by Siân Evans
Mrs Greville concentrated on encouraging the Yorks, who were now de facto King and Queen. On the evening of Edward VIII’s abdication broadcast she wrote a letter of support and encouragement to his younger brother:
We all acclaim your Majesty […] I feel a special sense of joy as I know so well your greatness, modesty, unswerving sense of duty and everything that represents the best in English life. I know that I will not have the same privilege of seeing you as before Sir but I will always stand aside and rejoice in your success and the beloved consort she who radiates peace and happiness.15
Though appalled by developments, Queen Mary took the long view, writing, ‘In any other country there wd. have been riots. Thank God people did not lose their heads.’ In fact, public opinion was divided within Britain and its Dominions. As Sir Alan Lascelles later wrote:
The attitude of the vast majority of the King’s subjects was pragmatical [sic]; they did not regard the problem as a moral one; they did not condemn the King as a fornicator and an adulterer – they did not set up to judge him, or Mrs S., on these counts. What they did feel, overwhelmingly, was that, since they were called on to support a monarchy, they would not tolerate their Monarch taking as his wife, and their Queen, a shop-soiled American, with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw.16
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, still smarting from not having been invited to Balmoral in the summer by Edward VIII, as was customary, revealed a somewhat unchristian desire to highlight the failings of the former monarch and those who had encouraged him in a BBC radio broadcast on 13 December 1936. He criticised ‘a social circle whose standard and way of life are alien to all the best instincts and traditions of his people. Let those who belong in this circle know that today they stand rebuked by the judgement of the nation which had loved King Edward.’ Both Elizabeth and Queen Mary endorsed Lang’s criticisms of many of Edward VIII’s friends. There had already been an undignified scramble by some who now pretended they had barely known the King or his mistress, and this rather ugly aspect of the whole business was seized on by Osbert Sitwell, the great friend of both Mrs Greville and the new Queen.
‘Rat Week’ was written on Sunday 13 December 1936, the same night as Cosmo Lang’s diatribe was broadcast to the world. Sitwell poured into his poem his distaste for those who had fawned upon the King and Mrs Simpson and encouraged their relationship, yet abandoned them as soon as it was expedient:
Where are the friends of yesterday
That fawned on Him,
That flattered Her;
Where are the friends of yesterday,
Submitting to His every whim,
Offering praise of Her as myrrh To Him?
They found Her conversation good,
They called Him ‘Majesty Divine’
(Consuming all the drink and food,
‘they burrow and they undermine’),
And even the most musical
Admired the bagpipes’ horrid skirl
When played with royal cheeks outblown
And royal feet tramping up and down.17
Osbert distributed copies privately to his friends, including Mrs Greville, and the new King and Queen gave a copy to Queen Mary too. Visiting Polesden Lacey on New Year’s Day 1937, Osbert’s brother Sachie was annoyed to discover that Mrs Greville had received a copy of the poem, while he hadn’t.
Lady Astor blamed Emerald for encouraging both the romance and the pro-Nazi leanings of the future King. Certainly Emerald had fostered the relationship, providing the settings and the flattery (‘Majesty Divine’ was how she addressed the King) and creating the social ambience. Noel Coward had complained: ‘I am sick to death of having “quiet suppers” with the King and Mrs Simpson.’ Emerald also encouraged the folie à deux between them, seeing herself as Mistress of the Robes, the senior lady at court, as well as Wallis’s confidante. However, it was Sibyl to whom Wallis was more likely to confide her thoughts, though Sibyl remained convinced that Wallis did not want to be Queen, had no intention of marrying the King and had no idea he would abdicate.
Emerald Cunard was immediately dropped by the royal family, and by those loyal to them. Mrs Greville, whose guest books show that Emerald dined with her seventeen times between June 1927 and 10 December 1936, did not host her again until November 1939; presumably she was rehabilitated by the coming of war. Emerald was the principal scapegoat, and Queen Mary was adamant. In a letter to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia (including the instruction that he should burn the missive), Queen Mary wrote:
The other day in my presence, Bertie told George [the Duke of Kent] he wished him and Marina never to see Lady Cunard again, and George said he would not do so […] I fear she has done David a great deal of harm as there is no doubt that she was great friends with Mrs Simpson at one time and gave parties for her. Under the circumstances I feel none of us, in fact people in society, should meet her […] as you may imagine I feel very strongly on the subject.18
Of all the hostesses it was Emerald who suffered most when Edward VIII abdicated. ‘How could he do this to me?’ she wailed. Emerald’s main fault was her fondness for royalty, but her desire to manipulate her characters as though they were figures on a stage was thwarted when she found she could not control the narrative. She lost status, being very publicly blackballed by royal and court circles. She attempted to brazen it out, holding a party for Sir Thomas Beecham, but most of the women attending wore black, as though the former king had died rather than abdicated. Emerald was horrified at being publicly vilified by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and sat up till the early hours talking about it with the Sitwells. The seasoned Conservative politician and Scottish Earl, Lord Crawford, described Edward’s American friends as ‘all the touts and toadies who revolved around Mrs Simpson and whose influence of society was so corrupting’, meaning in particular Emerald Cunard.
Others were deeply affected by the abdication. Lady Astor and her maid were in New York when the story erupted. Rose remembered: ‘She was very upset when I broke the news to her: I’d heard the paperboy shouting it in the streets. She cried bitterly.’19 Nancy was vitriolic about Wallis: ‘Really, she seems to have turned out an arch adventuress of the worst type’20, she wrote on 16 December 1936. Nancy blamed her fellow MP ‘Chips’ Channon for encouraging the romance, and on 11 December she remarked in his direction, ‘People who have been licking Mrs Simpson’s boots should be shot.’ Nancy was commissioned by the BBC to broadcast a radio programme to the States about the abdication, explaining that Wallis Simpson’s unsuitability was due to her marital history, rather than her American origins or non-aristocratic background. True-blue Tory Lady Londonderry took a different view of the nationality issue, wondering if the whole affair had been planned in America to undermine the Prince of Wales.
In America public reactions were understandably different. Noel Coward, that veteran of ‘quiet little suppers’ with all the main dramatis personae, was also in New York that December. At first he was deeply shocked and upset that the King had decided to go. At a cocktail party he encountered Harold Ross, the editor of the humorous magazine the New Yorker, who found the whole business hilarious. Coward remonstrated with him in crisp tones, saying ‘In England we’re all terribly, terribly distressed. It is absolutely no occasion for levity.’21 Ross replied, ‘You mean, the King of England runs away with an old American floosie, and that ain’t funny?’
However, Coward had an ambivalent relationship with Edward VIII, who had once cut him dead the day after the songwriter had spent the evening playing the piano for him. Once the dust had settled, Coward suggested that statues of Wallis Simpson should be erected throughout the country by a grateful nation. Worldly Mrs Greville shared his view; she had been appalled by Edward’s flaunting of Wallis, because of her personal loyalty to the Yorks, King George and Queen Mary. She had long held a low personal opinion of the Prince, as he was then, since visiting India with him more than a decade before, writing to her great friend Lord Reading t
he Viceroy in 1922: ‘HRH is wearing his nerves out in a fruitless life and it is altogether very sad and as [Lord Birkenhead] said last night he cannot maintain his popularity under existing circumstances.’22
By contrast, she had become genuinely fond of Bertie since becoming first his ‘fairy godmother’ and then his mentor. Being childless had left her with a nurturing instinct for the young; she had encouraged his romance with Elizabeth even when it had seemed hopeless, and had hosted the young couple for their honeymoon. She had even promised to leave her beloved home, huge estate and an enormous bequest to the Yorks so that they could live there with their two delightful daughters. Through an unimaginable twist of fate she was now the ‘favourite aunt’ of the King and Queen. It was all a long way from running a boarding house in Edinburgh.
Sibyl Colefax had cultivated royalty for her own ends, but she also genuinely liked both Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, and wished to smooth the path of their romance. Just two weeks after Wallis fled to France, she wrote an emotional letter to her trusted old friend Sibyl, promising to tell her everything if they ever met again. After the abdication, unlike most of their former friends, Sibyl loyally continued to see the Windsors for many years; indeed she stayed with Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque over Christmas in 1936, so she could console the lonely and shell-shocked Wallis Simpson. They spent much of their time playing cards. After one game of bridge Wallis was asked why she had not used her king of hearts. ‘My kings don’t take tricks, they only abdicate,’ she replied.
1936 had been a dreadful year for Sibyl; in less than twelve months she had lost her friend Rudyard Kipling, her husband Arthur, her beloved Argyll House and her status as confidante of the King and his lover. In time she came to agree with the general view that the abdication at least saved Britain from the prospect of King Edward VIII, but she remained genuinely fond of them both. Because she proved to be a true friend to the Windsors, Sibyl was not dropped from court circles to the same extent as her vilified rival Emerald. However, she was still the unfortunate butt of practical jokes. As the momentous year drew to a close, as light relief, an advertisement appeared in the Personal column of The Times on 21 December:
Lord Berners wishes to dispose of two elephants and one small rhinoceros (latter house-trained). Would make delightful Christmas presents. Apply R. Heber Percy, Faringdon House, Berkshire.
The press fell on the story like wolves; a spoof was a boost to the national mood before Christmas. The Daily Sketch, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and the Evening News ran various versions of the story. Those journalists who rang Faringdon House were informed by Lord Berners, masquerading as his own secretary, ‘Actually, I haven’t seen the rhino myself, sir, but it is often about the house. It’s quite gentle, I’m told. The weather is getting so cold for the poor things.’ He also told the journalists that one elephant had been sent to Harold Nicolson and the other to Lady Colefax.
Harold Nicolson, through gritted teeth, responded to all media enquiries by commenting, ‘I have known him for twenty-five years but I do not feel too friendly towards him today. I do not want an elephant, have never wanted one, and I have not bought one.’ Blameless Sibyl’s official response is not recorded; presumably she was already en route to the south of France to spend an anguished Christmas with Somerset Maugham and the exiled Wallis Simpson.
However, when Berners wrote to Gertrude Stein in February 1937 he reported ‘Lady Colefax is in America. I had a row with her about an elephant […] she was besieged by press photographers asking her if they could photograph her with the elephant. She was very angry. And now I see that she was knocked down by a pig at one of Elsa Maxwell’s parties.’ His friend Lady Harris delighted in the joke too, writing to him:
I have no intention of inviting SC to the film. You ought to know […] that anyone who can be so cruel to animals as SC was to that poor elephant could never again join the crush beneath my glittering chandeliers. How could she have kept that poor noble beast squeezed in and shut up in that small antique Normandy armoire in the back part of her shop for weeks and weeks never letting it even see what was going on in the front part of the shop and giving it nothing to play with but the old school ties that had belonged to her late husband.23
1936 was a year Sibyl was to remember with horror for many reasons.
9
The Coronation, the Cliveden Set and the Munich Crisis
The royal family were very aware that 1936 had been ‘the year of three kings’, and felt that the very image of a constitutional monarchy had been severely tarnished by the abdication. The ‘heir’ had abandoned his post, and the public was coming to terms with ‘the spare’. The last coronation had been that of George V and Queen Mary in 1911. Twenty-six years later, the plans to crown Edward VIII had been radically overturned with just five months’ notice. Pottery manufacturers agonised over their stocks of commemorative mugs, now overtaken by events; cast-iron post boxes embossed with the insignia ER VIII had been manufactured for use in towns all over Britain, and commercial artists scrabbled to redesign biscuit boxes and book jackets with pictures of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The iconography of the coronation was as fundamentally changed as the central figures.
Nevertheless, the ceremony held in Westminster Abbey on 12 May 1937 provided Britons of all classes with a welcome opportunity to celebrate, after the considerable shocks of the previous year. The King and Queen’s great friend Mrs Greville had prime seats in the Abbey with her friend Osbert Sitwell, and Ladies Londonderry and Astor were in attendance as peeresses. Emerald Cunard busied herself organising concerts; Noel Coward had a new musical on stage, Victoria Regina; and London was teeming with visitors. There were a great many parties. Mrs Ronnie delighted in sitting next to the grandson of the Kaiser, ‘Fritzy of Prussia’, at the Channons’ dinner party; and in return she gave a spectacular dinner party at her home for forty guests, including the King of Egypt, the Mountbattens, Lord and Lady Willingdon and the ubiquitous ‘Chips’.
The Windsors’ wedding took place on 3 June 1937 at the Château de Candé, owned by their new friend Charles Bedaux. Their honeymoon began in Venice and Milan, then they moved to Schloss Wasserleonburg, a fifteenth-century castle in Austria that they had rented from the Countess of Munster, Peggy Ward, Sibyl Colefax’s business partner. The Countess welcomed them on arrival, saying, ‘Wallis, how well you are looking.’ Ice formed on the Duke’s upper slopes: ‘The Duchess, you mean …’, he corrected their hostess.
Typically the Windsors did not query the motivation of Charles Bedaux, a wealthy, naturalised American, in cultivating them. He was an entrepreneur who had developed a mechanistic ‘efficiency system’ of mass production; it was the basis for Chaplin’s satire in the film Modern Times. Bedaux wanted to smooth the path of his business endeavours within the Third Reich, so he delivered the former British King and his new wife as prestigious visitors. The Windsors were fêted in Germany and followed everywhere by the press; they met the Nazi high command and, of course, Hitler at his mountain retreat, Berchtesgaden. It was a PR coup for the Third Reich; the Duke was even filmed and photographed giving a modified Nazi salute. The Duke of Windsor was generally pro-German, but it seems he was simply too naive and inexperienced to make strategic decisions without professional advisors. After forty years of automatic deference, cap-doffing and seamless international travel organised and paid for by professionals, he had been lured by the controversial idea of making an all-expenses paid ‘state visit’ to the New Germany with his new wife.
Immediately after the triumph of the Berlin Olympics, the Third Reich once again clamped down on those of its citizens it wished to repress. At the instigation of Emerald Cunard and von Ribbentrop, in November 1936 Sir Thomas Beecham took the newly founded London Philharmonic Orchestra to Berlin. They played to a full house, and the guest of honour, Adolf Hitler, summoned the conductor to his box during the interval to congratulate him. At the end of the concert, Beecham spotted that the Führer was applaudi
ng too. He turned to his orchestra and said, ‘The old bugger seems to like it!’ The remark was picked up by the microphones and broadcast by radio across Europe.
Sir Thomas refused to be intimidated by the Nazis. His newly appointed secretary was Dr Berta Geissmar, who had been personal assistant to conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. She was Jewish and had been forced to leave Nazi Germany for London. Beecham employed her and took her with him to Berlin, knowing that his hosts would not dare to menace her while she was under his protection. Beecham had long admired German culture, having visited Bayreuth first as a youth. Between 1929 and 1938 he made annual trips to Germany to conduct major music festivals, meeting many Nazi leaders, including Hess and Hitler. But not everyone approved; at a luncheon party at Sibyl Colefax’s, Emerald asked Sir Austen Chamberlain to accompany her to the opera, a season of which was currently being conducted by her lover. Sir Austen said he would, but not if they were playing Wagner, whose music was ‘typical of the bestiality and brutality of the modern Hun’.
To mark the coronation in May 1937, Hitler’s representative, Blomberg, was the guest of honour at the lavishly refurbished German Embassy. Von Ribbentrop organised two very select lunches in his honour with those guests considered most important to German interests in London. The first lunch included the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Baldwins (whose Cabinet had just resigned), the Edens and Vansittarts, Lord and Lady Londonderry, Lord Lothian and Lord Derby, the press barons Lord Rothermere and Lord Kelmsley, and Mrs Greville.
The second lunch consisted of the Neville Chamberlains (he was the new Prime Minister), Duff and Lady Diana Cooper, the Samuel Hoares, Lord and Lady Halifax, Sir Thomas Inskip, Winston and Clementine Churchill, and Emerald Cunard. There was also a very grand reception at the embassy, with 1,400 attending and the Duke and Duchess of Kent as guests of honour. This party was fraught with problems; von Ribbentrop had insisted on issuing the invitations in German, rather than the normal ambassadorial lingua franca of French, or the language of the host country, in this case English. His arrogance irritated the diplomatic community, so the Turkish Embassy replied in Turkish, the Japanese responded in their own language, and Peter Rodd, husband of Nancy Mitford, RSVPed in Yiddish.