The King Who Had to Go

by Adrian Phillips

  The record of von Ribbentrop’s royal policy is a fine specimen of the incoherence and dilettantism of Nazi diplomacy and its disconnection from reality. All it achieved was to alert Downing Street that the King’s Party was not the only grouping that aspired to manipulate the crisis to its own ends. It is unclear how fully Wilson was briefed on the intelligence available, but Mrs Simpson posed a real threat in his eyes and he was determined to thwart her. Money provided the obvious tool to frustrate her and through Chamberlain he lobbied hard for it to be used against her. The threat of withholding a Civil List pension for the King if he cohabited with Mrs Simpson had already been decided on whilst Goddard was on his way to Cannes. It does not seem to have been delivered to Mrs Simpson, but Sir Edward Peacock did tell the King of Chamberlain’s threat ‘if, in the meantime, he [King Edward] associated with Mrs. Simpson he could not get a penny’.29 Wilson succeeded in part and persuaded Chamberlain to extend the threat to cover ‘activities of a kind of which Parliament would disapprove’ or ‘other troublesome activities’ as distinct from misbehaviour with Mrs Simpson.30 This would embrace any agitation against the new King or with a foreign power. Peacock appears to have stopped short of giving the King the broader warning. Wilson could take some comfort from the fact that Peacock had advised the King to remain abroad for at least two years on behalf of Baldwin and Chamberlain.31 The imminent threat of a rival court, if it ever existed, had receded greatly.

  Far more deeply hidden is the answer to the question as to whether Wilson also tried to block the divorce, which he believed was an integral part of Mrs Simpson’s scheme to make herself Queen. Chamberlain and Wilson talked about Mrs Simpson’s divorce before Wilson wrote to Chamberlain on the Thursday, and there is a hint as to the direction that the conversation might have taken in a memorandum that Wilson wrote the following day about the discussion: ‘…the Chancellor agreed that steps should not be taken to interfere with any action which anyone might take to prevent the individual [Mrs Simpson] from obtaining the “freedom” that is desired.’32 The possibility that the divorce might be blocked through the intervention of the King’s Proctor offered a convenient sword of Damocles to hang over Mrs Simpson and, to say the least, Wilson did not find it an alarming prospect from the government’s point of view. The double negative in what Chamberlain told Wilson might be code for tacit approval for some covert move to facilitate intervention. Chamberlain too wanted to prevent the marriage albeit for less specific reasons: ‘I should like him to be saved from a marriage which I fear must end speedily in Disillusionment and disgust.’33 On a more innocent reading Chamberlain’s comment might mean no more than that the two had agreed that the government should not attempt to interfere with the judicial process should some ‘busybody’ launch an intervention, but there are arguments against this reading. The general possibility of private intervention had been chewed over for a good while, so the simple fact that it was raised suggests that there was some specific reason to do so. Any attempt by the government to pressure some genuinely private intervenor would have been risky in the extreme. Everything that had been said about the possibility assumed that the government would be powerless.

  Even before Chamberlain and Wilson talked about intervention, a ‘busybody’ had finally gone into action. Francis Stephenson, a 73-year-old managing clerk at a City of London firm of solicitors, had made a formal court ‘appearance’ on the Wednesday, giving notice of intervention on the grounds that Mrs Simpson was collusive and that she had committed adultery with the King. He had gone to the court together with someone else from his office, an articled clerk called Gordon, whose ‘politics are very advanced. He is of extreme Labour principles.’34 According to Stephenson, Gordon immediately afterwards went to the offices of the left-wing Daily Worker newspaper and told them about Stephenson’s court appearance ‘without my knowledge or consent’ and to his extreme annoyance. Stephenson’s intervention as a formal judicial act was to prove very short-lived, although its practical repercussions lasted for months. To pursue the intervention, Stephenson would have had to file a formal affidavit within four days. He did draft one, but did not file it, and on 14 December he wrote to Goddard’s office saying that he did not intend to proceed any further.

  Superficially at least, Stephenson fits perfectly the image of the ‘busybody’ or zealously patriotic citizen mooted by the hardliners. A respectable elderly man with metal-framed spectacles living in the London suburbs, he was almost a caricature of an individual so innocuous that only a scandalous threat to national harmony would move him to action. It is only his thoroughness that invites us to look more closely. He insisted throughout that he was acting entirely of his own volition and he generally resembles many of the more literate people who wrote to the King’s Proctor, who were affronted at the idea that Mrs Simpson might have obtained her divorce under irregular circumstances despite what seemed to be flagrant adultery with the King. When the King’s Proctor later interviewed him, Stephenson said that he had no firm evidence and was only going on gossip at the Stock Exchange and the like. He trotted out rumours of astronomical bribes paid to Ernest Simpson for his complaisance.35 He also said that he was motivated by precisely the same calculation that Sir John Simon had imagined: intervention would prevent abdication and an undesirable marriage. Stephenson’s information might have been no more than gossip, but it drew on all the available sources: social chit-chat amongst brokers and jobbers dealing in US securities, articles in Cavalcade and American newspapers thoughtfully posted to Stephenson by convenient friends in America. He detected collusion in press stories that Mrs Simpson remained in contact with her husband after the decree nisi and her manifestly token residence in Felixstowe, but as a legal professional he skated over the apparent use of a professional co-respondent. In the eyes of the Ramsay MacDonalds of the world, this was evidence of collusion, but someone who knew the judicial game like Stephenson was aware that it was not genuinely a weak point. He accused the authorities of ignoring the convention that undefended divorce cases should be heard in open court because entry to the Ipswich Court had been severely restricted. This was the only point on which Stephenson admitted to being better informed than normal members of the public, having obtained direct evidence from a nephew who conveniently lived in the town. Stephenson’s recitation of the places and dates of the King’s supposed adultery with Mrs Simpson was circumstantial and comprehensive.

  It was when Stephenson tried to explain his failure to follow through from his ‘appearance’ that he began to contradict himself flagrantly. He told the King’s Proctor and the newspapers that it was the ex-King’s broadcast that changed his mind. He provided journalists with a suitably vivid story of his reaction to hearing the radio:

  If the Duke of Windsor could say goodbye to his subjects with ‘God save the king,’ then he as managing clerk in a law office could forgive and forget and toast the new monarch, too … His words made me think … I realised that here was a man who wanted to be happy … I thought of my own married happiness … When I heard his words I regretted what I had done.36

  If Stephenson had truly believed his intervention would prevent abdication, he had already failed and there would have been no need for this mawkish drivel to explain why he had gone no further. Even more tellingly, it was only after the broadcast that he sat down to draft a clear and precise affidavit setting out his grounds for intervening. The affidavit cites the ex-King’s statement in the broadcast that he loved Mrs Simpson and wanted to marry her as evidence for adultery with her. For good measure he pointed the King’s Proctor towards the International Press Agency, one of whose journalists had tried to get information from Stephenson and had claimed that he might provide Stephenson with ‘useful’ information on a reciprocal basis. This is being a sight too helpful for someone who supposedly just wanted the Duke of Windsor to have his happiness. By far the most plausible explanation for the brevity of Stephenson’s intervention is that he had never intended to go further than his
‘appearance’ and the leak to the Daily Worker. The draft affidavit was written purely to lend credibility when, as he must have known would happen, the King’s Proctor interviewed him.

  Stephenson appears even less reliable when what he said in 1936 is compared to what he told one of Beaverbrook’s journalists, a Miss O’Callaghan, who persuaded him to talk freely in 1949. By then his story had changed radically. He could have provided direct evidence of Mrs Simpson’s adultery with the King. A friend had lived opposite the flat in Bryanston Court and from their windows Stephenson had seen the King regularly arriving there by car and letting himself in with his own latch-key, about half an hour after Ernest Simpson had left.37 The explanation of Stephenson’s change of mind as to whether to pursue his intervention is also different: he was ‘quite confident and convinced that it was the Duke of Windsor’s solicitors who caused him to be approached to withdraw his intervention…’ When the King’s Proctor interviewed him, Stephenson claimed that he had been offered hush money to withdraw his evidence in the form of expenses payments, which he had declined. In the interval before Mrs Simpson’s divorce was finalised, Stephenson told Miss O’Callaghan that he went around armed with a knuckle-duster on the advice of friends. Tudor Jenkins, the senior journalist to whom Miss O’Callaghan reported, labelled the material as ‘dynamite’ but endorsed the view that not a word was publishable.38 Even this was not Stephenson’s final word on what had gone on. A few years later he was denying having given any information to a ‘pretty girl’ sent by one of the newspapers, despite being offered a blank cheque to do so.39 The only common feature to the two versions is Stephenson’s boast that he was immune to financial inducements. Even allowing for the fact that Stephenson was almost ninety by then, it is a remarkable change of tack.

  It is thus unwise to attach too much importance to what Stephenson said about why he had acted. His true motivations remain hidden, but it is possible to assess what he achieved. The timing of his appearance was almost perfect from the point of view of someone who wanted to torpedo the divorce but not the abdication. It came just after the King had committed himself irrevocably to abdication, so there was no risk that the King might have decided to stay on learning of his intervention. Abortive though it was as a piece of judicial process in its own right, Stephenson’s ‘appearance’ prolonged and deepened the uncertainty over whether Mrs Simpson would get her decree nisi. Under a quirk of English law – more precisely Matrimonial Causes Rule 56 – even though Stephenson had failed to file an affidavit and had even told Mrs Simpson that he did not intend to proceed, his ‘appearance’ remained on file and a decree absolute could not be granted unless it were shown how this had been dealt with.40 Stephenson also provided another reason for the government’s law officers to be as scrupulous as possible in handling the case. The King’s Proctor had been deluged with letters of varying degrees of literacy, many of which alleged that Mrs Simpson’s divorce case had been given an unfairly easy ride because of political pressure or outright corruption. The procedures of divorce law were certainly bizarre and oppressive, but a good number of people still believed that divorce should only be granted very sparingly. The report of Stephenson’s ‘appearance’ in the Daily Worker made doubly certain that the King’s Proctor would take it into account. Stephenson never explained why he had taken the articled clerk Gordon with him to his ‘appearance’ despite his political affiliations. His protestations of ignorance and annoyance ring hollow, and it is at least as likely that Gordon was there precisely to leak the story. Stephenson’s ‘appearance’ did not just stay on file. It also prompted Sir Boyd Merriman, President of the Divorce Court, to instruct the King’s Proctor to undertake a formal investigation on 19 January 1937, and Goddard was informed accordingly.

  At minimal cost and effort, Stephenson had ensured that Mrs Simpson’s divorce was subject to legal uncertainty on two levels. His ‘appearance’ created another legal hurdle for Mrs Simpson to clear and the King’s Proctor was politically, if not legally, certain to investigate thoroughly. A comprehensive dossier of points against the divorce had been fed into the system. Of course, none of this means that Stephenson was operating on anybody else’s behalf, although his repeated claims to working entirely on his own volition are no more trustworthy than anything else he said. It is hard to escape the conclusion that if the government or someone under the government’s influence had tried to come up with a suitable ‘busybody’ to do its dirty work, Stephenson would have fitted the bill nicely: a devious individual with a good grasp of legal procedure and a power of imagination worthy of a borderline fantasist.

  Unknowingly, Stephenson was operating in parallel to the government’s law officers. With the approval of the Attorney General his subordinate, Sir Thomas Barnes, the King’s Proctor, had already begun to follow up allegations made by the more credible letter-writers on an informal basis.41 Neither Somervell nor Barnes displayed any desire to block the divorce. From the outset, their primary motivations were professional instinct and a keen awareness of the need to pre-empt public criticism that they had failed in their duty. Moreover, Somervell doubted whether unearthing evidence of Mrs Simpson’s adultery with the King would actually stop the divorce: ‘Even if proved [adultery with the King] would not the Court on ordinary principles grant a discretion, particularly as Mrs. S. could plead the difficulty of informing the Court of her misconduct with the then ruling Sovereign?’42

  Soon after the launch of the King’s Proctor’s formal investigation, the rumour mill, or at least its high-level section, made a sharp change in direction. The judiciary was no longer being leaned on to wave Mrs Simpson’s divorce through; the Establishment was now keen that the divorce should not be finalised. The rumours were strong enough to prompt Monckton to write an extraordinary letter to Wilson:

  2nd February, 1937.

  CONFIDENTIAL

  My dear Sir Horace,

  As you know, I dined with the Prime Minister last week and yesterday I saw the King.

  I am very anxious that an impression should not get abroad that the powers that be would be glad if the decree were not made absolute. I do not suppose that Mr. Baldwin wishes the decree not to be made absolute and I know the King hopes all will go smoothly. I am less certain of some of the others [author’s italics]. Personally I feel that if there was a hitch we might well be in for a tragedy before the Coronation – certainly for something extremely unpleasant.

  The danger is that if the idea is spread in the region of the Inns of Court that some members of the Government feel that there should be no decree absolute, this may unconsciously affect the minds of any Judges to whom it may be reported.

  Is there anything which can properly be done to counteract the spread of such a rumour?

  Yours ever,

  WALTER MONCKTON43

  The ex-King’s unofficial representative felt compelled to act as an intermediary between the King and the Prime Minister on one side, and a senior civil servant (even though he worked directly for the Prime Minister) and unnamed ministers on the other. Monckton’s suspicion that ‘some of the others’ did want to block the divorce gives the lie to the letter’s ostensible purpose of merely quelling rumours. The letter expresses Monckton’s lightly coded belief that the hardliners, with Wilson to the fore, wanted intervention to succeed, as Wilson had been advocating by implication to Chamberlain in his panicky letter the day after the abdication. Monckton was still in close touch with the Duke of Windsor and thus able to judge how he would have reacted if he had found himself unable to marry Mrs Simpson, which he thought would be disastrous. The letter also provides an interesting sidelight on the vaunted political independence of the judiciary in the view of an experienced barrister that judges, even unconsciously, might fall in with perceived government wishes.

  There is not the slightest indication that Monckton’s letters led to any pressure being applied to Barnes to go gently. As far as can be seen, the government continued in its resolute respect for the princ
iple of not interfering in the legal process. It did, though, make a significant choice in the way it dealt with Barnes’s investigation, which could have led to a far less benign outcome. The government chose to withhold a piece of crucial evidence that it had already used during the crisis toward another goal. The government had deployed the accusations made against Mrs Simpson and Guy Trundle by the Special Branch (or something very similar to them) to head off the Imperial Policy Group when it threatened to cause trouble in Parliament, but the accusations remained buried when they might have been used to torpedo Mrs Simpson’s divorce a few weeks later. Barnes did not know about the Trundle allegations, and it is inconceivable that he would not have pursued them if he had. Adultery by Mrs Simpson with anyone would have had to be taken into account. Moreover, they were in a different league to the supposed adultery with the King, which might not have been fatal to the divorce if proved. A squalid, doubly duplicitous and semi-commercial liaison would have been infinitely more damaging. Tacitly or otherwise, a decision was taken by the handful of individuals privy to the Trundle story not to alert Barnes. As well as the incalculable consequences of blocking the Duke of Windsor’s marriage to Mrs Simpson, it would have been unimaginably scandalous.