Traitor King

by Andrew Lownie

  I remember like yesterday the morning after we were married and I woke up and there was David standing beside the bed with this innocent smile, saying, ‘And now what do we do?’ My heart sank. Here was someone whose every day had been arranged for him all his life and now I was the one who was going to take the place of the entire British government, trying to think up things for him to do.’2

  She did her best. They entertained friends, relaxed in the castle’s heated swimming pool, played golf and tennis, went deer stalking, and the Duke exercised excessively, as he had always done, often climbing a rocky peak behind the castle and signalling his position to Wallis with a small mirror. The New York Times reported on how, ‘Attired in Tyrolean leather breeches, white hose and short-sleeved shirt, he watered flowers in the garden.’3

  Walter Monckton was amongst the visitors and he persuaded the Duke to drop his complaints about the Duchess’s title – the Duke was threatening to renounce his own royal title – as bad for his public image.

  Whilst there, the Duke was approached by the writer Compton Mackenzie, best known for his novel Whisky Galore, keen to write a biography of the former king with his cooperation. The Duke was tempted by both the money – the deal was that he would receive £10,000 and Mackenzie £20,000 – and an opportunity for Wallis to ‘challenge the accusations which have been made against you.’4 Discussions continued throughout the summer until the Duke withdrew from the book in October, realising it best he not be seen to cooperate with any writer. Mackenzie’s The Windsor Tapestry on the reign and abdication was published the following year.5

  Part of the Windsors’ time was also spent at the Hotel Bristol in Vienna. It was on 20 June, whilst at the Brazilian Legation for dinner, that George Messersmith, the American minister to Austria, unwisely passed on the information to the Duke that a train from Germany to Italy had crashed and naval shells, supplied by Germany to Mussolini’s navy, had been discovered. This was in breach of League of Nations sanctions. It also showed that the Americans were reading Italian cyphers. The next day Messersmith was shown an intercepted telegram, sent by the Italian ambassador to Rome, discussing the discovered shells and revealing his source – the Duke. It was a salutary warning that the ex-king could not be trusted.6

  Windsor had continued to stay in touch with Charles Bedaux after the two men had built up a friendship over games of golf and late-night glasses of brandy. The Duke was interested in Bedaux’s work practices and attracted to his utopian ideas for world peace, whilst Bedaux realised the benefits of cultivating an association with the former king.

  What Windsor may not have known was that, since the First World War, Bedaux had been suspected by the Americans of being a German spy.7 He had extensive business interests in Nazi Germany, working closely with Krups, Mercedes, Opel and IG Farben. He leased a Schloss near to Hitler in Berchtesgaden and was close to Hjalmar Schacht, head of the Reichsbank, and Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front.

  Since his companies had been seized in Nazi Germany in 1934, Bedaux had worked hard to ingratiate himself with the Nazi leadership. The Duke of Windsor now gave him that opportunity. He had only been able to reopen his German businesses after bribing the Nazi authorities in July 1937 to the tune of $50,000 and agreeing that they be supervised by the Nazi labour organization, the Arbeitersfront.8 It was this very organisation that he suggested should host the Windsors for a tour of the country.

  * * *

  In September, the Windsors stayed with the Bedauxs at Borsodivánka Castle, a hunting lodge in Hungary, which Bedaux rented from a nephew of the Regent Horthy, and the plans that they had laid over the previous few months were put into action. Such a visit had several benefits. It would raise Windsor’s profile on the international stage, it would help promote Bedaux’s business interests, and they both believed it would help secure world peace.

  On 19 August, Bedaux had seen Howard K. Travers, chargé d’affaires at the American legation in Budapest, saying that he was acting for Windsor, who wished ‘to make a complete study of working conditions in various countries’, adding, ‘with a view to returning to England at a later date as the champion of the working classes’. Travers reported this to the State Department in a ‘strictly confidential’ memo that day, where it was seen by George Messersmith, now Assistant Secretary of State in charge of the Balkans. The authorities were now on their guard.

  In the spring of 1937, Oscar Solbert, an American general and business executive, who had acted as Windsor’s attaché during his 1924 American visit, had written to the Duke suggesting he ‘head up and consolidate the many and varied peace movements throughout the world . . . I am not a pacifist, as you know, but I do believe that the one thing the world needs more than anything else is peace.’9 In August, Bedaux replied on the Duke’s behalf:

  The Duke of Windsor is very much interested in your proposal that he lead a movement so essentially international. We all know that as Prince of Wales and as King, he has always been keenly interested in the lot of the working man and he has not failed to show both his distress and his resolve to alter things whenever he has encountered injustice . . . He is determined to continue, with more time at his disposal, his systematic study of this subject and to devote his time to the betterment of the life of the masses . . . He believes this is the surest way to peace. For himself, he proposes to begin soon with a study of housing and working conditions in many countries.10

  The Duke’s equerry, Dudley Forwood, interviewed for a television documentary in 1994, explains the background:

  The story goes that he got a very great payment from Hitler, though whether this is true or not I really don’t know, if he would arrange to get the Duke of Windsor prepared to accept an invitation to go to Germany that took place. At the trip to Germany, Bedaux was never seen, he wasn’t to be seen at all, but there’s no doubt about it, he was behind the scenes . . . he was an unpleasant piece of work.11

  It was a view shared by one of the Duke’s protection officers, Philip Attfield:

  I distrusted Bedaux and was quite certain he was working hand-in-glove with the Nazis. My international and personal intelligence service had supplied me with many disturbing details about him and I felt sure he was not cultivating the duke for nothing. Although he always went out of his way to give me every comfort and privilege, I watched his every move with suspicion.12

  The Duke’s communications and travels in the region were now being monitored, not least by his personal protection officer, David Storrier, who filed regular reports to Scotland Yard, but also by local diplomats. On 30 August, Sir George Knox, the minister to Hungary, wrote to the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, about a forthcoming visit to Hungary, reporting that the Duke wished ‘to present the Duchess to the Regent and Madame Horthy. While Admiral de Horthy entertains considerable sympathy and friendship for the Duke, whom he knows well, he has expressed himself in strong terms regarding the Duchess.’13

  There were good reasons for the authorities to be suspicious of the couple’s loyalties. The Duke was strongly pro-German, indeed considered himself almost German, telling Diana Mosley, ‘Every drop of blood in my veins is German.’14 He spoke German fluently and sometimes referred to it as his mother tongue and had spent most of his summers before the First World War visiting German relatives. The murder of his Russian relations in 1918 had had a profound influence on him and he always considered communism as the real threat to Britain’s interests and empire.

  Though, as heir to the throne, he was prevented from seeing active service during the First World War, several of his friends had been killed, including an equerry and a driver, and he was determined there should never be war again between Germany and Britain. He was also a believer in strong government. The journalist Robert Bruce Lockhart noted in his diary in July 1933:

  The Prince of Wales was quite pro-Hitler and said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either re
Jews or re anything else, and added that dictators are very popular these days and that we might want one in England before now.15

  The following year, Chips Channon wrote in his diary: ‘Much gossip about the Prince of Wales’s alleged Nazi leanings. He is alleged to have been influenced by Emerald [Lady Cunard] (who is rather eprise [sic] with Herr Ribbentrop) through Mrs Simpson.’16

  There was certainly plenty of evidence of the Duke’s sympathies. In 1935 he had made a speech to the British Legion, suggesting a visit of reconciliation to Germany, which may have directly impacted the Anglo-German Naval Agreement that was being negotiated at the time.

  In March 1936, when Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland, Windsor’s cousin, the Duke of Coburg, was sent to London to work through him to keep the Government sweet and prevent any reaction. Fritz Hesse, the press attaché at the German embassy, reported how the ambassador ‘von Hoesch went to see the King, secretly, one night’ to defend Hitler’s actions and argue it was not worth going to war over. Edward later called von Hoesch, telling him, with Hesse present, ‘I sent for the Prime Minister and gave him a piece of my mind. I told the old so-and-so that I would abdicate if he made war. There was a frightful scene. But you needn’t worry. There won’t be a war.’17

  Edward is ‘going the dictator way, and is pro-German,’ wrote Chips Channon in his diary in November 1936. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he aimed at making himself a mild dictator, a difficult enough task for an English King.’18

  Number 10 increasingly saw Edward as a security risk. Suspicious of the expensive gifts he lavished on Wallis, officials feared he was being blackmailed by nefarious foreign agents and worried about his association with known right-wing personalities such as Sir Oswald Mosley.

  Surveillance had revealed that the couple were both having affairs elsewhere. The 1935 Special Branch report that had stated that Wallis had a secret lover, later identified as Ford car salesman Guy Trundle, also observed that: ‘Mrs Simpson is very jealous of a certain Austrian or Hungarian woman whom POW met on his recent visit to Austria. This woman has since been to London and spent some time with POW.’19

  Wallis was regarded as indiscreet and too close to Lady Cunard and her friend, Hitler’s minister of foreign affairs and ambassador to London, Ribbentrop.

  Baldwin’s biographers later wrote:

  Mrs Simpson . . . found herself under close scrutiny from Vansittart, and both she and the King would not have been pleased to realise that the Security Services were keeping a watching brief on her and some of her friends . . . The red boxes sent down to Fort Belvedere were carefully screened by the Foreign Office to ensure that nothing highly secret could go astray. Behind the public facade, behind the King’s popularity . . . the Government had awakened to a danger that had nothing to do with any question of marriage.20

  On 4 February 1936, John Davidson, Baldwin’s Intelligence coordinator, wrote in a ‘Most Secret’ memo that: ‘Mrs S is very close to Hoech (sic) and has, if she likes to read them, access to all Secret and Cabinet Papers.’21 The same month Ralph Wigram, head of the Central Department at the Foreign Office, recorded in his diary that senior Whitehall officials thought her to be ‘in the pocket of the German Ambassador’.22

  On 25 November 1936, the wife of the King’s private secretary, Alec Hardinge, noted that ‘one of the factors in the situation was Mrs Simpson’s partiality for Nazi Germans’.23 In the parliamentary debate on the day of the Abdication Bill, the Communist MP Willie Gallagher had stated, ‘Mrs Simpson has a social set, and every Member of the Cabinet knows that the social set of Mrs Simpson is closely identified with a certain foreign Government and the Ambassador of that foreign Government.’24

  Now in 1937, the Duke’s activities raised alarm bells in Whitehall and at Buckingham Palace. There had already been discussions on how the couple should be treated by the diplomatic service, but these were given a new impetus with the imminent plans to tour Germany. On 2 September, Alec Hardinge wrote to Sir Robert Vansittart:

  His Royal Highness the Duke of Windsor and the Duchess should not be treated by His Majesty’s representatives as having any official status in the countries which they visit. For this reason it seems to the King that, except under special instructions, His Majesty’s representatives should not have any hand in arranging official interviews for them, or countenance their participation in any official ceremonies.25

  According to George VI, the couple were not to be invited to stay in any embassy, ministers should not meet them off the train, and any entertainment at an embassy could only be unofficial.

  On 17 September, Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler’s personal adjutant, saw the Duke to discuss the tour. It was agreed that a German attaché who spoke English would accompany the couple and would meet Fern Bedaux at the Ritz on 30 September to make the final arrangements.26

  On 20 September, the British Government received their first official warning about the proposed trip to Germany, then only a few weeks away, when the Duke told the British diplomat Neville Henderson, ‘Although our two weeks tour is being organised under the auspices of the Reich, it will naturally be of a purely private nature.’27 That same day the Duke told Walford Selby that it was ‘in order to see what is being done to improve working and living conditions of labouring classes in several of the larger cities.’28 Few were persuaded by the Duke’s statement.

  There was consternation in Whitehall and copies of the correspondence from the Windsors were sent to the King at Balmoral. ‘Personally I think these tours, prearranged without a word to us, are a bit too much,’ Vansittart wrote to Hardinge on 1 October. ‘And I hope our missions abroad will be instructed to have as little as possible to do with them.’29

  The following day, Hardinge replied, ‘I entirely agree with what you say about these tours, and I feel strongly that nothing should be done to make them appear other than what they are, i.e., private stunts for publicity purposes – they can obviously bring no benefit to the workers themselves.’30

  On 4 October, Ralph Wigram described the tour to George VI as a ‘dangerous, semi-political move’.31 The same day Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador in Paris, called on the Duke and warned him not to be used for propaganda purposes. The Duke merely gave an assurance he would not make any speeches.

  On 8 October, Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British ambassador in Washington, was summoned to Balmoral, where he was joined by the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, amidst concern that the Duke was a pawn in the hands of a scheming and ambitious wife. ‘The Palace Secretaries are extremist, the Foreign Office still more so,’ Lindsay wrote to his wife. ‘All are seeing ghosts and phantoms everywhere and think there are disasters round every corner.’32

  At Balmoral, Lindsay related to his wife that the King and Queen were in a:

  state of extreme nervousness about it or rather about all the Duke’s activities – his theatrical appeals to popularity and these visits of inspection – perfunctory and no doubt pretty insincere, but none the less evidence of his readiness to bid for popularity. Hitherto he has been quiet and has shown no desire to study housing conditions in France and Austria.33

  Lindsay felt that the Duke ‘was trying to stage a come-back, and his friends and advisers were semi-Nazis. He was not straight.’ He continued with the observation that there was a personal as well as political aspect to the panic:

  It interested me to notice that really the King does not yet feel safe on his throne, and up to a point he is like the medieval monarch who has a hated rival claimant living in exile . . . He talks quite well and vigorously – but he is not clever. There are plenty of rather pointless remarks and divagations, and a fair part of those rather heavy jokes which one gets from Royal Princes.34

  His view of the Queen was equally revealing. ‘Too short and thick-set to be beautiful, and someday she will be a fat little lady though she will always be altogether charming . . . she was backing up everything the men said, but protesting against anything that seem
ed vindictive.’ His shrewdest analysis, however, was of Wallis:

  Is she really ambitious? Perhaps; and opinion at the Palace has no doubt of it, but is certainly violently prejudicial. On the other hand, in marrying a man she has pulled him down from a very high place. There are lots of women who have done the same thing and who then, without being ambitious themselves, try hard to stick him up again on as high a stool as can be found.35

  Concerns were heightened when on 10 October the Duke met Axel Wenner-Gren.36 The tall, white-haired Swedish industrialist had founded the Electrolux Company in 1919 and made his fortune from the electric vacuum cleaner and solid-state refrigerator. By 1939 he was the largest private employer in Sweden with interests in newspapers, banking, wood pulp – he was the world’s leading producer – and a large stake in the arms manufacturers Bofors.

  A close friend of Bedaux, in 1937 Wenner-Gren had published a Utopian tract, An Appeal to Everyman, calling for international disarmament, the abolition of trade barriers and the need for improvements in education, wages and working and living conditions. However, it was his dealings with Hermann Goering, ostensibly as an honest peace broker, and his anthropological expeditions in areas of strategic interest to the Nazis, which were causing alarm in British and American official circles, now that he was also meeting with the Duke of Windsor.

  How fair were the concerns about the proposed trip to Germany? There was certainly a desire for public attention by both Windsor and his wife. He had no inner life to take refuge in. Royal tours and fawning courtiers were all he had known. Having given up his throne, he was looking for a role and was prey to the unscrupulous. Sensing they would not approve, Windsor had told neither his friends nor the authorities about the tour until the last moment.