The King Who Had to Go

by Adrian Phillips

  The King remained in a highly emotional and depressed state after Baldwin had left. He called Beaverbrook, and in a long and one-sided conversation he spoke as if he had definitely decided to abdicate and to retire into private life. This was probably as close to despair as he came. Over the coming days his spirits revived and fluctuated, and with them his thoughts for the future. He was utterly certain that he wanted to marry Mrs Simpson, but unsure and indecisive about anything else. In the remorseless eyes of the government hardliners, he appeared feckless and unreliable.

  NOTES

  1. Chamberlain diary, 30 November

  2. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 66

  3. Channon diaries, 30 November

  4. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 70

  5. History of The Times, p. 1033

  6. BBK G/6/19

  7. A King’s Story, p. 354

  8. A King’s Story, p. 354

  9. A King’s Story, p. 354

  10. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 80

  11. Beaverbrook to Murphy, 3 September 1949, BBK G/6/23

  12. A King’s Story, p. 372 fn.

  13. Baldwin to Selwyn Lloyd, 20 October 1947, quoted in Thorpe, Alec Douglas-Home, p. 67

  14. NAA CP 4/10, Dominions Secretary to High Commissioner in Australia, 3 December

  15. NA CAB 21/4100/2, from High Commissioner, Canberra, 2 December

  16. Reith diaries, 16 April 1937, NA CAB 23/68

  17. Chamberlain diary, 2 December

  18. BBK G/6/12, Monckton to Duke of Windsor, 22 August 1949

  19. Chamberlain diary, 2 December

  20. NA CAB 23/68, Chamberlain diary, 2 December

  21. NA CAB 23/68

  22. Chamberlain diary, 2 December

  23. NA PREM 1/446, Constitutional Crisis: Attitude of the British Press

  24. The Times, 3 December

  CHAPTER 11

  OBSESSED TO GET AWAY

  * * *

  From the moment he took his seat beside W. in the motor, Lord Brownlow subtley [sic] and persistently worked on W.s mind. He even tried to talk her out of leaving Great Britain at all. But she was obsessed with the desire of putting the English Channel between herself and me: ‘A lot of incidents in British history have terminated in the Channel. Maybe this one will!’

  DUKe OF WINDSOR, DRAFT MEMOIRS1

  WHEN THE NATIONAL newspapers took up the story on the morning of Thursday 3 December, it was not The Times that had the most impact at Fort Belvedere. It was an unnamed, illustrated paper that splashed a photo of Mrs Simpson across its front page. She was appalled; not only was she sensitive to publicity in itself, but she feared violence and this seemed to be an incitement. She had already been warned by the police that they saw risk of ‘some lunatic throwing vitriol at her’.2 This was a testimony to the imaginative powers of the Metropolitan Police rather than anything else – the only physical threat that is recorded was the supposed bomb plot – but it helped confirm Mrs Simpson in the decision she had made the previous evening to leave the country.3 Terror of an attack combined with the same horror at seeing her name splashed across the papers that had oppressed her at the end of the Nahlin cruise. All she wanted was to get as far away from it all as quickly as possible. To the King she ‘was obsessed with the desire of putting the English Channel between herself and me’.4 Obedient as ever to her wishes, the King made no protest, but he might also have been aware that she would try to prevent him from abdicating in order to marry her. He certainly claimed that the decision on whether to abdicate was his and his alone.5

  Mrs Simpson’s decision to leave the country for France was what the government hardliners and the King’s allies had been scheming to bring about. The hardliners had been trying to make this happen almost since the beginning of the crisis, and the King’s allies for the previous week. It came far too late for the effect that the hardliners had desired: the discreet disappearance of Mrs Simpson from the scene and the end of the scandal. Through a series of miscalculations, bad luck and, possibly, her own indiscretion, her flight to France fuelled the story rather than dampening it. Everything was fixed at almost the last minute, so this is hardly surprising; once again the King made bad decisions because of tiredness and minimal discussion. It was the King who took complete control of the arrangements, which he made with his usual precipitation. The man he had chosen to escort Mrs Simpson was given no more than forty minutes at Fort Belvedere before starting the journey.6 Her old friends Katherine and Herman Rogers had a villa in the south of France outside Cannes, and this seemed to offer an easily arranged and comfortable place for her to stay, but she had to get there first. She disliked flying and he did not consider her going by train, presumably because it was thought to be insecure. This left a car journey of well over 1,000 kilometres across France. It was to take two days and a night to complete, which gave the press pack ample time to mount a full scale pursuit in force. According to one account, Mrs Simpson herself compromised the secrecy of the journey by telling two American journalists (out of ‘Southern politeness’) that she was leaving for France, to explain why she could not give them the interview she had promised.7 The choice of vehicle also proved to be a weakness. It was the Buick that the King had given to Mrs Simpson; modern, comfortable and powerful, but a type extremely rare in France and easily recognised. Worse, the export document gave the owner’s name as Mrs Ernest Simpson, which instantly destroyed the plan to travel under the alias of Mrs Harris, the name she had used for the ferry crossing from Newhaven. Her arrival in Dieppe was immediately and conspicuously signalled to the French customs personnel, who seem to have passed the information on to the press. To cap it all, the Buick’s registration number was CUL 547, which by bad luck made the car doubly unmissable. Cul translates as ‘arse’ in French, and is used as a slang shorthand for sexual affairs. No attempt was made to inform the French government of her journey, so there was no possibility of help from the authorities; indeed there was a strong suspicion that the French police kept the press informed of where to find Mrs Simpson.8 As a small concession to practicality, it was decided to leave Slipper behind, and he was able to keep the King company for the final traumatic days of the crisis and his own journey into exile by the more comfortable and dignified means of a Royal Navy destroyer and a private Pullman carriage.

  As an extra security precaution, the King agreed with Mrs Simpson an elementary set of code names for the main players to conceal their identities in phone calls. They were closer to family nicknames in flavour and probably provide a better clue as to how the couple felt about the individuals than they offered as a means of concealment. Their names for Beaverbrook and Baldwin contrasted aptly: Beaverbrook was ‘Tornado’ and Baldwin was ‘Crutch’.9 Churchill was known simply by his initials, ‘W. S. C.’, somehow emblematic of his ambiguous role. The couple’s names for the King’s family members display a degree of acid. His undistinguished military brother the Duke of Gloucester was ‘The Unknown Warrior’ and his oldest brother’s wife was ‘Glamis Monster’, in an early foretaste of acrimony between her and the Duchess of Windsor.10 Glamis was her birthplace and home to her great-grandparents, who had had a baby boy who died on the day he was born. According to much later stories, he was born severely deformed and this, in turn, sparked a host of quaint and gruesome legends.

  The plan to send Mrs Simpson to Cannes by road guaranteed her a long, stressful and exhausting journey, which provided ample copy for the gleefully pursuing journalists, but the King’s next part of the organisation also quite unintentionally introduced a further series of complications that contributed to the chaotic developments of the final days of the crisis. It nearly led her to try seriously to give him up so as to let him keep the throne. To escort her on her journey to Cannes, the King chose none other than Lord Brownlow – ‘Perry’ – who, two days before, had agreed to persuade her to leave the Ki
ng on behalf of Beaverbrook and Harmsworth. The King knew that Brownlow and Beaverbrook were on good terms – Brownlow had arranged Beaverbrook’s first meeting with Mrs Simpson on 5 November11 – but the King was unaware that Beaverbrook was working to break up his relationship with her, so he saw Brownlow’s closeness to Beaverbrook as a positive advantage for the job.12 He just seemed a loyal and discreet courtier. Brownlow had the added attraction of being one of the court who had a good relationship with Mrs Simpson. The King was so obsessed by the need for secrecy that he forbade Brownlow from telling even his wife why he was leaving the country. Brownlow loyally obeyed the King on this point and was nonplussed when Channon telephoned him at Cannes a few days later, unaware that his destination had become an open secret in London.13 The party was completed by his personal chauffeur, George Ladbrook, and one of the royal bodyguards, Inspector Evans, for Mrs Simpson’s protection.

  Mrs Simpson’s departure for France left the King even more isolated. On her way through France, they regularly talked by telephone, but had to battle with the poor quality of the network and, before she arrived at Cannes, the pursuing journalists. At one point, two of her escorts had to stage a loud conversation outside the booth, which held the hotel’s only telephone, to defeat eavesdroppers. Her power to influence the King was drastically reduced, and he was thrown back onto his own very shaky judgement. Brownlow spotted the risk that ‘her absence from him – at very long range – would only increase the confusion and uncertainty of his personal conduct of the crisis’, and soon after they had left Fort Belvedere, tried to persuade her to go into hiding at his country home at Belton in Lincolnshire instead of going to Cannes.14 Unlike Beaverbrook and, weeks before him, Sir Warren Fisher, Brownlow understood that Mrs Simpson was the only person with any power to influence the King. His obedience to the King’s orders was resolute but selective, and he was willing to disobey when he thought they would hurt his master. According to Mrs Simpson’s account, he was afraid that the King would decide to abdicate, and was prepared to risk a permanent breach with him to prevent this.15 Mrs Simpson refused to disobey the King, claiming that it was not in her power to stop him. Whether Brownlow was moved by a genuine desire to do the best by the King or because his real loyalty lay with Beaverbrook hardly matters; for the next few days, her closest companion was in practice working to break up the relationship.

  The King had already practically retreated to Fort Belvedere; he never spent a night anywhere else in Britain as King. He was almost entirely isolated there. He had never had any friends, in the true sense, on whom he could lean, but a large Court and an undemanding social circle had offered a palliative. The King was now thrown back on Ulick Alexander and his lawyers: Walter Monckton, who had agreed to stay with him on the evening of Mrs Simpson’s departure for France, and George Allen. A handful of servants completed his retinue. Monckton had taken over from Hardinge as the intermediary between the King and the government and he was also the link-between for the King and Beaverbrook. Monckton was a man whom almost everyone liked and trusted; the King was no exception. He was certainly a steadying influence on some of the King’s wilder impulses, but it was far too late for anyone to fulfil the fantasies that his mother had entertained at the start of his reign, of sensible and conservative advisers who would improve the King’s behaviour for good. Like any lawyer, Monckton was anxious to protect his client’s interests (although, in keeping with tradition, he did not charge the King) and, once the morganatic idea evaporated, tacitly began to prepare to negotiate terms for the King’s abdication. Monckton’s first move was to try to throttle back the incipient confrontation between the King and the government. On the day of Mrs Simpson’s departure, he told Beaverbrook via Brownlow that he would stop seeing him:

  He [Monckton] cannot talk with me [Beaverbrook] any more. He wants to negotiate the terms of the King’s abdication and he does not intend to prejudice those negotiations by the suggestions that he is allied with me. Although he wants to avert the abdication, he considers on balance that he should sever himself sufficiently from those opposing the government’s views to escape the danger of any impedimenta in the financial arrangements.16

  The crisis was moving so fast that Mrs Simpson’s flight, which would have been of the highest importance a few days before, left barely a ripple in the government. On the Wednesday evening, Monckton had tipped Downing Street off to the prospect that Mrs Simpson was heading for Cannes, but her actual departure late on the Thursday was not detected, according to Dugdale’s later account, because her car used the back drive of Fort Belvedere.17 Downing Street anyway knew within hours that she had left for Cannes.18 This failure sparked neither recrimination nor regret. Moreover, her flight does not appear to have sparked any of the exultation that it would have done in government circles a few weeks or even days before. Things had gone well past the point when the departure of the King’s scandalous mistress into Continental obscurity was going to help.

  The end of the press silence had radically changed the crisis. Public knowledge and interest created pressure for a quick and clear decision that had been absent before whilst the King’s affair was restricted to a tiny handful of insiders. Inevitably, the matter would be raised in Parliament. The Labour Party and its leader Clement Attlee had no intention of challenging Baldwin, but Attlee still had to go through the motions of holding the government to account. He put arguably the gentlest possible question to the Prime Minister by asking him whether any constitutional difficulties had arisen and whether he would make a statement. Baldwin was able to deny to a hushed and attentive House that any difficulty existed, but did make clear that the situation was delicate.19 Far more important than the token activities of the official opposition was that public awareness of the crisis allowed Churchill to break cover completely. Churchill believed that Parliament should have the final say in the matter and demanded openly that Parliament discuss it. He had already been calling insistently, but privately, to the Prime Minister through Sir Horace Wilson, demanding that nothing ‘irrevocable’ should be done without some statement having been made to Parliament.20 He was trying to block any possibility that the news of abdication might simply be sprung on the House with no debate or even advance warning, much as Chamberlain and Wilson had hoped to do. According to one MP, Churchill was nearly in tears when he spoke, but his sentiment was in tune with the mood of the House and his fellow MPs cheered him.21 Baldwin’s reply was again entirely non-committal. These brief exchanges did nothing to dispel the mood of tension in Parliament, and when the Commons were summoned to the Lords by Black Rod there was a surge of expectation that abdication was going to be announced.22 In the stress of the moment, MPs had forgotten that this was merely a routine step, in this case to give the Royal Assent to an Act regulating the shipment of munitions to Spain. By chance it was the second time that the tangled path of the government’s response to the Spanish Civil War had crossed its handling of the royal crisis, in a healthy reminder of how attention to serious international events was being sacrificed to a trivial question of the King’s love life.

  Letting Mrs Simpson leave the country was a major surrender by the King; it was something he had been trying to prevent almost from the start and, as his repugnance for the idea makes plain, could easily be construed as an admission that she was unworthy. He had not, however, abandoned the fight, and he threw himself into one more frantic attempt to keep the throne and marry Mrs Simpson. Even before she had left Fort Belvedere he had set to writing the text of the broadcast that he proposed to make to Britain. The hostile tone of much of the press coverage that morning had given him an added impetus to pursue the idea. ‘The broadcast that the night before had been a vague and abstract notion became for me a burning necessity.’23 As ever when presented with an idea that seized his interest and imagination, he took it up wholeheartedly. A surge of enthusiasm swamped the despondency of the night before. What he wrote was a heartfelt plea that he should be allowed ‘…something that the fun
damental law of the realm allowed my subjects, but that the Prime Minister proposed to deny me’.24 Quite how the British public were to express their opinion on the matter was left entirely open. Perhaps the King imagined that the radiantly powerful justice of his case would unleash spontaneous demonstrations of support, which would compel Baldwin to yield. Probably his thinking was entirely vague and unstructured. In what was to prove a severe tactical error, he accepted the possibility of a morganatic marriage – ‘Neither Mrs. Simpson nor I have ever sought to insist that she should be Queen’. Doubtless the King thought it should be open to the public to decide if they wanted Queen Wallis by whatever osmotic process they used to decide on the marriage. He did not seem to appreciate that he was reviving a proposal that had been specifically rejected by his governments around the Empire. He also introduced a refinement to the plan entirely of his own, which gives us a clue to the effect of the cumulative stresses of the previous weeks: he would leave the country – the Alps were his first thought of a destination – whilst his people considered their verdict. ‘I feel it is best to go away for a while, so that you may reflect calmly and quietly, but without undue delay, on what I have said.’25 As well as offering the country constitutional chaos, he was awarding himself a badly needed holiday. He was also slipping in another layer of emotional blackmail, insinuating a ‘no’ vote would condemn him to exile. The last words of the broadcast were as blatant an appeal for a ‘yes’ vote as anything from a professional politician: ‘Nothing is nearer to my heart than that I should return…’