by Anne Sebba
like talking to a child of 10 years old. He did not seem to grasp the issues at stake, he seems bewitched … He has no religious sense. I have never in my life met anyone so completely lacking in any sense of the – the – what is beyond … And he kept on repeating over and over again: ‘I can’t do my job without her … I am going to marry her, and I will go’ … There simply was no moral struggle and it appalled me.
Even when the Prime Minister warned the King that he risked the destruction of the monarchy he ‘would keep on throwing his arms out with a curious gesture repeating: “SHE is beside me … the most wonderful woman in the world.”’ But on the night of the 8th the King was in ‘what I can only describe as a perfectly exalted condition. He would spend nearly the whole day telephoning to that woman and would come in from the telephone box with the most beautiful look I have ever seen on his face, like a young knight who has just seen the Holy Grail and say: “I’ve just been talking to Her: talking to the most wonderful woman in the world.” It was hopeless to reason with him.’
Baldwin told his Cabinet that he had then, as a last resort, said to the King: ‘Suppose if an archangel asked you to give up Mrs Simpson would it have any effect?’ ‘Not the least,’ replied the King. And the Prime Minister told his wife on his return home that he felt ‘as though he had been in Bedlam’. Dugdale asked the Duke of Kent at this time, ‘Do you think the King will be happy?’ and received the reply: ‘Happy? Good heavens no, not with That Woman.’
The King, as he tried in those vital last hours to negotiate his future, was desperately alone. He had abandoned the support of his family months previously and now, at his lowest point, was almost without advisers he trusted. ‘He was’, as his biographer Philip Ziegler acknowledged, ‘agonised by the fear that he would let Wallis down, secure for her less than she deserved, earn her contempt.’ At the final dinner before the abdication, where the King spoke to each of his brothers in turn and tried to explain, there was yet another telephone conversation with Wallis in Cannes, partially overheard by Dugdale, in which the King ‘was heard to tell her he would get less than he hoped for, which caused a harsh voiced twang of rich American invective from Cannes’. Under such pressure he clutched at any straw which he thought might help him improve his bargaining position. But then, as Ziegler puts it, ‘he told for reasons of self-interest, a foolish and suicidal lie … He was to suffer the consequences until the day he died.’
The precise size of Edward VIII’s fortune before abdicating is a mat [tinheiter of historical debate. Sir Edward Peacock, a man of immense experience as a former governor of the Bank of England as well as adviser to George V and Edward when Prince of Wales, later put it at around £1.1 million, excluding his Canadian ranch. A year before he became king, the Prince had asked Peacock to put his money in securities outside England, setting up a trust with provision for Mrs Simpson. When Peacock warned the Prince that if this became known it would reflect badly on him the Prince insisted he still wanted it done. ‘Peacock told me this to show that Wales had in mind to get out of England long before the abdication,’ Joseph Kennedy, the US Ambassador, wrote in his diary following a lunch with Peacock. ‘This was all invested and very wisely,’ Kennedy continued; ‘with cash and other interests he had about £1,000,000. This figure confirmed later by Sir Horace Wilson …’ Nevertheless when the King met his family for the last time at the Fort he ‘distinctly told his brother [the Duke of York] that … he did not think he had £5,000 a year’ and made an impassioned speech about how badly off he was, citing his father’s will, which still rankled, giving him a life interest in Sandringham and Balmoral. He told Churchill a similar sob story about how poor he was and about his need for a subsidy if he was going to survive in a suitable manner for an ex-king of Britain. In the abdication settlement there was a proposal for a grant from the government of approximately £25,000 a year free of tax. But Baldwin was worried that, if debated in Parliament, this would lead to a heated discussion. Nancy Dugdale was probably correct in her belief that most people think ‘public money should not be voted for the ex King in the Civil List … the Royal family, who all inherited the late King’s private fortune, should give their brother enough to live on’. She also reported hearing ‘considerable public annoyance because the King has given Mrs Simpson Queen Alexandra’s jewels … Lawyers have discovered that they were left to King Edward as head of House of Windsor … a position he subsequently relinquished therefore the jewels go to his successor. The King has given Mrs Simpson vast sums of money placed in banks all over world.’ The legend of Queen Alexandra’s emeralds, said for years to have been spirited away by the King and given to Mrs Simpson, persisted throughout their lives in spite of vehement denunciations from their lawyers and by Wallis herself as Duchess of Windsor. In reality, the likely sources of the jewels the Duke gave to Wallis, both loose and set, were his private family heirlooms, therefore genuinely personal property, as well as gifts given to him while he was travelling the Empire as Prince of Wales, especially during his tour of India in 1921 and 1922.
But in order to avoid an unpopular public discussion about how much the ex-King would need, the future King agreed to underwrite this amount to his brother out of the Privy Purse. According to Ambassador Kennedy: ‘Peacock advised Edward that he thought Baldwin had done the best he could and agreed with Baldwin that it should be given up in Parliament.’ When King George VI later learned the truth about his exiled brother’s sizeable fortune he wrote to him in subdued shock to say ‘that I was completely misled’.
Until that time he – if not Wallis – had retained the underlying affection of his sister-in-law the Duchess of York, who wrote one of the most moving letters of the whole drama just before the abdication, begging her brother-in-law to be kind to Bertie, who finds it ‘awfully difficult to say what he thinks, you know how shy he is – so do help him’. She went on: ‘I wish that you could realize how hard it has been for him lately. I know that he is fonder of you than anybody else and as his wife I must write to tell you this. I am terrified f [m tknoor him – so DO help him, and for God’s sake don’t tell him that I have written.’
On 10 December, less than six weeks after Wallis Simpson had appeared at Ipswich assizes pleading for a divorce, the King signed the Instrument of Abdication at Fort Belvedere with his three brothers present. Once Parliament had endorsed this, he would become a private individual and his most pressing obligation was to speak directly to the nation and earn Wallis’s respect by making plain to posterity how hard she had tried to dissuade him from abdicating. He had been working on such a speech for days but felt goaded into action by what he perceived as Baldwin’s unforgivable failure when speaking to the House of Commons about these events to explain the nobility of Wallis’s behaviour. Most people in Britain had first learned of the drama and heard mention of the American woman he loved only in the previous few days. ‘We Londoners, with our insatiable thirst for scandalous gossip,’ wrote Lieutenant Colonel Tweed to the former Prime Minister David Lloyd George, ‘tended to assume that everybody knew all about Mrs Simpson and I was rather staggered on visiting Birmingham and Manchester a week prior to the crisis breaking to find that not a single soul I talked to had even heard of Mrs Simpson.’
The abdication speech, with its expression of heartfelt longing for a woman and desperation to appear courageous in her eyes, was essentially Edward’s own creation, with some Churchillian improvements and flourishes. After a final lunch at Fort Belvedere, Churchill bade his own emotional farewell to the man who had ceased to be king while they were lunching; with tears in his eyes he began to recite two lines of poetry, tapping his stick the while: ‘He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene,’ words written by Andrew Marvell on the execution of King Charles I. Churchill was not alone in making the comparison with Charles I. The writer Virginia Woolf and the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, transfixed like most of the country by the dramatic events, had gone to the House of Commons to be as close as
possible to unfolding history. Woolf wrote in her diary of how, as the women walked along Whitehall, Ottoline, pointing to the great lit-up windows of the Banqueting House in their frame of white stone, remarked: ‘That’s the window out of which Charles the First stepped when he had his head cut off.’ Woolf said she felt she was ‘walking in the seventeenth century with one of the courtiers; and she was lamenting not the abdication of Edward, but the execution of Charles. “It’s dreadful, dreadful,” she kept saying. Poor silly little boy. No one could ever tell him a thing he disliked.’
Today, the abdication speech has achieved iconic status and become shorthand for those who wish to make clear what is meant by a sacrifice for love. It was also a big nod to the modernity for which he had hoped to be remembered, given that broadcasting, especially royal broadcasting, was in its infancy. The ex-King sat in front of a single microphone in the tower room of Windsor Castle, set up as a temporary studio, introduced by the Director General of the BBC, Sir John Reith, and started by declaring his allegiance to the new King, his brother. After a reminder of his twenty-five years of service to the country, he explained:
… I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.
And I want you to know that the decision I have made has been mine and mine alone. This was a thing I had to ju [g I1emdge entirely for myself. The other person most nearly concerned has tried up to the last to persuade me to take a different course.
I have made this, the most serious decision of my life, only upon the single thought of what would, in the end, be best for all.
This decision has been made less difficult to me by the sure knowledge that my brother, with his long training in the public affairs of this country and with his fine qualities, will be able to take my place forthwith without interruption or injury to the life and progress of the empire. And he has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you, and not bestowed on me – a happy home with his wife and children.
I now quit altogether public affairs and I lay down my burden. It may be some time before I return to my native land, but I shall always follow the fortunes of the British race and empire with profound interest, and if at any time in the future I can be found of service to his majesty in a private station, I shall not fail.
Wallis listened to the broadcast on a crackly radio at Lou Viei with Perry Brownlow, she lying on the sofa, Herman and Katherine Rogers and all the domestic staff gathered around to hear. ‘David’s voice came out of the loudspeaker calmly, movingly … After he finished, the others quietly went away and left me alone. I lay there a long time before I could control myself enough to walk through the house and go upstairs to my room,’ she wrote dramatically. She explained that she listened with her hands over her eyes ‘trying to hide my tears’. They were tears of rage, pity, fear and bafflement.
Queen Mary flinched when her son, now known as the Duke of Windsor, said he had been ‘denied’ the happiness of his brother in having a wife and children, ‘as if he might not at any time have honestly possessed this happiness if he had chosen’, while Nancy Dugdale found the conclusion ‘God bless you all’ rather jarring ‘as everyone knows his belief in God is rather a faint reality’.
Monckton drove the new Duke to Portsmouth and then tactfully – if not entirely accurately – wrote to Queen Mary that:
during the journey he talked quietly of old times and places well remembered by us both but above all he talked of you, how grand you were and how sweet to him especially at the last. I left him on the destroyer. He was still full of the same gay courage and spirit which has amazed us all this week. There is and always will be a greatness and glory about him. Given his faults and his follies [in an unsent draft the word ‘madness’ is here crossed out] are great … I will go on trying to help him when he needs.
Ulick Alexander and Piers (Joey) Legh, whose birthday it was, agreed to accompany their former sovereign in the early hours of that foggy December morning as they left England on HMS Fury. The captain, having been given his sailing orders at the very last minute, was obliged to borrow from the royal yacht some bed linen, crockery and glass as well as an experienced steward who knew the ex-King and would serve him during the crossing. For one of the most tragic aspects of the departure was the decision of his staff, including his valet Crisp, not to accompany their royal master into exile. The Duke carried his small Cairn bitch up the gangway himself and the dog later disgraced herself in the private quarters of the Captain, Cecil Howe. As Legh’s s [As thtepson Freddy Shaughnessy was to recount:
The exiled king was, not surprisingly, in a state of high nervous tension and restlessness that night. He sat up in the wardroom until four in the morning drinking brandy and going over the events of the last few weeks. Legh and Alexander, already exhausted by the strain of the whole abdication trauma … longed for HRH to retire to his cabin so they themselves could turn in.
Duty was the watchword of the moment or, as the Duke said in the television account of his departure, A King’s Story, created more than thirty years later, by which time his American accent was even more pronounced: ‘The path of dooty was clear.’ Others saw his duty very differently. Lucy Baldwin wrote: ‘But in the background there is that ache of which I spoke, the ache for the man who took the wrong path and chose inclination and desire instead of duty and responsibility. One just aches for his future, regrets his want of background and anchorage and prays for him with all one’s heart.’
And the former Duchess of York, now Queen of England, who had been in bed with a high temperature on the day of the abdication, decided that the first letter of her new reign should be to her friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, assuring him not just of how deeply she and the new King felt their responsibilities and duty at this difficult time, but of how miserable they were, ‘as you know, over his change of heart and character during the last few years and it is alarming how little in touch he was with ordinary human feeling – Alas! He had lost the “common touch”,’ she wrote and signed her letter for the first time ‘Elizabeth R’.
Queen Mary, in a post-abdication letter largely written for her by Lang and published in the next day’s newspapers, also spoke of ‘the distress in a mother’s heart’ when she contemplated how ‘my dear son has deemed it his duty to lay down his charge’. But she begged the British people, ‘realizing what it has cost him to come to this decision, and remembering the years in which he tried so eagerly to serve, [to] keep a grateful remembrance of him in your hearts’. Lang himself observed that when he went to see Queen Mary ‘she was much moved and distressed but wonderfully self controlled’.
Did Wallis want to be queen of England? Some of those who witnessed her confidently greeting her sister-in-law, the Duchess of York, at Balmoral on the ill-fated night of 26 September believed that there was the evidence that she did, that it was ‘a deliberate and calculated display of power’. But that makes no allowance for her natural American brashness, which for example allowed her to comment on that same visit, when taken to see the beach at Loch Muick by the King, ‘Just like Dubrovnik’ – a comparison, according to Helen Hardinge, ‘which did not go down any better than the casual careless way of referring to a voyage [on the Nahlin] which had not been popular in many respects’. Nor did it make any allowance for her state of mind at the time. Chips Channon among others had consistently reported her as ‘looking unhappy’ (7 July) or ‘worn out and on a fish diet’ (27 July) and, by the end of November, he recorded ‘that she had had a sort of breakdown and must be kept quite quiet and away from visitors’ (29 November).
Perhaps the realization that she was now desperately trapped was most clearly visible in her unvarnished letters to Ernest and in her increasingly evident physical fear. Ernest’s attempts to visit Baldwin, telling h [in,varim he could help with ‘the psychological aspect of the matter’ were based on the probably correct belief that he understoo
d his wife; he did not, however, have the same understanding of the King. But his message to the Prime Minister, explaining that he was convinced she was not as much in love with the King as the King was with her and therefore, if she was seen by ‘somebody in authority’, might be persuaded to leave him, was not followed up. According to Wigram, Ernest was even prepared in early December to turn King’s evidence and ‘come forward and say that the divorce was entirely a collusion between HM, himself and Mrs S’. Not only would this have prevented the divorce going through, it would have been hugely embarrassing. As Cecil Beaton recognised, ‘she loves him, though I fear she is not in love with him …’ . Ministers were advised not to meet Ernest.
Today it seems clear that becoming queen was far from what she wanted. ‘I who had sought no place in history would now be assured of one – an appalling one, carved out by blind prejudice,’ she wrote in The Heart Has its Reasons. The self-pity may grate. But while it is easy with hindsight to see why ‘Queen Wallis’ would never have been acceptable as consort to a monarch of the British Empire, it is also important to remember that when Edward VIII came to the throne in 1936 he was hailed as the most widely travelled man of his time, with so much excitement and hope based on his perceived glamour and youthful charm, his daredevil smile, his apparent ability to connect with ordinary people, that anyone not familiar with Britain might easily have assumed he would win through. Lloyd George had declared in 1922 after his 41,000-mile tour as Prince of Wales: ‘Whatever the Empire owed him before, it owes to him a debt which it can never repay today.’ Wallis may not have known the speech but she was aware of the sentiment. She had grown up with it. What she totally failed to understand, as she frankly admitted later, was the King’s true position in the constitutional system. For not only had she lived in Washington and London circles where divorce was acceptable at the highest echelons, she had never thought her relationship with Edward would last longer than a few years. When it did, and she suddenly found herself the King’s adored favourite, she believed that: