After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Stan Laurel, English born, and Oliver Hardy made innumerable comic films which unconsciously echoed the ‘Special Relationship’ between the two great Western democracies

  Lord Louis Mountbatten with his wife Edwina depicted with Pandit Jawaharal Nehru and Dr Radhakrishnan. Mountbatten, or Mountbottom as he was privately known, was given the task by the new Labour Government of disposing of the Indian Empire as soon as possible. The speed with which partition with Pakistan was accomplished led to hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths.

  The radiant beauty of Princess Elizabeth, heir to the throne, consoled many for the drabness of post-war Britain. Here she is seen with her sister Princess Margaret visiting South Africa in 1947 and sounding the whistle of the Beyer-Garratt locomotive.

  It was the new Queen’s decision to insist upon her Coronation being televised and viewed by millions across the world. This row of movie-cameras focussed on the royal pageant is emblematic of the life which the twentieth-century royal family had to live, beneath the constant surveillance of the camera.

  James Watson and Francis Crick, the inspired young scientists who cracked the code of DNA and established beyond question the hereditary basis of life

  After the war, Britain had lost its empire and its place in the world. The desire to conquer the globe was set aside in favour of more modest aspirations – a house, a family, a car.

  It is probably true to say that Edward VIII was pro-German but not especially pro-fascist, not by the standards of the age. He is not recorded as having any especially anti-Semitic feelings; unlike his brother, the moronic Duke of Gloucester, who surprised an officers’ mess at the beginning of the war by remarking airily: ‘You can say what you like about this Hitler Johnny, but he knows how to treat the Nosey Brigade.’ Nor did Edward VIII show any more fondness for the odious new German ambassador in London, Joachim von Ribbentrop, than, say, his brother the Duke of Kent, who was very much part of the Ribbentrop ‘set’. Harold Nicolson wrote, disapprovingly, of the ‘champagne-like influence of Ribbentrop’.26 It was one of the Nazis’ fantasies that Edward VIII was more than halfway to being of their political persuasion, which is why so many who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the upper ranks of the party, and with Hitler himself, implied or openly stated that the king, either before or after his abdication, had expressed actual Nazi opinions as opposed to the package of fellow-travelling beliefs which many perfectly nice people (wrongly) held at the time: belief that the Nazis had brought full employment and peace and a bloodless revolution, that the Nazis had no territorial ambitions beyond the lands of which the Versailles treaty had deprived the Fatherland, and so on. It certainly suited Baldwin’s purposes, and those of the new king and queen after 1936, to play up the rumours that David and Wallis were Nazis, or would be the puppet-king and queen in the event of a Nazi takeover of Britain.

  The idea that Nazi Germany in general, Hitler in particular, could be attractive to foreign visitors is a disturbing one. One does not need to excuse those who were enraptured by the Führer, any more than one needs to excuse those, like George Bernard Shaw, who loved Mussolini and went to the Soviet Union during the Stalinist purges and thought that it was an earthly paradise. The truth is, however, that all but the most acute and inquisitive foreign visitors to a country see either what they are shown or what they wish to see.

  Many things were obscure to foreigners, however intelligent they may have been in other areas of life, which were obvious to the natives. The diaries of Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, translated as Diary of a Man in Despair, depict the real Germany to which figures such as Chips Channon and many others from Britain and America were blind. One obvious thing, which these foreign visitors missed, was that the Nazis were gangsters. Reck-Malleczewen, a lofty North German liberal aristocrat with lands in Bavaria, seeing a picture in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung of Goring with his lady, noted: ‘They stood in front of an immense Gobelins tapestry which had been part of the Wittelsbach private collection which had been stolen.’

  Reck-Malleczewen was a snob, undoubtedly. The commonness of the Nazis offended his aristocratic sensibility; but his diary is one of the documents which undoubtedly give snobbery a good name. For he believes that the old idea, still retained in England, of a governing aristocracy, of a class which is set apart by birth and education to govern fairly and decently, was a better system than the one in which the Germans had entrapped themselves. He recalls a moment in 1920 when staying with a friend called Clemens von Franckenstein (good name!). Someone who, according to the butler, had gatecrashed the party ‘wearing gaiters, floppy wide-brimmed hat and carrying a riding-whip’, and accompanied by a collie-dog, began to harangue the other guests. It was Hitler. ‘The effect, among the Gobelin tapestries and cool marble walls, was something akin to a cowboy’s sitting down on the steps of a baroque altar in leather breeches, spurs, and with a Colt at his side.’ Reck found him to be ‘the stereotype of a head waiter’, and was unimpressed by the rant – ‘he went on at us like a chaplain in the army’. When he eventually left, the host stood up and opened one of the huge windows. ‘It was not that our grim guest had been unclean, and had fouled the room in the way that so often happens in a Bavarian village. But the fresh air helped to dispel the feeling of oppression.’27 When he saw Hitler glide past in a car in 1936, only five days after Chips Channon had felt that meeting the Führer was better than being blessed by the Pope, Reck observed: ‘so sad, so utterly insignificant, so basically misbegotten is this countenance that only thirty years ago, in the darkest days of Wilhelmism, such a face of an official would have been impossible. Appearing in a chair of a minister, an apparition with a face like this would have been disobeyed as soon as its mouth spoke an order – and not merely by the higher officials in the ministry: no, by the doorman, by the cleaning women!’28

  Reck saw that what had happened to Germany was not merely a sociopolitical change. It was something metaphysical. ‘I am neither an occult nor a mystic. I am a child of my time despite all forebodings, and I hold strictly to what I see. But there is a frightful riddle here, and I come back again and again to what appears to me the only answer to it: What I saw gliding past, behind the face of his mameluke, like the Prince of Darkness himself, was no human being.’29

  From a completely different perspective, that of a Jewish academic, Viktor Klemperer, who, astonishingly, lived through the whole of the Third Reich, there is the same tangible sense of things having gone mad, of a Germany taken over by gangsterism, and by the entirely new and twentieth-century idea of the mass media. ‘Religious madness and advertising madness,’ Klemperer calls it. ‘And always the lies that accompany everything.’30

  It is hardly surprising that Edward VIII should have been caught up in this drama, becoming king as he did at precisely the moment when the Nazi propaganda machine was working so hard to persuade the British that it was in their interest not to resist their expansionism or to be caught up by treaty in anything which would limit Hitler’s quasi-imperial ambitions. Leopold von Hoesch, Ribbentrop’s predecessor in London, dispatched to his masters in Berlin the view that ‘I am convinced that his [King Edward’s] friendly attitude towards Germany might in time come to exercise a certain amount of influence in the shaping of British foreign policy.’31

  Memos of this sort are adduced by some biographers to suggest that the British government was right to be wary of Edward VIII. If the Germans’ estimate had been true, it is odd that so many of the professional politicians who were of ‘the King’s party’ – Duff Cooper, Colonel Wedgwood, Winston Churchill – were actually those who were most anti-appeasement, and anti-German. These men by 1936 were urgently reminding the British people, and the world, of the dangers of Nazi expansion; they were arguing for rearmament. Is it likely they would have backed a king who was pro-Nazi? It remains the case, however, that the old men who decided to sack the king, come what may, sniffed out in him that kind of cheap populism which Reck-Malleczewen found so detestable in Na
zism. Reck rightly saw Nazism as a product of an entirely new phenomenon, popular culture. Mass-man, he called the result of such manipulation – ‘stupefied mass-man, and the conversion of human societies into heaps of termites!’31 It was a particular cause of resentment by David and Wallis, after their abdication, that the Old Men banned by law the sale of gramophone records of his one and only wireless broadcast to his people, explaining why he had given up the throne.32 They were determined to control the ‘mass media’ of their day and to make them as unpopulist and as unpolitical as possible.

  Luckily for the Old Men, they did not need to conspire against the king. They did not need, until they had pushed him out, to exaggerate his (in fact quite mild) fascistic leanings. The king whom they so much disliked can only with a small part of himself have wanted to be king. With another part of his nature, he must have needed, very deeply, to wound his mother and insult the memory of his father by doing the unthinkable thing of renouncing the throne. Baldwin and Cosmo Gordon Lang did not need to do anything except stand firm on a simple religious point of principle. This principle is that the national Church – founded in order to facilitate a royal annulment (Henry VIII) and rescued from Roman Catholic obliteration by the maritally irregular Elector of Hanover (George I) – forbade the remarriage of divorced persons in church. The British constitution is an unwritten phenomenon which is made up on the hoof. Had Baldwin and the Dominion prime ministers so desired, it would probably have been possible to do as the King’s Party desired and allow the king his crown and his wife. They did not want this, so they offered him a fait accompli. Wallis always denied, with vehemence, that her marital status was the sole reason for the Old Men sacking her husband, and she had some evidence on her side.

  In her memoirs, The Heart Has Its Reasons, Wallis describes her shock upon the story breaking in the Press. ‘The dam was broken; I felt unnerved; self-reproach flooded through me … through my mind ran the question: Why? Why? Why? Why didn’t you follow your first instinct? Why didn’t you go when you first knew that was the only thing to do?’

  She said to the King: ‘Dearest David, I am sorry I’ve done this to you.’ His reply was: ‘What’s done is done. We’ve got things to do right now.’33

  These things included spiriting Wallis abroad – to France – in her Buick with the king’s lord-in-waiting ‘Perry’ Brownlow and Brownlow’s chauffeur at the wheel. From the Villa Lou Vieie near Cannes she attempted to keep in touch with the king by a crackling telephone line, and to persuade him to stay on the throne, if necessary to give her up. Theodore Goddard, her solicitor, was dispatched to France to persuade her to withdraw divorce proceedings against Ernest Simpson. Lord Brownlow, in her presence, told the lawyer that if the king did abdicate, which he was close to doing, he would do so in order to marry, so that scrapping divorce proceedings would solve nothing.

  Wallis became convinced at this stage of things however that Mr Baldwin would force the king to abdicate whether she remained in the picture or not. The implications of her letters to Sibyl Colefax are not given sufficient weight by all commentators. On 18 December, after the abdication, she wrote to Lady Colefax:

  I still can’t write about it all because I am afraid of not conveying the true facts – as brain is so very tired from the struggle – of the past two weeks – the screaming of a thousand plans to London, to pleading to lead him and not to force him. I know him so well. I wanted them to take my advice but no driving in they went headed for this tragedy – if only they had said – Let’s drop the idea now and in the autumn we’ll discuss it again – and Sibyl darling in the autumn I could have been so very far away – I had already escaped – some day if we ever meet I shall tell you all. The little faith I have tried to cling on to has been taken from me when I saw England turn on a man that couldn’t defend himself and had never been anything but straight with his country.34

  What this letter shows is that at the height of the crisis Wallis had wanted to get shot not merely of England but of the King. Chips had surely been right, that all she had envisaged was to be the King’s mistress: to reap fun and social advantage of this, not to be with him for ever. Two tragic ingredients conspired against such a light-hearted scheme. One was that the King was in love with her, and stubbornly determined to marry her, partly to show what he thought of Baldwin and the ‘Old Gang’.

  Another letter, written a few days later in December 1936, makes it clear not only that she had been planning to drop the King, but that he had been prepared to drop, or at least postpone, marriage to avert a constitutional crisis:

  It is a cruel world and honesty doesn’t seem To [sic] be the quality that gets you the longest way. Naturally you knew the King need never have gone – he offered to drop the subject of marriage for the present. It was turned down by the powers that be. What does one read into that? I did all in my power and succeeded rather well with the King. But you know I had no power with the Government – remember my dear only one side of their case is known to the world at present and it has been presented almost too cleverly.35

  There is no evidence that Mrs Simpson was here lying to her friend Lady Colefax. It surely, therefore, constitutes proof that Baldwin sacked the King even if the younger man agreed not to force the government’s hand over the royal marriage. So if the King was not forced to abdicate because of his desire for marriage, what was the reason? It is easy to see why the conspiracy theories sometimes come to the surface – as that the King was sacked for having fascistic leanings.

  When he had gone, the Archbishop of Canterbury felt constrained to rub a little salt in his wounds. Broadcasting to the nation on Sunday, 13 December, he said: ‘What pathos, nay what tragedy, surrounds the central figure of these swiftly moving scenes! On the 11th of December, 248 years ago, King James II fled from Whitehall. By a strange coincidence, on the 11th day of December last week, King Edward VIII, after speaking his last words to his people, left Windsor Castle, the scene of all the splendid traditions of his ancestors and his Throne, and went out an exile. In the darkness, he left these shores.’

  The Archbishop’s broadcast caused very great offence, even among those who broadly speaking felt it had been right for the king to go. In particular, the humbug tone of the Archbishop’s moralizing was felt to strike the wrong note. ‘Even more strange and sad it is that he should have sought his happiness in a manner inconsistent with the Christian principles of marriage, and within a social circle whose standards and ways of life are alien to all the best instincts and traditions of his people.’ A wag responded: ‘My Lord Archbishop what a scold you are!/And when your man is down, how bold you are!/Of Christian charity how scant you are!/And auld Lang swine, how full of cant you are!’36

  Though the broadcast made the Archbishop disliked, it was to have a deadly influence with the one family who should have ignored it: the royal family themselves. One can imagine how robustly either George IV or Edward VII would have responded to the impertinence of an unmarried old gentleman of over seventy commenting upon his choice of friends or his sexual morals. George VI, who did not have a social circle of any kind, never mind one whose standards were alien to the traditions of the British people, could hardly have been affected by the words. But his wife was, and ensured that her daughters surrounded themselves until they were grown up with the stuffiest old Scottish aristocrats and a few handpicked homosexuals, such as Osbert Sitwell and Noël Coward. Nemesis, however, never forgot the Archbishop Lang broadcast. Princess Margaret Rose, sister of Queen Elizabeth II, was the first casualty, giving up the man she loved because he was divorced and going on to mix with a strangely rackety ‘set’ who would not have passed muster with Cosmo Gordon Lang. Her sister, both as Princess Elizabeth and as Queen Elizabeth II, was as blameless as her father, but she achieved the remarkable hat trick of seeing three out of her four children contract marriages that ended in divorce.

  Poor Little Dook, as his friends in exile called him. You can see why Baldwin wanted to ban his last broadcast
. It is electrifying: the slightly cockney, already slightly Americanized voice. The passion. He had no idea when he gave it that thirty-five years stretched ahead in which he was not to be allowed back to reside in Britain. During the war years, they kept him out of harm’s way by making him the Governor of the Bahamas. They could indulge the malice of the new Queen-Empress, Elizabeth, by denying Wallis the privilege, which she strangely enough craved, of calling herself Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Windsor. Otherwise, it was a thirty-five-year stretch of golf, shopping trips to New York, dinners with the Mosleys, Daisy Fellowes, and others.

  ‘At long last I am able to say a few words of my own’ – that is one of the best sentences ever broadcast. Some would think it was the first distant cry, decades too early, of the me-generation; others would see it as the gentlest of reproofs to intolerably interfering politicians.

  You all know the reasons which have impelled me to renounce the throne. But I want you to understand that in making up my mind I did not forget the country or the Empire which as Prince of Wales, and lately as King, I have for twenty-five years tried to serve. But you must believe me when I tell you that 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.37

  After he had delivered the broadcast, he went to Royal Lodge to say goodbye to his family. As well as being grief-stricken, Queen Mary was stiff with rage38 at the ‘humiliation of it all’. It was a moment which might have been invented by the man who won the Nobel Prize for literature that year, Eugene O’Neill, that brilliant chronicler of the hatred and power struggles which are interwoven in the love between sons and mothers. With a bowler hat on his head and a West Highland terrier tucked under one elbow, the king went aboard the Royal Naval vessel HMS Fury, which conveyed him by night to France.