Churchill and the King

by Kenneth Weisbrode

  In 1910, Churchill received his first cabinet department, the Home Office, becoming its youngest secretary in nearly a century. It was one of many government positions he would hold during the coming years. It brought the ambitious, hyperactive young politician into even closer contact with the monarch, now George V. He had effectively, though recklessly in the view of some critics, led the effort to defeat a libel against the king for an alleged secret marriage. He also acquired the duty of reporting regularly to the king the proceedings of the cabinet, a job generally done by the prime minister. “Churchill . . . approached the task with gusto,” Roy Jenkins has written. “The whole exercise encapsulated his attitude to the monarchy: a great respect . . . combined with a total confidence and freedom in the expression of his own views on a basis of Whiggish equality.” This may have been overstating the case. Was it really one of equality or an equitable division of labor? Churchill the Whig, if he could be called one, ascribed more value to the status of monarchy than to the substance; that is, the monarch must reign but not rule.

  Churchill’s opinion of the aristocracy, by contrast, was more forthright. He welcomed its eclipse and warned that throwing it a lifeline would lead to a dangerous national sclerosis. This was most likely not the result of self-hatred or clear-cut class bias. His disdain for his fellow members of the aristocracy could be said to match his regard for the middle, particularly the lower-middle, class, but Churchill had little patience for class warriors from among the so-called lower orders. They were not spared the show of his antagonism. There was the Sidney Street incident, in which he, as Home Secretary, personally intervened in an attack upon a group of anarchists and annoyed colleagues by having his photograph from the scene appear in the newspaper. Churchill achieved several things as Home Secretary—notably prison reform—but it was the exhibitionism that most people remembered. Sidney Street and the Welsh Tonypandy riots in late 1910, when troops threatened to put down a miners’ strike, stuck in the mind.

  Being offered a proper military department the following year must have come as a relief. Now thirty-seven, he relished the job of First Lord of the Admiralty. British naval power, he later wrote, was the center of British existence, not merely a source for expansion, as it was for Germany. The Admiralty may have been the most important government department during what many people presumed at the time would be a short, intense war, fought largely between gunships where the British with their new dreadnoughts were sure to prove victorious. But a quick victory was not to be. The First World War would bring more death and suffering than the British people had ever expected. Churchill ended it with the title of chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which David Lloyd George had said was “reserved either for beginners in the Cabinet or for distinguished politicians who had reached the first stages of unmistakable decrepitude.” Churchill managed to achieve both in record time.

  The reason was the terrible Dardanelles campaign in 1915. Scores of men were lost in a doomed attempt to expel the Turks from the Dardanelles as the prelude to seizing Constantinople. He had been a passionate advocate of the campaign and helped to prevail against others who were less enthusiastic. Its failure was not entirely Churchill’s fault, and much of the responsibility fell on the army, but Churchill was the man most identified with it. His idea had been that this action against Germany’s Turkish ally could succeed. It was unlikely. But it made great sense to him at the time. Churchill blamed the military commanders, and not for the first time, for faulty execution of an otherwise sound, albeit ambitious, plan.

  Now, as Roy Jenkins has written, the “littorals were covered with the bones of those who had fallen in 1915, and also with the skeleton of his early and considerable reputation.” Churchill was pilloried. About the only person to express sympathy was his old army adversary Lord Kitchener, even though he probably bore as much blame for the Dardanelles disaster as Churchill did. “There is one thing at least they can never take from you,” he told him. “When the War began you had the Fleet ready.” Yes, at least one historian has asked, “[b]ut what precisely was it ready for?”

  The recovery of Churchill’s reputation, for one. It would take time. The failure fueled the perception of a reckless and dangerous mountebank. Sidney Street and Tonypandy had been unfortunate excesses of exuberance; the Dardanelles action was a tragic disaster. As before, he turned to the inner resource of self-assurance, some would say egocentricity, which saw him through such crises, yet had the tendency to bring them on in the first place. He admitted, in other words, the fact but not the necessity of failure. Sharing a Turkish bath with his friend Duff Cooper, Churchill insisted that he would be vindicated by the commission of enquiry and would have a new job in due course. “He is a strange creature,” Cooper concluded.

  Churchill presently went to the western front to command an infantry battalion. He saw some combat but otherwise succeeded in raising morale by delousing his troops and by instituting the practice of singing on the march. He showed his usual bravery but was also reckless: “For God’s sake keep still, sir!” “Put out that bloody light.” These were typical cries heard from the trenches while Churchill was there. He was known for ordering nighttime artillery attacks, for example, which had the effect of angering not only the enemy but his own troops as well. But he emerged unscathed. The same could not be said of his career. Although he returned to government in 1917 as minister of munitions, gaining valuable knowledge of the latest advances in weaponry, followed by service as secretary of state for war, for air, and, finally, for the colonies, he lost his seat in 1922, joining the Communist candidate in his Durham constituency at the bottom of the list. Kept out of much of the campaign by an operation, he contributed the memorable line “In the twinkling of an eye, I found myself without an office, without a seat, without a Party and without an appendix.”

  Another organ has been mentioned less kindly: he was simply “a floating kidney in the body politic,” drawn in two directions by his dual nature as conservative adventurer, being “both cautious and wild by turns.” He tried to turn his mind away from current politics and instead to writing, including an excellent history of the war. Churchill may have been a likable outcast to some, but there was no doubting his condition. He was in the wilderness.

  —

  Bertie had had a rather different war. On his twenty-first birthday, the king made him a Knight of the Garter, a distinct honor and, apparently, a vote of confidence in his son. He would return to the navy after his convalescence, seeing more action—including a U-boat attack that brought him face to face with human death—until his health again forced him out. He would spend the rest of the war in England, apart from a quick visit to France soon before the end while seconded to the new Royal Air Force. He received flying lessons and, eventually, certification.

  He went on to perform the duties of a young prince and continued to learn from his father. The period gave him useful practice, particularly in visiting hospitals, soon to become a royal staple. News of it reached as far as the United States, where Franklin Roosevelt later told the story of George V noticing “a huge tattoo” on top of an injured man’s chest. The king

  asked what it was, to which the man had said: “It is Your Majesty, sir.” The King made him open his shirt and the man showed him not only himself, but on the top of his back, Queen Mary, and on each arm the Prince of Wales and Princess Mary. The King congratulated him on his patriotism, to which the man replied: “That isn’t all, sir; whenever I sits down I sits on Kaiser Bill and von Hindenburg”!

  In June 1920 the king named his son the Duke of York, which had been his own former title, and set for him an expanding program of royal duties. Bertie also developed a few special interests, notably in factories, so that his brothers called him “the Foreman.” He probably did not mind; to him this was more than royal busywork. Then, in 1923, he scored an even greater success with his marriage to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. It nearly did not happen but did thanks to a frie
nd, J. C. C. Davidson, who girded him with the will to propose, which he had thought he could not do. She accepted on the third attempt. The two had laid eyes on each other at a tea given at Spencer House, owned by Churchill’s cousin. It was their second meeting but their first as young adults. She had been hesitant during the courtship, and there had been another suitor, whom it was said Queen Mary had helped to remove from the competition. The two developed their own affectionate language, known as the “mutual telegram” in the shape of a smile, and began a most successful marriage.

  Once again his father was gratified. “By your quiet useful work you have endeared yrself to the people,” he wrote to him. “I am quite certain that Elizabeth will be a splendid partner.” This was an understatement. The duke’s marriage, wrote his official biographer, was nothing less than the “first great climacteric of his life . . . it brought him much for which he had long craved in deprivation—love, understanding, sympathy, support . . . and his whole conspectus of life changed accordingly.” She was the primary source of his strength from then on, according to most accounts, and also helped to ease relations with his larger family by becoming a favored confidante of his brothers. All this greatly pleased the king, who reaffirmed Bertie’s position as favorite son.

  They took up residence in the small White Lodge in Richmond Park. Daughter Elizabeth was born in 1926 and Margaret Rose in 1930. It was the duke’s private happiness with his own immediate family that girded him in public. He was much aided by his wife, who also supervised his parenting, for example, when instructing him never to shout at his daughters as his own father had done with him, thereby “making you feel uncomfortable [and losing] all your real affection.”

  He did not need to be loved by millions of subjects; he now had all the love he appeared to want from his own tiny circle. The confidence that this particular source of security granted made it possible, and even probable, that the two would combine in strength, allowing Bertie to further the familial role that his father and great-grandmother had promoted so assiduously. This was doing as well as being. He said upon his return from Australia and New Zealand in July 1927:

  I return a thorough optimist. When one has travelled over the vast extent of the Empire; when one has witnessed what our fathers have accomplished; when one has seen how the grit and creative purpose of our kinsmen have triumphed over the most tremendous difficulties, it is impossible to despair of the future of the British race. The same qualities which carried us successfully through the war will, I am convinced, so long as we remain united as members of one family, enable us to surmount all difficulties that may beset us, however formidable or however perplexing.

  —

  In November 1928, King George V became ill and began a prolonged decline lasting another seven years, so long, in fact, that when the end finally came, Bertie was caught by surprise: “What’s all this about the King not being well?” The duke and his elder brother, the Prince of Wales, returned to Buckingham Palace, though the latter, who had been visiting Africa, took longer to get there in 1928. “I am going to bag the Throne in your absence!!!!” the duke joked. The king died on January 20, 1936. The prince broke down in his mother’s arms, screaming and crying. She responded by kissing his hand the moment her husband was gone. Thus began the most difficult period in Bertie’s life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Abdication

  The interwar years—Churchill called a portion of them “the Loaded Pause”—were fateful for both men. Bertie would marry, have children, and endure the worst crisis to befall the British monarchy in recent memory. By the end of 1936 he would be king. Churchill, having found himself again on the margins, again recovered. He would reenter government, once more as a Conservative, having earlier concluded that “Liberalism was a state of mind rather than a growing political force,” only to be sidelined by the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin. Again, he would see his career and reputation founder.

  One reason this time around was his loyalty to King Edward VIII. Churchill was the most prominent, perhaps the only, Tory to do so well after it was politic or useful. The unhappy royal may have known better: “I want no more of this Princing!” he was overheard to say before his coronation, adding, “I want to be an ordinary person” and “I suppose the fact of the matter is that I’m quite the wrong sort of person to be Prince of Wales.” To his brother Bertie he later said something similar: “It was never in my scheme of things to be King of England.”

  Or he may have prepared for it and may well have intended to keep it. A monarch with a loose reputation was nothing new. Edward was said to take after his free-spirited grandfather, who followed in the wake of so many decades of the reign of the staid Queen Victoria, so much so that the term “Victorian” will forever carry the association of dark rooms, tight collars and corsets, and large, virtuous families. Stern, strict, and dutiful George V, who followed Edward VII, brought about a kind of restoration, and his son, too, may have been expected to perpetuate the cycle.

  The twentieth century has been described with good reason as the age of extremes. The new king declared that his bachelor days were over and that he was now determined to marry an American, Wallis Simpson, “a nice, quiet, well-bred mouse of a woman with large startled eyes and a huge mole.” The problem was that she was a divorcée who was still married to her second husband when this latest association began. Edward could not remain on the throne if he were married to such a person. There could be no doubt of that. His determination to impose his beloved Wallis upon the British people and to demand her acceptance took things too far. He was her “absolute slave,” and was unmovable. He even began to speak with a slight American accent. He cared little for the concerns of those around him and even less for the popular press. Both were errors. “The Battle for the Throne,” meanwhile, “had begun.” Its partisans were not only journalists but also figures like Sibyl Colefax, the salonnière hostess whose circle, it was said, was “a party of lunatics presided over by an efficient, trained hospital nurse,” and her chief rival, Emerald Cunard, whose circle was “a party of lunatics presided over by a lunatic.” So formidable was the mobilization of gossip by these people that they and others like them were seen to be the arbiters of a royal split. The king’s loyal but dwindling camp began to wonder how much longer the ordeal could drag out. The Canadian press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook foretold the end to the Anglo-American social adventurer Chips Channon:

  “Our cock would be all right if only he would fight, but at the moment he will not even crow.”

  “Cocks crow better in the morning.”

  “Not this one.”

  Churchill, however, stood by Edward. “What crime . . . had the King committed?” he asked. “Had we not sworn allegiance to him? Were we not bound to that oath? Was he to be condemned unheard? Was he seeking to do anything that was not permitted to the meanest of his subjects?”

  Why did Churchill do it? At that time, he was a man of known qualities, but he was also tenaciously, even permanently, unpredictable. There was no record of hostility, true enough, and Churchill was a loyal monarchist. He and his father had not always seen eye to eye with their respective sovereigns and, in the latter’s case, had even reached the point of a public breach. Yet Churchill was said to like this king, a “chatty, handy type of monarch,” and had been close to him socially. Churchill was consistent about many things, and inconsistent about others, but the one value from which he never wavered was his reverence for the institution of the monarchy, and this now included defending the flawed man on the throne. Churchill’s real feelings were probably mixed, as suggested by his later confession to Beaverbrook: “Perhaps we were both wrong that time.” He may well have placed Edward in a different category. Or this may be reading too much between the lines. Once, during a game of bridge, “Winston, having led up to and sacrificed his king, declared: ‘Nothing is here for tears. The king cannot fall unworthily if he falls to the sword of the ace.’” />
  A less charitable view of the crisis has held that this had nothing, or at least very little, to do with whom the king married or bedded and everything to do with Churchill’s own political ambitions and corresponding strategies. By 1930, if not earlier, Churchill had cast his lot decidedly against Baldwin, “the cabin-boy made captain,” who became determined to see abdication through as rapidly as possible after a difficult delay. There was no love lost between them. Churchill considered Baldwin, along with Joseph Chamberlain, father of Neville, to have had the most devastating effect on the country of any two politicians. It is probably impossible to disentangle Churchill’s motives, although given the result—it would coincide with his longest period in the wilderness, lasting over a decade—it was more likely that he wished the king to survive more than he wished Baldwin to fall. In any case, “to bugger Baldwin,” as Beaverbrook (who genuinely did seek Baldwin’s defeat) put it, was not entirely consistent with Churchill’s nature. Baldwin, “half Machiavelli, half Milton,” had brought some of this on himself, pretending for too long that the crisis was not really happening, then wishing it away at the final moment by taking an absolute position in favor of abdication, more or less concurrent with the king’s own ultimatum over his decision regarding Mrs. Simpson. “Let this thing be settled between you and me alone,” the king was supposed to have said to him. “I don’t want outside interference.” By then this was out of the question. Churchill was not the only one who “had put himself in a false position.” Baldwin “flung up his hand. ‘We are all in false positions!’” The final position was, Wallis or the throne. That is certainly not the way Churchill would have preferred it, for while his loyalty to the king was clear, he never took seriously the possibility of Wallis becoming queen. He dismissed whatever power she had, which was considerable. Nor had Bertie publicly admitted the possibility that his brother would not become and remain king. At the very least, he never expected it to happen so soon.