This was not a favourable time for the forces of Conservatism. In the American general election on 3 November, Roosevelt had led the Democrats to victory once more, winning virtually 61 per cent of the popular vote. He was elected on the strength of the New Deal, set up to alleviate the worst effects of the Depression, and had concluded his presidential campaign with a rousing attack at Madison Square Gardens on the 'organized money' that opposed him.66 Corporate leaders had denounced him for what they regarded as socialist policies, but the electorate still wanted to keep him as President. Some Americans saw a similarity between the hostility to Roosevelt and King
Edward's developing problems in Britain. On 25 November, a New Yorker (who was president of an organization called 'Association Better Citizenship, Inc.', which aimed to dispel ignorance, misunderstanding, superstition and prejudice) wrote in a letter to the King that
It is with a feeling of great concern I learn of the mental attitude of the reactionaries in your Court. You are of the same nature as our great President. If he were in your position he would do as he damn pleased. We, in America, are putting the reactionaries back on their heels. They are a necessary adjunct, to any organization or kingdom, but they have to be kept in their place, or the progress of the world would be stopped ... A Queen of American descent sitting upon the Throne (with you) would bind England and America indissolu- bly. All those that love you, and there are many in America, wish you and Mrs Simpson all the happiness in the world.67
Not just Conservatism, but Stanley Baldwin in particular, was beleaguered in the autumn of 1936. On 12 November, during a debate on rearmament, he admitted to the House of Commons that he had misled the country three years earlier on this issue. 'I put before the whole House my own views with an appalling frankness', he announced, before explaining that because of the strong pacifist feeling running through the country in 1933, he had sought - and won - re-election on an anti-war platform. 'My position as the leader of a great party', he explained, 'was not altogether a comfortable one. I asked myself what chance was there . . . within the next year or two of that feeling being so changed that the country would give a mandate for rearmament?' Supposing that he had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that Britain must rearm, he said, 'does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.'68
Churchill, not a friend of Baldwin in any case, was not impressed. 'This was indeed appalling frankness', he observed many years later - 'That a Prime Minister should avow that he had not done his duty in regard to national safety because he was afraid of losing the election was an incident without parallel in our Parliamentary history.'69 Leo Amery, the Imperialist statesman and writer, also took a dim view. It was a 'most lamentable confession,' he wrote in his diary on 12 November, 'and one which filled the House with dismay. Then SB sat down almost in dead silence.'7" The leader in the Daily Mail on 23 November drew a contrast - in a paragraph of bold lettering to emphasize the point - between this speech and the King's concern for the Special Areas:
Surely those who have recently confessed that they dared not tell the people the truth three years ago and who have since accomplished so little towards defence will realise the gulf between their conduct and the King's methods in Wales.71
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, just four months before Edward's visit to South Wales in that year, seemed to divide the people of Britain into two opposing camps - those on the left and those on the right. On the right were the Conservatives, aristocrats and businessmen who supported Franco's military uprising against Spain's legally elected Republican Government. On the left were many of the working-class and unemployed, as well as middle- class Marxists and liberals, who supported the popular front of the Republicans. 'Left and Right', observed the American journalist Janet Flanner, 'no longer referred to man's hands but to his politics.' This was a time, she added, when suddenly everybody began being interested in politics - 'President Roosevelt's New Deal, Stalin's Five- Year Plan, Mussolini's Mare Nostrum, Leon Blum's Front Populaire, Hitler's Lebensraum, and Franco's Civil War finally began altogether their full, their delayed, their conflicting implications.'72 Many people were terrified, wondering where all this conflict was going to lead. The Spanish explosion, wrote George Bernard Shaw to Beatrice Webb, was a 'deliberate refusal to accept the democratic substitution of the ballot for the bullet.' At present, he said, the Spanish Government was only a muddle. But, he added, 'after the Russian success against overwhelming odds anything may happen. Well, apres nous, le deluge.'73
John Buchan, the famous author of the espionage thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps and Governor-General of Canada, wrote a letter about the crisis in Europe to Edith Londonderry on 18 September. 'We do not want to be mixed up in this dog-fight of Fascism and Communism', he said, adding that 'I dislike both, though of the two evils I slightly prefer the former, like Sir Percival, who, when he found a lion fighting a snake, helped the lion as "it was the more natural beast of the twain".'74 King Edward shared this horror of Communism and regarded it as a threat that must be resisted in every way possible. No doubt his feelings were influenced by the murder in 1918 of his Russian relatives, the family of the Tsar Nicholas II, by the Bolsheviks. Like most of the ruling class, he believed that Russia and international Communism was a greater threat to Britain than the growth of Fascism in Italy and Germany. Along with a large section of the Conservative Party, he opposed the idea of sanctions against Italy after Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia. He believed that it would be foolish to annoy Mussolini on this issue, on the grounds that there was little the British could do, and in any case he believed that the Italians had some grounds for the invasion. He also thought that nothing should be done to drive Mussolini into Hitler's arms.
Britain's best safeguard against war, argued Edward, was to have a strong fighting force, and on issues of rearmament he was at one with Churchill.75 He also had great hopes for an Anglo-American alliance and expressed the view that the USA and Britain should 'get definitely together... the only hope for us and the world was to stand together.'76 Overwhelmingly, however, he was haunted by the carnage and brutality of the Great War and shared the common view that every possible effort should be made to avoid another conflict.
The political situation in the autumn of 1936 seemed to many to be unstable and explosive. It reflected the more personal situation in which Edward now found himself. By now, he wrote later in his memoirs, he felt that his affairs had 'reached a highly explosive state, and a careless spark from outside might touch off the charge.' Just thirty-one hours after the momentous meeting with his Prime Minister on 16 November, he bade farewell to Wallis and boarded the night train for the journey to South Wales. The King's work still had to go on, even if he was leaving behind in London a personal crisis of unbearable proportions:
As the train clanked and rattled through the night, I lay in my berth reflecting on the turmoil that I knew must by this time have gripped Whitehall. Yet I was at peace with myself. My spiritual struggle was over. I had passed the climax. The public struggle remained, and in many ways it would be more pitiless. But I had declared myself.
6 'The Battle for the Throne'
By the time Edward had returned to London from South Wales, he had changed his mind: he now hoped to stay on the throne and to marry Wallis. This, said Baldwin to Archbishop Lang, was because he had seen 'evidence of his popularity' while on his Welsh tour.1 It did not occur to the Prime Minister that, faced with the desolation of Merthyr and Dowlais, Edward would feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility for the unemployed - that 'something must be done'. Seeing the pinched, worn faces of the poor in South Wales may have suggested to the King that he had a moral obligation to stay on the throne and do what he could to help. Such a view was consistent with his stated beliefs. When Alexander Woollcott, an American writer who broadcast on the BBC
, was asked in 1935 to explain his own liberal and humanitarian convictions, he drew on a philosophy that had been put to him by Edward. He always remembered, he said, 'a pungent bit of advice, given, oddly enough, by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. He suggested to those about him in England that, pending the millennium, each man take hold of a piece of the depression next him and do something about it.'2
But Edward's change of mind had in any case been influenced by a new plan, which Baldwin had not anticipated: a morganatic marriage, as an alternative to the stark choice between giving up Wallis and abdication. Inviting Wallis to lunch at Claridges while Edward was in Wales in mid-November, Esmond Harmsworth, chairman of the Newspaper Proprietors Association, had put this idea to her. He explained that it had been thought of by his father, Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail (and rival to Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the Evening Standard and the Express Group - between them they controlled most of the British mass-circulation press). By the morganatic arrangement, were she to marry the King she would remain a private citizen, and any children they might have would not be in the line of succession. Although unprecedented in England, this was not an uncommon strategy in the royal courts of Europe for solving a conflict between love and social status. Queen Mary's own paternal grandparents, Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg, and Claudine, Countess Rhedey, had had a morganatic marriage. Harmsworth explained to Wallis that a marriage of this kind ought to remove any difficulty, given that Mr Baldwin's stated objection to the marriage was that Edward's wife would have to be Queen. As a morganatic wife, Wallis could style herself after one of Edward's subsidiary titles, and be known as the Duchess of Lancaster, for example, or of Cornwall; she would be 'Her Highness', but not 'Her Royal Highness'. She would rank in the social hierarchy below the three royal duchesses and would not be entitled to curtseys.
Wallis was astonished by the idea. At the time, she said later, she was sure of only one thing - that she knew 'less than ever of the marvellous workings of the British political mind'.3 She told Harmsworth that she felt unable to express an opinion, but he persuaded her to pass the suggestion on to the King. This she did, during the weekend of 21-22. November, when she and her aunt were with Edward at Fort Belvedere. At first he reacted with distaste, but gradually it appeared to him to be a real solution to the dilemma. The plan had the support of Winston Churchill and Beaverbrook. 'Max [Beaverbrook] rang me up to say he had seen the gent,' wrote Churchill, '& told him the Cornwall plan was my idea. The gent was definitely for it. It now turns on what the Cabinet will say. I don't see any other way through.'4 Churchill called it the 'Cornwall plan' because he assumed that, as the King's morganatic wife, Mrs Simpson would become the Duchess of Cornwall.
Edward returned to London from the Fort at the end of the weekend. He sent for Harmsworth and asked him to put the idea informally to Baldwin. The Prime Minister replied that he was interested, but did not commit himself in any way. In fact, he was unsure how to proceed. According to Geoffrey Dawson, he was 'getting more and more worried, though he told me very little and confined himself, as on Friday, to discussing various possibilities and the popular reaction to them. He was quite clear however that I ought to give up a visit to Yorkshire planned for the week-end . . ,'5 The ball was now in Baldwin's court, which changed the balance of power between him and Edward. From the moment the King proposed a morganatic marriage, argued the historian A. J. P. Taylor, 'he put himself at the Government's mercy. He was now asking them for something, whereas previously they had been asking him.'6
On Tuesday 24 November, Baldwin moved into action.7 He summoned to Downing Street the three men who had the potential to form an alternative government: Clement Attlee, Leader of the Opposition; Sir Archibald Sinclair, Leader of the Liberal Party; and Winston Churchill. He told them that if the King refused to abandon his idea of marriage to Wallis, the Government would resign. Sinclair and Attlee gave their word not to form governments if this were to take place. Attlee told Baldwin that Labour voters would have no objection to the King marrying an American in principle, but would not accept Mrs Simpson or a morganatic marriage. 'Despite the sympathy felt for the King and the affection which his visits to the depressed areas had created,' wrote Attlee later, 'the Party - with the exception of the intelligentsia who can be trusted to take the wrong view on any subject - were in agreement with the views I had expressed.'8
Winston Churchill said that 'though his attitude was a little different, he would certainly support the government'.9 Despite this assurance, there was some suspicion that Churchill would exploit the crisis as an opportunity to challenge Baldwin. If the Government resigned in direct confrontation with the King, worried Lord Zetland, the Secretary for India, would 'Churchill resist the temptation to take up the gauntlet and endeavour to form an alternative ministry?' In such a scenario, he added, 'There would be a grave risk of the country being divided into two camps - for and against the King. This would clearly be fraught with danger of the most formidable kind.10 These anxieties were fuelled by a widespread mistrust of Churchill, who was widely regarded at this time, in the words of the historian David Cannadine, as 'a cad', a 'half breed', a 'dictator', a 'rogue elephant', and 'the greatest adventurer in modern political history'.11 Walter Elliot, the Scottish Conservative MP, was 'full of fears', said the wife of Baldwin's Parliamentary Private Secretary, 'as to what Winston Churchill would do in conjunction with Lord Beaverbrook as to forming a King's party.12
The editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, took up his pen. On 24 November he wrote a leader for the newspaper in which he 'took the occasion to introduce one or two passages on the importance of keeping the Crown and its representatives remote from "glaring public scandal" and above "public reproach or ridicule".' The significance 'of this and yesterday's leaders', he noted in his diary, 'was not lost on the American Press or indeed on many people in England.' Dawson also 'happened to meet both Neville Chamberlain and Alec Hardinge lunching with Lady Milner, and saw N[eville] C[hamber- lain] again later in the day; but they added little to what I knew already.13
Alec Hardinge knew all about the morganatic plan, even though the King had asked Baldwin not to tell him. 'I apologize for everlastingly bothering you,' wrote Hardinge to the Prime Minister on 22 November, 'but the Queen has told me what the King made you promise not to tell me.' If, under these circumstances, 'you feel that you can speak to to [sic] me about it,' he added, 'I should very much like to see you before you see the King again.' He offered to come round to see him that night.14
On 25 November, Thomas Jones, who had worked in Baldwin's private office and was close to him, told a friend about a revealing conversation with the Prime Minister. 'I cannot tell you all that was said between us,' he told his friend, 'but I can tell you the essential fact. The king agreed [before going to South Wales] to go out quietly, and he afterwards told this to his Mother and his brothers. But he has clearly now gone back on that. Mrs S was down at Fort Belvedere over the weekend and has talked him out of it.' Meanwhile, added Jones, 'I am collecting opinion from all over the place. I've seen Bruce of Australia and heard from John Buchan.'15 Those making plans were still working on the assumption that Edward would give up his throne.16
Queen Mary was not at all impressed by the idea of a morganatic marriage (though she herself was the granddaughter of such an arrangement). 'Really!' she was heard to remark, 'this might be Roumania!'17 On 25 November the Duke of York wrote to Sir Godfrey Thomas, Assistant Private Secretary to the King, to assure him of his complete cooperation in the event of abdication. 'If the worst happens & I have to take over,' he promised, 'you can be assured that I will do my best to clear up the inevitable mess, if the whole fabric does not crumble under the shock and strain of it all.18 Some members of the royal court had been thinking for quite a while that it would be better to have Albert on the throne than Edward. Clive Wigram had said 'that if he had the Duke of York he could make him into another King George [V]', noted Mrs Runciman in her diary. 'I suppose th
ere is a great sense of duty there which HM doesn't entirely lack but he has been spoilt."9
There were many reasons for Albert's appeal to the court as a replacement for Edward. He was seen as dependable, just as his father had been, and was like him in many other ways, too. He was a family man and had the same zest for shooting. He also, said Edward, found 'the same abiding contentment in Sandringham and Balmoral. He collected stamps as had my father, and also made a hobby of collecting rare plants . . . there was the same disinterestedness in foreign ideas and the same disinclination for foreign travel.'20 The patterns of their lives
were much the same, with the steady swing of habit taking them both year after year to the same places at the same time and with the same associates. Strongly rooted each in his own existence, they tended to be withdrawn from the hurly-burly of life that I relished.21
Albert was a deeply conservative and conventional man, and he and his wife enjoyed good relations with all the key representatives of the Establishment: Baldwin and the Government ministers, the Archbishop, and the chief courtiers. Albert had lived in the shadow of Edward's personality and talents for most of his life, but he could adopt a commanding manner when he needed to. In 1912 Helen Hardinge wrote a letter to her husband in which she described an occasion on which The Duke of Y[ork] had dined with all the gang at Claridges. They all danced afterwards & when he was going away 4 or 5 of them came to see him off. He said a ceremonious goodnight to them and then signing to Elizabeth [Bowes- Lyon, his future wife] said 'Get in', pointing to his car which was waiting. Elizabeth tripped in the royal-auto and they departed together about 1 o'clock in the morning!!"
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