Churchill and the King

by Kenneth Weisbrode

  The moment could not be relished for long. The Germans had begun a new air assault, only now with the dreaded V-1 rockets, the so-called doodlebugs. They caught many people by surprise; even Lord Cherwell did not believe how destructive they could be. “For sheer damnable devilry what could be worse than this awful instrument?” asked an enraged James Lees-Milne. The V-2s, introduced a short while later, were supposedly more powerful but less terrifying, “for when you hear them you know you’re all right.” The attacks hit, as before, close to home. The Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks was destroyed; the king and Churchill retreated once more to the palace air-raid shelter for their luncheons. Lees-Milne and others resumed their duty as wardens and stretcher-bearers. Harold Nicolson’s had been to sit “on the top of the Victoria Tower pressing bells.” To him it was “immensely exciting.”

  Churchill traveled to Moscow again in October. He and Stalin went to the Bolshoi, where they were feted by crowds. The experience was replicated the following month in Paris when he and Eden joined Charles de Gaulle at the Hôtel de Ville: the city had been liberated in August. Churchill was given a German flag and invited to speak in his funny French. He and de Gaulle went on parade, laid a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe, at the Clemenceau statue, and at Foch’s tomb; he was awarded the Croix de la Libération. The crowds chanted “Chur-chill!” and, according to Eden, “not for one minute did Winston stop crying . . . he could have filled buckets.” De Gaulle had given him the room at the Quai d’Orsay that the king and queen had used on their last visit before the war. Eden went to see him and heard sounds in the bathroom: “Come in, come in, that is if you can bear to see me in a gold bath when you only have a silver one,” Churchill announced. The bathtub had been meant for Goering.

  —

  “Do you think that there is any chance of London being ‘Liberated’ in the coming months?” the queen asked Churchill. “My heart aches for our wonderful brave people . . . and I long for them to have a lightening of their burden.” They were almost there.

  In February 1945 came the conference at Yalta. Churchill arrived in his Skymaster; FDR in his, called the Sacred Cow. Everything they could ask for was provided, even when the requests were made in jest. When Churchill noted that FDR’s orange tree provided more fruit than his, a new one appeared right away, along with lemon trees, “gold fish in a stone pool brought from who knows where . . . [and] flower beds bright with zinnias and geraniums, blooming hypocritically in their buried pots.”

  They ate and drank well. But Churchill was “fiercely controversial.” By now, he was playing a losing hand against the Soviet Union, and the ailing Roosevelt seemed unable to help. So much time had passed since Churchill promised, back in 1940, that a liberated Poland would rejoin the European family of nations. It was now self-evident that “all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevised; and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for poor Poland either.” Still, he said a month later that he had “not the slightest intention of being cheated over Poland, not even if we go to the verge of war with Russia,” but there was precious little leverage. Stalin took little time to reveal his policy. Churchill was with the king at Buckingham Palace on February 28 when news arrived of the first Soviet heavy-handedness toward Romania and Bulgaria. “My God,” Eden said, “what a mess Europe is in! What a mess!” Indeed, Stalin in Eden’s recollection was “the only one of the three who has a clear view of what he wants and is a tough negotiator. PM is all emotion in these matters, FDR vague and jealous of others.”

  In March, Colville noticed “[i]t was strange to see footmen in livery again” at embassy dinner parties. The next month the sky was “black with Fortresses and Liberators” coming home from their bombing missions across the Channel, where earlier “the Battle of Britain raged hottest and the Flying Bombs did their worst.” Churchill visited the Rhine, and Brooke feared that “he longed to get into the most exposed position possible . . . at this moment of success. He had often told me that the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.” He would live, but in a few weeks Roosevelt died. The king discouraged Churchill from attending the funeral in the United States and instead they took part in a memorial service in the damaged St. Paul’s Cathedral on April 17. The king and Princess Elizabeth wore their military uniforms—his naval and hers from the Auxiliary Territorial Service. The queen dressed in black. “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played and Churchill cried, conspicuously.

  Lascelles, meanwhile, had ordered floodlights at Buckingham Palace be prepared for an anticipated royal appearance on the balcony. It was rumored to be unsafe and in need of reinforcement, and the king wondered about “the dramatic conclusion to the war and to his reign if it disintegrated under the weight of himself, the Queen and Churchill.”

  —

  Then, victory.

  Ismay was the one to give Churchill the news. Or almost. Eisenhower called Ismay at 3:00 a.m. and told it to him. When Ismay then put a call in to Churchill, his line failed, so “[t]here was nothing for it but to collect some coppers, put on a dressing-gown, and go to the public call-box a hundred yards down the road,” only to be told that Churchill had somehow “already heard the glad news and gone to bed.”

  Churchill later called the king and told him, then celebrated with his staff.

  Brooke merely noted that his “main sensation is one of infinite mental weariness!” The king also was said to have “felt the strain of the war terribly. He looked shattered.” Churchill had been exhausted for weeks, often staying in bed and working from there throughout the day. On V-E Day he roused himself to attend or preside at commemorations lasting well until the early hours of the morning.

  He drafted the last paragraph of the king’s victory broadcast, ending with the line “The power and might of Germany is finally broken.” The king had to wait another day to make it, since V-E Day was to be declared on May 8, 1945. It was one of the few times in his life that he genuinely seemed eager to speak by radio, “just like waiting for one’s wife to have a baby.” In spite of gathering crowds at the palace, the king resisted showing himself on the balcony, “not wishing to shoot his grouse before the Twelfth, so to speak.”

  The next day was, appropriately, a Tuesday. The king recorded: “The Prime Minister came to lunch. We congratulated each other on the end of the European War. The day we have been longing for has arrived at last, & we can look back with thankfulness to God that our tribulation is over.” Trafalgar Square had filled with people. All the surrounding streets were full of bodies pressing to be near the palace. Loudspeakers had been set up near Parliament Square, and from them came Churchill’s voice, following the chimes of Big Ben. His words echoed off the walls of the palace. He announced the German surrender, after which “God Save the King” was sung.

  James Lees-Milne wandered to Piccadilly Circus, which was lit up by bright lamps. The crowd danced and sang and laughed. The people “were orderly and good humoured. All the English virtues were on the surface. . . . The scene was more Elizabethan than neo-Georgian, a spontaneous peasant game, a dance round the maypole, almost Bruegelian, infinitely bucolic.” The two princesses ran around the streets, as incognito as possible. Back at the palace, Their Majesties appeared on the balcony, over and over. Churchill joined them. “One’s heart was too full with all the cheering and recollections of six years to speak to anyone,” Halifax wrote. “It is an amazing thing that just as both Houses go to the place of worship, so the populace flocks to Buckingham Palace to see the symbol of everything that they instinctively gather up in articulate patriotism.”

  On May 17 the king delivered his victory address to Parliament. He delivered it flawlessly except for a slip on the word “imperishable” and a breaking of his voice when he mentioned the Duke of Kent.

  A reprise took place in August with V-J Day. Crowds swarmed, facing the crimson-and-gold-decked balcony of Buckingham Pal
ace, chanting, “We want the King. We want the Queen,” although less raucously than before. The “façade looked splendid, but the minute royal standard was out of scale.” Then, as Lees-Milne observed,

  [a]t last, just after midnight, the French window opened a crack, then wider, and out came the King and Queen. They were tiny . . . her little figure swathed in a fur, and something sparkling in her hair. The gold buttons of his Admiral’s uniform glistened. Both waved in a slightly self-conscious fashion and stood for three minutes. Then they retreated. The crowd waved with great applause, and all walked quietly home.

  “Thus has ended the World War which started 6 years ago to-day,” wrote the king in his diary on September 3.

  —

  One evening the previous May, Lascelles had noticed an owl sitting and hooting on top of one of the chimney pots at Windsor. “I’ve never seen an owl do this before.” The country’s mood had shifted. In July, Churchill took a restful visit to France, where he began to paint again. He went on to Berlin, where he toured the Chancellery building, whose floors were covered with “files, papers, pieces of broken furniture . . . [and] hundreds of new Iron Cross medals,” and Hitler’s bunker. Churchill “said nothing. He did not seem greatly interested. . . . His thoughts were elsewhere.”

  Denouement

  I shall be glad when this election business is over,” Churchill had said. “It hovers over me like a vulture of uncertainty in the sky.” He did not like elections but had waged them most of his life. He liked to quote his father in this respect: “Never . . . be afraid of British democracy.” But it disappointed him. Some people threw stones; a squib nearly hit him in the face. And he was exhausted—more so, he said, than he had ever been since the Boer War.

  On Election Day, July 26, 1945, Churchill was seen in his siren suit holding a cigar. He appeared impassive; the only emotion he showed was when he was told that the king had sent word to say how much he would be missed. The British people had defeated his party and turned him out of office.

  “Five million against us.”

  “Keep alert,” he advised some young friends of one of his daughters. “It’s your turn now. I’ve thrown the reins on the horse’s neck. . . .”

  “But you won the race, sir,” one of them interjected.

  “Yes . . . and in consequence I’ve been warned off the Turf!”

  Beaverbrook had predicted the result: “Winston is a great war P.M., but he is not the man for the peace.” Or as Churchill put it, he would not be the one to “bring the magic of averages to the aid of millions,” and would not even be on hand through the end of the Potsdam Conference—code-named “Terminal.” He was replaced there by Clement Attlee.

  It is not difficult to imagine how he must have felt. He had given a sense of it, some decades earlier, in a biographical sketch of King Alfonso XIII of Spain. In it he made a distinction between monarchs and politicians, noting that the latter should be prepared to be tossed out at any time, but if this happened to the former, the damage was spiritual as well as political. For him at this moment, though, the two roles and sets of emotions must have blurred. Poor Alfonso: “To begin life again in middle age under novel and contracted conditions with a status and in a state of mind never before experienced. . . . Surely a harsh destiny!” Now the portrayal came closer to home: “To have given his best, to have faced every peril and anxiety, to have accomplished great things, to have presided over his country during all the perils of the twentieth century . . . and then to be violently rejected by the nation of which he was so proud, of whose tradition and history he was the embodiment, the nation he had sought to represent in all the finest actions of his life—surely this was enough to try the soul of mortal man.” Even, or especially, if he were warned to expect it.

  Maybe his defeat would turn out, to repeat his familiar riposte, to be another blessing in disguise, “quite effectively disguised,” but for now he felt right back in 1922 and all the other dark times: rejected and rebuffed.

  On July 30 “at 7 p.m. he said quaintly to [Captain] Pim: ‘Fetch me my carriage and I shall go to the Palace.’” There he submitted his resignation. The king recorded that “it was a very sad meeting.”

  I told him I thought the people were very ungrateful after the way they had been led in the War. He was very calm. . . . I asked him if I should send for Mr. Attlee to form a government & he agreed. We said good bye & I thanked him for all his help to me during the 5 War Years.

  The next day he wrote:

  Your breadth of vision & your grasp of the essential things were a great comfort to me in the darkest days of the War, & I like to think that we have never disagreed on any really important matter. For all those things I thank you most sincerely. I feel that your conduct as Prime Minister & Minister of Defence has never been surpassed. You have had many difficulties to deal with both as a politician & as a strategist of war but you have always surmounted them with supreme courage.

  The king’s point is well taken. There were few recorded disagreements between the two, apart from the rather silly D-Day affair. Where the king found Churchill’s logic wanting, he generally asked for more information or for a clarification, that is, to be persuaded, which he almost always was with a bit of his own contribution. The lack of disagreement may be taken as resulting from deference to Churchill, but it was not doctrinaire.

  So, in the end—did the king matter to the war? Operationally, probably not. There is not a single major decision or policy that Churchill and his government changed solely on his advice or only to satisfy him. He was no hidden hand, nor sought to be one. But the operational question is the wrong one; it does not solve the puzzle posed at the outset of this book. A better conclusion is found by asking whether their alliance mattered for Churchill and his own capacity as leader. Here the answer must be yes. It had as much to do with the character of the king as it did with the deficiencies of Churchill, if that’s what they were. No matter how much he was in demand in the spring of 1940, Churchill was regarded in some critical corners of British society as something of a foreign body: he was mistrusted and always would be, not merely for who he was but also for what he did over the course of his turbulent political career.

  The king augmented Churchill’s authority and, in a curious way, contributed an aspect of humility that he otherwise would have found difficult to feign, especially among the classes that were coolest toward him. It underwrote Churchill’s sense of prerogative and gave him a freer hand to cast himself as his nation’s selfless savior. This might have happened anyway, Britain being as desperate as she was at the time and Churchill being so indomitable. However, after reconstructing the history of the two men in tandem it becomes very difficult to imagine Churchill succeeding in that without the full support of the king, and certainly not if the two had worked deliberately at cross purposes. This was the outer gift. The inner one has already been discussed—that is, the degree to which the two men helped to clarify each other’s thinking and strengthen each other’s spirit through the exercise of a professional and personal alliance against multiple adversaries, including their own fears and deficiencies. This is their primary lesson for leadership: it must have the capacity to work in combination and in concert, or it will not work at all. Prerogative, like adversity, has a fungible value. Anchor it too firmly in one person and it will almost certainly obstruct and destroy him.

  —

  “[I]s it true,” Churchill’s young grandson Nicholas Soames once asked, “that you are the greatest man in the world?” “Yes,” came the reply, “and now bugger off.” Roy Jenkins, who has related that story, agreed. At the very end of his long biography of Churchill, the last book he would ever write, he concluded:

  Of more importance than a comparison of the different obsequies is a judgement between Gladstone, undoubtedly the greatest Prime Minister of the nineteenth century, and Churchill, undoubtedly the greatest of the twentieth century. When I started writ
ing this book I thought that Gladstone was, by a narrow margin, the greater man, certainly the more remarkable specimen of humanity. In the course of writing it I have changed my mind. I now put Churchill, with all his idiosyncrasies, his indulgences, his occasional childishness, but also his genius, his tenacity and his persistent ability, right or wrong, successful or unsuccessful, to be larger than life, as the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.

  Greatness is difficult to measure. It tends to dissipate. With Churchill it took a long time to do so, and he would go on to serve another term as prime minister after 1951. The king, however, had less time left in his reign. The war had exhausted his already frail health. In September, Churchill told his own doctor that he was “shocked by the King’s appearance.” Moran reassured him that the king’s doctors would limit his suffering. “That is all very well with an ordinary patient,” Churchill replied, “but it does not apply to the Monarch. Under the Constitution, the duty of the king’s doctors is to prolong his life as long as possible.”

  On September 23, Churchill “did a thing this morning that I haven’t done in many years—I went down on my knees by my bedside & prayed.”

  The king lingered for a few more months. At dinner on February 5 he “was relaxed and contented. He retired to his room at 10.30 and was occupied with his personal affairs until about midnight when a watchman in the garden observed him affixing the latch of his bedroom window. . . . Then he went to bed and fell peacefully asleep.”