The principled disagreement went right to the top, with Sweet summoned to see Joseph Phillips, deputy assistant secretary of state for public affairs, who told him that the British ambassador, Sir Roger Makins, had said that unless agreement was reached quickly between himself and Miss Lambert, the prime minister intended to raise the matter during a forthcoming summit with President Eisenhower in Bermuda.
In a more placatory vein, Miss Lambert addressed the issue of resignation, arguing that for an official historian to resign implied loss of confidence in the host government. “Actually,” she wrote, “I was decidedly impressed by the scrupulous care with which my views were treated by the Prime Minister downwards.” She felt that the use of resignation because of a change of emphasis, rather than suppression, was inappropriate.
At first Lambert succeeded in obtaining a degree of American agreement for the revised plan, Bernard Noble telling Sweet that he had little option but to approve stoppage of the work on Series D. Nonetheless Sweet, hopeful of a change in political climate with the eventual retirement of the British prime minister, continued to work on the virtually complete series.
Churchill, though, was still on the warpath. He was so obsessed with the issue that he had taken to telephoning Miss Lambert late at night to harangue her about the cursed file.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Traitor King or Duped Duke?
Churchill’s determined rearguard action to stop the publication of the Windsor file was looking increasingly shaky. Not only was he facing stubborn resistance from the Americans and French, in 1953 the Germans entered the fray, catching him in a deadly pincer movement.
As part of the process of restoring democracy and economic stability to West Germany, Chancellor Adenauer was insistent that the Allies return the mountain of official German documents that they still held under their control. It was a matter of national pride to recover what was considered to be the archival soul—“the bare bones of history”—of the new nation rising from the ruins of war. Germany wanted her history back. The Americans were sympathetic but once again the British were concerned to keep the vexatious Windsor file away from prying foreign eyes. It was the Russians who raised the stakes even further, returning the official German records they had captured to Communist East Germany in 1955, thus enabling the German Democratic Republic to dismiss West Germany as a “puppet state” of the Allies.
It was not just the events of 1940 that threatened to embarrass the duke and the royal family. In January 1954 another unwelcome file, this time concerning the duke’s “unfavourable” constitutional behaviour during his brief reign as King Edward VIII in 1936, was discovered. It could not have happened at a more inconvenient moment. As the Germans were pressing hard for the return of their files, it placed the British government in a predicament. As a negotiating gambit, they might have been able to withhold the existing Windsor file from the Germans in exchange for handing over the bulk of archival material. What, though, of these new royal embarrassments emerging like unexploded bombs among the tons of official papers the archivists were slowly sifting through? Once again British foreign policy was compromised, the existence of the Windsor file staining and straining relations with another nation, this time the newly democratic West Germany.
The communal head-scratching by ministers and senior civil servants was almost palpable. In a memo of March 4, 1954, Minister of State Anthony Nutting pondered how to deal with the added complication of “another document which I understand records certain very unfortunate and unconstitutional sayings to the Germans by King Edward VIII during his reign about the attitude of Mr. Baldwin and the government of the day to the reoccupation of the Rhineland. The difficulty here is that whatever we do we cannot be absolutely certain that these documents will not fall into the wrong hands.”
The episode itself relates to the reports by the king’s friend, German ambassador von Hoesch, who made clear to Berlin that the king was taking an active part in diplomacy surrounding the Rhineland crisis. Apparently he had summoned his senior ministers, including Baldwin and Chamberlain, to the palace and insisted that Britain should resist an attack on Germany over their territorial incursion.
As von Hoesch reported: “The directive given to the Government from there [Buckingham Palace] is to the effect that, no matter how the details of the affair are dealt with, complications of a serious nature are in no circumstances to be allowed to develop.”
That same month Frank Roberts, deputy under-secretary at the Foreign Office, was tasked with producing a Cabinet paper to the effect that the Germans could have their records returned—they had chosen Schloss Gymnich in Westphalia as the centre for storage and research—if the British could retain the Windsor file. The Cabinet agreed with the proposal, Churchill urging: “All steps should be taken to extract these [Windsor] papers from any which are handed back to Germany.”
The one consolation from this added complication was that the controversial material, which related to events in 1936, was not scheduled to be published by the official historians for many years hence. In fact the material was finally released in 1966, thirty years after the king’s reign, in series C, volume V.
Not so the main Windsor file. At an editors meeting in July 1954, Sweet and the French editor Baumont returned to the attack, even though they faced fierce opposition from Wheeler-Bennett, E. Llewellyn Woodward—who first suggested the project—and five other distinguished historians, including Miss Lambert, the editor in chief.
As E. James Passant later minuted: “It is very clear that, if such a programme [continuation of Series D] is now adopted, the documents in dispute will be published in 1956, unless the whole project collapses before then.” Effectively the only way to prevent publication of the Windsor file was to go nuclear and explode the entire exercise, thus compromising a primary war aim, namely to educate the German people about their folly.
In a memorandum to justify the continuation of Series D and the subsequent publication of the Windsor file, Dr. Sweet argued that the decision to suspend work was “made at governmental direction” rather than for any historical considerations. As a result, the current position was uncomfortable bordering on the “intolerable.” Lambert was furious, complaining to Passant that Sweet’s attitude was “deplorable.” She made it clear that she could proceed with the publication of Volume X Series D only if Churchill and the Cabinet waived any objections.
Shortly after this transatlantic clash of the historians, Churchill got an early reaction to the likely impact of the publication of German diplomatic reports regarding the Duke of Windsor. In November 1954, the Duke of Windsor’s wartime activities came to light in an entirely different official volume, this time Volume VIII Series D, where the German ambassador in The Hague reported in January and February 1940 on the duke’s behaviour.
Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, German minister to The Hague, had, in two dispatches dated January 27 and February 19, 1940, reported that the duke was “not entirely satisfied with his position” and sought a field of activity in which he would have an active rather than a merely representative role (all of which was true and seemingly non-contentious). Zech-Burkersroda went on to say: “He has expressed himself in especially uncomplimentary terms about Chamberlain, whom he particularly dislikes and who, as he thinks, is responsible for his being frozen out.”
During a brief visit to London that month the duke shrugged off the matter when asked by reporters, saying that the documents were false. His long-time defender Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, also made light of the matter, dismissing the veracity and source of the allegations.
In May last, after these three documents had been selected for inclusion in the Eighth Volume of this work, they were brought to my attention. I naturally thought it proper to show them to the Duke of Windsor, and on 25 May I told him that they were to be published in the United States and in this country later this year. His Royal Highness did not raise any objection. He thought, and I
agreed with him, that they could be treated with contempt. . . . They are of course quite untrue.
Then he paused and, to guffaws of laughter, added: “They may rest in the peculiar domain which this formula describes as ‘the highest scholarly objectivity.’”
It seems that Churchill’s witty spearing of the international body of historians, the subdued reaction, and the paucity of headlines may have convinced the prime minister to slacken the reins of resistance regarding publication. Just six weeks later, on December 23, 1954, Britain’s ambassador to Washington visited Douglas MacArthur II, counsellor of the State Department. He told him that the British would no longer press their objections to the publication of the documents in Volume X Series D and that the documents could be published in due course. He requested that the British have at least two months’ advance warning before publication so that they could consider how to answer any questions about the duke’s behaviour.
Shortly afterwards, in January 1955, the same month that the duke visited President Eisenhower at the White House, the ex-king was working out his public position on the imminent publication of the “unmentionable” file. It was, observed his biographer Frances Donaldson, no secret to the duke’s advisors and those closest to him that, during the period that elapsed between his receiving this information and the publication of the documents, he was an “exceedingly unhappy and worried” man.
He asked his old friend and lawyer Sir Walter Monckton to draft a suitable statement.
I regard it as essential . . . that the Foreign Office ‘dementi’ [official denial] should be entirely general in character and should ignore all specifically alleged anti-British statements attributed to me, as a pack of lies. . . . And with regard . . . to your persuasive powers . . . it would be only fair to emphasise that I needed no persuasion, whatsoever, firstly, not to return to Spain, nor secondly, to sail for the Bahamas on August 1st, the date stipulated by Winston and to which I agreed.
If the duke was contemplating the inevitable, the royal family were not finished yet, launching their secret nuclear weapon in the shape of King George VI’s biographer, John Wheeler-Bennett. Since 1953 he had been working from the Pine Room at Buckingham Palace and had become part of the wider royal family, on excellent terms with Sir Alan Lascelles, a small army of courtiers, and influential politicians like Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan.
He was flattered to be asked to be the official royal biographer and made no attempt to hide the adoration he felt for the queen mother, describing with much affection the “gracious kindness” she displayed at their first meeting at Buckingham Palace.
“Queen Elizabeth, beautiful in her mourning, greeted me with a warmth and charm which I have never forgotten and which has remained unvarying throughout the succeeding years during which she has been so wonderful a friend to Ruth [his wife] and me.” Such was their friendship that he dedicated the last volume of his memoirs to the queen mother.
He was sensitive to the demands of court, particularly the bitter relationship with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, skirting around the issue in his royal biography. As Professor Sweet pithily observed: “In the end, for the years after his abdication, the Duke of Windsor received a single sentence and one perfunctory mention in a volume of 891 pages.”
Even that modest inclusion illustrated the rift at the heart of the House of Windsor. When the duke asked Wheeler-Bennett, whom he had helped with childhood reminiscences about his brother, to review passages of the manuscript referring to himself, the court prevaricated about sending him the relevant pages. They relented only after a threat of legal action. In July 1956 he wrote to his lawyer, Sir George Allen:
I am incensed by this latest display of rudeness towards me from the Palace and am determined that, unless my niece has the common courtesy to give me an opportunity of reading all references to myself in Wheeler-Bennett’s official biography of my late brother, then no mention of me whatsoever shall appear therein.
Little wonder that Wheeler-Bennett’s biography has failed to pass the test of time. Dismissed by historian David Cannadine as “courtly and obsequious,” the book portrays the late king as an icon on a pedestal rather than a flesh-and-blood human being. While it is biography as if written from the bended knee, it had the effect of making the historian thoroughly acceptable to the royal family and their courtiers.
Uniquely placed as a historian and a courtier manqué, he used his influence to try and end the tripartite historical project in order to protect his friends at court. If the French and Americans were adamant that Volume X Series D be published, placing the Windsor file before the public, then the only option, as Passant had perceptively minuted, was to deliberately collapse the entire enterprise, thus ensuring that the House of Windsor escaped any public unpleasantness.
Wheeler-Bennett was not the only one who believed the project was doomed but was probably the only one motivated purely by a desire to safeguard the reputation of the royal family.
The other primary argument for ending the project was the pressure from the German government, somewhat tardily supported by the British Foreign Office, to move the archival venture back to Germany. The cabal of British historians believed it would compromise the objectivity of the operation. Such was the rancour felt towards the British historians that a British diplomat, who complained bitterly about their obstructive behaviour, said “the British historians are a stink in our nostrils.”
Wheeler-Bennett was lobbying for the project to be ended without the knowledge of the British editor in chief, Margaret Lambert, a friend of twenty years’ standing. Ironically, his underhand behaviour led to a reconciliation between Dr. Sweet and the British editor in chief. They now recognized a common enemy in the avuncular historian. As Miss Lambert wrote on January 31, 1956:
Wheeler-Bennett on his own and without a word to me decided to recommend that we be closed down forthwith, went to various high-ups and said so. I can hardly tell you what a jolt this gave me; at first I could not believe it.
As to the prime mover in all this, our guess is that his motives are only indirectly connected with us but are personal. We know he is much gratified by his new role as biographer and it may well be that the old love gets a bit in the way of the new. There was publicity here for one aspect of the last volume [the reports on the Duke of Windsor in volume VIII] and presently there will be a lot more.
With help from Sir Lewis Namier, she was able to avert an imminent shutdown, the project not winding up until March 1959.
Publication of the much anticipated, much feared volume was further delayed by the Swiss government, who were concerned that certain documents chosen for publication in Volume X Series D would reveal that it had breached its much vaunted neutrality during the war. They were worried that any publication would affect the way the Swiss were treated by foreign governments in the future.
With the publication of Walter Schellenberg’s racy but posthumous memoirs in July 1956 by André Deutsch, the wrangling about the Windsor file was all becoming a little, well, academic. The German spymaster’s story, ghosted by Louis Hagen, an Allied glider pilot who had written a bestseller about the Arnhem landings, made headlines around the world with its lurid claims that the duke was offered fifty million Swiss francs to go over to the Germans. The story, which was published in magazines in Sweden and West Germany and reprinted in the London Sunday Dispatch, was quickly and comprehensively denied by the duke.
I have not read the newspaper reports of Nazi intrigue which are supposed to concern me. No doubt the Schellenbergs of Hitler’s regime had all kinds of devious schemes in the back of their minds. I had no communication or contacts whatsoever with Schellenberg and nor for that matter did I ever hear of him until this alleged matter developed. As for Ribbentrop I met him only in his official capacity and never saw him after 1937.
Posthumously, Schellenberg had dug the duke out of a hole, the public gaze firmly focused on Nazi conspiracies rather than ducal perfidy. Even so, Schellenberg
’s revelations were soon overshadowed by the duke’s wife, who published her own ghost-written autobiography, The Heart Has Its Reasons, in the same year. As it concentrated on the human side of the romance of the century, it gave the watching world, especially women, a vivid insight into her life and times.
In the end, the main event, the long-awaited publication of Volume X Series D on 1 August 1957, was something of an anticlimax. The Foreign Office worked hard to corral Fleet Street editors and correspondents, briefing them on the angle that the duke was an innocent party caught in a web of Nazi intrigue, a royal dupe rather than a traitor king.
The resulting editorials reflected Establishment thinking: “Plot Against the Duke” was the Manchester Guardian headline, reflecting the consensus that he was a victim rather than an ersatz Quisling. “Nazi Efforts to Bring the Duke of Windsor under German Influence” was the rather more long-winded effort on the front page of the New York Times. The story was merely a passing storm; the next day the same newspapers announced that the duke had signed a deal with publishers Houghton Mifflin to write on the other great passion of his life, gardening. As Sarah Bradford noted: “The Foreign Office mounted quite a campaign in Fleet Street at the time. The press were quite naïve.”
Just to emphasize the point, an official Foreign Office notice, inserted in the volumes issued by HM Stationery Office, contained the following passage:
The Duke was subjected to heavy pressure from many quarters to stay in Europe, where the Germans hoped that he would exert influence against the policy of His Majesty’s government. His Royal Highness never wavered in his loyalty to the British cause or in his determination to take up his official post as Governor of the Bahamas on the date agreed. The German records are necessarily a much tainted source. The only firm evidence is of what the Germans were trying to do in the matter, and of how completely they failed to do it.
17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up Page 32