, mentioning in particular her connections to two scandalous women.28 She was described as a great friend of Alice ‘Kiki’ Preston, a sexually promiscuous cocaine addict known as the ‘girl with the silver syringe’, who had an affair with the Prince’s brother George and supposedly introduced him to drugs. Just how close she was to Lady Cunard is hard to establish but, in reality, Edward, in one of the very rare entirely altruistic acts of his life, had devoted considerable effort to rescuing George from such influences. Even more questionably, the detectives mentioned Emerald’s daughter Nancy, who committed the unforgivable sin, by the standards of the time, of openly having black lovers, as well as publicly advocating racial equality. As mother and daughter had become bitterly estranged some years before over Nancy’s support for the avant-garde film-maker Luis Buñuel and public appearances with her black lover Henry Crowder, this looks little better than a smear.29

  Baldwin had good excuse not to have done anything about Edward when he returned to Downing Street; there were far more urgent calls on his attention. Fascist Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia was the first of a series of international crises that culminated in the Second World War. A general election was due in Britain that autumn. Moreover, nothing noticeable changed in Edward’s relationship with Mrs Simpson, so things were at least not getting worse. It is, however, tempting to speculate that the police reports might have lulled the government into something of a false sense of security. They presented the Simpsons as such low grade and vulnerable people that they ought not to be seen as a serious threat. If Downing Street had fallen into any such complacency, it was matched by a sense of hopelessness at Buckingham Palace. Neither parents nor politicians actually did anything and the question of Edward was allowed to drift for the rest of George V’s reign. The Establishment rather lapsed into a sense of collective denial. The King was relatively young – he only turned seventy in 1935 – and there was no immediate reason to fear for his life. A number of courtiers expected him to live to a ripe age, which would defer the question of Edward by a good number of years. But this had more to do with wishful thinking than any considered examination of George V’s medical history. He had nearly died of septicaemia in 1928 and was a heavy smoker.

  Paradoxically, George V’s illness was hijacked by optimists with a strong literary bent. Edward was recalled from Africa to what many thought was his father’s deathbed, but as soon as he entered the room George V regained conscious and curtly asked his son, ‘What the devil are you doing here?’30 It was like the scene in Shakespeare’s Henry IV when the old King, also on his deathbed, catches his dissolute son trying on a crown and triggers an argument that marks the start of Prince Hal’s road to redemption and his proper recognition of the duties of kingship, which he goes on to fulfil magnificently as Henry V. The parallels between Prince Hal and Edward seemed all too neat to a surprisingly large number of people, who were sucked into the deluded hope that when Edward cam
e to the throne, he too would experience a similar conversion to full cognisance of the obligations that it brought and banish the worthless companions of his misspent youth.

  NOTES

  1. Middlemas & Barnes, Baldwin, p. 976; Windham Baldwin papers 3/3/14; extracts from Lord Hinchingbrooke’s diary, 26 February 1937

  2. Ziegler, King Edward VIII, Chapters 2 & 3; Frances Donaldson, Edward VIII, Chapters 1 & 2

  3. Frances Stevenson diary, 16 March 1920, 18 June 1921, 23 May 1934

  4. Rose, The Prince, The Princess and the Perfect Murder, Chapter 18

  5. Mrs Simpson to Duke of Windsor, 7 April 1937

  6. Ziegler, King Edward VIII, p. 231

  7. Vickers, Behind Closed Doors, p. 280

  8. Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets, Vol. III, p. 218

  9. The Maisky Diaries, 15 November 1934, pp 16–17

  10. The Times, 12 June 1935

  11. A King’s Story, p. 254

  12. DGFP Series C, Vol. IV, p. 331

  13. The Times, 13 June 1935

  14. NA CAB 23/82, Meeting of 19 June 1935

  15. Ziegler, King Edward VIII, p. 209

  16. Templewood papers, IX/7, Abdication notes

  17. Vansittart papers, VNST 2/27, Vansittart to Wigram, 7 November 1935

  18. Lascelles, King’s Counsellor, p. 104

  19. Lascelles, King’s Counsellor, p. 104

  20. Ziegler, King Edward VIII, pp 183–5

  21. Lascelles, King’s Counsellor, p. 105

  22. NA PREM 1/466

  23. Reith diaries, 21 January

  24. Attlee, As It Happened, p. 102

  25. NA PREM 1/466

  26. NA MEPO 10/35

  27. Chamberlain to Hilda, 13 December

  28. NA MEPO 10/35, undated report, ERNEST SIMPSON

  29. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry for Nancy Cunard, accessed 4 April 2016

  30. Windham Baldwin papers, 11/1/1, Monica Baldwin, ‘An Unpublished Page of English History’

  CHAPTER 2

  THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE SUPER-CIVIL SERVANT

  * * *

  S.B. felt the job too heavy, and … suggested Wilson should come and help him. There was nothing more to it than that – no new title, no definition of function … Other ministers and Departments of State would watch the new departure with jealous eyes. Ministers in particular would be hot against any attempt to subordinate them to any sort of Super-Civil Servant…

  RAYMOND STREAT, DIARY, 26 JULY 1935

  IT IS ALMOST a truism of British politics, notably in the Conservative Party, that leaders are chosen because of what they are not much more than because of what they are. They are often the least unattractive alternative to an individual or group of individuals who are actively loathed and rejected. Stanley Baldwin rose to the top of politics on a groundswell of backbench hatred for the man who put them in office in 1916 and kept them there for six years. Gratitude is rarely a feature in such choices. David Lloyd George had broken with Henry Asquith, who led the Liberal Party to which they both belonged, and replaced him as Prime Minister with the support of the Conservatives in 1916. Lloyd George offered the war-winning dynamism so noticeably lacking in Asquith and he amply delivered on the promise, but once he was in power he did not play by the established rules. He did not pick his preferred supporters from the ranks of traditional Conservatives. Indeed, some of his key ministers were deeply suspect and were seen as unprincipled political adventurers: Winston Churchill, who had defected to the Liberals in 1904; F. E. Smith, brilliant lawyer and violent opponent of any weakening of Ireland’s ties to Britain; and a gaggle of press lords. Traditional Conservatives distrusted these men for their opportunism, but distaste for their varying permutations of dubious finances, irregular sexual activity and heavy drinking added a moralistic layer to this disapproval. Lloyd George’s style of leadership seemed to be contrary to every tradition of the Conservative Party. It was highly personalised and was funded by a series of dubious measures including the sale of honours. Baldwin memorably described Lloyd George’s government as a ‘thieves’ kitchen’.1

  By 1922, Lloyd George had exhausted whatever fund of goodwill he had once enjoyed. The press barons, never the most trustworthy of allies, had already deserted him. He had conspicuously failed to build a ‘land fit for heroes’ and was threatening to drag Britain into futile diplomatic and military adventures in the relics of the Ottoman Empire. In October the backbenchers of the Conservative Party met at Carlton House and decided to put an end to the coalition. The memory of the coup is still hallowed in the Conservative Party through the 1922 Committee, which continues to serve as a powerful conduit to remind the party’s leaders that they ignore rank-and-file sentiment at their extreme peril. Lloyd George was replaced as Prime Minister by Andrew Bonar Law, the most senior of the rebels, with Baldwin as Chancellor of the Exchequer. After a few months as Prime Minister, Bonar Law was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer and Baldwin was the obvious choice to succeed him at 10 Downing Street even though he had scant experience of being a minister of any kind. F. E. Smith sneered that the new government consisted of ‘second-class brains’. Baldwin is credited with responding that this was better than a government of ‘second-class characters’ although this is sometimes attributed to Lord Robert Cecil. Whether he actually said this or not, the sentiment provides the leitmotif for Baldwin’s leadership. He marked a return to stability and balance after a decade of turbulence. Baldwin was (and still is) widely criticised and mocked for his lack of inspiration and charisma, but that was precisely what appealed to both professional politicians and voters of the era.

  Baldwin became the defining politician of Britain between the wars. He was either Prime Minister or a true deputy Prime Minister for ten years and led the Conservative Party into four general elections in the fourteen years of his leadership, but he is one of the very few modern Prime Ministers of whom it can plausibly be claimed that he had no ambition for the job. He had been fully prepared to leave politics entirely if the Carlton House coup had gone wrong. He certainly had no particular grand schemes or dreams that he wanted to realise when he got into 10 Downing Street. He believed that his political duty was to identify and implement the wishes of the British public. Insofar as he felt that he had any particular talent for the job, he believed that he had the ability to read the collective mind of Britain. His bitterest feud was with the press barons, whom he accused of usurping this role by claiming to speak for their readers.

  In the months after the Carlton House coup, the coalition ministers returned to the fold, more or less chastened. Only Lloyd George remained in the wilderness for the remainder of his life, a dwindling force on the political scene. The political world that he had built disappeared almost overnight as his heavyweight supporters switched their allegiance to the new regime, but in one corner of the machinery of government his legacy proved remarkably enduring and created an immovable internal opposition to Baldwin. In 1919, Lloyd George gave a single individual, Sir Warren Fisher, clear responsibility for running the entire civil service, replacing the chaotic and ambiguous arrangements that had gone before. This was badly needed. The First World War had given a huge fillip to the massive expansion of the civil service through the nineteenth century. It had become by far the largest single employer in the country and it reached into corners of people’s lives undreamed of a few decades before. The civil service was becoming a political liability and badly needed to be taken in hand. Things that had been acceptable in the crisis of total war were out of place as the country returned to what people hoped would be the normality of peace. The press barons had withdrawn from government in the final year of the war, but their ambitions to influence politics remained strong. Even whilst Lloyd George was still Prime Minister, Viscount Harmsworth, proprietor of the Daily Mail, had launched a venomous and highly effective campaign against what he saw as government overspending under the slogans ‘squandermania’ and the ‘Road to Ruin’. Lloyd George hoped
that Fisher would ward off Harmsworth’s growing assault on the government for the size and cost of the civil service by instituting a more manageable regime.2

  Fisher’s appointment was typical of Lloyd George’s methods. He gave a man in whom he had confidence a loosely defined task and left him to get on with it under minimal supervision. Fisher had already proved his value to Lloyd George twice when he built from scratch bureaucratic operations to translate Lloyd George’s political vision into hard practical reality. Lloyd George had practically staked his career on the National Insurance Act of 1911, Britain’s most extensive piece of social legislation ever, covering most of the working population. Early attempts to build an organisation to administer it had fallen into confusion and had Fisher not rescued them with spectacular efficiency, it would have been politically disastrous for Lloyd George. Fisher revered Lloyd George personally and he was, like Lloyd George, an outsider, having begun his career far down the civil service pecking order in the Inland Revenue and twice failed to secure a transfer to the Treasury, the premier department of the civil service and its intellectual powerhouse. Anyway, he had no taste for abstract consideration of high policy; he was much closer to Lloyd George’s ideal of ‘men of push and go’, business entrepreneurs whom he brought into government and administration. Fisher described his own talents as those of a department store ‘floor-walker’. Although he was only thirty-nine, he appeared a perfect man for the job and was appointed as the top civil servant in the Treasury to ‘act as permanent Head of the Civil Service’ [author’s italics].3