17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up

by Andrew Morton

  These swirling undercurrents found no place in Herman Rogers’s homemade movie of the weekend visit. Describing his holiday as “delightful and interesting,” he seemed to be filming a typical jolly house party in the Highlands rather than a piece of history—Edward VIII’s first and last visit as king to Queen Victoria’s former home. For once the weather was good enough for guests to be served outside by liveried footmen. Louis Mountbatten tried to outdo the king at a curious game of arrow golf, apparently an Austrian invention, while Mountbatten and the king’s brother the Duke of Kent joked around with a huge black cloak that resembled a wizard’s costume. In fact it was used by the king to disguise himself when he went stalking, so as not to alert the grazing deer. During excursions around the 40,000-acre estate the king looked relaxed, smoking his pipe and eating a snack, seemingly at peace with the world. This was hardly the appearance of a man who had contemplated suicide a couple of weeks before.

  The nearest Herman Rogers came to piercing the bonhomie was a black-and-white picture he took of the king and Wallis by a waterfall at Gelder Shiel. Both the king and Wallis look warily, somewhat sadly, at the camera, as if pondering the difficult road ahead, the hunters about to become the prey.

  That journey was not long coming. Shortly after leaving Balmoral, Wallis rented a house in Felixstowe on the Suffolk coast in October to await her divorce case, which was due to be heard in nearby Ipswich. “Do you still want me to go ahead?” she wrote to the king. “I feel it will hurt your popularity in the country.” He brushed aside her concerns and on October 27 Wallis was granted a divorce from Ernest. A by-product was one of the most famous royal headlines ever. The Chicago Sun-Times screamed: “King’s Moll Reno’d in Wolsey’s Home Town” (Cardinal Wolsey was Henry VIII’s most powerful advisor).

  That night, as compensation, the king presented her with a fabulous emerald ring inscribed with the words “WE are ours now 27x36.” It was intended as her engagement ring, and WE was their shorthand for Wallis and Edward. She moved to a rented apartment on Cumberland Terrace in Regent’s Park, where she would stay for the next few weeks. From now on it was a waiting game—in six months’ time her decree nisi would become absolute, allowing Wallis the opportunity to marry Edward before the Coronation in May 1937. At least that was the king’s plan.

  Wallis became increasingly jittery as the full implications of what the king was proposing gradually dawned on her. Shortly after her divorce petition was granted she had a frank conversation with Lady Londonderry at a party hosted by Emerald Cunard in Grosvenor Square. Lady Londonderry warned her about the damaging accounts appearing in the American media about her relationship with the king. Bluntly, Lady Londonderry told her that she would never be accepted as queen by the British people.

  Mrs. Simpson acknowledged that no one had been really candid with “a certain person” about the true climate of opinion. Lady Londonderry agreed, saying that if the king’s “real friends all help, much can be done to silence all this weird conspiracy.”

  That said, a “certain person” had not been forthcoming even to his closest friends and most trusted advisors. Herman and Katherine Rogers were kept in the dark, as was his lawyer, Walter Monckton. He had always believed, based on confidential conversations, that marriage was out of the question and that Mrs. Simpson was simply looking forward to enjoying her freedom. When Herman was finally let in on the king’s thinking, he argued strongly that he should stay on the throne. As he told Endicott Peabody, his former headmaster at Groton School, the alma mater of FDR and Rogers himself:

  I should like you to know that every possible and sincere effort was made from this house to prevent the King from abdicating. I believe the King chose the wrong course. He knows what I think and we are still friends. But at least he made his choice soberly. I doubt if he will ever regret it.

  As for Wallis, she felt trapped, realizing more than anyone that the king would literally follow her to the ends of the earth to be with her. She felt, though, that going abroad would help the king focus on his position and stem the growing tide of gossip. For a mad moment she even considered fleeing to China but knew that the king would follow her. Out of sight, out of mind was a remedy proffered by many. Even President Roosevelt’s mother, Sara, pitched in, writing to her godson Herman urging Wallis to return to the United States:

  I do so wish W Simpson would come back to Baltimore and stay where she belongs. The poor young king owed it to his country to settle down with his own people and if he does not marry in his own class he ought to give up these intimacies and leave the ladies alone.

  It was a forlorn hope, the king’s private secretary, Major Hardinge, writing to Edward in early November stating baldly that the British press were about to break their silence and that the Cabinet were about to meet to discuss the serious situation. He strongly suggested Mrs. Simpson go abroad immediately to avoid a political crisis. While Wallis was stunned by the letter, she was in broad agreement, believing that their position was so “hopeless” it could only mean “tragedy for him and catastrophe for me.”

  The king was deaf to all entreaties. On November 16 he summoned Prime Minister Baldwin and told him that marriage to Wallis was “an indispensable condition of my continued existence, whether as a king or man.” In response, Baldwin presented the king with three choices. He could give up the idea of marriage, as the Church, the British people, Parliament, and the Dominions would not contemplate the king marrying a woman with two husbands still living. Alternatively, if he chose to marry against the wishes of his ministers, this would cause a constitutional crisis, as the government would resign. The final choice was abdication. After listening carefully, Edward repeated that if the country opposed the marriage, he was prepared to abdicate. Later that evening he delivered the same obstinate message to Queen Mary and his three brothers. All were dumbstruck and horrified. They thought he had gone mad, the Duchess of York expressing her bewilderment in a letter to Queen Mary:

  Staying here, in a very normal English shooting party, it seems almost incredible that David contemplates such a step and every day I pray to God that he will see reason and not abandon his people. I am sure that it would be a great shock to everybody and a horrible position for us naturally.

  Immediately after seeing his family, the king travelled to South Wales for a two-day visit to this depressed region where he uttered the immortal phrase “Something must be done about it” as he walked past the loyal crowds of impoverished families and hungry children. It was a populist gesture, one that worried politicians who felt he was trespassing beyond his constitutional role.

  While he was with the destitute and homeless, Wallis was enjoying lunch at Claridge’s with newspaper owner Esmond Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere. He floated the idea of a morganatic marriage, a device whereby Edward could marry Mrs. Simpson but on the condition that she would merely be his consort and would not take the title of Queen of England.

  It was an idea first promoted by Princess Stephanie in tandem with Ambassador von Ribbentrop, who was desperate to keep Edward on the throne. He tried to send the king a personal message via the pro-German Lord Clive, stating that the “German people stood behind him in his struggle.” He even summoned his diplomatic staff and told them: “King Edward must fight, and you will see, Gentlemen, that he is going to win the battle against the plotters!”

  While Wallis listened intently as Harmsworth explained this unusual marital device, she was not aware of the social nuances that were associated with morganatic marriage. As their friend Diana Mosley later recalled, the king, acutely aware of the niceties of rank and position, was not enamoured. “A morganatic wife is a second-class wife, the target of every petty-minded Court official and the recipient of endless pin pricks.”

  Nonetheless the king agreed to place the idea before Baldwin who, at their meeting of November 25, promised to consult the prime ministers of the Dominions as well as his cabinet. The chances of success were slim. Under English law, such an innovation would
have required a special Act of Parliament as well as the full support of all the countries throughout the empire. So it proved, Baldwin reporting a week later that there was no appetite in the empire or at home for such a matrimonial device.

  In Parliament, blunt-spoken Communist MP William Gallacher pointed his finger at the “sinister processes” of Ambassador von Ribbentrop in trying to impose a morganatic marriage on the country. “I want to draw your attention to the fact that Mrs. Simpson has a social set, and every member of the cabinet knows that the social set of Mrs. Simpson is closely identified with a certain foreign government and the ambassador of that foreign government.” It was the most pointed public pronouncement yet about the machinations of von Ribbentrop, Princess Stephanie, and other foreign parties.

  While these negotiations were under way, Wallis was under virtual siege from the media and the plain curious at her Cumberland Terrace apartment. Daily she received hate mail and death threats. It was only a matter of time, she feared, before one of these threats became real. Concerned for her welfare, the king asked his Scotland Yard bodyguard to see if patrols around the Terrace could be discreetly increased. She was now firmly of the opinion that for her own safety she should leave the country.

  The so-called king’s party, which had formed around Winston Churchill, Lord Beaverbrook, and war secretary Duff Cooper, had the same idea but for a different reason. They believed that if “Cutie” left the country for the winter it would focus the king on the Coronation in May. By then, his passion would have waned, Edward would do his duty, and the monarchy would be spared.

  Years later, Churchill admitted that Wallis had been given added incentive to leave after Beaverbrook apparently instructed journalists at his Daily Express newspaper to mount a campaign of intimidation. “Then terrible things began to happen,” recalled Churchill. Bricks were thrown at her dining room window to terrify her, poison pen letters arrived, and angry slogans were written on the walls of neighbouring houses.

  It was the brick throwing that prompted her immediate flight; she left her London prison for Fort Belvedere before accepting an invitation from the Rogerses, who had been contacted by the king, to spend the next few weeks at their villa, Lou Viei, in the South of France.

  After suffering a nightmare journey in the company of Lord in Waiting Lord Brownlow, she finally arrived at the Rogerses’ villa, exhausted and strung out. Once settled, she wrote to the king, urging him not to abdicate. There was self-interest at stake. She believed that she would be blamed for the crisis and felt that it would be better to discuss his marital ambitions once he had been formally crowned king-emperor in May. Delay would give him a stronger negotiating position, advice also proffered by Beaverbrook and Harmsworth. They gave him to think that with time and patience he could have it all—remain sovereign and marry Mrs. Simpson.

  It was apparent to everyone, including Wallis, that Edward was intent on abdicating, no matter what. He seemed to have given little if any thought to his future role, his wife’s title and honours, whether they could remain or return to Britain, as well as their financial future. It was a fatal mistake.

  Events were now moving towards a tragic conclusion. On December 3 the British media finally broke its silence, a gush of articles on the matter drowning out all other news. As the Earl of Crawford drily observed: “After months, one might almost say years, the torrent is overwhelming—a cascade of articles, pictures, headlines, one would think that the relations of the king and Mrs Simpson must exclude all other topics . . . .The temptation to magnify the affair is irresistible—to propagate every possible rumour, however absurd.”

  He was right to be cynical, as every piece of gossip, hearsay, and innuendo was eagerly devoured. Bloomsbury Group hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose circle included literary luminaries like D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and T. S. Eliot, was typical, noting in her diary that the king “had injections to make himself more virile and they affected his head and have made him very violent. Poor little fellow, they also say he has been drinking all these last weeks and has signed two abdications and torn them up.”

  On the authority of the Home Secretary, the king’s conversations with Wallis were now being intercepted by MI5, the prime minister anxious to know what the king was thinking. Isolated in her villa, Wallis was put under enormous pressure to give up the king, which she duly did, issuing a press statement on December 7 stating that she wished to “avoid any action or proposal that would hurt or damage His Majesty.” Furthermore, she declared herself willing to withdraw from a situation which had become “unhappy and untenable.”

  It had no effect. By now the royal die was cast, Edward intent on abdication. On December 10, only a week after the crisis became general knowledge, the king made his historic radio address telling the world that he found it “impossible to do my duty as king and emperor without the help and support of the woman I love.” He stressed that, until the last, Wallis had tried to persuade him to take a different course. As he mentioned her name, Wallis, who was listening to the broadcast hiding under a blanket on a sofa in the sitting room at Lou Viei, jumped to her feet and fled the room, crying: “Did you hear what he has said?”

  Meanwhile, outside Buckingham Palace, five hundred Blackshirts, shouting support and giving the Fascist salute, chanted “We want Edward.” They had no effect.

  King no more, with the title HRH Duke of Windsor, Edward drove through the dark and dismal December night for HMS Fury, which took him across the Channel on the first leg of his journey to Austria, where the Rothschild family had offered him Schloss Enzesfeld, their castle near Vienna. He left behind him a nation in shock, if not in mourning. “I knew now that I was irretrievably on my own,” he wrote in his memoirs. “The drawbridges were going up behind me.”

  He had reigned for just 325 days.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Love in a Cold Climate

  She was right of course. As she predicted, the American was blamed for the abdication, a nation’s venom directed at the outsider who had dared take away their golden-haired boy. From the throne room at Buckingham Palace to the cowsheds in Caerphilly, Wallis Simpson was spoken of with derision and disdain.

  The new queen could not, would not, utter her name, contemptuously referring to Wallis as “that woman.” Princess Marina dismissed her as a “dangerous adventuress,” while Queen Maud of Norway sincerely hoped that something nasty would happen to the “bad woman” who she believed had hypnotized him.

  Yes, that was it. She had bewitched him with sex, using bizarre techniques she had learned in the singing houses of Shanghai and Peking. It was said she was an expert in the celebrated “Singapore Grip,” or what the French called the “Cleopatra grip.” The joke went round that while other harlots were able to pick up pennies, she picked up a sovereign.

  He was her slave. Her sex slave. That was it.

  Diarist Chips Channon recalled how she spoke to him as if he was a naughty schoolboy, then rapped his knuckles when he begged for cigarettes. Just like a trained poodle. He even got on his knees to buckle her shoes—and in front of the servants. The story soon went round about the butler who entered the sitting room at the Fort to find Edward on all fours, painting Wallis’s toenails. He promptly resigned.

  Not forgetting that she was an out-and-out gold-digger. “Really she seems to have turned out an arch adventuress of the worst type,” noted her fellow American and Conservative MP, Nancy Astor, with barely disguised contempt. Downing Street advisor Sir Horace Wilson swallowed the thesaurus as he spat out his loathing. “Selfish, self-seeking, hard, calculating, ambitious, scheming and dangerous,” he wrote in an official memorandum. Baldwin simply shrugged: “If she were what I call a respectable whore, I wouldn’t mind.” Sir Horace, though, was not done with her.

  He continued: “Her line throughout seemed to be to feather her own nest and to save her own skin. She steadily ‘fed’ [the American Hearst press] with material which gradually brought matters to a head in a way which m
ade the king’s position untenable.”

  Though Wallis was virtually out for the count after this beating, she would have fought back at this canard. Both she and the duke bitterly concluded that it was the American press that engineered the crisis. The duke later told American ambassador to Austria George Messersmith during a visit to Vienna: “It is because of the American newspapers that I am here today.”

  Not just a gold-digger, but a spy to boot. That was it.

  That Wallis was a potential spy, blackmailer, and Nazi-lover was never seriously challenged inside the Establishment. Indeed, on the day that Edward renounced his throne this mindset was reinforced, Downing Street being warned by Scotland Yard detectives watching Mrs. Simpson’s movements in the South of France that she was planning to flee to Nazi Germany. In a handwritten note to the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police on December 10, 1936, a Scotland Yard official confirmed he had instructed the two personal protection officers to remain with her at Cannes. In guarded language the senior officer indicated that Mrs. Simpson “intended to ‘flit’” to Germany.

  Snubbed by local French society, watched by five French gendarmes and three Scotland Yard police officers and dozens of reporters and cameramen, Wallis was living in social purgatory. She wrote to Edward: “So much scandal has been whispered about me, even that I am a spy, that I am shunned by people, so until I have the protection of your name I must remain hidden.”

  At the time, the least likely explanation for the crisis was that the king was actually in love. It was the conclusion eventually arrived at by Winston Churchill, the man who had suffered most, at least politically, because of his loyalty to the king. Some time later, he reflected on the love affair that threatened Crown and country, telling Queen Mary’s lady-in-waiting, Mabell, Countess of Airlie, that the duke’s love was one of the great loves of history: