Churchill and the King

by Kenneth Weisbrode

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CHURCHILL AND THE KING

  Kenneth Weisbrode is a writer and historian living in Turkey. His previous book is The Atlantic Century.

  Praise for Kenneth Weisbrode’s Churchill and the King

  “Wonderfully readable . . . This is popular history at its best. . . . Weisbrode does a very good job of illuminating the bonds that drew two men with such different personalities together.”

  —Michael Korda, The Daily Beast

  “A perceptive profiling of the challenges of leadership.”

  —The Washington Times

  “Weisbrode’s excellent book on Churchill’s relationship with King George VI is very well done and will take an honored place on my Churchill shelf.”

  —Paul Johnson, author of Modern Times and Churchill

  “An organic comparison of two highly flawed and deeply sympathetic characters at the helm of England at her most perilous hour. . . . Weisbrode makes a very compelling case that each man was ‘working against his own faults, on behalf of the other.’ An inspired, engaging comparative portrait.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “One of the last unexplored relationships of World War Two is that between Winston Churchill and the only person who could have sacked him during that conflict, King George VI. They had very different personalities and views on politics, but their country needed them to work in perfect tandem. As Kenneth Weisbrode writes, ‘Somehow they made it work,’ and in this well-researched and well-written book, he shows how what began as a professional necessity turned into a genuine friendship, and eventually one of the best working relationships of either man’s life.”

  —Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War and Masters and Commanders

  “The shy, stammering king and the loquacious, domineering prime minister were an odd couple—but they gave each other courage and confidence when England stood alone. Ken Weisbrode has written an elegant and perceptive study of friendship in power.”

  —Evan Thomas, author of Ike’s Bluff and Sea of Thunder

  “Churchill and the King is a thoughtful, deeply insightful account of two unconventional friends—the shy, stammering George VI and the flamboyant Winston Churchill—who, after triumphing over their own personal adversities, join forces to rally their countrymen and inspire the world in the dark days of World War II.”

  —Lynne Olson, author of Citizens of London, Troublesome Young Men, and Those Angry Days

  “Historian Weisbrode shares the story of how two of the most important figures in twentieth-century Britain, Churchill and King George VI, worked tirelessly to maintain British interests throughout World War II. . . . The friendship that grew between these two historical figures makes for an uplifting story.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Why this alliance worked so well—for the two men personally and, in a larger context, for the benefit of Britain—is analyzed in terms of the two men’s personality traits and qualities that challenged and stimulated both of them to be, and do, their finest.”

  —Booklist

  “Churchill, of course, has been the subject of countless books, many of which have touched on his relationship with his sovereign. But by focusing solely on that friendship, Weisbrode amplifies an important facet of the British bulldog.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013

  Published in Penguin Books 2015

  Copyright © 2013 by Kenneth Weisbrode

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Quotations from the diary of King George VI, Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, per- mission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

  Quotations from the war diaries of Lord Halifax. Used by permission of Borthwick Institute, University of York.

  Quotations from the Ismay, Alanbrooke and Dill papers, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives. Used by permission of The Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-63808-8

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Weisbrode, Kenneth.

  Churchill and the king : the wartime alliance of Winston Churchill and George VI / Kenneth Weisbrode.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-670-02576-3 (hc.)

  ISBN 978-0-14-312599-0 (pbk.)

  1. Churchill, Winston, 1874–1965—Friends and associates. 2. George VI, King of Great Britain, 1895–1952—Friends and associates. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Great Britain. 4. Great Britain—History—George VI, 1936–1952 I. Title.

  DA587.W45 2013

  941.083092'2—dc23

  [B] 2013017201

  Cover design: Kristen Haff

  Cover photograph: May 8, 1945: British statesman and prime minister Sir Winston Churchill and King George VI on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, London, on VE Day. Keystone/Getty Images.

  Version_2

  For my mother, my sister, and my late father

  CONTENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER ONE: Churchill’s Moment

  CHAPTER TWO: Uncommon Births

  CHAPTER THREE: Ordeals of Youth

  CHAPTER FOUR: Abdication

  CHAPTER FIVE: Appeasement

  CHAPTER SIX: Character

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Personality

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Horror

  CHAPTER NINE: Reversal

  CHAPTER TEN: Victory

  Denouement

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  Your Majesty’s treatment of me has been intimate and generous to a degree that I had never deemed possible.” So wrote Winston Churchill to King George VI in January 1941, just after Britain had endured its darkest hour. There was more to the statement than courtesy. Some people have said that only Churchill could have saved the country at that moment. They have also said that if he had failed, the king would almost certainly have lost his throne and probably much more. The statements may be qualified in various ways, but most amount to the same thing: Winston Churchill was the necessary man. Though it has been a debatable point, few have said it about George VI. But no one who knows the king’s war record would call him an idle spectator. A verdict does not issue easily for either man on his own. The real question is: Where would each man have been without the other?

  Viewers of the 2010 film The King’s Speech came away with a new appreciation of the trials and triumphs of the unexpected king; those in the know detected its odd and inaccurate portrayal of Churchill. He was, as he probably
had to be to some extent, the Churchill of caricature, with cigar, grimace, and growl. But to have shown him strongly in favor of abdication did a disservice. So did the superficial, even supercilious, way he appeared to treat the new king. Did it really happen this way? Was that all? What about the war?

  The story of what happened between these men tells us something important about the position and purpose of the British monarchy, then and now. It has been an effective institution for binding the nation (and back then, the empire) together; if not, it would have disappeared long ago. But is it still necessary? That so many people in Britain and elsewhere continue to revere it must come down to more than tradition, sentimentality, and personal affection for a few particular members of the royal family. There must be, in other words, a better reason for its survival.

  Rulership, like leadership, is a puzzle. It is not just an assemblage of policy, personality, intelligence, charisma, and power but of some changeable and often unpredictable chemistry among all these elements and also between the ruler and the ruled. It may be true that the best things in life are done in combination. Success is almost never solitary. Yet why some rulers succeed while others fail may be impossible to understand. The British case is complicated further by the existence of an unwritten constitution, enforced by custom, habit, and instinct. This book addresses the puzzle by exploring the alliance of a British king and prime minister during a most difficult time. George VI became king after the abdication of his brother in 1936. Winston Churchill became prime minister after the fall of Neville Chamberlain four years later. Britain and its empire would soon fight alone against a resurgent Germany. The two men met nearly every week whenever both were in London. Each was, in his own way, admired, even beloved, by many of his countrymen. Theirs was an alliance that came to be one of trust and fellowship, even friendship, but it was none of these things initially, nor was it simply an association of convenience. It was one of several partnerships that each man made that mattered. Partnerships are often limited. They can be dissolved. Alliances take things a step further. Genuine alliances are indivisible. In deriving its strength from the life mettle of both men, this alliance set an example and a precedent that would outlive them both.

  Why did this alliance work so well? Was it the product of crisis? Or were the two men predestined for mutual sympathy? Upon what was such sympathy based? Churchill had come to power after a long and complicated political career; many people mistrusted him. He was an embattled man facing a losing war. The king came up unprepared, unconfident, and perhaps unwilling to rule. On the face of it, the two would appear to have inspired little hope, but history suggests otherwise. Churchill could not have been the leader he was without having had so strong a working relationship with his monarch. The king—and more to the point, the monarchy and the British nation—could not have endured the war without it.

  These points may have more to do with the essence of modern leadership than with its exercise by this monarchy or any single leader. It has been said that today’s world is leaderless. The observation tends to conflate what leadership is with what it does. How do leaders earn trust? How do they collaborate with rivals? How do they come to know themselves—their strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities? How do they manage to find what they most need from others without appearing weak and flawed? If they succeed, is a fall from popular grace inevitable? Even the Churchills of this world have limited and diminishing capacity to rule. Power usually falls after it rises. In the race to preserve it, how do they make use of allies, adversaries, interests, habits, perceptions, and expectations while maintaining or furthering their own unique, innate character, which, in most cases, compelled their urge to lead in the first place? And how do they go on to mold, meld, and adapt that character with that of others, and to augment it?

  Students of history learn something when they set out to understand the past: that it is never complete; it is a perpetual argument, or what Churchill called “a scenario without an end,” filled with puzzles and gaps. Because it is impossible to re-create the past entirely—there are no time machines—new attempts, no matter how exhaustive or repetitious, will always raise new questions and complicate the ones that have been asked and answered. And they will always contain holes.

  The world does not need another hagiography of Churchill or the royal family, and this book will be that for neither. “We have been told more about Winston Churchill than any other human being,” Max Hastings has written, with some license. “Yet much remains opaque, because he wished it thus.” The king’s official biographer, John Wheeler-Bennett, posed it in the form of a question about Churchill over forty years ago: “Has not every aspect of his Protean career been covered—and amply—either by himself or by others?” A generation hence, the answer to Wheeler-Bennett’s question may well be no. After poring over the same anecdotes, aphorisms, speeches, and quarrels over who said what exactly and why, it appears that so obvious and apparent a relationship—that between the prime minister and his king—has been taken for granted, with studies by David Cannadine, Philip Ziegler, and Robert Rhodes James being among the very few perceptive exceptions.

  It may seem strange or unwise for an American who has never been enamored of British royalty, or of Winston Churchill, for that matter, to revisit them. Both paths have been well trod, to put it mildly. But once I began to think about them, I was struck by the gap hiding in plain sight: Why has so little been written about what went on between these two important figures, and how did that affect history?

  This relationship was important. Both men were champions against adversity. Each had lived with it his entire life. Both nearly died from it. It brought them together as much as any other factor, person, or event, and it merits recognition in its full spectrum or as that favorite British formulation—the concentric circle—might depict it. A concentric circle of adversity would place Churchill and the king as moving back and forth through the rings of family, upbringing, career, character, and the war, all presenting obstacles, challenges, and affirmations of their deepening partnership as it evolved, both in time and in reference to their separate pasts, as well as to their future legacies. The various roles they played to and for each other—foil, confidant, fellow traveler, conspirator, and comrade—blur so that the full effect, again, was exponential. The story of such an alliance will by necessity tread over familiar ground to many readers, but the aficionados among them will, I hope, see old facts in a new light.

  This book is written for anyone who has wondered why some leaders and nations succeed against great odds. The varieties of allied success are infinite as well as important. Like biographies of Winston Churchill and the British royal family, their mysteries will remain with us for a long time to come.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Churchill’s Moment

  Neville Chamberlain had taken far too long, some said, to admit failure. So they gave him a hard push. Britain’s prime minister imagined that he had appeased Hitler. He may have deterred him, but only for a brief time. He did not dissuade, disarm, or destroy him. Hitler took the Sudetenland and dismembered Czechoslovakia; he had conquered his piece of Poland and allowed Stalin to grab the rest; he had invaded Denmark and Norway, “fascinated, browbeaten, cajoled and then garotted.” The way was open to France, and everyone, or nearly everyone, knew it. In May 1940, Europe was again at war. And in Britain, Chamberlain got the blame.

  The king was worried. He had seen his father age terribly during the last war and had served in it himself. He may have had “boundless confidence” in his prime minister, but Chamberlain had failed. “Resign—Resign,” the members of Parliament shouted amid stanzas of “Rule Britannia.” The burden of choosing a successor fell to them and, ultimately, to the British people. But the formal responsibility rested with the king, for the king is the only one who can ask a prime minister to form a government.

  The most likely candidate to replace him was Lord Halifax, the foreign secretar
y. “The Holy Fox,” as Churchill had named him, was a tall, trim, elegant Yorkshireman and a former viceroy of India, whose “long figure curled like a question mark.” He was at once skeptical and imaginative—a man, it was said, who “could see at least three more facets to any diamond than the jewelers who cut it had placed there.” One of the few sympathetic qualities of this “high priest of the Respectable Tendency,” perhaps, was his possession, like the king, of a speech impediment that was said to resemble “a slight lisp.” He was also missing a hand.

  Halifax was a man after the king’s heart: aristocratic in style and spirit, resilient, stately, shrewd, cautious, principled, practical, courteous, attentive, and, probably above all else, “insinuating, but unlovable.” He was, therefore, a reliable figure, not at all like the unpredictable Churchill, whom Chamberlain regarded as a “d——d uncomfortable bed fellow.” The king trusted Halifax and was said to be “far closer to him than to any other senior politician of the day.” His wife was a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and it had been he who had convinced the king, ultimately, that the policy of appeasement had been misguided.

  But Halifax did not want the job and made a strong case for why he should not have it. He was already a member of the House of Lords; prime ministers generally came from the Commons. As foreign secretary he was associated in the popular mind with Chamberlain, whereas Churchill, though he had been serving until now as First Lord of the Admiralty, had been the prime minister’s loudest critic. Halifax suggested a government of national unity with members of each major party, but not with himself as head. According to him, Chamberlain

  thought that it was clearly Winston, or myself, and appeared to suggest that if it were myself he might continue to serve in the Government. I put all the arguments that I could think of against myself, laying a considerable emphasis on the difficult position of a Prime Minister unable to make contact with the centre of gravity in the House of Commons. The P.M. did not think so much of this . . . and my stomach ache continued. I then said . . . that I had no doubt at all in my own mind that for me to take it would create a quite impossible position.