This provided the kernel of fact around which has grown the legend of the ‘China dossier’ on Mrs Simpson compiled by the secret services, which has inspired so much speculation and fruitless searching as well as providing a pretext for near-pornographic tales of Mrs Simpson’s life. Caution is called for throughout. The description rings more evocatively to a modern listener than to someone of the era. The word ‘dossier’ had no stronger meaning than the word ‘file’ has now. The Police Special Branch was also classed as one of the secret services so it is possible that the only allegations made against Mrs Simpson were those in the 1935 reports.36 The term was used by de Courcy only long after the event as a shorthand for the allegations against Mrs Simpson, although this was in the context of asserting ‘no such authentic dossier ever existed’.37 He reported that these allegations included one that ‘Mrs. Simpson’s private life in China left much to be desired’.38 De Courcy was a noted fantasist, who later served a prison sentence for company fraud. He claimed to hold a – completely imaginary – dukedom and boasted that he was a friend of Sir Stewart Menzies, Head of MI6, and that Menzies had told him that he had a hand in the killing of Lavrenti Beria, Head of the KGB.39 The only supporting evidence that rumours about Mrs Simpson’s time in China were even current is a story picked up by the high Society littérateur Osbert Sitwell that she had taken a Chinese lover when she was in Shanghai, which would have been deeply shocking.40
The drive to bring a swift and clean end to the crisis meant that important questions were left open. Had the King accepted the inevitability of abdication earlier there could have been time to settle them in calm conditions, but he was now paying the price for delay, which had eliminated any leverage he might have held over the politicians. It is easy now to see the seeds of the crop of bitterness being sown that grew strong in the aftermath of the abdication, but the government had decided to draw a line. The question of the King’s financial arrangements was left unresolved deliberately when Peacock spoke to Baldwin and Chamberlain at 6.15 p.m. shortly before the second Cabinet meeting of the day.41 The politicians repeated their earlier willingness to grant him money in principle, but refused to make any commitment. They could not bind the House of Commons to approve any agreement and the memory of the fiasco over the Two Bills plan was an awful warning of what might happen if political approval for anything was taken too readily for granted. More important, the threat of withholding government money remained the best lever to prevent the King from cohabiting with Mrs Simpson before she was divorced and they could be married. Baldwin and Chamberlain maintained their outwardly benevolent attitude to money when the discussion with Peacock turned to the question of what the King should do once he had abdicated. It is a telling register of just how much the single, vital question had dominated the preceding weeks of frantic debate that this point had been ignored up to the last moment. From an early stage it had been taken for granted that the King would go abroad, but no one had considered how long he should spend out of Britain or any other details. When the matter arose, Peacock suggested an absence of two years which Baldwin thought ‘would help very much’.42 When Peacock put the figure to the King later that night, he did not demur. It was left entirely open as to whether his return would be subject to any conditions. The politicians were similarly non-committal but ostensibly friendly when Peacock raised for the last time the possibility of legislation to finalise Mrs Simpson’s divorce immediately. Baldwin’s reply that Peacock should ‘Leave this thought with me’ would have rung warning bells in the ears of anyone attuned to politicians’ non-promises, but the King had run out of bargaining chips and soft-soap was all he could expect.43
One question of the King’s future was settled on the Wednesday morning, but in a way that, probably accidentally, made a very large contribution to the abdication’s legacy of bitterness. The Duke of York agreed that his brother should retain royal status after his abdication, which meant that he would be a Royal Highness.44 The Duke was partly motivated by an inexplicable fear that his brother would become politically active as a non-royal peer or even stand as an MP, but in isolation the decision was quite uncontroversial and to all appearances a warm-hearted fraternal gesture. It was agreed informally between the brothers with no advice from politicians or lawyers. Only later when its full implications had to be faced did great difficulties arise. The King appears to have taken his brother’s promise to apply to Mrs Simpson when he married her and was furious when the title was withheld.45
Baldwin was taking a risk in pushing ahead with abdication with, on the one hand, Mrs Simpson uncommitted to marriage and, on the other, the danger that intervention might create a devastating scandal in which the government could be accused of having provoked the abdication of the King to prevent him marrying a woman who was now unable to divorce her current husband. Both were serious risks and beyond his control. Indeed, before the day was out Mrs Simpson denied, or at least went through the motions of denying, the King a third time. It would not have stopped the abdication if it had been followed through, but it would have meant a different, and probably much worse, outcome to the crisis. It is little wonder that when they met in the aftermath of the abdication, Baldwin joked to Brownlow, the man who had pushed Mrs Simpson the hardest to renounce the King, that, had he succeeded, he would have been thrown into the Tower for the rest of his life.46 History would have viewed Baldwin’s performance in a quite different light.
Mrs Simpson and Brownlow had briefly escaped from the prison of the Villa Lou Viei to see Esmond Harmsworth at his mother’s villa nearby, where he had come with a last-ditch scheme to keep his friend on the throne. He broached a nebulous and devious plan involving the King leaving the country, which would be entrusted to a Council of State, publicly renouncing Mrs Simpson and then reneging on the promise once he had been crowned.47 Neither Mrs Simpson nor Brownlow saw anything in this and, when he learned of it, the King quite rightly said that he and Mrs Simpson would have deserved to be hanged if they had followed it.48 On the way back to the Villa Lou Viei, Mrs Simpson was sufficiently unsettled by this lunacy and everything that had gone before for Brownlow to have a final try at making her save his master.
Brownlow played on Mrs Simpson’s fears of how she would appear to the world if the King did abdicate and warned her ‘as kindly and gently as [he knew] how’ of the ‘appalling position’ in which she would find herself.49 It was not the moment for a hard approach and even this was enough to make her break into tears and ask him what he would do in her place. Brownlow sensed that the moment was ripe and told her ‘although it is very late and the mills of God are grinding fast and all too surely, if I were you I would leave Europe and perhaps we could still save the position’. She agreed at once to what Brownlow described with some understatement as a ‘wild’ suggestion. The plan got as far as Brownlow sending one of the Scotland Yard detectives to the railway station to book a private carriage to Genoa from where the next liner was sailing away from Europe, to the Far East. Brownlow even proposed to accompany her on the journey. He drafted the second statement of the day to be fed to the press, which said simply, ‘Mrs. Simpson has abandoned the project for marriage with his Majesty & is leaving Europe tonight – for an indefinite period’.50 Unlike its predecessors it did not aim to load the responsibility onto the King’s shoulders, but it was to prove to be just as much of a blind alley.
Just as had happened when Mrs Simpson had agreed to follow Goddard’s advice, the plan did not survive the ensuing telephone call to Fort Belvedere to tell the King that she now planned to leave him. The King, in Brownlow’s words, ‘raised Hell’ and finally resorted to the service of Allen to draw up a chilling statement of the only available alternative: ‘The only conditions on which I can stay here, are if I renounce you for all time.’51 To make absolutely sure that she understood, he added that he would not renounce her and had given his final word to the Cabinet. For good measure he got Allen to read the sentence to her again. The cruise from Genoa was c
onsigned to oblivion. It is a moot point whether it would even have been effective. The King, she had been sure earlier in the day, would follow her to the ends of the earth.
In the face of the King’s iron resolve, it is barely relevant to the analysis of the crisis how seriously Mrs Simpson wanted to withdraw, but it mattered for her reputation. The statement made in her name entirely failed to save her from blame for the crisis; in fact it hurt her reputation as it was seen as a piece of self-serving humbug. In Nancy Dugdale’s words: ‘After having done her utmost to split the country … she now played the part of the gilded angel who, having failed to accomplish this, only wanted to act for the best.’52 ‘I despise her for making it at the eleventh hour, running away when she knows she is beaten.’53 Tommy Dugdale’s was, if anything, more damning: Mrs Simpson made the Cannes statement out of ‘fear for her own safety’; her claim to Goddard that she was willing to withdraw was ‘not in substance differ[ent] from similar declarations by the schemers in a hundred penny novelettes.’54 Walter Monckton claimed contemptuously, ‘she would periodically offer to clear out but always being quite sure that the King wouldn’t agree’.55 Monckton was almost certainly influenced by Wilson’s scepticism of Mrs Simpson’s sincerity, which would have been shaped by his access to the transcripts of her phone calls.56
NOTES
1. Windham Baldwin papers, 11/1/1, Monica Baldwin, ‘An Unpublished Page of English History’
2. BBK G/6/29, Brownlow memorandum, ‘The Goddard Incident’
3. Dugdale diary
4. BBK G/6/29, Brownlow memorandum, ‘The Goddard Incident’
5. Chamberlain diary, 8 December
6. NA PREM 1/466
7. NA PREM 1/466
8. NA PREM 1/466
9. Monckton papers, Goddard narrative
10. NA PREM 1/466
11. Chamberlain papers, NC8/22/3, Goddard narrative
12. Goddard narrative
13. NA PREM 1/466
14. NA CAB 23/68
15. NA CAB 23/68
16. Dugdale diary
17. Windham Baldwin papers, 3/3/14, extracts from Lord Hinchinbrooke’s diary, 9 December
18. Dugdale diary
19. Dugdale diary
20. NA CAB 127/157, Dugdale memorandum, n.d.
21. NA CAB 23/68
22. NA CAB 23/68
23. NA CAB 23/68
24. Monckton narrative
25. Monckton narrative
26. Lascelles, King’s Counsellor, p. 177
27. Young, Stanley Baldwin, p. 240
28. Murphy, Alan Lennox-Boyd, p. 49
29. The Times, 7 December
30. Murphy, Alan Lennox-Boyd, p. 49; Young, Stanley Baldwin, p. 240
31. Padfield, Hess, Hitler and Churchill, p. 81
32. Dugdale diary
33. Joseph Kennedy diary, 13 June 1938
34. Joseph Kennedy diary, 14 April 1939 and p. 326 fn.
35. De Courcy papers, memoranda, 10 and 12 March 1951
36. Jeffrey, MI6, pp 222f
37. De Courcy papers, memorandum on Kilbritain Newspapers, paper n.d. but post 1957
38. De Courcy papers, memorandum on Kilbritain Newspapers, paper n.d. but post 1957
39. Davenport-Hines & Sisman, One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper, pp 264–8, 313; Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, p. 506
40. Osbert Sitwell, Rat Week, p. 36
41. Peacock narrative
42. Peacock narrative
43. Peacock narrative
44. Peacock narrative
45. Bryan & Murphy, The Windsor Story, p. 341
46. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication Of King Edward VIII, p. 93
47. BBK 6/6/29, Additional marginal notes
48. Peacock narrative
49. BBK G/6/29
50. BBK G/6/2-5, notes of conversation with Brownlow
51. A King’s Story, p. 403
52. Dugdale diary
53. Dugdale diary
54. NA CAB 127/157, Dugdale memorandum, n.d.
55. Reith diaries, 11 December
56. NA PREM 1/466
CHAPTER 20
LYING LIKE A GENTLEMAN
* * *
He did more than justice to the King but lied like a gentleman about the King’s behaviour. He gave the impression of the King as a grave and composed man regretfully insisting upon either Mrs. Simpson as wife or abdication – whereas the king’s friends and Baldwin’s friends know that the king on many occasions was ‘impossible’ as the idiom goes.
COLLIN BROOKS, JOURNAL, ON BALDWIN’S SPEECH ON 10 DECEMBER
SIR JOHN SIMON’S late-night briefing session set the machinery in motion to handle every necessary formal aspect of the King’s abdication. First and foremost, came the production of the documents that the King would have to sign himself to attest that he wanted to leave the throne. They were a message to Parliament announcing his intention and a formal Act of Abdication. Separate examples were required for the Prime Minister, the Houses of Parliament and each major part of the Empire. By a quirk of constitutional procedure, the House of Lords and the House of Commons shared one Act of Abdication between them, so this made a total of fifteen pieces of paper. They were ready by about midnight and it fell to Monckton to take them to Fort Belvedere. At 10 a.m. the following morning, the King and all three of his surviving brothers met in the octagonal drawing room of the Fort, where the King had held his final audience with Baldwin on the Tuesday evening. With only the four members of the King’s entourage who had worked most closely with him through the crisis – Monckton, Allen, Peacock and Alexander – as witnesses, the four brothers in turn took their place at the table to sign the papers. It took some time to produce thirty-six calm and deliberate signatures fitted to the solemnity of the occasion.1
Simon had composed the Message to Parliament, and it was as dry and legalistic as could be expected. The closest it came to a human touch was a very indirect admission that the King as a bachelor could ‘no longer discharge this heavy task with efficiency or with satisfaction to Myself’.2 He simply ‘appreciated’ the appeals that had been made to him to take a different course. It was very far from what the King wanted to say in explanation for his departure and he had no intention of letting a bloodless government lawyer issue the final word on his reign and the reasons for it ending. There were two ways in which he was going to do this. Once he had abdicated, he would broadcast to his people by radio to explain his choice. He would no longer be King and thus held in check by the constitutional rule that reduced him to the status of a mouthpiece for his ministers, which had been used to prevent him appealing directly for a popular verdict in favour of his marriage the previous week. The King gave the government as good as no choice as to whether he would broadcast, but he did say that ‘out of courtesy’ he would let the Cabinet see the text in advance.3 The King also wanted Baldwin to make two specific points in his statement to Parliament that afternoon. According to the King’s account, Baldwin had asked him for suggestions through Monckton, although Monckton’s narrative is silent on this point.4 The King gave Monckton two scribbled slips of paper. One was entirely uncontroversial and said that he and his brother and successor had always been on the best of terms and that he was ‘confident that the Duke deserves and will receive the support of the whole Empire’.5 The other was far more delicate and went to the heart of the question of who might be blamed for the crisis: ‘Mrs. Simpson – Has consistently attempted to withdraw and even yesterday made a final attempt to dissuade the King from the course he has resolved to take.’6
The King Who Had to Go Page 35