It was unlikely that the government would endorse the morganatic scheme anyway, but Harmsworth chose to combine it with an attempt to use the Rothermere newspapers to try to bully Baldwin as his father and Beaverbrook had tried to unsuccessfully over the Empire Free Trade issue five years previously. On the Monday after the King’s return from Wales, Harmsworth’s Daily Mail published an editorial comment, which drew an unfavourable contrast between the King’s obviously heartfelt engagement with the unemployed and the allegedly callous indifference of ministers and civil servants in the committee rooms of Whitehall. Later legend, in part cultivated by the then Duke of Windsor, has it that there was a genuine disagreement between King and government on social and economic policy, but in reality, his declaration that ‘Something must be done’ never went further than sentiment. The only senior minister who complained about what the King had said was Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald, who objected to its constitutional impropriety rather than its sentiments of social justice. MacDonald feared that the King’s statement might be seen as binding on the government and also suspected that this might be a way of ‘cloaking his [the King’s] other troubles’.10
It shows how little the King understood of political realities and how precipitately he was behaving, that he allowed Harmsworth’s initiative to go ahead in the way that its author thought best. Once the King had accepted the idea of the morganatic scheme, he gave no thought as to how it might be presented effectively to the government. Mrs Simpson might have found Harmsworth impressive, but it would have been hard to find anyone in Britain less suited to the job of persuading the Prime Minister to consider the morganatic scheme seriously. Harmsworth, of course, represented the kind of press proprietor whom Baldwin despised in general and as a would-be force in politics in particular, so he started the conversation at a considerable disadvantage. Like MacDonald, Baldwin also saw through the attempt to restage the Empire Free Trade campaign, as he told Tom Jones: ‘The Daily Mail is flying kites over the south Wales visit but really with the marriage business in mind.’11 If the Harmsworths imagined that the Daily Mail leader would frighten the government with a foretaste of what the popular press could do if it did not cooperate, they grossly overestimated their influence. Baldwin had seen off the press barons in a much harder fight over Empire Free Trade.
By coincidence, just as Harmsworth was tasked with pitching the morganatic scheme to the government, Downing Street was trying to speak to him in his capacity as chairman of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association in order to sound him out about the industry’s willingness to remain silent about the King and Mrs Simpson. For a couple of days, Harmsworth dodged messages from the government, presumably to give time for the Daily Mail leader to appear, and it was not until that Monday that he came to Downing Street. Wilson’s notes are not written for comic effect, but it is difficult to believe that he was not aware of the farcical side to the interview between the Prime Minister and Harmsworth, which might have come out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel in which an idiotic youth pesters an elderly peer with the supposed merits of some half-witted scheme. Once Harmsworth began to talk, it was obvious that he had no interest in press silence, but was desperate to broach the idea of a morganatic marriage. He seems to have paraded the same recently acquired erudition on the topic that he had deployed with Mrs Simpson to vastly less effect. The abdication is full of incidents of which the various participants gave different accounts afterwards, but none even remotely compare with the gulf between Baldwin’s accounts of the meeting and those given by Harmsworth. Even in Hankey’s restrained prose, it is obvious that Baldwin made no secret of his distaste for Harmsworth’s importunity when he told the Cabinet about the conversation a few days later. According to the minutes, he also told Harmsworth firmly that it was for Parliament and not newspapers to decide whether a morganatic marriage was acceptable, and offered little hope that it would be agreeable. When Baldwin told the story to his niece, Monica, some months later, he gave full vent to his personal dislike of Harmsworth and the press lords.
A disgustingly conceited fellow and yet curiously timid … I told him that he and his filthy paper did not really know the mind of the English people: whereas I did … ‘I tell you that the English people will never accept the thing that you suggest’ … Harmsworth was frightfully funny though he didn’t realise it.12
Even if Baldwin had been less blunt to Harmsworth than he told Monica, it is hard to understand how Harmsworth came to tell Mrs Simpson that Baldwin was ‘interested but wary about committing himself’, and the King that he was ‘surprised, interested and noncommital’.13 Harmsworth went to Downing Street to talk rather than to listen, but he seems not to have listened at all. That, or he was so embarrassed at his abject failure to bully the Prime Minister that he lied outright to his friends.
Yet again, the dialogue between the King and government was compromised by simple but serious misunderstandings. Baldwin seems to have thought that what he told Harmsworth was enough to put an end to the idea of a morganatic marriage and did nothing further. It is not even clear whether Harmsworth had told him that the proposal had been endorsed by the King; he seems to have thought that it was simply a scheme that he had dreamed up which he did not discuss with the King until after he had spoken to the Prime Minister. Baldwin was still labouring under the misapprehension that the King had given him a firm commitment to abdicate at their last conversation. On his side the King thought he had left the question open and appears to have accepted Harmsworth’s version of his conversation with Baldwin. He was burning with impatience and took offence at the lack of an immediate response from Downing Street even though a moment’s reflection would have told him that the government had been presented with a scheme with deep constitutional implications.14 He summoned Baldwin to an audience on Wednesday 25 November; the first time that he had taken the initiative.
The King confirmed that he had spoken to Harmsworth and asked the Prime Minister to consider the idea of a morganatic marriage.15 It was bad enough that the King appeared to be operating on the advice of a contemptible press baron, but to Baldwin it seemed that he was going back on a promise given at the audience on 16 November. Baldwin’s reply to the King was not as emphatically negative as his reply to Harmsworth, but it was anything but encouraging. He blamed Harmsworth for the King’s apparent change of mind and delivered a tirade on the unimportance of the Daily Mail’s assessment of public opinion. Baldwin did offer to sound out the political parties in Britain and the Dominions informally, but gave the King a pessimistic estimate of the prospects that the legislation necessary for a morganatic marriage would be approved. He also asked the King for a brief written summary setting out his vision of a morganatic marriage, which he agreed to but never delivered. Once again, he passed on to the King something that was weighing heavily on Wilson’s mind, but which, if anything, might have deterred the King from abdication. Baldwin warned him that there might be ‘a wave of fury’ against Mrs Simpson if the King abdicated. It is not clear how much this registered on the King at the time, but over the course of subsequent audiences he began to feel that Baldwin was using threats against Mrs Simpson as a way of putting pressure on him. Arguably the most productive outcome to the meeting was that Baldwin’s uncompromising attack on the Daily Mail scheme registered on the King and he distanced himself from Harmsworth’s attempt to manufacture a constitutional crisis on a political issue; he ‘expressed regret that certain articles had appeared in the press suggesting there was a divergence [of view with ministers]’.16 That was the last anyone was to hear of Edward VIII as the champion of the unemployed against an uncaring government until well after the crisis had ended. The legend lingered on and has become embedded in various narratives of the era.17
The King was so deeply in the grip of his own impatience that he had not been prepared to wait the few days necessary for Beaverbrook, his only other worthwhile potential ally, to return to Europe before telling Baldwin that he intended to marry Mrs Simpson and th
en launching the morganatic marriage scheme. It is doubtful whether it would have changed much if he had waited, given Mrs Simpson’s enthusiasm for the scheme, but as it was, the accident of timetabling meant that the King’s campaign to stay on the throne was dislocated from the start and Beaverbrook found himself trying to cope with the consequences of two barely considered moves. When the Bremen arrived in Southampton on Thursday 27 November, Beaverbrook was driven directly to Fort Belvedere. Beaverbrook immediately proceeded to attack Harmsworth’s idea of a morganatic marriage. He had instantly spotted the same weakness as Monckton: the proposal passed the initiative into the hands of the government, who would have to try to get Parliament to approve it, and they were under no compulsion to try very hard. Beaverbrook told the King that by raising the possibility of a morganatic marriage, he had ‘put your head on the execution block. All that Baldwin has to do now is to swing the ax’.18 Beaverbrook spent much effort in the coming days in unavailing attempts to retrieve the initiative that the King had handed to the government by acting so hastily. He was determined that the King should refer as little as possible to the politicians. He took the view that only the written law counted and that the King was free to marry whomever he wanted.19 Even before they got round to substantial questions of tactics in the campaign, it was clear that jealousy and mutual suspicion would further hamper things. The King began by asking Beaverbrook to conceal from Harmsworth the fact he had returned to Britain at the King’s request. He also appears to have withheld from Beaverbrook the fact that he had already sounded out his two supposed friends in Cabinet. When Beaverbrook advised the King to find an ally to support him in Cabinet and seems to have offered to try to use his influence with Hoare on his behalf, there is no sign that the King warned him that he himself had tried already. Beaverbrook even went to see Hoare the same evening, but Hoare told him outright that he was opposed to a marriage of any kind.20
The King did not agree to Beaverbrook’s advice to withdraw the morganatic scheme, but his arguments were persuasive enough for the King to find out whether Mrs Simpson would change her mind. It had anyway never been what he wanted. She, however, remained convinced and made it plain that she preferred morganatic marriage to becoming Queen. She relished the financial benefits and the prestige from her relationship with the King, but she shared his distaste for duties of royalty and was daunted by ‘all that formality and responsibility’.21 The King telephoned Beaverbrook at Stornoway House, his Mayfair mansion, with the bad news at 2 a.m. but, characteristically, was more interested in finding out whether Beaverbrook had succeeded with Hoare where he himself had failed. In turn, Beaverbrook’s chief concern – apart from natural annoyance at being woken – was that the King was talking unrestrainedly over an open telephone line that Beaverbrook feared was being tapped by the government. In its way this phone call encapsulates many of the key features of the crisis: the King’s inconsiderateness, duplicity and impatience; Mrs Simpson’s dominant part in the relationship; the all-pervading presence of the secret services.
Somewhere in his discussion of the morganatic scheme with the King, Beaverbrook slipped in what might have seemed to be a trivial untruth, which was to have serious consequences. He told the King that the true author of the proposal was Winston Churchill. It was not an especially outrageous lie, certainly by Beaverbrook’s standards. He and Churchill had already discussed what they called the ‘Cornwall plan’ (after the idea of making Mrs Simpson Duchess of Cornwall) and Beaverbrook freely admitted to him what he had told the King, although he went on to tell him that the King was enthusiastic, which was certainly not the full truth.22 Moreover, Churchill and Beaverbrook were long-standing cronies. Beaverbrook’s motives for the lie are obscure. Possibly Churchill was fleetingly taken with the idea of a morganatic marriage and Beaverbrook wanted to reinforce it. Possibly Beaverbrook felt he was already in competition with Churchill for the King’s ear and wanted to foist onto him the responsibility for what he already recognised was a damaging proposal. This would also explain why he had misled Churchill on the King’s support for the proposal. At the time the King believed Beaverbrook, and with his habitual lack of discretion told people around him that the morganatic scheme was Churchill’s idea.
Beaverbrook’s fear that phone lines were being tapped was – at that point – wide of the mark, but MI5 was collecting information via its informant network. Downing Street was quickly aware of what was happening in the King’s camp or, at least, what the King thought was happening, and Wilson was soon treating the morganatic scheme as a ploy of what was soon being called the King’s Party. At the outset he was cautious – ‘There is some reason to believe that this idea [the morganatic proposal] originated with Mr. Winston Churchill’ – but he was soon referring to it ‘as the Churchill– Harmsworth proposal’.23 As had happened before when MI5 was reporting on the plan to get to get Mrs Simpson out of the country, it repeated what the King was saying without considering whether the King was himself correctly informed. Fisher’s intelligence-led over-optimism about Mrs Simpson’s post-divorce plans had left few marks beyond the dents to Fisher’s pride and a further deterioration in Mrs Simpson’s deplorable reputation in Downing Street, but associating Churchill with the morganatic scheme had far more radical consequences. It fuelled paranoia in Downing Street, triggering fears of a close-knit conspiracy to manufacture a constitutional crisis for the benefit of a small group of political adventurers. In reality, the Harmsworths (father and son), Churchill and Beaverbrook were pursuing quite different goals: Esmond Harmsworth wanted to find a way for the King to marry Mrs Simpson and stay on the throne; Churchill wanted to keep the King on the throne; Beaverbrook was determined to force Baldwin’s removal. The most famous version of Beaverbrook’s motivation is Randolph Churchill’s story that he said he wanted to ‘bugger Baldwin’.24 Years later Churchill and Beaverbrook were still bickering about what the abdication had been about. Early in the Second World War, Churchill, by then Prime Minister, accepted he might have been wrong in wanting to keep Edward VIII on the throne and that his brother was the right man, but Beaverbrook, then in the Cabinet, was still insisting that he had wanted to ‘get rid of Baldwin’.25 Esmond’s father, Lord Rothermere, was caught between his son’s loyalty to the King, his own loyalty to Beaverbrook and the dictates of good sense. Apart from Esmond, none had any affection for Mrs Simpson, and Beaverbrook positively disliked her. Moreover, there is scant evidence that there was any coordination between the Harmsworths on one side and Churchill and Beaverbrook on the other. Apart from a qualified claim from MI5 that Churchill was in touch with Esmond Harmsworth, there is no record of any contact and some indication that they were operating separately. Both parties talked of making Mrs Simpson a Duchess, but Esmond Harmsworth thought of making her Duchess of Lancaster, whilst Churchill and Beaverbrook had Cornwall in mind. However shaky they were, MI5’s reports that Churchill was behind Harmsworth’s morganatic scheme in close alliance with Beaverbrook provided the central narrative of the supposed conspiracy. From then on, the hardliners thought they were fighting for the control of the country and not merely dealing with a sovereign’s wayward matrimonial instincts.
Churchill had unintentionally cast himself almost perfectly as the villainous leader of this conspiracy. At this stage in his career his reputation was at its lowest ebb. Almost from the beginning of his political life he had appeared erratic and untrustworthy. He had defected from the Conservatives to the Liberals in 1906 and defected back again after the war. After his disastrous handling of the Gallipoli campaign as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, he had briefly abandoned politics to command a battalion on the Western Front. In the early 1930s he had waged a bitter campaign against government plans to give India Dominion status. He championed rearmament and firmness to Nazi Germany; entirely correctly in hindsight, but in the teeth of almost unanimous pacifism. Many saw his opposition to Hitler as merely another opportunistic scheme. His tiny band of faithful followers included two MPs wi
th extremely lurid reputations: Bob Boothby and Brendan Bracken. He was in the curious position of holding great political stature – he had been a senior Cabinet minister on-and-off for twenty years – but was firmly outside the pale of respectable politics. The middle 1930s were Churchill’s wilderness years, but his ambition to return to political power was undimmed. To a respectable Conservative such as Tommy Dugdale’s wife, he was a ‘potential snake in the grass, whose very freedom from loyalties makes him a “dark horse in a loose box”’.26 When Churchill finally became Prime Minister, Rab Butler, a long-standing opponent, disdainfully claimed that ‘…the good clean tradition of English politics … had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history’.27
The King Who Had to Go Page 17