The King Who Had to Go

by Adrian Phillips

  28. A King’s Story, p. 400

  29. Stanley Baldwin papers, add. papers, Lucy Baldwin memorandum, 9 December

  30. Chamberlain diary, 8 December

  31. Dugdale diary

  32. NA CAB 23/68

  33. Dugdale diary

  CHAPTER 19

  BEYOND RECOVERY

  * * *

  He [Stanley Baldwin] himself … had now the gravest doubts as to whether in any circumstances, even if the King threw the lady over and whatever steps were taken, such as an interval for a rest-cure to restore his perspective on the matter, the King could recover his position or whether his own successor as Prime Minister would not later be confronted with equally difficult situations. He deeply regretted this. He knew and admired the King’s fine qualities, but doubted if, even so, he could recover his position.

  MINUTES OF CABINET MEETING ON 9 DECEMBER 1936

  GODDARD’S MISSION TO Cannes had an inauspicious beginning. The party experienced a nightmare journey and was lucky to arrive safely at all. The weather was atrocious. Another British plane crashed in the area and Downing Street thought at first that their emissary had gone with it.1 Goddard’s plane suffered an engine failure and had to land at Marseilles from where he continued to Cannes by road. If he had genuinely brought Kirkwood along with him for medical assistance, he would not have regretted his decision. By the time he arrived, it was late at night and he checked into his hotel in the hope of a night’s rest before he saw his client the following morning, but his arrival in the south of France had an almost instant impact.

  Somewhere along the way the news of the mission had leaked out and had done so in a way that might have been calculated to draw the maximum attention to it. Much points to Goddard having been intentionally responsible. After a frantic evening of discussions and phone calls, Brownlow was about to go to bed at 2.30 a.m. when one of the accompanying detectives brought him a message from four of the British journalists amongst the vast press pack besieging the Villa Lou Viei. It told Brownlow that Goddard had arrived and, far worse, said that he was accompanied by ‘Dr. Kirkwood, the well-known gynaecologist and his Anaesthetist’.2 The American papers had received the same information, but the British journalists wanted a comment before they filed the story. To add to all their other problems, it now looked as though Mrs Simpson’s party would find themselves fending off a story that she was pregnant. Goddard himself was probably the source of the story, given the detail that the journalists had. Goddard’s landing at Marseilles was not scheduled but the journalists knew that it was where he had arrived. Moreover, it stretches credulity that any stray press informant, even at a prestigious Côte d’Azur hotel, would have recognised Goddard and, still less, Kirkwood, or known of the latter’s professional specialisation. The whole episode very soon sparked the suspicion that it had been stage-managed by Goddard. At Downing Street, Dugdale surmised that Goddard had chosen Dr Kirkwood as his travelling companion with the intention of creating the rumours.3 In Cannes, Brownlow stopped short of accusing Goddard directly of intentional manipulation, but his furious reaction implies that he thought this or something near to it. Brownlow labelled Goddard’s conduct as grounds for ‘indignation and mortification’. At its kindest, he saw Goddard as guilty of foolish indiscretion. He labelled the episode as the ‘last straw’ and felt that it threatened to undo everything that he and Herman Rogers, Mrs Simpson’s friend and owner of the villa in Cannes, had done ‘to protect [Mrs Simpson’s] dignity, good name and peace of mind, and obviously the prestige of the King’.4

  Brownlow instantly issued a denial of the journalists’ story with the improbable fiction that Goddard had come out merely to deal with mundane topics such as the lease on her house in London. He was still furious when he telephoned Goddard at the hotel the following morning. He was determined to kill any idea that there was any medical reason for his visit at all and was not troubled to impose draconian conditions on Goddard to achieve this. He seems to have positively relished dictating these to Goddard. He was to come to the Villa Lou Viei by taxi on his own and to walk the last 100 yards to the gates carrying nothing in his hands, thus walking the gauntlet of the journalists who could verify his identity and that he was merely a solicitor, unequipped for any surgical purposes.

  Even if charity dictates that Goddard is exonerated of manufacturing the rumour of Mrs Simpson’s pregnancy, his mission was complex enough when he set off and it was about to become more complex still. Whilst Brownlow was taking steps to prevent anyone from imagining that Goddard and his party had arrived in Cannes to deal with a pregnant Mrs Simpson, ministers in London had come up with yet another task for him to accomplish. Simon had been appalled at the prospect that the King might simply ignore the consequences of intervention and cohabit with Mrs Simpson if the divorce were blocked, and he persuaded Chamberlain late on the Tuesday night that a message should be sent to both threatening not to give the King any money from the Civil List if they did.5 It was the same message that Dugdale had tried to make Baldwin give the King at Fort Belvedere that evening. They believed that her sole interest in the affair was what money she could make from it and thought that her influence would thus be sufficient to prevent this happening. A telegram was sent to Goddard at Cannes instructing him not to leave until he had spoken to Wilson, who was to pass on the message from Chamberlain and Simon.6 Perhaps fortunately it arrived after Goddard had set off for the Villa Lou Viei. He had already been given a bewildering array of jobs.

  When Goddard finally began his conversation with Mrs Simpson she was under severe stress and barely taking things in.7 On top of all the agony of the journey and the press siege, she had been told by the King and by George Allen that Goddard was coming out to speak to her because of the risk of intervention and ‘this had caused her considerable doubts as to the future’.8 Rather than try to belabour her with the full array of questions and advice with which he was freighted, Goddard focused on the most important message that he had brought. He told her what the mood was in Britain and advised her directly to abandon her divorce.9 He thought that he succeeded. According to his later account she told him that she ‘was willing to do anything that eased the situation’ or, in more concrete terms, ‘was quite prepared to give him up’.10 Goddard even wrote out a short statement on Miramar Hotel notepaper in which he said on her behalf that ‘she was willing and still is perfectly willing to instruct me to withdraw her petition for divorce and indeed willing to do anything to prevent the King from abdicating’ in the belief that she approved of what it said.11 Goddard was at great pains to persuade Wilson of the importance of the Miramar memorandum, but it was no more substantial than Mrs Simpson’s statement of Monday night. Brownlow did not even countersign it. At one level it served again to thrust the apparent responsibility on the King; at another it certified to Downing Street that Goddard had done his utmost and that was probably why he thought it was so important. In reality, his mission had failed on almost every level.

  Goddard was guilty of over-optimism, if not worse. Mrs Simpson was not in a state to make a rational decision. Moreover, all that really counted was what the King wanted. Goddard should have understood that she was telling him the absolute truth when she told him, ‘Wherever she went the King would follow her’.12 The matter was settled by a telephone call to Fort Belvedere, which put an end to Goddard’s efforts. Just as he had told the Prime Minister the previous night, the King made it clear that he was determined to marry Mrs Simpson and to abdicate. It was enough for Goddard and he decided to come home, but when he called Wilson, having finally received the phone message sent on behalf of Chamberlain and Simon, he was urged to make one last effort. Wilson wanted to be certain that Mrs Simpson was aware of ‘all the consequences of a certain decision, including the worst…’ and told Goddard that George Allen was trying to reach him to pass on the same message.13 Wilson appeared to hope that the prospect of the King abdicating and finding Mrs Simpson unable to marry him, might be enough to turn th
e scales. Goddard did agree to talk to Allen, but whatever they said, it was not enough to alter his assessment of the chances, and he returned to London. The threat of intervention thus vanished from the scene as a factor in deciding whether the King would abdicate or not, but it was far from dead.

  At the same time as Goddard was talking to Mrs Simpson in Cannes, the Cabinet met for what was to be its last substantial discussion of the crisis. After his evening at Fort Belvedere with the King, Baldwin knew what was going to happen and that it was just a matter of shepherding his ministers to the obvious and inevitable conclusion. Even if Goddard had succeeded in obtaining Mrs Simpson’s instructions to abandon the divorce case and to give up the King, Baldwin knew that it would not have ended the affair. Indeed, as Baldwin saw things, it would probably have made things worse: ‘If that meeting would by any chance result in a decision to give the King up, there was every risk that the King would proceed to Cannes by air if he could obtain an aeroplane.’14 The King’s hare-brained scheme for an Alpine holiday now rebounded on him to his double discredit. In Baldwin’s eyes, he had now burned all his bridges and was beyond redemption. What the Prime Minister now said to the Cabinet about the King went even further than the hardline position that the Australian Prime Minister Lyons had set out in his message responding to the question of the morganatic proposal. Baldwin told the Cabinet, he

  had the gravest doubts as to whether in any circumstances, even if the King threw the lady over and whatever steps were taken, such as an interval for a rest-cure to restore his perspective on this matter, the King could recover his position or whether his own successor as Prime Minister would not later be confronted with equally difficult situations.15

  The King could simply no longer be trusted; he had to go and the sooner the better. It was the closest Baldwin ever got to a verdict on the King as a man, and it does suggest that nothing had happened to change his view from the one he had shared with Lascelles in Ottawa almost a decade before. He had done his utmost to save the King from himself, but finally the King’s own flaws were too great.

  As the weeks had worn on, Baldwin had needed to become ever more careful in his handling of the King. To begin with, Dugdale saw him as a father dealing with a wayward son, but towards the end it was the analogy of a doctor with a mental patient that appeared more appropriate.16 In the final days, Baldwin did not trouble to conceal his view of the King’s capriciousness and instability, telling a peer that ‘It seems to me that I’ve got a film star to deal with these days’.17 To the end he pitied the King but reserved his hatred for Mrs Simpson, ‘who goaded him on to fight’.18 He railed against her ‘evils’.19 Downing Street blamed Mrs Simpson for using her dominance of the King in her own interests:

  It seems clearly to have been her brain that evolved the lines of the campaign for the marriage and when she retreated to Cannes and was forced to realise that public opinion would not stand it, she nevertheless with great persistency urged the King to ensure, before his departure, the grant of the conditions which – she clearly realised – were essential to her eventual return … to set up a rival Court, to exercise influence…20

  Baldwin had washed his hands of the King, but he was still acutely aware of the perils of the situation, in particular the risk of intervention and how badly it might affect the King: ‘he expressed serious apprehensions as to the effect on the King’.21 But the time had come to make a hard decision and Baldwin was prepared to take the risk of the King abdicating and being unable to make the marriage for which he had left the throne. For all the abuse that his detractors heaped on Baldwin’s willingness to temporise, he showed here that he could cut the Gordian knot. In a neat reversal of the internal debates on the crisis, it was Chamberlain who was fixated on the risks. Chamberlain had an ugly premonition of successful intervention and scandalous cohabitation. Worse, Mrs Simpson might turn up her nose at whatever payoff the King might be offered and persuade him to stay on the throne. He was haunted by the same fears of civil unrest that had dogged Wilson. Having decided that the British public actually wanted renunciation, he feared it might react with an ‘outburst’ if it did not get one. Sir John Simon added another touch of panic when he found a way of trivialising the risk of intervention that only served to pour oil on the flames. He let his imagination run riot with the image of Mrs Simpson obtaining a Reno divorce if she abandoned the British case. Baldwin cut through all this with the simple statement that ‘the King had been most anxious to sign his Abdication that very day and get it all over’.22 As he was leaving Fort Belvedere he had discussed a timetable with the King as well as hypothesising about celestial intervention.

  All that was left was to put things into proper constitutional form. Baldwin went through the motions of asking his colleagues’ opinion, but he knew what he was going to do. They obliged with a welter of abstruse constitutional points and recondite practicalities. Predictably, Malcolm MacDonald was well to the fore with a long exploration of how the process was to be synchronised with the Dominions, concluding that matters would be better kept on an informal basis for the time being. This gave Baldwin his opportunity to tell the Cabinet firmly that there was now time pressure and, moreover, that ‘he was anxious to avoid another journey to Fort Belvedere that day, if possible’. After his conversations with the King the night before, Baldwin had no doubts, but he was also heartily sick of the road to Sunningdale. Instead, it would be possible to cast ‘a written communication’ to the King in a way that avoided upsetting the Dominions. This was the cue for Simon to whip out a letter that he had already drafted. The lines that mattered had already been scripted, but the ministers were being allowed to adlib for the others. Gently, the Prime Minister also led the Cabinet to endorse him making a statement to Parliament the following day. MacDonald had fixed 10 p.m. as the best time to do this, as it would allow simultaneous announcements throughout the Empire. The last thing that Baldwin wanted was to be kept up late into the night by a debate in the House of Commons following a statement at that time. He even turned down Halifax’s counterproposal of 7 p.m., which for some unexplained reasons would have suited his fellow peers, but did not demur at Duff Cooper’s idea of 4 p.m. He knew he could put an end to the undignified Dutch auction by leaving the final choice to Chamberlain’s Cabinet Committee.

  At the very end of the meeting, Halifax made his second contribution to the discussion by feeding a line to Baldwin that allowed him to encapsulate the whole crisis in a brisk putdown. Halifax appears not to have been paying much attention and felt that he and his colleagues needed a lead from the Prime Minister, whom he asked ‘what steps he contemplated in order to enable the Cabinet to reach a decision that night’. In one of his rare and well-disguised moments of irony, Hankey minuted the dryness of Baldwin’s reply that ‘The PRIME MINISTER supposed that an answer would come from the King’.23 Baldwin had no doubt how the King would respond to the Cabinet’s message when it reached Fort Belvedere. The choice had always been the King’s to make. Baldwin had never expected that it would be the right one, but he had understood that his job as Prime Minister was not to force any choice on him. Baldwin knew that it had never been the Cabinet’s decision to make. The politicians had merely been spectators throughout the affair. They could only react and could not hope to influence the outcome.

  The Cabinet’s formal message was duly despatched to Fort Belvedere, but Baldwin did not even wait for the King’s written reply to call the next meeting to set the final seal on procedure. A telephone call from Monckton confirming that the King was adamant in his decision to abdicate was enough. In contrast to the morning’s meeting, the Cabinet that met just before 8 p.m. merely rubber-stamped the logistical arrangements for the legislation and announcements required to accomplish the only voluntary end to the reign of a British monarch in modern times. Baldwin wanted the abdication completed by the Friday night.24 Another weekend of uncertainty of any kind was the last thing that the country needed. It was Simon whom the Prime Minister put i
n charge of the arrangements, and he had chosen his man well. Simon is best known to history as an advocate who always saw two sides to a question and as a result was an indecisive politician, but for the second half of the First World War he had taken a break from politics and learned the trade of a senior staff officer for Hugh Trenchard, commander of the Royal Flying Corps and the founder of the Royal Air Force. Trenchard was entirely unimpressed by Simon’s status in Westminster and had demanded the same standard of excellence he sought from his other officers. That evening it was the clear, incisive brain of the military planner that dominated. Simon’s performance stamped itself on the memory of the group of five men who were called together to make the arrangements, of whom three were former combat soldiers:

  Sir John gave us complete orders to ensure that the Instrument of Abdication and the Messages should be distributed at the right time and place throughout the Empire and that there should be no breakdown in the machinery. I have seen many Staff Officers but none so competent.25

  After weeks of temporising and uncertainty, the crispness and clarity of the briefing signalled that once the decision had been taken, the agony would be brought to a close as efficiently as possible. To ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, the royal secretary, it seemed a moment worth preserving and years later he

  got from Simon a promise to send me a copy of the masterly operation-order which he dictated to a midnight meeting that I attended in Downing Street on the eve of the Abdication … [which] should certainly be in the archives at Windsor for the guidance of any who may be so unfortunate as to conduct another abdication in the future.26

  The government was leaving nothing to chance as abdication moved from a dreaded eventuality to a firm administrative project, and it did not scruple to attack Mrs Simpson’s reputation if it detected a potential obstacle. With the Prime Minister due to make a substantive statement to Parliament, which would be followed by the actual legislation to effect abdication, the time had come to study the likely impact on MPs and the risk of any upset. The official opposition parties had been behind the government’s line from an early stage and Churchill had suffered a savage mauling on the Monday afternoon, but this was no guarantee that hostile comment or even votes against the government might not come from elsewhere. One possible source of difficulty was the ‘die-hard’ right wing of the Conservative Party. A group of MPs chose to adopt the King’s cause and wrote to him assuring him of their support if he tried to assert his rights under the constitution.27 They appear to have been grouped around the Imperial Policy Group, founded in 1934, with a vocal policy of strengthening the Empire and maintaining British rule in India.28 The battle over granting a measure of autonomy in India had been lost by 1936, but the group still counted a number of Tory peers and MPs. Its leaders saw an opportunity to express openly ‘acute and growing anxiety at the Government’s action and procedure’.29 At least one of the group’s MPs was appalled at this attempt to hijack the affairs of the monarchy for political reasons and Baldwin later dismissed it as an ‘insignificant group’, but Downing Street took steps to neutralise it nonetheless.30 On the Wednesday afternoon, Dugdale saw two of the Imperial Policy Group’s leaders – Lord Mansfield, a Scottish grandee, and Kenneth de Courcy, its secretary and ‘intelligence officer’ – and ‘enlightened them upon one or two things they did not know’.31 They left ‘somewhat chastised’.32 Exactly what Dugdale told Mansfield and de Courcy is unknown, but it almost certainly included some version of the Special Branch reports about Mrs Simpson’s relationship with Guy Trundle, which were definitely used to discredit her soon after the abdication. In 1938, the Trundle story was relayed to the incoming US ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, by Sir Edward Peacock, to whom Baldwin had referred him when he asked for information on the financial side of the abdication.33 It was couched in sufficiently lurid terms for Kennedy to be willing to describe her publicly as a ‘tart’.34 Peacock passed off the information as common knowledge, but the leak was clearly designed to ensure that Kennedy did not become too sympathetic to his countrywoman. De Courcy claimed to have heard years later practically the same allegations as he received from Dugdale from a courtier that ‘her personal record is so shocking that no English gentleman could properly advise Queen Mary to receive her or in any way relent’.35