Beaverbrook’s dreams of using the King to provoke an all-out battle with Baldwin were fading, but he clung on to the hopes for the Brownlow plan.19 He was already losing faith in the King’s combativeness after Monckton had told him that contact was to cease. Earlier that night he had told Channon, ‘Our cock would be all right if only he would fight, but at the moment he will not even crow’.20 Persuading Mrs Simpson to give up the King was looking like a far more certain way to keep the King on the throne, and Beaverbrook pressed it on Churchill as the correct line to take. Churchill, however, wanted to work directly on the King to stop him from abdicating, and told Beaverbrook that he was going to write to Baldwin. They parted with no agreement as to what to do.
The final blow to Beaverbrook’s enthusiasm for an all-out fight came the following morning. The message that Monckton brought to Downing Street that the King had decided to abdicate gave the government the ammunition for a move to head off the King’s Party. By chance it seems to have forced a wedge into the gap that had been opening between Churchill and Beaverbrook since their conversation of the early hours. Having been told by Monckton that negotiations between the King and the government were well advanced when he cut off contact, Beaverbrook was now to be told that they had practically concluded. Simon went to see Beaverbrook at Stornoway House to tell him that there was no point in trying to continue the struggle; the King had given up, and it was only a matter of a short time before the King was gone. Simon delivered a list ticking off how each serious obstacle had been overcome:
That an accommodation had been reached
That a Bill was in preparation solving the difficulties attending on the divorce
That the King would abdicate at once.21
Simon’s call at Stornoway House was a matter of the greatest delicacy. There is no hint of it in any document, official or otherwise, from the government side. Beaverbrook is the only source for the incident, but if he can be believed, he was being fed a story that was significantly in advance of what had actually been achieved at that point. In reality, there was still much to be done, in particular the King had given at most a conditional agreement to abdicating. Beaverbrook was aware of the sensitivity and was unsure as to how much to say of it; he referred coyly to a ‘member of the Cabinet’. It is anyway striking that he was not told by Hoare, his usual intermediary with the Cabinet, but the one member of the Cabinet who was entrusted with the most ticklish parts of the government’s work over the next few days. These included lying outright to a journalist to block a story that the government did not want to appear. The government was still afraid of a large-scale press campaign supporting the King’s views against its own, and could well have judged that the risk of anticipating a happy outcome to its negotiations with the King was worthwhile to head off the most likely architect of such a campaign; failure of the negotiations would have taken the country into entirely uncharted territory. If it was a gamble, it paid off; Beaverbrook appears to have taken Simon’s account at face value.
Monckton’s message from the King opened a chink of light at the end of the tunnel for Baldwin, but there was no guarantee that it would be reached or even how far away it might be. Baldwin could not know of the dissention within the King’s Party and how its strategy was hamstrung by the King’s unwillingness to commit himself to an all-out fight, but he knew the hardliners on the government side would question his judgement in acceding to the King speaking to Churchill and that he would need to head off criticism before it developed. To do this he picked almost the oldest gambit in the book: defusing criticism by making it himself and inviting his interlocutor to tell him that he was wrong. Wilson created the first opening for this little piece of theatre the following morning with the blood-curdling warnings of ‘…the apparent activities of Mr. Churchill, and of the leaders of the Harmsworth and Beaverbrook press, [and] that the King’s interview with Mr. Churchill might be used harmfully…’22 Baldwin figuratively held his head in his hands and confessed, ‘I have made my first blunder.’ Wilson changed tack smartly and loyally disagreed with him on the grounds that ‘the King might have felt that any attempt was being made to isolate him’ if the Prime Minister had objected.
Heartened by the success of this little ruse Baldwin repeated it on the whole Cabinet when it met at 10 a.m. that Saturday morning. It had been fine-tuned for the audience: ‘I made a bloomer last night. I am very sorry for it. I realised it afterwards. I suppose I was tired at the time.’23 He recited sympathetically the King’s complaint that ‘he had no friends to discuss the matter with’ using almost the King’s own phraseology to describe his plight, ‘…faced with the serried ranks of the Cabinet and Parliament…’ 24 Duff Cooper observed the performance in fascination: ‘He adopted with the vocabulary of the schoolroom, the appearance of a penitent schoolboy “owning up” to a delinquency.’25 Baldwin did not even have to trot out Wilson’s admission that the King might have complained of an attempt to isolate him. Ramsay MacDonald rose to the bait with a magisterial, flat and unambiguous endorsement of the Prime Minister’s decision: ‘May I be allowed, as your predecessor, to say that I very much doubt you were wrong in giving your consent.’26 MacDonald’s only reservation was that the King should not see Churchill again.
Baldwin had covered his flanks against immediate internal criticism from both his Cabinet colleagues and the civil servants, but it remained to be seen whether he had assessed the risks correctly. He had to give away a little more later on in the meeting when a number of ministers challenged him on how he would deal with exactly the strategy that Churchill was urging on the King: stonewalling on the grounds that Mrs Simpson was not free and that a marriage was impossible. Somehow the Labour Party newspaper the Daily Herald had picked up or guessed that the King’s unofficial advisers were pointing him in that direction. It was certainly a risk which they should have been worried about. Even as convinced a hardliner as Sir John Simon acknowledged that it existed; it never took much to make Simon revert to his lawyer’s habits and he admitted there would be a ‘basis’ for such a move – in other words it would be very hard to challenge in law, as Churchill was fully aware. Fortunately for the government it never had to decide how to respond; Baldwin had a good sense that it was not a strategy that appealed to the King. He could also hint to his colleagues that negotiations on terms of the abdication had begun and that he hoped to be able to get a clearer sense of how they were going when he saw the King again that afternoon.
Baldwin had been wise to anticipate an adverse reaction to Churchill becoming directly involved in the affair and this was amply proved when the Cabinet meeting was interrupted to bring in a copy of the personal letter that Churchill had told the King he was going to write to the Prime Minister. Baldwin read it out to the ministers. In typical Churchill style, it was overwrought and high-flown, giving Churchill’s account of the King’s overstretched mental state; his loss of the thread of the conversation had become elevated to ‘two marked and prolonged “black outs” in which he completely lost the thread of the conversation’.27 It concluded with the same plea for time that Churchill had been urging directly on the King: ‘It would be a most cruel and wrong thing to extort a decision from him in his present state.’ Churchill gave no indication of how much time he felt the King needed to make a decision and ministers recognised instantly that he wanted the King to stonewall. The point was answered by Simon, still wearing a lawyer’s hat, but this time he was a street-fighting hard-man choosing from an armoury of legal low-blows and not a judicious quasi-academic expert on the constitution. If the King tried that on, he should be told that Mrs Simpson’s divorce would be blocked. Halifax was even more radical; if the King attempted to stonewall, the Cabinet should take the ultimate step and give him formal advice. The King had done well not to follow Churchill’s advice. The result would have been messy in the extreme if he had.
The hostile mood in the Cabinet was further fuelled by yet another piece of news that arrived from the outside world
. It seemed that the second part of Churchill’s programme for the King had been put into operation. By a roundabout route, Wilson had picked up a story that Lords Dawson and Horder had already been to see the King. It did not take him long to see a connection with the King’s Party. The story as it reached Wilson was inaccurate, and Downing Street had very quickly established this, but it must have had some basis in fact. Drafts of the Duke of Windsor’s memoirs refer vaguely to a doctor ‘of the highest eminence and probity’ having been prepared to certify his state and the fact that the rumour mentioned the same two doctors whom Churchill had suggested points to more than coincidence.28 Once again the cry went up for the King to be made to make a decision, with Chamberlain well to the fore. Simon dropped any pretence of legal courtesies and proposed that any public statement should firmly rub the King’s nose in the fact that a month had gone by since he had first told the Prime Minister that he was prepared to renounce the throne in order to marry Mrs Simpson, with the acid observation that ‘There had been no need for Doctors at that time’.
Whilst the Cabinet was in session, Churchill and Beaverbrook resumed their conversation of the previous night at Churchill’s flat in Morpeth Mansions. It was no more productive than the first leg of the discussion. Beaverbrook was now staking heavily on Brownlow succeeding in persuading Mrs Simpson to withdraw. Just after Churchill left Stornoway House early that morning, his hopes had been fed by a message that had arrived for onward transmission to the King in the infantile code they had devised:
W. M. Janet [Mrs Simpson] strongly advising the James Company [the King] to postpone purchase of Chester shares to next autumn and to announce decision by verbal methods, thereby increasing popularity, maintaining prestige, but also the right to re-open negotiations by the autumn.29
Beaverbrook claimed that this meant that Mrs Simpson was offering to withdraw completely rather than trying to persuade the King not to abdicate before his coronation, and leaving the matter open until later in 1937, rather as Duff Cooper had advised the King to do in mid-November. It was a weak straw to cling to and Beaverbrook might merely have talked it up to disguise the extent to which he was double-crossing Churchill. In his later accounts of the conversation, Beaverbrook emphasised his continuing disagreement with Churchill over the right tactics to adopt and implied that he argued the case to Churchill in terms of the King’s determination to avoid a conflict with the government: ‘Our cock won’t fight.’ He concluded with a final and seemingly hopeless, ‘No dice.’ He did not disclose to Churchill what he had learned from Simon earlier that morning. Beaverbrook contented himself with the bland statement: ‘Unfortunately the same information was not conveyed to Churchill. Like myself, he had thought on Friday the King had decided to resist abdication after all. But, unlike myself he still thought the same on Saturday.’30 Why did Beaverbrook leave his old crony and ally under such a damaging misapprehension? Simon might have told him that the information was entirely confidential, although it is hard to believe that this would have counted for much to Beaverbrook. More likely he was following the same apparent ruthless logic as the King: keeping Churchill warm for a fight with the government that was looking ever less likely. He might simply have been taking twisted revenge for Churchill having displaced him in the King’s counsels. Beaverbrook is one of the few figures in British history who relished mischief for its own sake, making this explanation credible.
In his later account of the crisis, this was the point at which Beaverbrook claimed to have washed his hands of the whole affair. After a week of banging his head against the brick wall of the King’s refusal to sanction an all-out press campaign, Beaverbrook decided to cut his losses. He retreated to his country house at Cherkley: ‘I considered myself well out of it.’31 He had been defeated by his old nemesis: ‘Baldwin had triumphed. He had dethroned his King just as easily as he had jettisoned Empire Free Trade.’32 Even the hope that Brownlow would persuade Mrs Simpson to withdraw also appears to have faded away. He did not follow up the coded message that he claimed had fired his hopes on the night of Friday with anything more than a single, tentative phone call to Brownlow at Cannes. A telephone call from the King on the Saturday night confirming that he had decided to abdicate was the final nail in the coffin. It was the end of Beaverbrook’s active involvement in the King’s Party, and for the remainder of the crisis he ‘lived as a mere spectator of the drama’.33 It is fitting that Beaverbrook himself delivered the most apt epitaph for the King’s Party, writing to the Duke of Windsor’s ghost writer as he was setting down to his work years later: ‘We were indeed a King’s Party. Unfortunately the King was not a member of it.’34 The King held back from the fight because Mrs Simpson was afraid of the newspaper publicity. Above all he wanted to marry her, if necessary sacrificing the throne to do so; he never for an instant shared Beaverbrook’s obsessive goal of getting rid of Baldwin.
This still left Churchill as a determined champion of the King’s cause, or at least his own understanding of it. Whatever the King or Beaverbrook actually said to Churchill, it signally failed to deter him from launching a frenetic one man campaign. He followed up his letter to Baldwin with a lengthy press release in roughly the same terms, which trotted out in detail the argument that marrying Mrs Simpson was only a hypothetical possibility and it would be five months before it became a real one. In the face of the momentum that the crisis had developed, it was decidedly feeble, but it was inevitably mentioned in the following day’s newspapers.
Churchill rounded off the day’s damage to his reputation with a letter that was barely coherent and so unbalanced that Roy Jenkins asserted in his biography of Churchill that he must have been quite drunk to write it.35 It is tempting to agree.
SIR,
News from all fronts!
1. No pistol to be held at the King’s head. No doubt that his request for time will be granted. Therefore – no final decision or Bill till after Christmas – probably February or March
2. On no account must the King leave the country. Windsor Castle is his battle station (poste de commandement). When so much is at stake, no minor inclinations can be indulged. It would be far better for Mrs. Simpson to return to England for a day or two, than for the King to go abroad now. Please let me talk to you about this, if there is any doubt. (This would anyhow show that she had not been driven out of the country.) But of course better still if she preferred to remain where she is for this critical time.
3. Lord Craigavon, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, is deeply moved by loyalty to the King, & (is) all for Time. Could not he be invited to luncheon tomorrow? He has a constitutional right of access (I think) & anyhow there could be no objection. His visit should be made public. He shares my hopes such as they are of an ultimately happy ending. It’s a long way to Tipperary.
4. Max. The King brought him across the world. He is a tiger to fight. I gave him the King’s message – but please telephone or write – better telephone. I cannot see it would do harm to see him if it could be arranged. Important, however, to make contact with him. A devoted tiger – very scarce breed.
5. For real wit, Bernard Shaw’s article in tonight’s Evening Standard shd. be read … It is joyous.
Summary. Good advances on all fronts giving prospects of gaining good positions & assembling large forces behind them.
Your Majesty’s faithful, devoted Servant & Subject
(signed) WINSTON S. CHURCHILL36
It is hard to know where to start with an analysis of the flaws in the letter. It was utterly wrong in predicting that the government would give more time. Churchill had failed to detect the growing ambiguity of Beaverbrook’s position and hoped still to mount a joint campaign. Referring to Mrs Simpson as a ‘minor inclination’ was almost perfectly calculated to enrage the King. There is no sign that the King replied and Churchill was left in his mood of hyperactive and self-destructive exaltation.
Churchill’s mood of exaltation and bellicosity abated as the weekend went on. On the Sunday
two of his old friends and allies, Sir Archibald Sinclair and Bob Boothby, came to Chartwell, his country home, and talked some sense into him. Together they formulated a more constructive programme to keep the King on the throne than the unadorned stonewalling that Churchill had been proposing up till then. Churchill was to advise the King that his only chance of keeping the throne was to make a public declaration that he would not marry ‘contrary to the advice of his Ministers’. 37 A letter proposing this was taken to Fort Belvedere on the Monday morning, but it came far too late to have even a chance of changing what he had decided to do. Monckton expressed polite enthusiasm when he read it, but that is as far as it ever got.
NOTES
1. NA PREM 1/466
2. Dugdale diary
3. CHAR 2/264, Memorandum, The Abdication of Edward VIII
4. CHAR 2/264, Memorandum, The Abdication of Edward VIII
5. Chamberlain diary, 4 December
6. CHAR 2/264, Memorandum, The Abdication of Edward VIII
7. CHAR 2/264, Memorandum, The Abdication of Edward VIII
8. CHAR 2/264, Memorandum, The Abdication of Edward VIII
9. BBK G/6/23
10. CHAR 2/264, Memorandum, The Abdication of Edward VIII
11. BBK G/6/23
12. BBK G/6/23
13. BBK G/6/23
14. CHAR 2/264, Memorandum, The Abdication of Edward VIII
15. CHAR 2/264, Memorandum, The Abdication of Edward VIII
16. Monckton narrative
17. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 77
18. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 76
19. BBK G/6/19
20. Channon diaries, 4 December, p. 92
21. BBK G/6/19
22. NA PREM 1/466
23. Duff Cooper diaries
The King Who Had to Go Page 26