The King Who Had to Go Read online

  The idea of marriage remained a secret between Edward and Mrs Simpson. Quite apart from the broader question of overcoming the likely resistance of government and family to such a marriage, the oddities of Britain’s divorce law at the time meant there was a very strong practical reason for Edward to keep his relationship with Mrs Simpson as quiet as possible. According to the law, the ‘innocent’ spouse had to take action against the ‘guilty’ spouse. Evidence or even suspicion that the ‘innocent’ spouse was involved with anyone else threatened their ‘innocent’ status, which could and frequently did wreck divorces. One of the government law officers, the King’s Proctor, was tasked with sniffing out any suspect divorces and had a healthy success rate in blocking those he discovered. There was a distinct danger that Edward’s plan to marry Mrs Simpson would fall at the first fence: securing her divorce from Ernest. It was around the time of the York House dinner that Edward had prompted Mrs Simpson to begin divorce proceedings. It was imperative to keep their relationship quiet. It was possible for the ‘innocent’ party to ask the judge in the case for ‘a discretion’ in respect of adultery of their own. But this would almost certainly have brought the King’s relationship with her into the light.

  It is an open question as to whether the York House dinner increased the number of people in Britain aware of Edward’s relationship with Mrs Simpson, but it certainly stoked the outrage that the affair provoked. Horror was amplified by inviting the flamboyant Society hostess Emerald Cunard as well. Lady Cunard was also originally American and had been an early supporter of Mrs Simpson’s in London Society. She used her husband’s money from shipping to support the musical career of her lover Sir Thomas Beecham. Her salon was faintly bohemian and a touch disreputable. Sir John Reith, the dourly sanctimonious Director General of the BBC and a close ally of Fisher’s, was appalled to see both on the guest list; the sight of the names in The Times caused him near-physical agony: ‘Lady Cunard, an evil woman who was never at the late King’s parties. Mr and Mrs E Simpson. It is too horrible and it is serious and sad beyond calculation.’ 46 There was a powerful element of outright snobbism in resentment at the invitations to Mrs Simpson and Lady Cunard. Nancy Astor, the American-born MP and a divorcee herself, ‘deplore[d] the fact that any but the best Virginian families should be received at Court’.47 At the level of crude social tactics, the King had succeeding in ambushing the Baldwins, who had no forewarning of the Simpsons’ (or Lady Cunard’s) presence, although the manoeuvre was sufficiently shocking for it to be believed that Baldwin had almost fled the dinner when he saw Mrs Simpson.48 It is unlikely that he would have done anything so offensive, but the matter was serious enough to be discussed in Downing Street. The only clue as to what was said is Wilson’s frustratingly impersonal remark: ‘There was some uneasiness at the thought that her name should be included in the Court Circular, but her husband’s name was also included…’ 49 The most plausible reading of this is that Wilson expressed his anxiety, but the Prime Minister was mollified because the social decencies were being respected. Mrs Simpson might still hold on to the status of ‘respectable whore’.

  In July, Mrs Simpson was again scandalously invited to a Court dinner, this time – even more scandalously – without her husband. Reith muttered once more, musing that an unfit monarch supported the argument for a republic. There was also an indication that alarm was spreading at the higher levels of the political world. Baldwin’s predecessor as Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was well past the peak of his political power and failing mentally, but the need to maintain the charade of a national government embracing the Labour movement had dictated that he remain in the Cabinet, albeit in a token quasi-sinecure of Lord President of the Council, which brought him into extensive contact with Court circles. He complained of the King’s ‘appalling obstinacy’ and how the affair was ‘making a bad effect on the country’.50 MacDonald’s worries were nebulous and it is hard to gauge how strongly or broadly they were shared by other senior politicians. Neville Chamberlain, who emerged as the chief advocate of taking a hard line with the King when the crisis proper began, did not mention the King at all in either his diary or his letters to his sisters between April and the autumn. In Downing Street, though, worry continued to grow. Once again, the imprecision of Wilson’s notes is frustrating. By the ‘latter part of the summer’, Baldwin was ‘increasingly anxious as to the way in which the matter might develop’.51 Quite what might have been feared is not clear, but the thing that set the alarm bells ringing was the news that the King was going on holiday and taking Mrs Simpson with him. By August, Wilson had told his wife he was very worried, but by then Baldwin was on a prolonged convalescence from acute strain.52

  Downing Street was not wrong to be perturbed. The next move in the King’s relationship with Mrs Simpson transformed it from a secret amongst a relatively small number of people in Britain into an international cause célèbre. It destroyed whatever chance that there might have been of the matter being dealt with in decorous, British silence. He took Mrs Simpson on holiday with him in a way that could not fail to attract enormous attention. This took things out of the control not only of Downing Street but also Edward himself, quite possibly to his surprise. In a number of respects he was behaving responsibly and cooperatively, at least by his own standards. He and Mrs Simpson had gone on holiday together the two previous summers; all that was different was that he was now King. These holidays were private to the extent that they did not feature in the Court Circular and so were less openly provocative than the York House dinners, which appear as conscious attempts to advance Mrs Simpson on the social chessboard. Edward was also sufficiently alert to any appearance of impropriety for Ernest Simpson to be invited to accompany his wife. Edward deferred not once but twice to Foreign Office advice. Originally, he had planned to rent a villa in the south of France, but the Foreign Office convinced itself that the outbreak of civil war in Spain made that area excessively sensitive. It might also have been deterred by the election of the left-wing Front Populaire government, which drew support from the Communist Party. The villa holiday was cancelled and the King chartered a luxurious yacht, the Nahlin, from its owner Lady Yule for a cruise in the eastern Mediterranean. The Foreign Office then successfully objected to a plan for the Nahlin to collect its guests from Fascist Italy, which the Italian ministry for foreign affairs recognised would have been a symbolic softening of official British policy.53 Instead, they boarded at a small port in Yugoslavia. Moreover, the King undertook to perform a slight, but not negligible, diplomatic mission in combining the voyage with private visits to a series of the local rulers, in particular Kemal Atatürk of Turkey. Having fought Turkey in the First World War and come near to war in 1922, this was a powerful token of a more friendly approach from Britain. The whole exercise sent a strong signal of British desire to maintain alliances in the region to Italian diplomats who followed the voyage closely.54 The presence of a Cabinet minister, Duff Cooper, on the Nahlin added another layer of superficial respectability.

  As an informal foreign policy exercise, the Nahlin’s cruise was a solid success, with Edward exercising his usual charm on his hosts. Some of them were surprised that the King of England should travel openly with his mistress, but as he was travelling privately and incognito as ‘Duke of Lancaster’, it all fell into a very grey area of protocol. Otherwise, the cruise was a catastrophe. The diplomatic achievements were swamped by the massive international press coverage of the King’s romance. British journalists believed that a tacit deal between the King and leading newspaper proprietors meant that the voluntary press silence on the King’s affair would apply to the holiday. The British blackout was maintained, but no such consideration applied to the US and European newspapers. Until then they had had very little to get their teeth into, but the Nahlin cruise changed this utterly. Photographs of Edward, bare-chested, strolling in the sunlight and walking hand-in-hand with Mrs Simpson were the sensation of the summer. British prestige abroad was severely
hurt by this catastrophic loss of royal dignity. Mussolini himself followed the cruise, sniffing that the King’s behaviour was ‘troppo democratico’.55 Letters began to flow into Downing Street and other Establishment addresses. The ludicrous move of cutting the offending articles out of foreign newspapers imported into Britain merely made things worse. Worst of all, in Wilson’s eyes, Cavalcade, a lightweight British magazine, revealed Mrs Simpson’s presence on the Nahlin.56 Even though Cavalcade did not discuss her relationship with the King, this was the first crack in the wall of British press silence.

  One part of the cruise that attracted favourable and open publicity at the time was later to hurt the King badly. Perversely enough, it was one that reflected his better side, his sense of solidarity with former combatants. As the Nahlin reached Gallipoli, the King visited the graves of the British and Empire servicemen who had died trying to storm the peninsula twenty years before in one of the most savage and futile battles of the First World War. Many had fought in the legendary ANZAC corps from Australia and New Zealand, whose name had become a byword for the sacrifice of Dominion citizens on behalf of the mother country. Given the King’s reverence for his comrades in arms it was practically inevitable that he should want to pay his respects to the fallen. His visits to the memorials were fully covered in the British press. The Turkish government was entirely supportive of a dignified act of remembrance. It was only when the crisis got under way that Mrs Simpson’s presence appeared as an act of gross disrespect, entirely cancelling out the goodwill generated at the time.

  The mass of publicity shook Mrs Simpson. Waiting for her as she travelled back to Britain through Paris at the end of the holiday was a wad of clippings from the US papers. This prompted her to write to Edward, making a half-hearted attempt to split from him and to return to the unchallenging world of her husband and a ‘calm, congenial life’.57 He responded with a threat of suicide. Faced with Edward’s obsession, Mrs Simpson’s letter led to nothing, but he had learned that she was disturbed by the thought of attracting press attention. He could not, of course, repair the damage done by the Nahlin cruise, but within a few weeks, his desire to protect Mrs Simpson’s privacy led him down a very dangerous path indeed.

  The disaster of the Nahlin cruise did not make Edward moderate his behaviour when he was back in the apparently safer environment of his home country. He continued to escalate his challenge to established decencies. Having scandalised or delighted the non-British world with his idea of a good holiday, he proceeded to vandalise the British idea of an appropriate holiday for its sovereign. Since Queen Victoria’s day, tradition had dictated that in September the sovereign went to Balmoral, which had acquired an almost sacred aura in the iconography of the House of Windsor as the cornerstone of its largely imaginary Scottishness. Edward did not go so far as to outrage his Court by not going in 1936, but what he did might have been even worse. Balmoral was part of the monarch’s official programme and the names of guests featured in the Court Circular, so the affront would be as severe as the York House dinners and probably worse given Balmoral’s particular status. The sovereign customarily invited well-established worthies, most notably the Prime Minister, to Balmoral. Edward chose lightweight cronies from Fort Belvedere instead.

  Edward’s guest list for Balmoral could, just, be dismissed as another turn of the screw on Society, but he capped it with a piece of grotesque insensitivity and bad manners, which seemed almost perfectly designed to cause the maximum offence to the ordinary public. He had been invited to perform the entirely natural and undemanding task of opening the new Aberdeen Infirmary on 26 September. He had laid the foundation stone on the building in 1928 as Prince of Wales. He declined to perform the opening on the flimsy pretext that he was still in mourning for his father and left the task to his oldest brother, the Duke of York. As if to rub in his apparent contempt for his Scottish subjects, on the day of the ceremony he personally drove to Aberdeen railway station to collect Mrs Simpson when she arrived from London. The Aberdeen Evening Express reported the two events side-by-side in an unstated but merciless denunciation of the relative priorities of the royal brothers.58 The article did not mention Mrs Simpson by name, but made a point of describing the King’s doings as ‘unexpected’ and drew an unspoken but damning contrast between the crowd of thousands at the Infirmary and the handful of railway employees who saw the King at the station, implying, probably accurately, that he had hoped not to be spotted. He added insult to injury by driving a Ford car rather than one from a British-owned company, but this registered only on Lord Nuffield.59 Even the feather-brain socialite Chips Channon, a normally uncritical friend to both of the couple, rated Edward’s behaviour as ‘almost brazen … Aberdeen will never forgive him.’60 It also created a deeply unfavourable and alarmist impression in Downing Street.

  The King used the visit to Balmoral to prepare for the burgeoning political crisis. One of his guests and possibly the only one who would have featured on anything other than the social pages of the newspapers was Esmond Harmsworth, one of the few of his friends who counted for something in the wider world. His father and uncle were the Harmsworth brothers, the prototypes of Britain’s press barons, who had become fabulously wealthy as proprietors of mass-market newspapers, above all the Daily Mail. They had also parlayed their newspaper readership into transient political power under Lloyd George’s coalition government, but had been left out in the cold following the Carlton House coup. Harmsworth’s father, Viscount Rothermere, was clearly the junior in the partnership and after his brother’s death in 1922 had been left in something of a limbo. He operated in loose alliance with his notional competitor Lord Beaverbrook, who had earned his undying gratitude for the sympathy he showed when Rothermere lost his two older sons during the War. Harmsworth had been brought into politics by his father as a mouthpiece for the venomous ‘anti-waste’ campaign against government spending that Rothermere launched after the War. He was elected to Parliament in 1919 as the baby of the House at the age of only nineteen, but he was hindered rather than helped by his father’s increasingly eccentric views; ludicrously, Rothermere had tried to extort a Cabinet post for his son in 1922. Harmsworth remained as an MP until 1929, but his energies were increasingly devoted to managing the family newspaper business competently in the teeth of his father’s erratic practices. He pursued the lucrative strategy of buying up provincial newspapers and since 1934 had been chairman of the proprietors’ trade body, the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association. Harmsworth was also a figure at the top level of Café Society, where his education, good looks and sporting prowess practically guaranteed success. At Balmoral, he and the King discussed politics, probably assessing senior politicians in terms of their likely behaviour in a confrontation with the King. The King told Harmsworth how much he disliked Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary.61 Simon did indeed emerge as one of the leading hardliners in the following weeks.

  Mrs Simpson’s visit to Balmoral brought her into uncomfortable proximity with the wife of the King’s oldest brother, the Duchess of York. Relations between the two were poor; before she arrived on the scene, the Yorks had seen much of Edward and had even entertained him and Lady Furness as a couple. Mrs Simpson treated the Duchess as a figure of fun and, according to one author, had earned her undying enmity by delivering a cruel impersonation of her in front of a group of people.62 If any of this came to Downing Street’s attention, it has left no trace in the record.

  It is hardly likely that the Aberdeen episode was intended as a provocation; it brought Edward nothing whatsoever. It was an example of the complete thoughtlessness that led him to neglect the possibility that the British press would abandon its self-disciplined silence when it reported Mrs Simpson’s divorce action barely a fortnight after his return from Balmoral. The court case would present the press with a temptingly hard domestic news item, and even the vaguest public mention of the King in connection with it would be too horrible to contemplate. One of the most formidable predators of the
British political and media jungles sensed vulnerable prey and began to stalk. On Monday 12 October, Theodore Goddard, Mrs Simpson’s solicitor, received a telephone call from the press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, warning him that one of his newspapers, the Evening Standard, had the story of the divorce case and intended to publish it.63 Goddard tried to persuade Beaverbrook to give his client privacy, but he received a studiedly non-committal reply.

  Beaverbrook was one of the great trouble-makers of his time. He took an impish delight in manipulating men and events from behind the scenes. He now began a discreet auction for his assistance in keeping the press quiet. There had long been an uneasy stand-off between him and Edward, who, like any celebrity, understood something of the dangers of getting too close to the media. In 1928, Edward played golf with Robert Bruce Lockhart, the former spy and now one of the star journalists in the Beaverbrook empire, who noted in his diary that ‘the Prince does not like Beaverbrook, says he wants to get everyone under his thumb and, if he cannot get them, he tries to down them’.64 In 1929, Beaverbrook had opened one potential channel of communication to Edward by hiring Mike Wardell, a close friend of the Prince, despite his only very humble business qualifications. Whilst this helped establish Beaverbrook firmly in the same social set as Edward, direct contact was modest. In his memoir of the abdication, Beaverbrook is ambiguous as to how actively he had sought Edward’s friendship. He did invite him to dinner, but claimed that the other guests ‘were made up of my own group of friends and had not been gathered for the purpose of entertaining the Prince of Wales. Dean Inge and his wife were among them.’65 The ‘gloomy Dean’s’ blend of intellectual Christianity and social conservatism might have been calculated to repel Edward. However, when Edward became King, Beaverbrook saw the prospect of a ‘new outlook in public life’ and broke his habit of not attending formal functions and attended Edward’s Accession Council, making great play of what he presented as the great sacrifice of donning his, admittedly uncomfortable, Privy Councillor’s uniform.