Therefore,
it would be hopeless. . . . If I was not in charge of the war (operations) and if I didn’t lead in the House, I should be a cypher. I thought Winston was a better choice.
A new government would also need the support of the leaders of the Labour Party, which either man probably could have got, but not under Chamberlain.
The three met together at Downing Street. Chamberlain’s “demeanour was cool, unruffled and seemingly quite detached from the personal aspect of the affair.”
“Can you see any reason, Winston, why in these days a Peer should not be Prime Minister?”
Churchill “saw a trap in this question.” His friend and fixer, Brendan Bracken, had warned him the previous night to expect it. “It would be difficult to say yes without saying frankly that he thought he himself should be the choice. If he said no, or hedged, he felt sure that Mr. Chamberlain would turn to Lord Halifax and say, ‘Well, since Winston agrees I am sure that if the King asks me I should suggest his sending for you.’” Churchill said that Chamberlain probably wanted him to serve as Halifax’s deputy and he was open to the possibility. “You cannot agree to this,” Bracken said.
“Winston was obdurate; he said that he could not go back on his word.” So Bracken told him to keep quiet.
“Promise?”
He did.
Churchill stared out the window and said nothing. “I have had many important interviews in my public life and this was certainly the most important,” he later wrote. “Usually I talk a great deal, but on this occasion I was silent. . . . As I remained silent, a very long pause ensued.” Halifax proposed that Chamberlain should nominate Churchill to succeed him. Churchill finally spoke and said he would take no political steps until he heard from the king. His son, Randolph, later modified the story:
It was quite true that Winston had been advised to keep quiet when he went with Halifax to see Chamberlain. It was also true that Chamberlain wanted Halifax and said that Halifax would be more acceptable to Labour and to the Liberals. It was also true that Halifax had said that he would not be captain of his own ship with Winston on board. W.S.C. had then spoken and said: “I am sure you wouldn’t.” Chamberlain had then suggested further discussion with the Labour Party. Winston had replied that he would have nothing to do with further discussions. If the King sent for him, he would form a government whether Labour came in or not.
Thus did Churchill emerge as the new leader.
—
The king had been feeling unhappy. His thoughts were said to be charitable, even sympathetic, toward Chamberlain, and he regretted the attacks on him. He was worried about the Labour Party leaders. He asked, “Would they serve in the Nat. Govt. with N. Chamberlain as P.M.? They said no. Would they serve in the Nat. Govt. with anybody else as P.M.?”
For his part, Churchill did “not remember exactly how things happened” but that he became aware that “I might well be called upon to take the lead.” He remembered being “content to let events unfold. . . . It was a bright, sunny afternoon, and Lord Halifax and I sat for a while on a seat in the garden of Number 10 and talked about nothing in particular.”
On the next day, May 10, the news came that Hitler’s armies had invaded Holland and Belgium. Churchill treated himself to a 4:00 a.m. breakfast of fried eggs and bacon, and a cigar. Later he discussed with the War Cabinet the effect of the previous night’s attacks. Halifax had gone to the dentist. Chamberlain then went to the palace. The king
accepted his resignation, & told him how grossly unfai[r] I thought he had been treated, & that I was terribly sorry that all this controversy had happened. We then had an informal talk over his successor. I, of course, suggested Halifax, but he told me that H. was not enthusiastic, as being in the Lords he could only act as a shadow o[r] a ghost in the Commons. I was disappointed over this statement, as I thought H. was the obvious man, & that his peerage could be placed in abeyance for the time being. Then I knew that there was only one person I could send for to form a Government who had the confidence of the country, & that was Winston. I asked Chamberlain his advice, & he told me Winston was the man to send for.
So he did. When Churchill arrived at the palace that evening, he
was taken immediately to the King. His Majesty received me most graciously and bade me sit down. He looked at me searchingly and quizzically for some moments, and then said: “I suppose you don’t know why I have sent for you?” Adopting his mood, I replied: “Sir, I simply couldn’t imagine why.” He laughed and said: “I want to ask you to form a Government.” I said I would certainly do so.
Churchill rode from the palace “in complete silence.” Arriving back at the Admiralty, he remarked to his detective, W. H. Thompson:
“You know why I have been to Buckingham Palace, Thompson?”
“Yes, sir . . .” Thompson saw tears.
“God alone knows how great it is,” Churchill said. “I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is. We can only do our best.” Then he “muttered something to himself” and strode up the stairs, “with a look of determination, mastering all emotion.”
It has been said that insouciance is the elixir of power. It is difficult to imagine Churchill or the king drinking in excess from that cup. Neither man was all-powerful politically: one was head of government, the other head of state. Neither was a Roosevelt nor a Stalin. But “[t]ogether”—to borrow a description once applied to Churchill and his amanuensis, Eddie Marsh—“this strangely assorted pair, the bulldog and the sparrow, plunged into the turmoil of politics without a moment’s delay.”
The question remains whether the extroverted and introverted elements of their character were inherently complementary; that is, whether each man strove consciously to work with the other so as to make an amalgam. They certainly warmed to each other. But the prospect of an alliance was not self-evident, at least not initially. It was fortunate that getting on, even developing a mutual affection, may have proved less difficult than either man had imagined, if they had even thought about it so directly. Somehow they made it work.
Halifax had been magnificently right. For Halifax was insouciant, in or out of power. He was practically a member of the king’s family; the two spoke each other’s language and had dealt familiarly for a long time. Halifax would have had no trouble working with him. Chamberlain’s rationale for not having recommended him to the king remains unresolved. He had said to Halifax “that he had always thought he [Chamberlain] could not face the job of being prime minister in war, but when it came he did; and yet now that the war was becoming intense he could not but feel relieved that the final responsibility was off him.” Perhaps he thought he was doing Halifax a favor. Halifax in turn must not have felt the need to place so much importance on reordering his mind and his relations for that purpose, as Churchill later did. Familiarity and trust were already in place. Churchill, on the other hand, had to earn them.
—
Churchill had been the most stalwart, most eloquent, and most determined opponent of the policy of appeasement. He had a checkered political past and an even more checkered reputation for a life once described “as a set-piece contest between curriculum vitae and genius.” He had served and abandoned both major political parties and had seen his career rise and fall repeatedly for nearly half a century. He had held every major cabinet post bar that of foreign secretary and prime minister, and not by accident. Some of his contemporaries abhorred the idea of his assuming office, but to his and his country’s credit, Halifax recognized that Churchill, not he, was the man it needed. Only Churchill could have formed a national government to rally the nation in war. Only he could have waged it.
So he did. But he did not lead on his own; no leader does. There is an easy tendency to promote the identity of Winston Churchill as a solitary bulwark: as Britain stood alone in the darkest hours of 1940, so did Churchill. But at his side were his aides and lieute
nants, his so-called Secret Circle of favorites, his parliamentary allies, and his loyal wife and family. Most of these people, however, were followers or courtiers. There was only one other man who stood with Churchill at the helm, from the very beginning, and he was the king. “Ministers come and go, but the King remains, always at the centre of public affairs, always participating vigilantly in the work of government from a standpoint detached from any consideration but the welfare of his peoples as a whole,” an editorial in the Times put it in May 1943 after the victories in North Africa. “He is the continuous element in the constitution, one of the main safe-guards of its democratic character, and the repository of a knowledge of affairs that before long comes to transcend that of any individual statesman.”
But the war caught the king unready and, apparently, unproven. In the spring of 1940, few could have predicted the calamity that was about to befall Britain. Even Churchill, for all that he had warned of it, could not have known the extent of the defeat and destruction that would come in the next few months.
“In times of danger,” wrote a contemporary observer, “democratic leadership is gained, not by the gun and rubber truncheon, but by great ability, the reputation for courage in vicissitude, stamina, and fighting spirit.” Churchill reached the pinnacle of British politics at last. Would another, younger prime minister have been better for the forty-five-year-old king? That was certainly possible. Would a different monarch have made Churchill’s life comparably worse, pushing him harder to justify and explain every strategic decision, or, alternatively, much easier, by letting him do his job without interference? Also quite possible. “George VI was not a born leader,” his father’s biographer, Kenneth Rose, has written. “He could seem shy and harassed, aloof and even morose. Yet when put to the test of war he displayed nobler qualities: resolution and dignity and the chivalry of an earlier age.” He, too, gained.
It is not easy to imagine either of the Edwards, VII or VIII, George V, or even Queen Victoria, for that matter—despite the interest she took in some matters of government—being granted so much direct involvement, and with no objection. This monarch had it, thanks to Churchill. The two were the better for it. So was Britain.
Who were they? Before anything can be understood of their individual or combined nature, something more must be said about their origins.
CHAPTER TWO
Uncommon Births
December 14, 1895, the day the future King George VI was born, was “Mausoleum Day.” On that day in 1861 Prince Albert, the beloved and influential husband and lodestar to Queen Victoria, had died. Princess Alice, his daughter, had died on the same day in 1878. Although not quite Friday the thirteenth, “[i]t was not a tactful day” to be born.
Nor was it an easy family to enter. Great-grandmother Victoria and her descendants were an especially large and complicated brood. “Gangan” was more divine than human. Her son, later Edward VII, on the other hand, was as warm and jolly and affectionate as a grandfather could be, and his wife, Princess Alexandra, doted on her grandchildren. But the family was not a warm one. Its customs, even for royalty, were formal, augmented by the queen’s habit of speaking to her relatives in German. To have been born “on a note of apology” was, somehow, appropriate.
—
Twenty-one years earlier at Blenheim Palace occurred another, not particularly propitious, birth. Winston, the firstborn son of Lord Randolph Churchill and his American-born wife, Jennie, arrived several months premature and was ill from the start. The Churchills were not royalty, nor even at the top of the aristocracy. It has been said that their family motto—“Faithful but unfortunate”—was well deserved, for “all Churchills were undoubtedly eccentric even when brilliant,” but they were brilliant, even dazzling, nonetheless. The family—especially the Spencer branch, from which Winston came—was far older in the English sense than the royal family. It included a few notable ancestors, such as the first Duke of Marlborough, the greatest English military figure of his—or perhaps any—time. Some may have seen this as an asset. It may not have been, because several descendants, particularly Winston, could escape neither the comparison nor the tribal solipsism that accompanied it.
His mixed parentage gave him the name the “Yankee Marlborough,” and, less flatteringly, the “Yankee mongrel.” The combination was said to have induced both his entrepreneurial and entitled tendencies: a status-conscious risk taker who acknowledged few inherent limits to what he could do and be. At the same time there was in him a certain indestructible quality that connected the past to the future. So mixed and conflictive a background need not assure such a life (Winston’s younger brother, John, for example, was dull and conventional), but for Winston it was seen, not least by himself, to confer one of predestined chaos, or at least drama.
His mother was the daughter of the New York financier Leonard Jerome, a flamboyant, almost fantastical figure of the Gilded Age. She was one of the most beautiful women of her generation, and was, reputedly, not averse to sharing the affections of admirers. Her eldest son adored her. They were not especially close during his childhood, but they developed a partnership in which she would serve as agent, matchmaker, and promoter of his career from behind the scenes. He never ceased being grateful to—yet also, at some level, dismissive of—the exquisite lady who was his mother.
That ambivalence could have described Winston Churchill’s lifelong attitude to women. He rarely spoke of them in public and seemed uninterested in them, generally preferring the company of men. When Nancy Astor walked into the House of Commons, for example, he said that he “felt as though some woman had entered my bath and I had nothing to protect myself with except my sponge.” He tended to see them in black and white: as either “virginal snowdrops” or worldly-wise figures who could be of use to him. To an extent this was characteristic of the times, but in Churchill it had less to do with any moral or cultural set of norms than with his own preferences and prejudices. He was never prudish or censorious for its own sake.
—
Queen Mary, the wife of George V, was remote, sometimes stern, and also German. She had been her husband’s late brother’s fiancée. She would outlive her husband and two of her sons, keeping up her bejeweled presence until 1953. We know comparatively little about the future king’s relationship with her; their letters reveal a formal affection, and he may have considered her a confidante. But it is hard to imagine them as being warm, especially given the appeal of his elder brother, known then as David—a sunny, lively, and outgoing boy, whose birth eighteen months before his own happened during Ascot week and was accompanied by festivals.
Later generations may have said it was more than slightly ironic for the British nation to be led by a prince of a German dynasty and his part-German wife, but that is how royalty is and always has been: international, or rather multinational, and complicated in ways that aren’t always politically expedient. The Windsors were of recent vintage. They acquired that name during the previous war when Baron Stamfordham, the private secretary to King George V, suggested it in lieu of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, which had an inconvenient ring to it when their country was at war with Germany. The future king’s own name came from his grandfather and great-grandfather (Albert), as well as from his great-uncle, the German emperor (Frederick), another great-uncle, the Duke of Connaught (Arthur), and finally, his father (George). Most people called him Bertie.
The challenges he inherited were several generations in the making. His grandfather King Edward VII, also called Bertie, was, by the end of his short reign, well liked, even loved, as the “Uncle of Europe.” His father, by contrast, was short, slight, and somber.
He is not loved, he is not feared,
The man with the receding beard.
Edward VII and Queen Alexandra led an open, vibrant, exuberant life. Their world at Marlborough House and Sandringham resembled a happy European salon. Theirs was the splendor of the Edwardian era.
Its Georgian successor could not, nor did it seem to want to, compare. George V and Queen Mary kept to a small circle. The king was not an especially complex man, nor was he especially caring, reserving his limited expressions of affection for Charlotte, his pet parrot. He could be cold, distant, and even hostile, except occasionally in written correspondence. He was overconsistent and overzealous in matters of routine and appearance, and seemed to live on the cusp of a very different age. He was dutiful and proper, but he rarely displayed enthusiasm for his role, once exclaiming, “But it’s horrible! I’m not educated for the job—in fact, I’m not educated at all!!”
People eventually warmed to him because of his efforts to boost morale during the First World War, which nearly destroyed his health, and his introduction of regular broadcasts by the new technology of radio, which proved surprisingly popular. It may have made him more human and less distant. Whether this was true or not, it certainly set a precedent for the popular media monarchy. In this way the war made him. He was, if only by default, a reassuring if less than inspiring royal figure, and not merely the abusive, domineering father of the occasional caricature. Yet his relations with his children, notably with his two eldest sons, were poor. Toward them he could be an uncompromising, rigid, petty tyrant.
It is not difficult, then, to imagine Bertie regarding his father with fear, nervousness, and annoyance. For all that there was a special affinity between them, as some of their correspondence suggests, it was neither intellectual nor sufficient to compensate for the king’s determination to rectify the boy’s physical debilities by force. Therefore, despite the affections bestowed on Bertie by his extended family and his own great affection for Balmoral—honed by visits to his beloved and indulgent grandparents—and for Sandringham, his early life was bleak. He wore painful braces on his legs to counteract knock-knees, and was persecuted because of left-handedness and his stammer—which only became worse as a result. It was no wonder he lacked, or appeared to lack, confidence, especially as contrasted with his uninhibited and more talented elder brother. He was prone, mainly in the presence of his great-grandmother, to burst out crying, a tendency exacerbated by terrible, even sadistic, nannies until the arrival of the one he adored most, called Lalla. What he lacked in confidence he made up for with exertion, intensity, and rectitude.
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