Not merely did the King want to take full public responsibility for his act, but he specifically wanted it to be taken off the shoulders of Mrs Simpson. He wanted the Prime Minister to make the same statement that Mrs Simpson had issued from Cannes on the Monday evening.
Even before he could find out whether Baldwin would oblige him on this score, the King received a brief foretaste of the colder, less deferential world that awaited him once he had stepped down and joined the small and unhappy band of Europe’s ex-monarchs. The message was delivered to the King in person at Fort Belvedere by Simon, this time wearing his hat as Home Secretary, the minister with departmental responsibility for the police. Now that the King was abdicating, the police detectives guarding Mrs Simpson at Cannes would be withdrawn. It was a singularly meanspirited and petty move, which inevitably ‘distressed the King greatly as he was most nervous for Mrs. Simpson’s safety’.7 The step had been triggered by an argument between Lord Brownlow and Inspector Evans, but the King was unaware of this and he was focused on the police’s job of protecting Mrs Simpson.8 By any standard there was some threat to her safety even if Wilson’s panicky fears of mob violence are discounted. The scale of public funds involved was trivial and Mrs Simpson’s unpopularity was the only reason why Simon might have faced parliamentary criticism for keeping the detectives in place. Simon was letting vindictive instinct drive his natural political gutlessness. It is unclear whether Simon had had the decision approved by the Prime Minister, but it was rescinded, albeit in extremely grudging terms, the following morning. Withdrawing the police would have been tantamount to a public declaration that the ex-King and his entourage deserved no greater protection from the British state than any other citizen. Wilson may also have appreciated the availability of police at the Villa Lou Viei as a source of intelligence when they became aware of talk that Mrs Simpson might leave secretly for Germany.9
Downing Street does not seem to have told the King in advance whether either of the points he had asked for would be included in Baldwin’s speech, so he had to wait for it to be reported to find out whether they had been. Here, too, he was disappointed and bitterly so. Baldwin did refer to his message about the Duke of York to great effect in his speech, but the only time he mentioned Mrs Simpson was to quote what the King had said to him at the fateful audience after the Hardinge letter when he announced that he was going to marry her. There was no reference to her willingness to renounce the King at all. Admittedly it would have been difficult to persuade the House of Commons of the literal truth of the King’s note in light of the brutal fact that Mrs Simpson had not followed through her public statement from Cannes on the Monday night, but it was a harsh omission nonetheless. Monckton, who was the only person aware of the note’s existence other than the King and the Prime Minister, did find it ‘a little hard on Mrs. Simpson that no reference was made to it’.10 As he neither liked Mrs Simpson nor believed she was sincere in her offers to withdraw, it is a telling verdict. The King was deeply upset and labelled Baldwin’s entire speech ‘an autobiographical triumph disguised as a homily on the errors of a King’.11 The omission was doubtless an ‘allowance for the prejudices of [Baldwin’s] less forgiving followers, even at the risk of deliberate historical gloss’. He accused Baldwin of unwillingness to render ‘simple courtesies’ because he was a politician and obliged to run for office. His contempt for Baldwin ignored the fact that he would never run for office again, and he contrived to overlook the string of laudatory comments that Baldwin made about him. Baldwin certainly held a very low opinion of Mrs Simpson and would have had no qualms about casting her as the villainess of the piece.
Not, of course, that strict historical accuracy played much part in Baldwin’s speech. It was widely praised for its effectiveness, but no one in the know said that it actually revealed anything or was even truthful. It is worth quoting the opinion of Lord Rothermere’s friend and assistant, Collin Brooks, who had been at the outer edges of the crisis and was a journalist of long experience. Even though he could notionally be counted as part of the King’s Party camp, he had a low opinion of the King personally and unmitigated contempt for Baldwin as a politician. Brooks saluted Baldwin for his effrontery in claiming that he was talking almost impromptu:
He is a veritable Bagstock* of a fellow – ‘deep and devilish sly, is tough old Joe, Sir…’ for having brooded over this inevitable announcement since November 16 he began, Anthony-like by remarking that he had no time to prepare a speech and proceeded to deliver a plain tale of great effective skill.12
Brooks recognised that the picture of the King was idealised to the point of dishonesty but condoned the device:
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 has it.
Roughly the same view came from the other end of the political spectrum and it was delivered openly in the House of Commons. At the very end of the debate a handful of MPs from the far-left Independent Labour Party or the Communist Party spoke against the government. One of them accused Baldwin and his colleagues of outright hypocrisy in praising a man whom they had decided to remove, in tones that still read blisteringly in Hansard:
I should not be honest if I did not do so. I have listened to more cant and humbug than I have ever listened to in my life. I have heard praise of the King which was not felt sincerely in any quarter of the House. I go further. Who has not heard the tittle-tattle and gossip that is going about? If he had not voluntarily stepped from the Throne, everyone knows that the same people in the House who pay lip service to him would have poured out scorn, abuse and filth. Some months ago we opposed the Civil List. To-morrow we shall take the same line. I have no doubt that you will go on praising the next King as you have praised this one. You will go on telling about his wonderful qualities. If he is a tenth as good as you say, why are you not keeping him? Why is everyone wanting to unload him? Because you know he is a weak creature. You want to get rid of him and you are taking the step to-day.
The only widespread criticism of Baldwin’s speech was that he spoke too much about himself. Apart from the King and Monckton no one appears to have noticed, still less objected to, his silence on Mrs Simpson, even her uncritical admirer and supporter, Chips Channon. Baldwin’s true opinion of the personalities involved is also suggested by the letter of warm congratulation and support that he wrote to Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on Lang’s broadcast about the crisis two days after the abdication.13 Lang savaged Edward for abandoning his duty because of his craving for private happiness and ‘Even more strange and sad it is that he should have sought his happiness in a manner inconsistent with the Christian principles of marriage, and within a social circle whose standards and ways of life are alien to all the best instincts and traditions of his people’.14 Many people found Lang’s words offensive and unnecessary, but there is little doubt that he was expressing what the higher levels of the Establishment thought of Mrs Simpson and her friends. At an early stage in the crisis, Baldwin told his confidant Tom Jones, ‘I have grown to hate that woman. She has done more in nine months to damage the monarchy than Victoria and George the Fifth did to repair it in half a century.’15 Soon after the abdication Tommy Dugdale, Baldwin’s parliamentary private secretary, wrote a savagely critical assessment of Mrs Simpson, which concluded that she was ‘selfish, self-seeking, hard, calculating, ambitious, scheming, dangerous’.16
The government’s reluctance to commit itself to any financial settlement threw the question onto the soon-to-be ex-King and his family. This opened one of the richest veins of bitterness in the whole affair, to a great extent because of the King’s flagrant dishonesty. In the words of his biographer Philip Ziegler: ‘He told a lie for reasons of self-interest, and this cannot b
e condoned. It was a foolish lie … It was a suicidal lie.’17 The brothers together with legal and financial advisers had gathered at Fort Belvedere on the Thursday evening to discuss the financial arrangements that abdication would make necessary. The King opened proceedings with an impassioned speech in which he claimed that he would be hard pressed financially once he left the throne if the government did not grant him a Civil List pension. By one account he claimed he would have less than £5,000 per year on which to live.18 His strongest bargaining chips were the ambiguous legal position of the palaces at Sandringham and Balmoral created by his father’s will. He insisted on getting the fullest monetary value possible for his interest in the palaces. An agreement was signed under which the Duke of York promised him £25,000 per year unless the government granted him a pension of that amount under the Civil List. What the King failed to disclose to his brothers was that he had accumulated a large private fortune stemming from the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall during his time as Prince of Wales, which had been shrewdly invested by Peacock. It was probably in excess of £1 million, which, even though it had been conservatively invested in gilt-edged bonds, would have brought in £30,000 a year.19
The abdication bills passed through both Houses of Parliament smoothly, with no opposition. The Imperial Policy Group had been silenced by Dugdale’s briefing. In his final act as sovereign, the King had given the Royal Assent to the Act, and at 1.52 p.m. on Friday 11 December he ceased to be King. The British constitution does not recognise any such thing as an interregnum so, until he had abdicated and been succeeded by his brother, he was still King and the only person who could give the Royal Assent. By this quirk he thus had to approve his own departure. Edward’s abdication also opened the question of what he should be called as the ex-King. It had already been decided that he would retain royal rank and thus the style of Royal Highness, but no further thought had been given to a title.20 As he was to broadcast on the BBC that night, the question became an urgent one. He would have to be announced by name and title. Sir John Reith was the man who needed to know the most. At one point, Reith suggested to the Duke of York that he should refer to him as ‘Mr. Edward Windsor’.21 The Duke of York disposed of this offensive and demeaning notion with the common-sense statement that, as the son of a peer, the least that his brother rated would be ‘Lord Edward Windsor’. He also dropped in the suggestion that he could stand for Parliament. This terrifying prospect was an unsubtle but completely effective way of ensuring that the ex-King would be given a peerage in his own right as soon as possible. The brothers settled on the title Duke of Windsor. Quite how seriously Reith intended his suggestion is open to question, but the episode gives a further flavour of how the ex-King was starting to feel the chill now that he was no longer protected by the deferential aura surrounding a monarch. Graciousness was not noted as one of Reith’s strong points and he was unarguably aligned with the Establishment hardliners.
Churchill was a noted foul-weather friend, whose loyalty to his friends usually rode out their problems. Even though he had been badly shaken by the reaction of his fellow MPs to his intervention on the Monday, he was not deterred by the risk to his reputation of associating further with someone who was set fair to become Britain’s highest-profile social pariah, and came to Fort Belvedere for lunch on the Friday to give a final show of support to the King, and to take his leave. They were together at table the very moment that Edward VIII formally ceased to be King.22 Churchill could claim to have been the one subject of King Edward VIII who stayed with him to the very last. Churchill made sure that the King felt he had been given adequate time for reflection by Baldwin.23 He finally understood that it had been Edward’s own decision not to accept Churchill’s advice to stonewall and play for time. They do not seem to have discussed how this could be squared with the King’s opening words at their dinner on the previous Friday night, which implied that he had not agreed to abdicate. Now that he had abdicated, he no longer required Churchill’s support on the question of his marriage, but he did want it for something else. The ex-King was looking to the future and treated Churchill to a similarly specious plea of impending poverty to the one to which he had treated his brothers.24 It is unclear from publicly available evidence whether the ex-King told Churchill about the agreement between Edward and his brothers which underwrote him against a failure to grant the ex-King a pension from the Civil List, but over the next few months Churchill vigorously championed granting him one. Churchill also advised Edward on the draft of the broadcast he was to make that night. It was in essence the text that the King and Monckton had prepared together, but Churchill added a few almost unmistakable touches of his own, notably a contrast between the ex-King’s solitary state and that of his brother and successor, who had ‘one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me – a happy home with his wife and children’. Churchill drew immense strength and support from his own marriage, so this comment was genuine and heartfelt. He left Fort Belvedere in tears, quoting a couplet of Marvell’s:
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable Scene25
It was doubtless done with an eye to posterity and the image that he hoped it would hold of the former King, who quoted it approvingly in his memoirs. It was just as much a part of the manipulation of the historical record as Baldwin’s speech the previous day. It would be some time before Churchill discovered that the King had lied to him as he had lied to his brothers about his finances.
Whilst Churchill stayed loyal to Edward to the last, it was otherwise with his domestic servants, who gave him another lesson in the realities of power and status. One by one they declined his instructions and invitations to join him in exile. He complained bitterly of ‘their amazing disloyalty’, but this tells us more about his egocentricity and foolishness than anything else.26 A precarious existence in the household of an ex-monarch was not an enticing prospect in its own right, even before taking into account his close-fistedness. Edward did not seem aware of how little he had done to earn their personal loyalty and certainly had no idea that the thought of working for his intended wife was actively unpleasant. It was an easy decision to shift allegiance to the new regime.
After lunch, Monckton had driven up to Downing Street with the draft of the ex-King’s broadcast, which was then shown to Simon. The government had not been invited to comment on the draft, but in practice held a power of veto. No longer King, the constitution allowed Edward to speak in his own right, but Reith was a servant of the government, and the BBC would not have broadcasted anything with which it was unhappy. In the event, the government found nothing to object to. The ex-King was allowed to say what Baldwin had declined to say in his speech to Parliament, that Mrs Simpson had repeatedly tried to alter his decision. It is perhaps revealing that Edward did not give her name and referred to her as ‘the other person most nearly concerned’. In the days before near-universal use of given names, to have done otherwise would have reminded his listeners that the woman he loved and intended to marry was still someone else’s wife. He may also have understood the resentment that her name might have provoked. For the rest, its restrained understatement chimed with Baldwin’s more histrionic but equally sugar-coated speech the day before. Much to his later chagrin, Edward had taken up a heavy hint from Baldwin that he should ‘stress that he had at all times shown me every possible form of consideration’, and thanked his ministers.27 Baldwin wanted to ‘preserve the unity of the realm’ by making it clear that there were no hard feelings between him and the King.28 He competed with Baldwin in playing down how close the country had come to an all-out constitutional crisis: ‘There never has been any constitutional difference between me and [Ministers] and Parliament. Bred in the constitutional tradition by my Father [another Churchill touch], I should never have allowed any such issue to arise.’29
Sir John Reith came to Windsor Castle to superintend the broadcast in person and found the ex-King under the same carapace of false normal
ity that he had been presenting to the outside world all week. Reith had been braced for a much more trying experience.30 He began with a voice test for the ex-King, which provided a final moment of comedy. Despite Reith’s best efforts to direct him away from anything in the newspaper from which he was reading that referred to him, Edward lit on a report of a tennis match in which Sir Samuel Hoare praised the Duke of York’s skills as a tennis player. The broadcast was heard all over the world. At this remove it is impossible to assess how great an impact it had. Whilst it did not trigger any widespread outpouring of public emotion, it was still enough to move Reith to overcome his doubts about Edward and detect the tragedy of the moment: ‘What an occasion. What that young man has thrown away – a greater opportunity than any King or any man ever had. I felt very sorry for him.’31
The arrangements for the ex-King’s departure from his former realm were marked by a final flourish of flair, which showed that he had not lost his sense of the dramatically effective. He wanted to leave that very night by Royal Navy destroyer, and overrode the pleas of Hoare, who was organising the operation in his capacity as the First Lord of the Admiralty and wanted to ‘provide a more fitting departure’.32 Perhaps Hoare had a more imposing warship in mind for the task. By one account, Hoare’s personal transport, the Admiralty yacht HMS Enchantress, was to have carried the ex-King until someone was alert enough to realise that her name would have provided ample fodder for dubious comment and ribaldry.33 The destroyer HMS Fury was substituted in a final gesture of advance news management. The ex-King had been given another foretaste of the more humble life he was going to lead when he found himself carrying Slipper on board under his arm.34 In an unconscious protest against his uncertain future, Slipper fouled the Captain’s cabin.35 Surgeon Commander H. E. Y. White, the senior Naval doctor from the crew of the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, was added to Fury’s complement at the insistence of the ex-King’s equerry Piers ‘Joey’ Legh, who accompanied him on this final journey together with Ulick Alexander, ‘in case the ex-King’s state of mental stress should cause him to require medical attention while at sea’.36 The doctor’s skills were not required, although his shipmates might have felt the need of some attention for the exhaustion brought on by attempting to match the ex-King’s nervous hyperactivity, which kept him awake until the early hours sending off radio messages, drinking brandy and talking.
The King Who Had to Go Page 36