The Queen’s House

by Edna Healey

  King George V had done little to prepare the Prince of Wales for the throne. He had always allowed Queen Mary to see even the most confidential papers; Edward VII had allowed his son to see confidential papers, though it was a privilege he denied Queen Alexandra. But King George V had never trusted the discretion of his eldest son, and certainly not that of his companions.

  So until those first months in his dark office at Buckingham Palace, King Edward VIII had never understood the magnitude of the task before him. Though private functions during the period of mourning were cancelled, the world did not stand still while Britain mourned, and minister after minister came to him at the Palace with news of a real world of alarming problems. He recalled,

  The international situation was steadily deteriorating. Mr. Anthony Eden, who had succeeded Sir Samuel Hoare as Foreign Secretary four weeks before my father’s death, appeared in the little Chinese room to tell me of his hopes of saving the Peace of Europe by strengthening the policy of collective security fostered by the League of Nations13

  and that

  Mr Duff Cooper, Secretary of State for War, described the first feeble beginnings of British rearmament. The Minister of Labour, Mr Ernest Brown, came to report to me on the slow progress made by the Government to combat the demoralisation in the depressed areas.14

  King Edward VIII began with good intentions, determined to be a ‘modern twentieth-century King’, but he was to discover early how difficult it was to make the transition. The public was, as always, notoriously inconsistent: they wanted him to be an ordinary fellow and when he behaved like one they were offended. As he wrote, he was expected to drive to the Palace in ‘the immense sombre Daimler known to my brothers and me as the Crystal Palace’.15 On one occasion when he had tried to walk in the rain from York House, carrying an umbrella, there was such an outcry in the press that he never tried it again.

  For this new life King Edward VIII wanted a Household and officers of his own choosing, in touch with the modern world. By tradition, the Court officials of the old reign were kept on during the six months’ period of mourning; but many of the members of King George V’s Household were now elderly and none too anxious to serve a King who was notoriously difficult to manage.

  The most important post to be filled was that of Private Secretary. Since Lord Wigram asked to be replaced, the King offered the position to Godfrey Thomas, who had been on his staff when he was Prince of Wales. He had left the Foreign Office to join the Prince and remained in his service for seventeen years, but modestly considered he was not up to the demanding post of Private Secretary. He became deputy to Major Alexander Hardinge, who had been Assistant Private Secretary to King George V for sixteen years. Hardinge, wrongly dismissed by Chips Channon as a ‘dreary, narrow minded fogey’,16 was in fact a man of great ability and honesty, who now, as Private Secretary, faced the most difficult year of his life.

  Major Ulick Alexander was appointed Keeper of the Privy Purse, a post that was almost as demanding as that of Private Secretary, since the King was passionately interested in his money, but combined a stinginess where his Household expenses were concerned with a stunning extravagance in his gifts to Mrs Simpson.

  The King dismissed servants in Buckingham Palace, ignoring the long-established practice of ensuring that they had alternative employment to which to go. At the end of six months, he was so preoccupied with his private life and so dependent on his Household that he made few changes.

  The King was capable of hard work, particularly if it involved encouraging trade or business relationships, and he enjoyed visits to the Army and Navy, but he was easily bored and, because he was remarkably insensitive, he often gave deep offence. At first he made an effort to work at his red boxes and received innumerable delegations at the Palace – provincial mayors, Lieutenant-Colonels of the Brigade of Guards, industrialists, Royal Academicians, journalists, scientists, ambassadors, Cabinet ministers, bishops, Maharajahs and colonial governors. But he soon lost patience and, as he recalled, was irritated when he was ‘informed out of the blue that I would have to begin to squeeze into my already crowded calendar, delegations from the so called “Privileged bodies” ie leading corporate elements with the traditional right of access to the monarch’.17 Much to the irritation of his staff and the annoyance of the twenty privileged bodies, he decided to lump them all together and receive them in the Throne Room at the Palace with one response to their scroll of loyal congratulations: The Lord Mayor of London was placated only after I agreed to receive him and his aldermen separately in an anteroom before the ceremony.’18

  Even more worrying for his officials was his negligent treatment of the sacred red boxes. His Private Secretaries and the Palace Household were not welcome at the Fort, except by special invitation. As a result the boxes, often with urgent papers to be signed, though delivered daily, were often allowed to stay unopened for days. Documents were said to be returned sometimes marked with the ring of cocktail glasses.

  The King’s affair with Mrs Simpson was an important element in the arguments for the abdication, but it was not the only one. There were those who, like Winston Churchill, romanticized the ‘greatest love story of all time’, and some, like Lord Beaverbrook, who backed King Edward VIII out of a mischievous desire to make trouble for Prime Minister Baldwin. But those in his Household who were closest to the King, even when they remained with him out of loyalty, saw as the months went by that he would be an impossible King. He himself felt the weight of the Crown, and the constant hard work that is the lot of the monarch.

  Apart from his political instability, and his reluctance to accept the hard grind of kingship, there was also an insensitivity and a psychological immaturity, the ‘Peter Pan mentality’ that Ernest Simpson had described. Sir Alan Lascelles, who had served King Edward VIII when Prince of Wales, wrote that it was important to understand that morally and psychologically the King’s development had stopped at the age of fifteen. Mrs Simpson saw this only too clearly.

  His ‘Never-Never Land’ was the Fort – his home before he moved into Buckingham Palace and to which he escaped more and more frequently thereafter, to be away from the problems of the real world. Here Mrs Simpson could direct his life as his mother had done in his childhood at Sandringham. His letters to Mrs Simpson are significant and embarrassingly infantile.

  Although others in the King’s circle managed husbands and lovers quite successfully, the King’s attentions to Wallis were now so blatant that even her husband Ernest’s tolerance was strained. Totally insensitive to public opinion, the King was now treating another man’s wife as his consort. Finally Ernest went to see the King at York House and, like an aggrieved parent, bluntly asked the King what his intentions were. According to this friend, the King replied, ‘Do you think that I would be crowned without Wallis at my side?’19 At this meeting, of which Wallis was unaware, Ernest agreed to give Wallis grounds for divorce.

  ‘I believe that man is seldom master of his own fate,’ King Edward VIII wrote. What worried his ministers in those first months was the increasing knowledge that here was a King not only not master of his own fate, but also totally dominated by the woman he wanted to marry. His ministers must have left the little Chinese Room in the Palace with uneasy foreboding.

  While the Prime Minister and his Cabinet had wrestled with the problems of the world and the worries about the future of the King, Queen Mary, before she had moved out of Buckingham Palace, had watched and listened with growing apprehension but a feeling of helplessness. Letters of condolence had poured into the Palace after the death of her husband, moving her to tears, but there were many others that alarmed and angered her. There were cuttings from American papers with sensational headlines and photographs of the lady from Baltimore, and there were scores of letters from well-wishers, begging her to intervene.

  After the King’s death there was only one of her Household with whom she could discuss the rumours that now reached her from all quarters. Her much loved friend
and Lady of the Bedchamber Lady Airlie remembered how one afternoon, when she was reading to the Queen, suddenly she was asked if her sons had ever disappointed her. She replied that in her case she

  had always tried not to be possessive, and to remember that their lives were their own and not mine.

  ‘Yes, one can apply that to individuals, but not to a Sovereign,’ the Queen said. ‘He is not responsible to himself alone.’ She picked up her embroidery and stitched in silence for a moment, then added, ‘I have not liked to talk to David about this affair with Mrs Simpson, in the first place because I don’t want to give the impression that I am interfering with his private life and also because he is the most obstinate of all my sons. To oppose him over doing anything is only to make him more determined to do it. At present he is utterly infatuated, but my great hope is that violent infatuations usually wear off.’20

  As the Queen walked through the Palace State Rooms before she left, did the portraits on the wall remind her that she was not the first Queen to suffer because of her children? As a historian, Queen Mary would have recognized a pattern and perhaps have been comforted. Children of the great have often reacted against their parents, but that ‘fierce light that beats upon the throne’ has always been especially remorseless. Perhaps, too, she would have been comforted by the words of Lady Airlie: ‘the generations pass but the green shoots live.’21

  The British newspapers remained astonishingly silent about a royal affair which was now the talk of London society. It was interesting that the King’s direct influence on two press moguls – Beaverbrook, who owned the Daily Express and Evening Standard, and Harmsworth, son of Lord Rothermere, who owned the Daily Mail and Evening News – was strong enough to achieve this silence.

  With the knowledge that divorce proceedings were due to begin on 1 October, the King behaved with even less discretion – as though Mrs Simpson were already free. As he wrote,

  Wallis had … been my guest at two official dinner parties at York House when I had entertained among others the Prime Minister and Mrs Baldwin and Mr & Mrs Winston Churchill … Her presence at my table was duly recorded in the Court Circular. Secrecy and concealment were not in my nature.22

  Wallis, in fact, was not merely a guest: she was beginning to arrange his official entertaining at York House and at the Fort she openly acted as his hostess.

  Itwas, however, the King’s lack of discretion during his summer holiday that alarmed Queen Mary, his ministers and his Household. The King chartered a large yacht, The Nahlin, for a Mediterranean cruise.

  Along with an Assistant Private Secretary and an equerry, I took with me some friends, among whom were my Minister for War, Mr Duff Cooper and Lady Diana Duff Cooper. Wallis was also a member of the party, although she and I were both by then well aware that my interest in her had attracted attention and speculation.23

  The Duff Coopers were there because there was some attempt to give the cruise official cover. The Foreign Office suggested that the King should extend his cruise and pay a call on the Turkish President, Kemal Atatôrk, as a ‘gesture of friendship since discussions were taking place about commercial credits’. The King expected the Duff Coopers, who led an unconventional life, to be understanding. But, tolerant as they were, even they were surprised when they joined the yacht and saw the King ‘scrambling down the gangway naked but for straw sandals, grey flannel shorts and two crosses on a gold chain round his neck. Ominously Mrs Simpson wore duplicates of the crosses on her wrist.’24

  Not surprisingly, the foreign press was now in full cry. Though the British press still was silent, pictures and reports flooded back to the government and to Buckingham Palace, where Queen Mary quietly read them and filed them away. There were photographs of the King and Wallis sunning together: on one occasion the camera caught them in a small boat, her hand on his arm and he looking lovingly down on her.

  King Edward VIII was beginning to realize that his new position brought unwelcome publicity. He returned from the cruise more than ever determined to marry Wallis, even if it meant forgoing the dubious pleasure of kingship. But he still could not bring himself to tell his mother.

  Still the British press remained silent. Wallis’s divorce petition was heard on 27 October. The decree nisi was granted, but it would take six months before the decree was declared absolute. Once the decree nisi was granted it could be only a matter of time before the voluntary press embargo was lifted.

  Wallis was established in great style in a splendid Regency house in Cumberland Terrace, and Aunt Bessie was brought over from Washington to act as chaperone. The King divided his time between her house, the Fort at weekends and Buckingham Palace, where he conducted what he called his ‘Kingy business’. When Queen Mary had finally moved out of the Palace, the King, at her suggestion, moved into the Belgian Suite on the ground floor kept for visiting foreign monarchs. He was reluctant to occupy his father’s old room on the second floor ‘out of respect for my father’s memory’. There were other reasons for his preference: ‘This five-room suite’, he wrote, ‘had tall french windows opening on the gardens, and was conveniently adjacent to the private Garden Entrance which is always used, except on State occasions, by the Royal Family.’25 So Wallis could visit him quietly there, and he could easily avoid unwelcome visitors by slipping out into the gardens.

  He made a few alterations.

  One never tinkers much with palaces; like museums, they seem to resist change. Besides, a curious presentiment induced me to leave the rooms as they were. Somehow I had a feeling that I might not be there very long. About the only changes I made for my comfort were to add a shower to the bathtub and to replace the ornate four-poster bed with a single one of my own. I installed a small extra switchboard to handle my personal calls, and added a private line to The Fort. During the two months I lived at Buckingham Palace, I never got over the feeling of not quite belonging there. I felt lost in its regal immensity.26

  In the last months of his reign, the Household became more and more irritated by the King’s unprofessional attitude to his work. He called them at all hours, and when they wished to report to him at the end of the day, they would often be told ‘The lady is still there’. As she looked at the priceless furniture in the magnificence of the Palace, in the Never-Never Land of her imagination, did she see herself as Queen? Even if she did, she was tough and worldly-wise, and at the back of her mind was always the expectation that the magic would suddenly disappear. In the next weeks, when the press swarmed round her gates, she was often to wish that she could do just that.

  In November, Chips Channon picked up hostile gossip in the House of Commons. On 10 November unemployed hunger marchers besieged Parliament, crowding into the Lobby. To them the King and his bejewelled lady were irrelevant, if not offensive. In the chamber for the first time Mrs Simpson’s name was called out in a rowdy question time; the smoking room and lobbies buzzed with rumours. ‘The Truth is’, Chips wrote, ‘that the monarchy has lost ground in a frightening manner. Prince Charming charms his people no more.’27 A Conservative MP estimated that if a vote had been taken in the Commons, more than 100 MPs would have voted for a republic.

  Still Channon and his friends, including Duff Cooper and Churchill, fêted the King in their elegant houses, where Mrs Simpson appeared, ‘dripping with jewels’. Why’, wrote Channon, ‘should we forsake our Sovereign?’ Yet even he admitted that the King had been foolish, and, as the King continued to seem blind and deaf, he and other loyal friends became alarmed: ‘The King is insane about Wallis, insane.’28

  In mid November the King received a letter from his Private Secretary, Hardinge, which brought him down to earth: it was his duty to advise the King and he did so with bluntness. Hardinge appealed to the King to send Mrs Simpson away ‘without further delay’. As the King remembered, ‘I was shocked and angry – shocked by the suddenness of the blow, angry because of the way it was launched, with the startling suggestion that I should send from my land, my realm, the woman I inten
ded to marry.’29

  But the King no longer trusted Hardinge and sent for his old friend, the lawyer, Sir Walter Monckton, who generously gave up his work and until the end of the King’s reign acted as his legal adviser and contact with the Prime Minister.

  On the weekend of 14–15 November the King tried to explain to Wallis, who was with her aunt at the Fort, the dangers ahead. On 16 November the King returned to the Palace and sent for Baldwin, determined to have it out with him. There have been many meetings in Buckingham Palace between Prime Minister and monarch, but none so strained as that at 6.30 p.m. that Monday. Outwardly both were courteous, but the King could hardly conceal his dislike of Baldwin – his mannerisms, the irritating way he snapped his fingers, even the sound of his little black beetle of a car crunching on the gravel of the Palace courtyard. He told the Prime Minister that he was determined to marry Mrs Simpson and hoped he could do so as King; if not he was prepared to go. Baldwin replied, ‘Sir, that is most grievous news.’ Exasperated and worn out, he returned to Downing Street and went straight to bed, telling his Chief Whip, Margesson, ‘David, I have heard such things from my King tonight as I never thought to hear.’30 He could not even bring himself to see the King’s Assistant Private Secretary, Alan Lascelles, who was waiting for his report.

  That same evening the King went over to Marlborough House to see Queen Mary. He told her of his decision to marry Wallis and if necessary to abdicate. Queen Mary, who had always put duty before anything else, was deeply shaken but remained compassionate. During the next days he told his brothers of his decision.

  Still he carried out some royal duties. It was as King that he went on a tour of the South Wales coalfields, meeting the unemployed, during which, in a famous speech, he assured them that ‘something must be done’. Yet at the same time he knew he was going to abdicate. On his return he consulted his friends in the government, especially Duff Cooper and Churchill. Both counselled delay: neither could imagine Wallis as Queen, but they hoped that after the Coronation the King would break with her.