Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  Although British public opinion “was solidly against his marrying Mrs. Simpson,” thousands of letters from the poor and working classes poured into Buckingham Palace “voicing their approval of his relationship with Wallis.” Some historians believed that Edward never saw these letters, “or he may not have been so hasty to abdicate.” Only in 2003 were letters from the Royal Archives made public that showed just how much of the British population emphatically supported the king’s desire to marry the woman he loved. According to one biographer, the idea that Wallis “became queen or some other form of consort—was overwhelmingly endorsed by the working classes, by former servicemen who admired Edward’s courage during the Great War, and by most British subjects under the age of fifty.”1349 Of course, none of these people knew about British Secret Intelligence Service reports that Wallis had been a drug courier in China—a fact that is still disputed by historians and biographers today—or that she was a proponent of Fascism and the Nazi Party.

  This unprecedented crisis affected Queen Mary on a deeply personal level. Years later, she still found it hard to discuss the incident in detail, though she described Edward’s actions as a “shock” that “grieve me beyond words.”1350 Not only did the king’s actions offend her sense of reverence for the institution of the monarchy, but the fact that the epicenter was her own son was at times too much to bear. Unwilling to do nothing while Edward undermined the credibility of the royal family, Queen Mary made sure to be seen out in public presenting an image of calm strength. As often as possible, she was out visiting exhibitions, museums, and the many Christmas festivities that were under way.

  In early December, she was at Marlborough House with Bertie when Edward arrived to inform them of his decision to abdicate. Upon being announced, the king walked across the room, kissed his mother’s hand, and apologized for calling at so late an hour. He had something important to say, he told them. They were curious about what he might say, his mother replied. Taking a sip of whiskey, Edward, standing with his back to a roaring fire, blurted it out.

  “Mama, I find I cannot live alone as King, and I must marry Mrs Simpson.” Still calm and collected, Mary asked him what he was going to do.

  “I shall abdicate,” he told them. “Mrs Simpson is everything in my life, and all that matters is our happiness.” Queen Mary stood silent for a moment.

  “No, you are mistaken, David,” she replied in one of the rare angry moments of her life. “All that matters is our duty. Consider the millions of young men who sacrificed their lives for their country in the Great War. And you will not even give up for your country a twice-married woman who is not even yet free to marry you!”

  “No, Mama, all that matters is our happiness. That is all,” the king shot back again.1351

  No longer able to be silent, Bertie chimed in, his voice stuttering with emotion. And what of Elizabeth? he asked. What of his family? What about the sacrifices Edward was expecting everyone else to make for the sake of his happiness? The king merely shrugged off his brother’s remarks, flippantly telling him he would make a good king. Then, as quickly as he entered, Edward kissed his mother’s hand and darted out of the room, leaving the pair stunned.

  “He is wrong in almost everything he is doing,” Mary told Bertie, “and only right in one thing.”

  “What is that, Mama?” Bertie asked.

  Turning to her son, she replied, “In his belief that you’ll make a very good king. And as Papa always said, Elizabeth will make a wonderful Queen.”1352

  The next day, Mary sent Edward a letter which he appears to have mistaken for acceptance of his decision: “As your mother I must send you a letter of true sympathy on the difficult position in which you are placed. I have been thinking so much of you all day, hoping you are making a wise decision for your future.”1353 The king sent his mother a warm reply: “I feel so happy and relieved to have at last been able to tell you my wonderful secret, a dream which I have for so long been praying might one day come true. Now that Wallis will be free to marry me in April it only remains for me to decide the best action I take for your future happiness for the good of all concerned.”1354 In a letter to her daughter-in-law Elizabeth, Queen Mary was more candid about her feelings. “I am more worried than I can say at what is going on.” Throughout the crisis, she felt very lonely and isolated. “There is no one I can talk to about it, except you two [Elizabeth and Bertie] as Mary is away & one can’t discuss that subject with friends,” she wrote to Elizabeth. “What a mess to have got into & for such an unworthy person too!!!”1355

  At 10:00 a.m. on December 10, 1936, the official announcement was made. Queen Mary wrote how “the paper” was “drawn up for David’s abdication of the Throne of this Empire because he wishes to marry Mrs Simpson!!!!! The whole affair has … been very painful—It is a terrible blow to us all.”1356 King Edward VIII became the first English monarch in history to voluntarily give up the throne. Later that day, Prime Minister Baldwin finally revealed the intimate details of the abdication crisis to the House of Commons. In her diary that night, Queen Mary recorded that this “was received in silence & with real regret. The more one thinks of this affair the more regrettable it becomes.”1357 The next day, Edward formally abdicated in the presence of his three brothers. He was forty days shy of having reigned for just one year. This gave him the dubious distinction of being the shortest-reigning monarch in British history and the fifth shortest in English history. That day, he made a radio broadcast informing the people of his choice: “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.”1358 He also said that to avoid further scandal, he would be leaving the country immediately.

  That night, the now ex-king met with his family to say their farewells at Royal Lodge, in Windsor Great Park. Queen Mary and the Princess Royal were the first to drive back to London after saying a “dreadful goodbye.” The queen confided that “[t]he whole thing was too pathetic for words.”1359 At the stroke of midnight, Edward and Bertie said an emotional good-bye. Edward bowed to his brother, hailing him as his new king, and the pair parted company. As part of Edward’s abdication, it was agreed that he and Wallis would never again reside in England, though in the future they would fight to have this decision reversed. When someone asked Queen Mary when her son might return to his homeland, she replied, “Not until he comes to my funeral.”1360 The relationship between the queen and her eldest son would remain estranged for the rest of their lives, despite the fact that they would continue to write to each other on a regular basis. After his mother’s death, Edward’s attitude toward her would grow decidedly more hostile. “My sadness was mixed with incredulity that any mother could have been so hard and cruel towards her eldest son for so many years and yet so demanding at the end without relenting a scrap,” he wrote in a private letter to his wife. “I’m afraid the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they are now in death.”1361 In an interview with the Daily Express years later, Edward admitted his true feelings about the abdication: “But make no mistake, it is the circumstances, not the decision itself, that I regret. If twenty years were to be erased and I were to be presented with the same choice again under the same circumstances, I would act precisely as I did then.”1362

  Edward VIII’s abdication and subsequent marriage to Wallis Simpson in June 1937 had far-reaching consequences and set a dangerous precedent. In the years that followed, kings and rulers around the world found themselves under fire from commoner mistresses who demanded they follow Edward VIII’s example and renounce their thrones for love. In Britain, the abdication crisis threatened the Windsor dynasty, already weakened by King George V’s death and the monarchy’s connection to Germany during the war. But in spite of everything, Queen Mary continued to enjoy unbridled popularity. Whenever she appeared in public, she was met with thunderous applause. One afternoon, the sight of her
on the street prompted all the witnesses to cry out, “Thank God we’ve still got Queen Mary.”1363 In October 1936, Elizabeth wrote to Mary, “In these anxious & depressing days you are indeed ‘a rock of defence’ darling Mama, & I feel sure that the whole country agrees.”1364 Regardless of his mother’s unimpeachable character, Edward’s actions had repercussions.

  On December 12, the day after the abdication became official, Bertie became King George VI, making his wife Elizabeth the queen consort. Bertie chose to take his father’s name to create a sense of continuity and traditional values from George V’s reign. Their ten-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was now heir apparent. George VI and his Privy Council sprung into action to limit the damage done to the monarchy by his brother. Edward was given the title Duke of Windsor and the style of Royal Highness. “Furthermore, my first act on succeeding my brother will be to confer on him a Dukedom and he will henceforth be known as H.R.H. The Duke of Windsor,” George VI announced.1365 This honor, however, was deemed inappropriate for Wallis and was therefore denied to her or any children they might have. “Is she a fit and proper person to become a Royal Highness after what she had done in this country, and would the country understand it if she became one automatically on marriage?” George VI asked. “I and my family and Queen Mary all feel that it would be a great mistake to acknowledge Mrs. Simpson as a suitable person to become Royal. The Monarchy has been degraded quite enough already.”1366 Queen Mary unequivocally agreed with the king: “It is unfortunate that he [Edward] does not understand our point of view with regard to the HRH and that this rankles still, but there is no doubt you must stick to this decision as it wld make great difficulties for us to acknowledge her [Wallis] as being in the same category with Alice & Marina.”1367

  There was a particular lack of sympathy from foreign courts for Edward or his American bride. Queen Maud of Norway was particularly scathing in her opinion of the whole affair. “Where is She? Do wish something could happen to prevent them from marrying,” she wrote to Queen Mary. “How sad it all is, that he has ruined his life, fear later he will be sorry what he has done and given up.” Queen Marie of Romania was just as dumbfounded over the news, since she had attached the highest hopes to Edward VIII’s accession. “Personally, I am too royal not to look upon David as a deserter,” the flamboyant queen admitted. “There is too much poetry in my heart and soul to be touched by this love story. She [Wallis] is an uninteresting heroine.… I could weep over him.”1368

  To secure Wallis’s divorce from her second husband, Edward secretly paid Ernest Simpson an estimated £100,000 “partly to compensate him for the theft of his wife, and partly to get him to appear to be the adulterer in the subsequent divorce proceedings.”1369 Once it was official, Wallis and Edward rushed off to get married at the Château de Candé, a Renaissance manor house in France. Huddled outside the château’s fences were anxious paparazzi hoping to capture photographs of the ceremony. As expected, the highly controversial wedding was small—only sixteen guests were in attendance. The Church of England refused to sanction it, and no members of the royal family attended. “I suppose you get endless letters as I do,” Mary wrote to George VI, “imploring us not to go out for the wedding as it wld do great harm, especially after the terrible shaking the Monarchy received last Dec[embe]r.”1370 The only mention of the wedding that Mary made was a brief note in her diary: “Alas! the wedding day in France of David & Mrs Warfield … We all telegraphed to him.”1371 Edward took the absence of his family as an “unforgivable snub.” Shortly after the ceremony, he wrote to his mother, “I was bitterly hurt and disappointed that you virtually ignored the most important event of my life. You must realize by this time, that there is a limit to what one’s feelings can endure, this most unjust and uncalled for treatment can have had but one important result; my complete estrangement from you all.”1372

  The abdication of Edward VIII was soon followed by the coronation of the new king and queen on May 12, 1937—the date planned for Edward VIII’s coronation. It was expected to be even larger in scale than the 1935 celebrations for King George V’s Silver Jubilee. In one of the rare moments of her life, Queen Mary broke with tradition by attending the coronation. Even the etiquette-insensitive Queen Alexandra had retired to Sandringham for George V’s crowning. This tradition dictating that a queen dowager was forbidden from attending the coronation of her husband’s successor predates the Plantagenet dynasty in the fifteenth century. But in light of the events surrounding George’s accession, everyone felt Mary’s presence was a necessity.

  By dawn on coronation day, some fifty thousand people had flooded Pall Mall. Another two million people poured into London that day. Those invited to be in the congregation at Westminster Abbey had to be in the church around 7:00 a.m. The guest list included George VI’s aunt and uncle Queen Maud and King Haakon VII of Norway; his second cousins the kings Christian X of Denmark and George II of Greece; King Yeta III of Barotseland (part of present-day Zambia); the prince-regent of Yugoslavia; Prince Chichibu of Japan; and Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands and her husband, Prince Bernhard. Departing from Buckingham Palace, Maud and Mary led the procession to Westminster Abbey in a glass coach escorted by a troop of mounted Horse Guards. As they proceeded down Piccadilly, thousands of voices cheered, “Queen Mary! Queen Mary!”1373

  Upon arriving at Westminster, the various royals processed down the abbey. After the Kents and Gloucesters took their seats, Queen Mary entered with Queen Maud at her side. “As Queen Mary’s noble figure appeared against the sombre woodwork of the choir-entry the impression was such as to give me a catch in the throat of my memory,” wrote one observer. “She was ablaze with large diamonds the size of beans, and she wore around her silvered head the circlet of her former crown with the 4 arches removed. But it was not alone the glory of her personal appointments, but the majesty and grace of her bearing that made everyone hold their breath.”1374 The two elderly queens were seated together in a special pew with the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. “Maud and I processed up the Abbey to the Royal Box,” Queen Mary recalled. “I sat between Maud and Lilibet, and Margaret came next. They looked too sweet in their lace dresses and robes, especially when they put on their coronets. Bertie and E. looked so well when they came in and did it all too beautifully. The service was wonderful and impressive—we were all much moved.”1375 During the service, little Margaret fidgeted incessantly. Mary eventually settled the princess by giving her a pair of opera glasses to look through. Later, along with the queen of Norway and the rest of the royal family, Mary posed with the newly crowned monarchs for the formal portrait. Queen Mary looked majestic in her famous diamond-and-pearl crown, red royal sash, and flowing ermine-lined robe. Queen Maud later admitted of her nephew, “Thank goodness dear Bertie and Elizabeth are so devoted to each other, and great help to each other, and they are so popular, and so are the darling little children.”1376

  Just before midnight on coronation day, Queen Mary wrote to the newly-crowned king and queen: “I cannot let this day pass without once again telling you both how beautifully & reverently you carried out this most beautiful impressive service, I felt so proud of you both, & I felt beloved Papa’s spirit was near us in blessing you on this wonderful day. I could not help feeling what that poor foolish David has relinquished for nothing!!! but it is better so & better for our beloved Country.”1377

  The outpouring of affection for the monarchy at this time touched the royal family deeply. Queen Mary received thousands of letters from the people offering her their prayers and support after everything she had endured in the last year. Moved by “the kind letters” she had received, Mary asked the king’s permission to issue a message of thanks to the British people. He immediately gave his consent, saying, “It will be such a great help to me.” Cosmo Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury since 1928, composed the message on Queen Mary’s behalf. Direct and uncontroversial, the message tried to give some credit to Mary’s eldest son, while begging for
support for George VI. She “declared that her heart had been filled with distress when her dear son laid down his charge.” She concluded by saying, “I commend to you his brother, summoned so unexpectedly and in circumstances so painful to take his place … With him I commend my dear daughter-in-law who will be his Queen. May she receive the same unfailing affection and trust you have given to me for six and twenty years.”1378

  Any tranquility that was hoped for after the abdication crisis was marred by talk of war in Europe again. After less than eighteen months on the throne, King George VI was confronted with the greatest trial of his life. On March 12, 1938, the Nazis invaded Austria in a forced union they called the Anschluss. At Hams Castle in Steenokkerzeel, Zita and her family were deeply distressed by the annexation of their beloved homeland through Hitler’s fait accompli. The next day, the empress spent hours in the private chapel of her castle praying “for a miracle to save Austria for the Hapsburgs.” Acting on his authority as head of the family, Otto “was reported bound to consult friendly statesmen of France and Britain on Reichsfuhrer Hitler’s Austrian coup.”1379 The union between Germany and Austria was a cause for alarm in Europe, but few governments were willing to take a stand against Adolf Hitler. It was a mistake the world was about to regret.

  Before the unthinkable happened, Queen Mary’s life was marred by further heartache. Her favorite sister-in-law and childhood friend Queen Maud died on November 20, 1938. The queen of Norway had come to England for a visit. While she was there, she checked herself into hospital after she began feeling unwell. An x-ray revealed Maud was suffering from an abdominal obstruction, prompting doctors to operate. The night before her surgery, Mary sat with Maud, keeping her company. Things seemed to be going well after the surgery until Maud suffered a sudden heart attack during the night and died. Her death came as a deep loss to Mary. The pair had grown up together, became close friends, and eventually sisters-in-law. Queen Mary confided that she “felt stunned at the tragic news.”1380 In a last act of friendship to the queen of Norway, Mary asked that her body be allowed to lie in state in the chapel of Marlborough House. It was a fitting choice, since Maud had been christened in the very same chapel sixty-eight years earlier. King George V and Queen Maud’s uncle the Duke of Connaught sent Queen Mary a heartfelt note the day Maud’s body arrived at Marlborough House: “My thoughts are with you today when dear Maud will be brought back to her old home to rest in the Chapel in which she was christened previous to her crossing the seas to the land of her adoption [Norway].”1381 After three days at Marlborough House, Queen Maud’s body was taken aboard the RMS Royal Oak bound for Norway. Assembled at the train station to bid an emotional last farewell to independent Norway’s first queen was Mary and the rest of the British royal family, including Queen Victoria’s three surviving children—the Duchess of Argyll, the Duke of Connaught, and Princess Beatrice.