The discussion at the Cabinet meeting itself on Friday 27 November showed that Baldwin’s timing had again been near perfect. He was well ahead of the curve and was able to control the discussion practically as he wished. When he sat down to write his own account of the crisis a few weeks later, Duff Cooper was struck by the similarity between Baldwin’s performance at that first Cabinet meeting on the question and his masterly performance at the House of Commons a fortnight afterwards.2 Baldwin delivered the same uninflected narrative of the events up until then, with no apparent overlay of analysis or obvious attempt at persuasion. Encased in the neutral narrative was a progression to a more or less inevitable conclusion. In the same way that he explained to Parliament why the abdication could not have been avoided, Baldwin was setting out to the Cabinet why the crisis was likely to end in abdication without spelling out or labouring so deeply pessimistic a message. One of the younger Cabinet members who had been part of the rumoured conclave was easily won back to the fold, and left the meeting full of praise for the Prime Minister’s performance.3
Baldwin did not torpedo the morganatic proposal so much as letting it sink on its own. He had hobbled the idea before the Cabinet got to the topic by pointing out the stark fact that morganatic marriage was entirely contrary to established practice. He quoted himself telling the King that ‘Public opinion, neither in the United Kingdom nor in in the Dominions would stand for it [marriage], for the reason that the Wife of the King automatically became Queen’.4 The ‘compromise’ proposal of a morganatic marriage was damned instantly because it came from Esmond Harmsworth. Baldwin described Harmsworth’s Daily Mail as ‘the worst judge in England of what people were thinking’. As even Esmond Harmsworth acknowledged that the morganatic scheme would involve legislation, Baldwin exposed its most glaring weakness. It is unlikely that anyone around the table would have questioned Baldwin’s judgement that Parliament would not vote for it. The only minister to say anything in favour of the scheme was Duff Cooper, who, perhaps unhelpfully for his cause, cited the example of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as a precedent. He was the only minister to speak out for the King at all, but he admitted that ‘There seemed to be general agreement that the morganatic proposal was unthinkable’.5 The Cabinet did not, however, come to any formal conclusion on the scheme, but agreed to seek the views of the Dominion governments.6
Along the way, Baldwin had adroitly slipped in some highly telling points in the guise of simple anecdote. He repeated something that he had been told by Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner, which had made a deep impression on him. Bruce had spoken to an ANZAC veteran who was appalled at the King ‘taking that woman to Gallipoli’.7 In the subtlest possible way, Baldwin was hinting at the concealed depths of wickedness that the Special Branch had discovered in Mrs Simpson. If her character was so bad that her mere presence defiled the graves at Gallipoli for a former soldier from the rough-and-ready Dominions, she must be pretty bad. Baldwin squeezed an extra point from the story with a much larger significance. The veteran was a New Zealander, so that was another Dominion that the Prime Minister was lining up against Mrs Simpson, even before they pronounced formally on the question of a morganatic marriage. Baldwin delivered one of the most crucial parts of his presentation by pretending that it was an after-thought that he had almost forgotten about. He told the ministers that Attlee was firmly behind his position, so any political support for the King was only going to come from the fringes of politics.
The meeting was subject to the deepest secrecy. The story had been spread that the Cabinet meeting had been called to discuss an urgent question relating to the supply of arms in the Spanish Civil War. Baldwin made a point of telling ministers how important secrecy was. The concern for confidentiality even extended to Maurice Hankey’s record of the meeting, which did not mention some things that were discussed, most notably the menace of the King’s Party, which was very much on the minds of the men at the meeting and found its way into one private account of the discussion:
But his [the King’s] present intention seemed to be to refuse to withdraw from his position. It was pointed out … that this might involve the resignation of the Government and that in this case it would give rise to a Constitutional issue of the first magnitude, viz the King v. the Government. It seems that the King has been encouraged to believe that Winston Churchill would, in these circumstances, be prepared to form an alternative government. If this were true, there would be a grave risk of the country being divided into two camps…8
Quite who raised the spectre of a government resignation was unclear, but it has the ring of coming from the inner circle. The comment squares with what was actually happening. Beaverbrook was touting Churchill to the King as a potential supporter, not necessarily with Churchill’s approval or even knowledge.
There was a further and very telling layer of secrecy to Hankey’s record of the meeting. It was not even classed as a formal minute, rather it was a ‘Note’ for the Prime Minister and only a single copy was to be kept ‘under the personal care of the Secretary’.9 It was not circulated to ministers or to the King, who routinely received the minutes of Cabinet meetings. Twenty years before, Hankey’s minutes had taken over from the time-honoured system of the Prime Minister simply writing a letter to the monarch to tell him what the Cabinet had discussed, but now he was being completely excluded. When the King opened the red box sent by the Cabinet Secretariat in which he used to receive the Cabinet minutes the following day it came as a double shock to him. Not merely did the minutes not contain an answer to his question about a morganatic marriage, but all they did was to state in a few words that the entire Cabinet had assembled to agree that the Foreign Secretary would assist the Trade Secretary in a debate on a bill to regulate the shipping of arms to Spain. It was an obvious sham, reporting at most a few minutes’ discussion and devoid of serious content. The true significance of what the Prime Minister had sent him was clear to the King and he was infuriated. Of course, he had no right to expect a rapid answer on so complex a point, especially as he had not sent the Prime Minister the written proposal that he had promised, but it was a potent symbol of the gulf that had opened between the King and what was still nominally his government.
Baldwin’s decision to call the Cabinet meant that he had acknowledged that it would no longer be possible to hold the secret until something had been settled, but despite Baldwin’s scepticism, the story did not explode. Apart from one well-informed courtier, no one at the select house party in Wales to which Duff Cooper went straight after the Cabinet meeting was in the know. Garbled rumours, though, continued to swirl about of the conflict between the King and the government. A friend of one MP had been told by her uncle that the Privy Council would resign en masse unless the King abdicated.10 Chips Channon was fed a deliciously distorted account of the King’s audience with Baldwin that was incorrect on almost every point:
The Battle for the Throne has begun. On Wednesday evening (I know all that follows to be true, though not six people in the Kingdom are so informed), Mr. Baldwin spent one hour and forty minutes … with the King and gave him his ultimatum that the Government would resign, and that the press could no longer be restrained from attacking the King, if he did not abandon all idea of marrying Mrs. Simpson … [The King] refused point blank and asked for time to consult his friends. ‘Who are they?’ Mr. Baldwin demanded … ‘Lord Beaverbrook,’ the King retorted. The Prime Minister gasped and departed.11
The most likely source for this farrago was Beaverbrook’s mistress, Mrs Jean Norton, adding a layer of confusion to her lover’s inventions. Channon did not even appear to have picked up that there was a Cabinet meeting. The one solid nugget of fact was that Beaverbrook was the King’s only declared or active ally.
The week after Beaverbrook’s return from New York was the high point of his involvement in the crisis and, on the surface, there were aspects to it that he could relish. He was the friend and confidant of the King, called on to use his power, influ
ence and contacts to keep him on the throne. He could indulge in an orgy of high-pressure phone calls and sweeping promises. If all went well, he would be established as one of the powers in the land and the favoured counsellor of the monarch. Even better, he had the opportunity to defenestrate and humiliate Stanley Baldwin. The reality was very different. He was the prisoner of the King who was already committed to a programme with which Beaverbrook disagreed, and deaf to any suggestions that he might make, as well as having no interest whatever in Beaverbrook’s plots to remove Baldwin. According to Mrs Norton: ‘Beaverbrook, while enjoying his role of Mr. Fixit and the power he now holds in his horny hands, is nearly distraught…’12 The problem was the King himself: ‘…he has no sense of reality and whenever Beaverbrook, whom he looks on as a supporter, gives him adverse advice, the King not only refuses to believe it, or take it, but actually only says to his advisers and solicitors: “Lord Beaverbrook was in a bad temper last night.”’ He tried to make the King undo the damage that he had already done to his chances by asking Baldwin to consider the morganatic proposal. As Beaverbrook had spotted immediately this was the move that placed the King’s fate irrevocably in the government’s hands, but having let the genie out of the bottle it was impossible to put it back in. Even more fatal in Beaverbrook’s eyes was when he learned from Hoare that the King had condoned the question being referred to the Dominions. With his Canadian background, Beaverbrook was well aware that social attitudes in the Empire outside Britain were more conservative. The King was persuaded to ask the Prime Minister via Walter Monckton to withdraw the request, but Baldwin skewered this move when he asked Monckton whether this meant that the King had abandoned his plans for marriage completely; Monckton could not answer the question. Nothing had changed; all that Monckton was asking the Prime Minister was the impossible, to turn the clock back. In the end Beaverbrook ended up with more or less the same fatuous dream as the King: marrying in secrecy just before the coronation and then springing the challenge on the government.
Beaverbrook consoled himself with fantasies of assembling an alternative government once the constitutional crisis swept Baldwin away. In his memoir of the crisis, he made much of the idea of bringing in Archibald Sinclair, leader of the opposition Liberals, as alternative Prime Minister, but this was no more than a daydream; there is no sign that he even spoke to Sinclair at the time.13 As he reluctantly concluded, Churchill was the only even vaguely possible candidate. How far Churchill went along with Beaverbrook’s plans is far from clear, but there does not appear to have been any very active conspiracy. Churchill was certainly in constant touch with Beaverbrook, but there is no indication that he had broken his undertaking to Baldwin not to communicate with the King. The only time he did anything that looked like canvassing support for the King was delivering an impassioned but ineffectual tirade to Duff Cooper a few days after the Cabinet meeting.14
In between attempts to lure the King out of his dreamland and musing on how to organise his own government, Beaverbrook was in constant contact with Hoare. It was the closest he came to serious political action. Beaverbrook bombarded Hoare with a great deal of self-serving twaddle and the occasional revealing snippet of truth, all of which found its way back to Chamberlain and much of it to Baldwin. Beaverbrook imagined that Hoare’s support for the government could be compromised, but his skills as a political intriguer were negligible. As Clement Attlee had recognised immediately, the King was a lost cause politically, and no professional politician with anything at all to lose was going to take it up. All Beaverbrook achieved was to heighten the mistrust of Churchill and reveal that the King had already lost interest in the morganatic scheme. He also admitted to Hoare that he disliked Mrs Simpson. The only worthwhile piece of information from the government side that Beaverbrook picked up from Hoare was that a Cabinet meeting had been fixed for Wednesday 2 December and that it would decide on the morganatic proposal. As well as a hopelessly uncooperative King, Beaverbrook now faced a deadline.
Beaverbrook entirely failed to change the King’s mind or to garner significant political support for him, but he did rather better with a far more deeply hidden part of his operation, which for very different motives aimed to achieve the same thing as the government hardliners had been trying to do for some weeks: to get Mrs Simpson out of the way. Helping the King and doing what the King wanted were quite different things, and this was what doomed the efforts of his friends. The King would have been furious at Beaverbrook’s dislike of Mrs Simpson and beside himself if he had discovered that Beaverbrook was scheming to send her abroad. Beaverbrook understood that separating her from the King was the only thing that gave him a chance of staying on the throne. Mrs Simpson became the target of a campaign of anonymous hostile letters and a brick was thrown through the window of her house on Cumberland Terrace near Regent’s Park. Many years later, Beaverbrook proudly implied that he had had a hand in the last incident, and it features as one of the key turning points in the crisis in a book about the then Duchess of Windsor by a writer closely linked to Beaverbrook.15 Having failed in all of the serious goals of his conspiracies, it was as though Beaverbrook took consolation from the thought that he had succeeded in this nasty little scheme. Even here, he would have been deluding himself: the window was broken after she had left the house for ever; neither she nor the Duke of Windsor mentioned it in their memoirs.16 The poison-pen letters and the strangers gathering on the foggy pavement outside the house, though, were real enough, and Baldwin’s warning to the King of ‘a wave of fury’ against her ate deeply into whatever physical courage Mrs Simpson possessed. The final straw came when the King learned of a nebulous and completely insubstantial story of a bomb plot that the Metropolitan Police investigated, which even he dismissed as ridiculous.17 On the evening of Friday 27 November, he drove up from Surrey to collect her, her dog Slipper and her Aunt Bessie, to take them away from London and its menaces to the security and isolation of Fort Belvedere. It brought a sudden end to Mrs Simpson’s career as a London socialite; the dinner party she had planned for the King and the Channons that evening was only cancelled at 4.30 p.m.18
The couple were finally installed together in the Fort under the token chaperonage of Aunt Bessie, where they could spend what proved to be one final weekend together in England. Mrs Simpson recognised immediately that the atmosphere had changed for the worse: ‘…this was no longer the enchanted Fort; it was the Fort beleaguered.’19 It was ever more claustrophobic. It had been his refuge from the burdens of kingship, but it was now almost a bunker. The only member of his court to remain with him at Fort Belvedere was a fairly recent arrival, Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse, in effect the household steward. The King’s only notable visitor from the older, happier days was the rather ambiguous figure of Bernard Rickatson-Hatt, a good friend of Ernest Simpson. In his capacity of a senior editor at Reuters News Agency, he played a small part in enforcing the news blackout and provided the King with Fleet Street gossip.20
The King was constantly on the phone to his allies but, in reality, they were all waiting powerlessly. Beaverbrook delivered the hardly surprising news from Hoare that the government expected the press silence to break soon. On the Sunday afternoon, the King finally told Mrs Simpson directly of his predicament: that in practice he was faced with the choice of giving her up or abdicating. She comforted him with the glimmer of an idea. She saw a chance of using American political methods to escape the trap: using radio to address the public directly, bypassing the politicians.21 It was still a relatively young medium, but President Roosevelt had recognised its potential whilst still governor of New York. He had used the medium to appeal directly to the public in his battle to overcome strong Republican opposition to his policies, but calling his broadcasts ‘fireside chats’ he had adroitly softened their function as a tool in party politics. She was much taken by what seemed to her to be a way of breaking the impasse on the King’s terms. In later years she complained that the King could have kept his throne
if only he had used a ‘first class public-relations man from New York’.22
For the time being, the couple kept this idea to themselves, but by the Monday night it was clear to his allies that the campaign to keep the King on the throne was in desperate trouble and that a radical change in approach was needed. Beaverbrook hosted a dinner party for Esmond Harmsworth, Monckton and Lord Brownlow, known as ‘Perry’, one of Edward’s courtiers and, more importantly, one of Beaverbrook’s network of semi-dependents. The main conclusion of the dinner, and probably the reason for holding it in the first place, was to persuade Brownlow to take a message from the King’s supporters directly to Mrs Simpson.23 They had recognised that the only ‘avenue of approach to the demented love-sick sovereign was Wallis Simpson herself’.24 Brownlow was bullied into taking approximately the same message to Mrs Simpson that the hardliners had tried to send: to ‘warn her confidentially that the country will not accept the marriage, and that she must go away for a few weeks, and allow the talk to simmer down, and to put all thoughts of marriage out of the King’s mind’.25 Brownlow ‘reluctantly but very patriotically’ agreed, but discovered that the King had put her beyond his – or anyone else’s – reach. Her departure from Cumberland Terrace for Fort Belvedere, for which Beaverbrook was unwittingly responsible, was almost the only move in the crisis that the King succeeded in keeping secret for any length of time.
As the King’s supposed allies were plotting to break up the relationship on which he had staked everything, the sky over London and the home counties was lit by a gigantic glow in the south. The Crystal Palace, a relic of the optimism of Queen Victoria’s reign, which had been mouldering sadly in the dreary suburb to which it had been moved after the glories of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, had caught fire and was utterly destroyed. Seldom has a pure accident held such an ominous quality. The symbolism runs doubly deep if there is any truth in the unverified, but widely repeated, story that Winston Churchill broke his journey to his country home, Chartwell, to join the estimated 100,000 spectators who flocked to Sydenham Hill to savour the spectacle, and remarked: ‘This is the end of an age.’26 Under the naval designation of ‘HMS Crystal Palace’, it had served as a depot for the Royal Navy Division, which had featured in the attempt that Churchill had made as First Lord of the Admiralty to muscle into the land fighting in the early weeks of the First World War.27 In one of his more futile and damaging errors of judgement, he visited the Belgian port of Antwerp, which the division was helping to defend against a German siege, and proposed to Prime Minister Henry Asquith that he swap his Cabinet post for the command of the Allied land forces there. The offer was refused. His involvement in the abdication crisis was to be no happier.
The King Who Had to Go Page 19