The King Who Had to Go Page 6
Things stepped up several gears when George V died in early 1936 and the new machinery of government had the opportunity to show how it could operate in a full-blown crisis, as the uncertainty over Edward’s fitness for the throne that had long hovered under the horizon became an acute question for Baldwin. It was not, though, the kind of problem that Fisher’s machine had been designed to deal with. Baldwin was confronted with elemental dilemmas, essentially the same as had confronted the chief advisers to monarchs down the ages. The sovereign was set on a foolish and dangerous course from which he had to be deflected. It came down to the dialogue between two individuals. The huge machinery of a modern state was redundant. The civil service could bring no relevant experience or technical expertise to the table. But power and influence are never lightly forsaken and Fisher and Wilson were no exception to this rule. There is no evidence that either ever met Edward on other than purely formal occasions, but what mattered to them was their position vis-à-vis the Prime Minister. It was not one that either was going to sacrifice willingly.
NOTES
1. Jones diary, 26 April 1926
2. O’Halpin, Head of the Civil Service, Chapter 1
3. NA T199/50b, Treasury Minute, 15 September 1915
4. O’Halpin, Head of the Civil Service, pp 8f
5. BBK G/6/9, Fisher to Lord Chamberlain, 18 July 1922
6. NA T160/639, ‘Treasury Control’, Fisher to Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister, 6 March 1923
7. Woolton memoirs, p. 139
8. O’Halpin, Head of the Civil Service, pp 142–7
9. NA PREM 1/53, Stamfordham to Waterhouse, 26 February and 3 March 1926
10. Streat diary, 16 February 1933
11. Thomas Jones papers, P3/68, notes of conversation with Sir Horace Wilson, 16 July 1942
12. Reith diaries, 2 March 1934, p. 117
13. Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, Vol. 1, p. 334
14. George Peden, notes of interview with Sir Thomas and Lady Padmore, 15 March 1975
15. Streat diary, 26 July 1935
16. Lord Donoghue, email to author, 14 February 2006
17. Jones, A Diary with Letters, p. 186
CHAPTER 3
ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO APPEAL TO REASON
* * *
Lord Wigram made it clear that, in his view, we were dealing with a case where it was almost impossible to appeal to reason or judgement and he gave no hope that anything that might be said would be effective
SIR HORACE WILSON, ABDICATION NOTES1
THE DREAM THAT the country would be spared for some time the question of coping with Edward as King vanished almost without warning when George V fell ill quite suddenly in January 1936, and it became clear that he had only days to live. This left the two individuals most deeply concerned – Queen Mary and Baldwin – with little time to make any serious preparations for the new reign.
Whatever private grief she was feeling, the Queen was strong enough to decide that Shakespearean optimism was not enough and that the politicians had to face up to their responsibilities. As ever, duty came first. She knew the man for the job. Family, courtiers, Cabinet ministers and the Archbishop of Canterbury had gathered around the King’s deathbed at Sandringham on the last day of his life, 20 January 1936, but it was Sir Maurice Hankey whom she took into her confidence and with whom she shared her fears.2 As well as being Cabinet Secretary, Hankey was Clerk to the Privy Council so he had a major part to play in the formal arrangements, but he also was a longstanding friend and confidant of the royal couple. The Queen summoned him to her private quarters and made it plain that action was required. First she wanted to know whether the Prime Minister had done anything to take her son in hand. In Hankey’s delicately phrased diary entry, she ‘indicated a doubt as to whether the Prince had fully realised his responsibilities, and how far he would have to alter his manner of living and so forth’. She had clearly noted that Baldwin had so far done nothing to correct the situation, and Hankey understood that she expected the Prime Minister to guide Edward firmly in the right direction. In particular, she was anxious that he raise the question of his staff. The raffish band of chancers and lightweights around the Prince had long been a source of worry to his father. She hinted to Hankey that the Prime Minister should try to ensure that her husband’s senior courtiers were kept on, in particular his private secretary Lord Wigram and Wigram’s assistant Major Alec Hardinge. Both had faithfully served King George for many years and earned the confidence of the royal couple.
Queen Mary had been unfair to behave as though Baldwin were doing nothing to steer her son in the right direction. On the same day that she was sharing her disquiet with Hankey, Baldwin raised – admittedly very tentatively – the question of Edward’s private life with one man who might just have established a worthwhile dialogue with him. Duff Cooper, the Secretary of State for War, was the only senior politician amongst Edward’s personal friends.3 He was about Edward’s age, which made him one of the youngest – and most glamorous – members of a Cabinet that was distinctly long in the tooth. He was a womaniser on an epic scale, so unlikely to be troubled by questions of pure morality. Baldwin summoned him to the Cabinet Room at Downing Street and expressed his unease at Edward’s relationship with Mrs Simpson. He was scared of the public reaction if it were to become widely known. Baldwin had a low personal opinion of Mrs Simpson but his fears were bluntly pragmatic. He told Cooper he would not have minded, ‘if she were what I call a respectable whore’ who was kept in secret and did not monopolise his time.
Baldwin and Cooper were caught in a Mexican stand-off. The Prime Minister did not openly ask Cooper to intervene with the King, and Cooper did not volunteer to. As far as Cooper could make out the only practical point of the conversation was to nudge him towards advising Mrs Simpson to leave the country, temporarily at least. Sending an unsuitable partner abroad was the Establishment’s instinctive and routine first move to deal with an undesirable entanglement. If nothing else, it would dampen the scandal and might even bring an end to the relationship, but it was neither an imaginative nor realistic solution to the problem. Cooper knew enough of Edward and his relationship with Mrs Simpson to foresee immediately that any such attempt on his part would not merely fail but would never be forgiven by Edward. Cooper was almost certainly right to doubt the scheme would work, and cannot be faulted for holding back, but with hindsight he might have explained himself more forcefully. As it was, the simplistic idea of getting Mrs Simpson out of the country remained on the government agenda with unfortunate consequences.
Baldwin gave no sign of great surprise or disappointment that Duff Cooper was not going to help, but he was under severe strain and needed a stiff whisky as he climbed the stairs of Downing Street to the library and the next item on his agenda: preparing the radio broadcast that he would make after King George’s death.4 Baldwin was in a deeply pessimistic mood as he discussed the arrangements with his speechwriter and long-standing confidant Thomas Jones. He did not relish the task of mentoring Edward at all: ‘You know what a scrimshanker* I am. I had rather hoped to escape the responsibility of having to take charge of the Prince as King … I am less confident about him than Lucy [his wife] is.’ He saw no prospect of assistance from anyone around the Prince, ‘nor is there any man who can handle him’. With a note of desperation, he expressed a hope that the Queen would continue to live at Buckingham Palace. When Jones tried to persuade him that responsibility would reform Edward, Baldwin was not convinced.
One aspect of Baldwin’s political style that fed the frustration of his more activist colleagues was his failure to share his analysis of the position as it evolved. He succeeded so well that he rather gave the impression that he was either shirking an obvious solution or, possibly worse, was confused as to what the problem was.5 His gloomy remarks to Jones give possibly the best idea of the problem as he saw it. There was little hope of a happy outcome, so his job was to manage the consequences of an unhappy one. On
ly Edward could save himself.
However little confidence he might have felt in the outcome, Baldwin supported Queen Mary’s desire to protect her son from himself. Two days later, after George V had died, Baldwin was still repeating the hope that the Queen ‘would act as hostess and keep an eye on him [Edward]’ with the additional hope that Wigram would be kept on.6 It is a safe bet that Hankey had passed on the Queen’s thoughts on the point to Baldwin. It is unknown whether Baldwin did actually ask the new King to keep his late father’s secretaries, but in the event he did. It must have come as a relief to the Queen, but it was anything but a solution, and rapidly proved to be a blind alley. The Queen appears to have thoroughly exaggerated their potential for influencing her son to the good or mitigating the ill effects of his instincts. Edward was prepared to keep Wigram and Hardinge, but this had nothing to do with falling in with his mother’s programme for reforming his behaviour. They provided window-dressing and not much else. The secretaries’ main job is the highly delicate one of acting as a conduit between the sovereign and the government, and it was a dialogue that Edward saw as going in one direction only. He had no desire to form the same kind of partnership of trust with his secretaries that his father and grandfather had done; they were part of the irksome world of royal duties. He did not plan to be directed by the government, so was doubtless happy that men of Wigram’s and Hardinge’s standing would be there to represent him in government circles. It is a register of his egocentricity that he imagined they would automatically transfer their full devotion to him irrespective of personalities – that they would unquestioningly use their standing and influence in Downing Street on his behalf.
On the very first day of his reign, Edward showed his contempt for tradition and flagged to insiders how important a part Mrs Simpson was going to play in the new reign. Traditionally, the new sovereign does not attend his or her own formal proclamation as monarch. Like so much in royal ritual, the original purpose has been lost in the mists of time, and all that is at stake is a willingness to be bound by the past. What made Edward’s decision to watch his proclamation from a window at St James’s Palace truly shocking was that he had invited the Simpsons to accompany him. This made a bad impression on his friend Duff Cooper, who recognised that this kind of behaviour was already attracting criticism.7 Not only had Mrs Simpson been spotted by members of Society, but she had also been caught on film, although the press maintained a discreet silence on this, as it was doing over the entire affair.
Criticism of the new King quickly sparked a heavily coded debate in the upper reaches of the Court and the Establishment. Edward VIII’s relationship with the Church of England had got off to a bad start when the Archbishop of Canterbury had called on him soon after his accession. Cosmo Gordon Lang was everything Edward disliked about the Establishment: conservative, unctuous yet ambitious. He had won a place in the esteem of George V, who had a strong and simple Christian faith, but his son had none. Lang made the fatal error of telling the new King that he had often discussed his ‘conduct’ with his late father and claimed that he had taken Edward’s side.8 It was a singularly inept attempt to present himself as a supporter of the King, whilst reminding him that his father disapproved of his behaviour. The debate was taken up publicly by Albert Baillie, the long-serving Dean of St George’s Chapel Windsor in his first sermon of the new reign.9 Baillie had served the royal family since Queen Victoria but his loyalties were deeply influenced by a feud with the monstrous Canon Dalton, George V’s boyhood tutor, who had remained a powerful influence at Court.10 Baillie insisted that Edward should not be criticised for not being an ‘imitation’ of his father. He recognised that George V’s settled Christian faith was the product of an earlier, more stable age and implicitly excused Edward’s more lax approach to religious observance.
Baldwin sensed that all was not well with the King at the time of his accession, and felt that he had a ‘hunted’ look in his face.11 At the time, Baldwin could not find a reason, but after the abdication he concluded that the King had realised ‘that he had missed an opportunity to get out and would now find it more difficult to do so’. The idea is supported by the courtier Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, who had served almost ten years as Edward’s private secretary when he was Prince of Wales and re-joined the royal household at the end of George V’s reign. Lascelles believed that Edward had wanted to avoid becoming King and to withdraw into private life but had changed his mind when he learned the terms of his father’s will, which left him little money.12 In Lascelles’s jaundiced view, Edward now wanted to milk his kingship for what he could. These accounts are quoted to support the belief that Edward never wanted to be King. This may have been true up to the start of his reign, but thereafter there is no real evidence. It conflicts with Edward’s enthusiasm for the idea of Mrs Simpson becoming his Queen. Moreover, Baldwin’s admission that he had not suspected any unwillingness to accede to the throne is testimony to how hard Edward fought to remain on the throne when the crisis developed.
Baldwin was deeply worried about the new King, but this was only one amongst a host of far more urgent problems that was to occupy him over the following months, above all in foreign affairs. Just before King George died, the government had been rocked by the scandal of the Hoare–Laval pact, which seemed to condone Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in a cynical great power carve-up. In March, Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, confronting western statesmen with the hideous reality of Hitler’s policy of aggression. In July came the Spanish Civil War. Baldwin had to defend his performance against the attacks of Conservative elder statesman, Sir Austen Chamberlain. Domestic politics were quieter, but the Budget in April ushered in a financial scandal that led a month later to the disgrace and painful resignation of Jimmy Thomas, a highly popular if excessively colourful Cabinet minister. These difficulties may have acted as active deterrent from trying to do anything about the King. Baldwin’s extreme worry about the King showed he appreciated the risks of the situation but he was pessimistic that active measures would succeed and he also recognised that he could not force the pace even if he knew the affair would almost certainly end unhappily. His true goal never went further than that of minimising the pain when the end came, ‘getting through without a row’.13 It was a realistic but pessimistic and uninspiring goal, and one that he could hardly explain in detail to the steady trickle of insiders who nagged him to take action in the first months of Edward’s reign.
One of the first calls for action took things back to the sordid world set out in the reports from the Special Branch. Ernest Simpson’s ambitions appeared to have become more realistic than his fantasies of ennoblement, but just as alarming. Whilst he was still Prince of Wales, Edward had arranged for Simpson to be admitted to his own highly prestigious Freemasons’ lodge. This was doubly questionable; outright blackmail might explain why the seducer should do the cuckold such a great favour and there was the normal suspicion that Simpson was merely interested in furthering his business activities by joining the lodge. Such suspicions prompted other members to complain to its president, Sir Maurice Jenks, a former Lord Mayor of the City of London, who obtained a pledge from Edward under Masonic oath that there was nothing between him and Mrs Simpson. Soon after Edward’s accession, Ernest Simpson came to Jenks with an extraordinary tale. Not merely did Edward wish to marry Mrs Simpson but he (Simpson) was willing to leave the country to facilitate the necessary divorce. As if this were not enough, Simpson wanted to discuss the matter personally with the Prime Minister. Jenks reported this all to J. C. C. Davidson, a relatively junior minister but a close confidant of Baldwin.14 Even though he found Simpson’s claim that Edward wanted to marry his wife ‘unbelievable’, Davidson saw enough to convince him that an unpleasant conspiracy was afoot; his response was unequivocal: ‘Convinced Blackmail sticks out at every stage … I advocate most drastic steps (deportation) … S and Mrs S, who is obviously a gold digger, have got him on toast.’ Ernest Simpson was in fact a British citizen, so
it would not have been possible to deport them anyway and Davidson failed to convince Baldwin to act. The Simpsons were behaving suspiciously, but there was no evidence that they were criminals. Even though the King had an extremely unsuitable mistress, there was nothing that Downing Street could do about it. Moreover, Baldwin appeared to share Davidson’s disbelief in the idea of Edward marrying Mrs Simpson.
Mrs Simpson’s image of seediness went beyond the tawdriness of commercial sex. From an early stage it had acquired a national security dimension thanks largely to the efforts of Joachim von Ribbentrop. Probably the stupidest and least competent member of Nazi Germany’s political leaders, he was nonetheless the Nazi Party’s supposed expert on foreign affairs. He was rather more cosmopolitan and polished than the other leaders, but that is to say very little as they were overwhelmingly provincial, petit bourgeois and monoglot. He was and still is sneeringly referred to as a ‘champagne salesman’, but even this is an exaggeration. His horrible and domineering wife was a member of the Henkell family who owned Germany’s best-established sparkling wine maker, but his in-laws recognised his worthlessness and refused him a partnership. He was, though, allowed to bail out their Berlin sales agent financially, so, in reality, he only dealt in champagne’s humbler German cousin, Sekt. He had two solid albeit negative qualifications for his job: he was entirely subservient to Hitler, who made all material decisions on foreign policy, and he was not a member of Germany’s foreign service establishment, which was genuinely aristocratic (von Ribbentrop’s noble status was of recent and suspect origin) and conservative, thus repugnant to the Nazis. He combined unbounded faith in his own judgement with neartotal ignorance of the countries on which he was so happy to pronounce. In particular, he simply did not know how British politics operated despite having made lengthy visits in 1934 and 1935. On the second of these visits he had successfully conducted the negotiations of the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, which gave him a quite unfounded reputation as a master diplomat. Otherwise he had merely concentrated on cultivating those (relatively few) politicians who were very friendly towards Germany, and members of high Society. Amongst the latter was one of the era’s great hostesses, Emerald Cunard, who had been instrumental in advancing Mrs Simpson in Society. She found him attractive as a man and responded to his advances. The witless MP and diarist Chips Channon contrived to see the Prince’s British Legion speech as their work in a weirdly eighteenth-century fantasy of diplomacy: