The King Who Had to Go Read online

Page 7


  Much gossip about the Prince of Wales’ [sic] alleged Nazi leanings; he is alleged to have been influenced by Emerald (who is rather éprise with Herr Ribbentrop) through Mrs Simpson … He has just made an extraordinary speech to the British Legion advocating friendship with Germany; it is only a gesture, but a gesture that may be taken seriously in Germany and elsewhere. If only the Chancelleries of Europe knew that his speech was the result of Emerald Cunard’s intrigues, themselves inspired by Herr Ribbentrop’s dimple!15

  According to one account, it was Mrs Simpson who arranged for the Prince to meet von Ribbentrop at Lady Cunard’s some time in 1935, to the great annoyance of the Foreign Office.16 Hitler and von Ribbentrop conceived a great faith in the prospects for using Edward to swing British policy onto a pro-German axis, misreading his personal affinity for Germany and his potential for influence under the British constitution.

  One of the legacies of Edward’s British Legion speech had been a deep anxiety on the part of the notably anti-German head of the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, who saw the hand of Lady Cunard as well as more traditional diplomats at the German Embassy and a campaign of active German propaganda.17 Unusually for a senior diplomat Vansittart was an enthusiast for secret intelligence sources and was well informed because he was personally handling his own spy in the German diplomatic community: Klop Ustinov, the Embassy’s press adviser and father of the actor Peter Ustinov.18 Ustinov defected to the British but he continued to handle an even more valuable MI5 asset: one of the Embassy’s accredited diplomats, Wolfgang zu Putlitz. Vansittart was intrigued by Mrs Simpson’s part in Edward’s life and, in December 1935, had made a point of inviting them to his grand house at Denham Place in Buckinghamshire.19 Mrs Simpson quickly recognised that this invitation from an only slight acquaintance was meant to give him the opportunity to inspect her closely. His verdict was unfavourable, and early in the new reign Vansittart made a determined attempt to alert the palace to the dangers he saw. Wigram was summoned to a meeting at the Prime Minister’s room in the House of Commons with Vansittart and the country’s highest-ranking civil servants: Fisher, Hankey. 20 The venue lent the discussion an air of Prime Ministerial authority, but it was the civil servants who supplied the urgency. According to Vansittart’s information the King ‘“discusses everything” with Mrs. Simpson … [who] is said to be in the pocket of the German ambassador’. Baldwin had declined to act, although his confidant J. C. C. Davidson credited the story of Mrs Simpson’s relations with the German ambassador, von Hoesch.21

  Wigram took little persuading that the country faced a major problem. He was an early, determined and indiscreet adversary of Mrs Simpson, complaining to Sir John Reith, ‘If only we could bump off that woman, but I can’t do that myself.’22 He also held distinctly alarmist views on Edward’s stability. Lascelles overheard him muttering out loud to himself, ‘He’s mad – he’s mad. We shall have to lock him up.’23 Wigram went to see Baldwin shortly after the meeting with the civil servants and pleaded with him to intervene.24 Baldwin brushed him off with the claim that doing nothing was the best course, as such problems tended to resolve themselves. Baldwin cannot have believed this idiocy, but Wigram might have thought that he did. He certainly understood that Baldwin was not going to do anything active, and went to see Fisher, who was convinced that action was urgently needed. Fisher saw the lack of intervention as evidence that the Prime Minister was being ‘too lazy’ on a question that involved the ‘fate of the Empire’.25 Fisher’s frustration shows that he had already succumbed to the unreflecting belief that any action was preferable to none. It marked a growing rift at the top level of government between those who thought it was vital to take a hard line with the King immediately and a Prime Minister who showed no inclination to intervene.

  Within a few weeks of the conference in the Prime Minister’s room, Hitler’s unilateral remilitarisation of the Rhineland in defiance of the Versailles and Locarno Treaties provoked a European diplomatic crisis but, curiously, there is no sign that there was any concern in official circles at the King’s attitude towards foreign affairs. On the one hand, the arrival of a full-scale international panic over a concrete issue pushed an abstract and potential problem into the background, and on the other, the British government appears to have remained ignorant of the attention that the German Embassy was devoting to the King. In both official and unofficial German eyes, he might have passed for a significant player. Von Hoesch, the ambassador, reported formally that the Court saw scope for a lasting settlement in the flimsy negotiating proposals with which Germany followed up its fait accompli, and that it had indicated to the government that no serious complications were to be allowed to develop.26 On the same day, according to his memoirs, the German Embassy’s press adviser, Fritz Hesse, was invited to listen in to a phone conversation between the King and the ambassador in which the King boasted of having threatened to abdicate if there was war and to have put Baldwin in his place.27 It is far from clear what foundation, if any, there was to either of these. Hesse’s story is especially suspect as the events were supposedly triggered by rumours of a British military mobilisation, of which there was at no point the slightest possibility, and occurred only four days after the remilitarisation when the British attitude was tentative and mainly concerned to head France off from any resolute action. There is no record of the King giving an audience to Baldwin in the relevant time frame. However, Hesse insisted ever after, when confronted with sceptical comment, that the telephone conversation had taken place, and cited numerous witnesses from the Embassy to support him.28

  The clue to the true purpose of the ambassador’s despatch and the telephone call could lie in an analysis of the relationship between Hesse and the accredited diplomats. Hesse had been sent from Berlin at von Ribbentrop’s behest and was suspected, probably accurately, of having been sent to keep an eye on the conservative apolitical professional diplomats.29 The most plausible explanation for his being asked to listen in to the phone call was to ensure that word of it got back informally to von Ribbentrop in Berlin. Von Hoesch may have wanted to cover his back against potential accusations by von Ribbentrop that he was failing to exploit the good relationship that he (von Ribbentrop) had nurtured with the King at a moment of great need. The garish phone call incident would have lent colour to the guarded and, quite possibly dishonest, despatch. Hesse did not know the King and failed at first to recognise the voice, so it is just possible that the whole thing was a charade. Certainly more junior diplomats were not above such manoeuvres.30 Whatever the truth is, von Ribbentrop retained his deluded faith in the potential for using Edward as a tool of Anglo-German rapprochement. He later claimed that this was strong enough to make him overcome his doubts and accept the job of ambassador to London when von Hoesch died suddenly a few weeks later.31

  The civil servants had been worried that the German Embassy might have sight of government papers via Mrs Simpson, but this was a facet of broader concern at the new King’s casual attitude to his constitutional duties.32 George V had read assiduously and promptly the government papers that were sent to him for comment and responded accordingly. Edward rapidly demonstrated how different he was from his father; he returned papers long after they were sent to him and, worse, displayed minimal respect for their security and confidentiality. Some showed marks where cocktail glasses had stood on them.

  When he came to prepare his account of the crisis very soon after it ended, Wilson was concerned that the government might be accused of having failed to act soon enough.

  It seemed to me that one possible criticism which the historian of the future might be tempted to make, would be that we did not appear to have begun soon enough to bring influence to bear upon the King to induce him to change his mind and that by the time we did take action a position had arisen which gave less hope of success.33

  Bureaucrats rarely set out even hypothetical criticism of the work of the governments they serve, so it is hard to escape the conclusion
that Wilson believed that the government was decidedly vulnerable on this score and, quite possibly, had felt so from the beginning. Wilson was being far more discreet than Fisher, but he was writing for the official record, not talking privately. At a number of points in his notes, he reports conversations with the Prime Minister as a subtle method of underlining the fact that a decision taken reflected Baldwin’s own judgement rather than a broader consensus. Baldwin’s response to the accusation of delay was to tell Wilson that Wigram had warned him early in the year that the King intended to marry Mrs Simpson, destroying his (Baldwin’s) hopes that acceding to the throne would change the King’s mind.

  Wilson’s fear that the government might be accused of failing to tackle the problem promptly made him drop the account of the list of priorities that Baldwin had shared with him in the summer of 1935 from the final version of his notes; he could not afford to admit that Edward gave grounds for concern well before his accession. The final version opens in the summer of 1936 but, in one of its many pieces of jumbled chronology, moves back to the early part of Edward’s reign to mark the start of the acute phase of concern with the moment when Wigram told Baldwin of his fears.

  The first major step toward outright crisis was noticeable to only a handful of the closest insiders. By custom, senior courtiers remained in place for the first six or so months of a new reign to allow the new monarch to settle it. It thus did not arouse much outside attention when Wigram decided to resign his post in May, which was announced in July. Only the handful of individuals aware of Queen Mary’s determination that her son keep Wigram would have spotted anything untoward. Soon after he decided to go, Wigram visited Downing Street and treated Baldwin and Wilson to a litany of his complaints. He was propelled by a catalogue of misdeeds, but above all by Edward’s ‘subservience to Mrs. Simpson’s wishes’.34 Wigram blamed a large programme of insensitive and highly unpopular cost cuts that the King had instituted in the royal palaces on his desire to have more money for her. Lurking behind Wigram’s decision to turn his back on his royal master was outright despair at the King’s imperviousness to anything but his own desires, which came through even in the restrained prose of Wilson’s notes: ‘It was almost impossible to appeal to reason or judgement and [Wigram] gave no hope that anything that might be said would be effective.’ Usually, Wilson maintained a decorous silence over Edward’s character and this is practically the only direct criticism of his personality either made or quoted in his notes, and it is all the more striking for that. The logical implication of Wigram’s verdict served as the unspoken slogan for the hardliners as the crisis unfolded: if the King was impervious to reason, force would provide the only solution.

  Edward was put out by Wigram’s departure, not because he was sympathetic to him, but because, like many egocentrics, he failed to comprehend that true loyalty has to be earned and saw anything other than blind obedience as betrayal. Wigram had been a conveniently reputable figurehead, and his resignation confronted Edward with the difficulty of finding a private secretary with sufficient credibility in Downing Street who could also cope with Mrs Simpson. One of Edward’s long-standing courtiers, Admiral Halsey, had already been dismissed because he criticised her.35 Edward’s first choice as Wigram’s replacement was Sir Godfrey Thomas, his assistant private secretary, who had worked for him for the best part of twenty years. Thomas, however, knew full well that the senior post would be anything but comfortable, and declined. Rather as had happened with ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, who had despaired of working for Edward in 1929, long and close acquaintanceship with his royal master inspired severe caution. This left Edward with Alec Hardinge, who had been assistant to Wigram and his predecessor, Stamfordham, since 1920. Even though he was only a few years older than Edward, Hardinge belonged firmly to the upright certainties of George V’s Court. His family had a long and distinguished record of public and royal service. He himself had fought bravely in the First World War, in which he had been seriously injured. He liked Edward personally – perhaps another victim of his dangerous charm – but he deplored Mrs Simpson’s all-pervading and dominant influence on the King.36 Chips Channon MP, a fair representative of the social circle in which Edward and Mrs Simpson moved, took it for granted that Hardinge and other such ‘dreary narrow-minded fogies’ would be sacked when Edward became King.37

  It was Hardinge’s personal tragedy that he followed his perceived duty towards the royal family and accepted the job. He had little direct experience of working with Edward, unlike Lascelles, who had re-joined the Court as assistant secretary to George V in 1935, and Godfrey. Hardinge had practical rather than people skills; according to Lascelles, his ‘great administrative and executive talents as a King’s secretary, compensated, on balance for his complete inability to establish friendly, or even civil relations with the great majority of his fellow-men…’ 38 Hardinge’s chances of success were further eroded by his outspoken and indiscreet criticism of Edward and his circle, some of which found its way back to the target.39 Edward was morbidly sensitive to adverse comment, either about himself or Mrs Simpson. It is improbable that there was anyone who could have created a genuine dialogue between Edward and Downing Street, but it fell to Hardinge to make the attempt.

  Wigram’s departure was the clearest evidence of doubts about the King to the highest levels of government, but he was also dissipating the fund of goodwill with which he had begun his reign in other ways as well. The most striking example was his savage economy drive in the royal household.40 It had long been run chaotically and inefficiently, but the King’s measures appeared to be no more than penny-pinching rather than a reasoned reform. Worse, the contrast between his meanness towards his servants contrasted vividly with the huge sums of money he lavished on Mrs Simpson. The brunt was borne by the palaces of Sandringham and Balmoral, which were his personal charge and cost. It did not help that he had no affinity for either place. The King also strove to punish courtiers who expressed any reservations about Mrs Simpson. His long-standing equerry Admiral Halsey was dismissed, and he conducted a vendetta against Louis Greig, a friend of his brother the Duke of York, whose unfavourable comments on her appeared to have reached his ears.41

  Edward VIII had no patience with the encrusted and arbitrary practices that had grown up around the sovereign. He manifested his contempt for ceremony and tradition by insisting that a clutch of privileged bodies with the ancient right of presenting a Loyal Address should be given a single royal reply in a group and not one each. It was established practice to alternate the profile of the sovereign’s head used on coins and postage stamps; left profile for one sovereign then right profile for his or her successor. In Edward’s case this would have meant using his right profile but he felt it was less flattering and insisted his left profile be used. Edward VIII stamps carried the left profile but no coins were ever circulated. It was a case of witless vanity versus pointless tradition. He offended the senior infantry regiment of the British Army, the Grenadier Guards in which he had also served. The Grenadiers had expected to be honoured by the first royal review of the reign, but he reviewed the Welsh Guards – a mere fifth in seniority – two days before them.42 Much of this was fatuous and barely damaging, but it all demonstrated an overbearing self-centredness and thoughtlessness towards the feelings of others.

  The King’s relationship with the Archbishop of Canterbury got no better when the question of a national memorial for George V came under discussion. Lang promoted vigorously a grandiose scheme to create a large esplanade between Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, supposedly as a fitting place for a statue of the late King.43 It would have involved the wholesale demolition of about a hectare of old buildings. In reality, Lang’s scheme was a naked attempt to promote the Church’s position in political life:

  If there is one place in London which can be described as very specially a centre of our national and Imperial life it is surely the great area which contains Westminster Abbey, the sacred shrine of its histor
y and the glories of Parliament, the scene of its Government.44

  The King and his brothers supported a rival scheme for public playing fields across the country, which was eventually preferred. Quite how much Lang might have resented this is unclear, but the King certainly came to believe – wrongly – that Lang worked against him in the crisis that was to come.

  Edward certainly did not see Wigram’s departure as a reason to moderate his behaviour; in fact it coincided with the next step in his plan to make Mrs Simpson his Queen. Whilst Edward was still Prince of Wales, Mrs Simpson had been almost entirely confined to the bachelor world that he created with its centre at his private house, Fort Belvedere. It was his refuge from the royal side of his life and the world of his official duties. But now he set out to introduce Mrs Simpson into the semi-public and ordered world of Court. His first step was to invite the Simpsons to the very first formal dinner of his reign at York House for Derby Day in May 1936. Their names thus appeared in the Court Circular, invariably reproduced in The Times and read intently by anyone who was anyone in British Society and wanted to know what was going on in the very top bracket. To an extent unimaginable today, inviting the Simpsons signalled that they belonged to this elite. The invitation was not merely intended as the first push of a pawn up the social chessboard. Edward wanted Baldwin to meet his ‘future wife’.45 According to her memoirs, this was the first time that he told her that he intended to marry her. If true, it was an unconventional proposal of marriage, in which the bride-to-be was still married to someone else and was also offered no choice in the matter. Perhaps he simply assumed that Mrs Simpson would want to marry him as much as he wanted to marry her. He was determined to marry her, whatever opposition there might be. She claimed to have seen the inevitable difficulties and told Edward, ‘The idea is impossible. They’ll never let you.’ Edward seemed to relish the challenge, although he had no clear idea of how he was going to do this: ‘I’m well aware of all that but rest assured, I will manage it somehow.’ Like the naughty child trying it on with its parents, he was just looking towards the next turn of the screw.