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

by Andrew Morton

  Meanwhile the duke’s relationship with the rest of the royal family continued to deteriorate. His hopes of landing a position as a roving envoy at the British embassy in Washington had languished, the duke told by Bevin that he was unable to recommend any kind of formal attachment. Even his scheme to encourage greater educational links between the two nations, an idea supported by the then Opposition leader Churchill, had fallen on stony ground. While the king encouraged him to live in America and undertake work in a strictly unofficial capacity, the duke and duchess, who had come to loathe the American press and were concerned that they would lose their tax exemptions, preferred to live at La Croë, their rented home in the South of France. The palace turned a deaf ear, too, to pleas from the duke and duchess that they should be allowed to return to England for several months of the year.

  Everything English seemed to be cursed. In the autumn of 1946 they stayed for a month at Ednam Lodge, the country house near Windsor Great Park owned by Eric, Earl of Dudley. It was the Duchess’s first visit to England since the outbreak of the war and is remembered solely for the spectacular theft of the Duchess’s jewels, worth £13 million ($20 million) at today’s prices. The audacious heist from Ednam Lodge gave rise to popular rumours that, as the duke was believed to have given family baubles to Wallis Simpson during their courtship, the robbery was an inside job instigated by the royal family to recover for the king and his daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, family property that was rightfully theirs.

  While this was so much nonsensical supposition—a local housebreaker was the prime but unconvicted suspect—it does demonstrate that the public were instinctively aware of the complete rift inside the royal family, a rupture that no amount of smooth evasions by courtiers could cover up.

  When the duke’s niece Princess Elizabeth married Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark at Westminster Abbey in November 1947, the duke and duchess, as well as Philip’s Nazi relations, were not on the guest list. Two years later, in December 1949, the duke made a final angry entreaty to his brother to give the duchess the title of Her Royal Highness. The king was immovable, as he was in their wrangling about his allowance. As the queen wrote to her daughter just before Christmas:

  Uncle David came and had one of his violent yelling conversations, stamping up and down the room, and very unfairly saying that because Papa wouldn’t (and couldn’t) do a certain thing, that Papa must hate him. So unfair, because Papa is so scrupulously fair and thoughtful and honest about all that has happened. It’s so much easier to yell and pull down and criticize, than to restrain, and build, and think right—isn’t it.

  The duke’s decision to write his memoirs up to the date of the abdication further served to anger his brother and mother as well as senior royal courtiers. The king was “very distressed” according to Harold Nicolson, appalled that his brother would sell the most traumatic period of his life to the highest bidder.

  The court refused to co-operate at all, even denying the request by his ghost writer, American journalist Charles Murphy, to visit his childhood home at York Cottage, Sandringham. When the book, entitled A King’s Story, was published in April 1951 it created an international sensation, though the duke’s delight was marred by the discovery that his wife was suffering from cancer of the womb, which forced her to undergo a hysterectomy.

  It might be thought that the deaths of George VI on February 6, 1952, and his mother, Queen Mary, a year later, would have healed the family split, with a new younger generation taking control of the Crown. Not a bit of it. The duke’s “jaunty” behaviour at his brother’s funeral attracted unfavourable comment. It was clear he could not wait to get away from his family—“these ice-veined bitches” as he ungraciously described the royal ladies in a letter to his wife.

  He wrote to the duchess in a similar tone a year later at the funeral of his “hard as nails” mother, Queen Mary, on March 31, 1953: “What a smug stinking lot my relations are and you’ve never seen such a seedy worn out bunch of old hags most of them have become.”

  The new Elizabethan age kept the duke and duchess outside the palace gates, neither the duke nor the duchess being invited to the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953. This changing of the guard coincided, somewhat ironically, with a renewed campaign led by Churchill, who was back in government as prime minister, to have the Windsor file wiped from history. Not only did he enrol his wartime friend, President Eisenhower, in this enterprise but he also encouraged the Cabinet and several eminent British historians to finally consign the file to the dustbin of history. Churchill, whose romantic and misty-eyed view of monarchy often clouded his judgement, felt passionately that the duke, his late brother George VI, and a “certain lady,” namely the queen mother, should not be embarrassed by the release of these documents.

  As Sarah Bradford observes: “The Queen Mother regarded herself as the guardian of the image of the monarchy which she had done a great deal to create and prop up. She regarded it as a sacred trust and did not want these disagreeable facts emerging.”

  It was almost too late. While the Windsor file had been kicked into the long grass, by now that grass had been duly mown by historians, who had reached the critical period of June 1940 and the Nazi machinations surrounding the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

  The Windsor file itself first appeared on the editorial agenda on June 15, 1949, at a conference of historians presided over by E. J. Passant, librarian of the Foreign Office. Professor E. Malcolm Carroll of Duke University argued that “the essential documents should be published,” while his English colleague Mr. Passant confirmed that the Windsor file was indeed available if selected. Given the slow pace of the project, that process, even without political interference, would take another five years.

  The Windsor documents were incorporated in Volume X Series D of the Documents on German Foreign Policy, which had been edited and translated by the American team of historians based in Washington. The “’ot potato” was ready to be digested by the waiting world.

  With an ever widening circle of those with knowledge of the Windsor file, it was becoming a matter of national pride that it be published. The former German diplomat Erich Kordt, the father of modern German diplomacy, had discussed the existence of the documents and “defied the Allies to publish them.” An American historian, countering the challenge via the columns of an historical review, pledged that they would be.

  Not if Eisenhower and Churchill could help it. A month after the Coronation, on July 3, 1953, General Bedell Smith, under-secretary of state and formerly chief of staff to Eisenhower at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), arranged to see Bernard Noble, head of the historical division at the State Department, at his offices in Washington. The only item on the agenda was the contents of Volume X Series D. Noble later recounted the conversation to the American editor in chief, Dr. Paul Sweet.

  He recalled that the general began very formally, almost like one government speaking to the representative of another. Smith said: “I have instructions to tell you that the British government is going to communicate a list of the documents on the Duke of Windsor which it wishes to have left out of Volume X. You are to inform the editor of the German documents that when he receives the list he will agree to the elimination of these documents.”

  When Noble informed the general that the fundamental underpinning of the entire project was editorial independence, Smith told him that the Eisenhower administration did not feel bound by undertakings entered into by the administration of President Truman.

  As the contentious documents were not due to be published for some time, Professor Sweet was puzzled by this crude political interference. He wondered aloud if Churchill, who ironically had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, was behind the renewed attempt to suppress the Windsor file. Noble indicated in the affirmative, noting that General Smith was acting on instructions from Eisenhower, who in turn had been contacted by Churchill.

  If the Eisenhowe
r administration continued with this new line of censorship, the only weapon in the historian’s armoury was resignation. That night, Sweet told his wife that he might be leaving his job before long.

  Sweet’s instincts proved correct. Just days after suffering a minor stroke, Churchill had written a three-page letter to Eisenhower on June 27, 1953, asking him to use his influence to prevent the publication of the Windsor file.

  The historical importance of the episode is negligible, and the allegations rest only on the assertions of German and pro-German officials in making the most of anything they could pick up. I feel sure your sense of justice and chivalry will make you wish to prevent the United States, by an official publication, from inflicting distress and injury upon one who has so long enjoyed their kindness and hospitality.

  He added that he was approaching the French authorities for their agreement in “refusing to allow the official publication . . . to anybody outside the secret circles.”

  The president’s reply was swift, on July 2 writing that he was “completely astonished” that a microfilm record existed. He recalled that when he was first informed of the documents’ existence in 1945 he had them “thoroughly examined” by Ambassador Winant and a member of his own intelligence staff.

  “They completely agreed that there was no possible value to them, that they were obviously concocted with some idea of promoting German propaganda and weakening Western resistance, and that they were totally unfair to the Duke.” In a subsequent note he was hopeful that the matter would be settled with “decency, justice, and finality.”

  With the Cold War at its height, the Korean War in its death throes, and Senator McCarthy beginning his witch hunt against perceived Communists, gays, and others, this unanimous decision by the two Allied leaders should have sealed the fate of the Windsor file for good. Even though the climate in the 1950s favoured suppression and repression, the historians did not prove so malleable. Bedell Smith reported that the “American editor in chief evidently did not like the idea of doing what he was told about this matter.”

  In a sarcastic note to President Eisenhower, Bedell Smith wrote: “Since all historians (including our own engaged in this project) think that history is more important than anything else, some of them will probably leak.” His assumption proved correct; the historians seemed horrified at this change of policy.

  In a letter to Bernard Noble, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Bernadotte E. Schmitt laid out the “disastrous” consequences for the British, American, and French governments if they went down the road of censorship and expurgation:

  I am reluctant to believe that the United States government would be guilty of going back on the undertaking given to the successive American editors-in-chief. . . . If Volume X appears without the documents in question the editors will not be able to say that they have enjoyed a free hand. . . . Questions will be asked and I fancy the Governments will be hard put to give satisfactory answers.

  As for the British, the current editor in chief, the Honourable Margaret Lambert, indicated that she had an obligation to resign if she was forbidden to publish the documents. Even though the historian came from a Conservative political family—her father, Viscount George Lambert, had served as a member of Parliament under Gladstone and often hosted the Churchills at his Devon home—initially she stoutly resisted political interference.

  They were helped in this rearguard action by the behaviour of the French. After two months waiting for a reply to his letter regarding the Windsor file, Churchill sent Sir Walter Monckton to Paris to speak personally with the French foreign minister, Georges Bidault.

  In his “Top Secret and Personal” report of September 1, 1953, Monckton returned with unhappy tidings. “Throughout the conversation,” reported Monckton, “M. Bidault showed an obvious disposition to help, though he could not, he felt, order the historians to omit the documents.” As an historian himself, Bidault had taken the trouble to consult with the academics working on the papers. The French were of the same mind as their American counterparts:

  Historians are not to be commanded. If this were attempted in the present instance the French historians would resign. In these circumstances he said that the suppression of the documents was impossible but agreed that it would be possible to postpone publication by taking the documents of a different period first.

  Churchill, who had taken responsibility for foreign affairs in April when Anthony Eden took six months’ medical leave, was still for censorship. He took soundings from Lord Beaverbrook, who read the Windsor file on July 18 at his country home of Cherkley Court. Unfortunately there is no note about his response, though it did not change the mind of the prime minister who, as John Colville reported, was “still set on suppression.”

  At a Cabinet meeting on August 25, a few days before Monckton reported the French position, Churchill passionately argued that the publication of the documents would “give pain to the Duke of Windsor” and was of slight historical value. “I propose to interview the British editor in chief and to propose that publication be postponed for at least ten or twenty years, and preferably the Duke’s lifetime.” Lord Salisbury, lord president of the council, argued for publication, saying that the documents’ suppression would “only give the impression that they were more damaging than they in fact were.”

  During the Cabinet discussion Lord Salisbury revealed that he had spoken with the British editor in chief, Miss Lambert, and he believed that she might be more accommodating than had been previously suggested. While she would not welcome any government attempt to limit the historians’ editorial discretion, she herself suggested that publication of this vexed correspondence might be delayed if the documents of an earlier period, notably the Weimar Republic, were published in advance of Volume X Series D. Effectively the Windsor file would be kicked back into the long grass.

  With delay rather than complete suppression the emerging British position, the prime minister, in the company of Minister of Labour Sir Walter Monckton—who had had a ringside seat at the unfolding events in Lisbon in 1940—and Lord Salisbury met with Margaret Lambert on September 16, 1953. Immediately after the Downing Street meeting she informed the American and French editors, Paul Sweet and Maurice Baumont, of the radical change of plan, focusing on the Weimar Republic and suspending work on the virtually complete Volume X Series D.

  In a four-page letter to Sweet on October 8, 1953, Lambert outlined the real reasons why she, other noted British historians, and the prime minister—a historian of international note himself—wished to delay the publication of the Windsor papers. The argument bore all the imprint of Churchill’s romanticized dalliance with the monarchy.

  Lambert explained that she had initially agreed with the publication of the Windsor documents even though the whole affair was reported in a way that was “grotesque and mendacious.” She continued:

  But at the same time it was put to me that the appearance of these papers in an official publication in the near future would cause much pain to a certain recently bereaved lady, who with her late husband is referred to in them. Such references were bound to be pounced on and sensationally exploited in a peculiarly unpleasant way. We could not prevent this happening. It was felt better that time should be allowed to do its work first.

  Other historians, notably John Wheeler-Bennett, who was now working on an official biography of King George VI from an office at Buckingham Palace, “whole heartedly agreed” with the change of policy, namely to leave Series D and concentrate on the Weimar Republic. It was a course of action endorsed by Churchill, who felt it was “very valuable and important” to see what went wrong after the 1925 Locarno treaty. As for Series D, it should now finish with the fall of France in June 1940, thus keeping the Windsor file in suspension—but not censored.

  A week later, on October 15, Lambert’s advisory committee of historians, a formidable array of esteemed academics, agreed unanimously with this change of emphasis. The elephant in the room, the Windsor file,
was never mentioned. Neither was a “certain recently bereaved lady.” It is perhaps the ultimate irony in this whole episode that the queen mother, who loathed the duke and duchess as much as they despised her, was used as the reason to shield the Windsors from unfavourable publicity.

  This lachrymose royal entreaty to focus anywhere but the House of Windsor cut little ice with the American editor in chief. Dr. Sweet recalled: “They [the Windsor documents] were part of the historical record even if they were objectionable to the royal family. It offended my sensibilities. The whole thing was cooked up.”

  There followed an increasingly tart exchange of correspondence between Sweet and Lambert, all the years of American suspicion about British duplicity and obscurification rising to the surface. Sweet described the decision to switch direction and focus away from 1940 and 1941 as “shattering,” telling Lambert: “If publication of volume X is too long delayed, awkward questions are certain to be raised which will put in question the integrity of the project.”

  A month later his tone was even more accusatory: “It seems to me . . . that certain decisions have been made on political grounds which I am now being requested to justify retroactively ‘as a historian.’ Thus for example a political decision would seem to have been made on your side with respect to suspending publication of Series D beyond volume VIII. It does not seem to me that I ought to be asked to give reasons ‘as a historian’ for such a decision.”

  As Professor Sweet later admitted, his letter reflected his “considerable exasperation” with the British. His reference to a “British decision on political grounds” rankled. Miss Lambert tartly informed him that rather than “political,” the appropriate phrase was “non historical.” With Sweet’s colleague Bernard Noble about to depart to London in November for further discussions with the British, Sweet handed him a memorandum stating that the American team was “deeply resentful” of the tone of the correspondence and that the British had adopted an “intolerable” strategy. Ominously he wrote: “We have no intention of continuing our participation in the project if this is to be henceforth the spirit in which business is conducted.”