The speech was heard on the wireless that evening. A 'lover of Church & State' in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, wrote to Mrs Baldwin after the broadcast to thank her and her husband for their stand on the royal crisis:
It is impossible to refrain from expressing profoundest gratitude for the news broadcast by the Premier this evening . .. Both of you understand well, the value & significance of a holy happy wedded life, & of its immense importance to the spiritual and human - social stability & destiny of the British Empire . .. Our beloved King George continually preached and practised this great truth. It would break his heart if he knew of the present state of affairs - Dearly beloved as our Sovereign is, we shall welcome the transfer of royalty to those who will carry on the traditions set by Queen Victoria & Queen Mary, should the change occur.41
But overall, Baldwin had misjudged the feelings of the British public - for there was widespread dissatisfaction with his account of events. That Friday evening, diners rose at restaurants and addressed the tables, proposing a loyal toast to the King which few people refused.42 'I am at a banquet of over 1050 people representative of business men of the country', wrote a woman to the King from Grosvenor House on Park Lane. 'The pointedly unusual fervour with which "The King" was toasted and the Anthem sung and the cheers after it,' she added, 'showed the temper of the people - undoubted sympathy for the King ... Of course Baldwin & Co have their knife into [the King] because he hates humbug and is honest and gets down to bed rock - and called in Malcolm Stewart [the Special Areas Commissioner who had just resigned in protest at the government's constraints on his job].'43 Popular sentiment was displayed wherever the ordinary members of the public collected together. The novelist Dennis Wheatley wrote to the King to say that, 'At a Fleet Street luncheon of a hundred men which I attended on Wednesday the unanimous view expressed was that if only you would rely upon the love, sympathy and understanding of the masses your "will would be done".' The 'decayed portion' of the country, he added, was arrogating to itself an authority it did not possess.44
Many of the general public could not understand Baldwin's hostility to Wallis. 'After 6 o'clock news when I heard Mr Baldwin's statement I sighed', wrote a woman in Essex to Edward, 'and said oh dear dear our poor poor King they are not going to allow him to marry.'45 'When your lady becomes our queen,' promised a letter from London, 'we will offer to her our love and devotion.'46 Admiration was expressed 'at the splendid way in which you are being true to the Lady of your choice.'47 'Keep your chin up Skipper Ted', urged a Londoner.48 Apart from gratitude for Edward's concern for the welfare of the poor, there was a view that a title and a noble background were worth nothing in comparison with love and happiness. A woman living in Llandeilo, South Wales, who supported the Conservative Party, wrote a letter to the King saying that she and her husband thought highly of Mrs Simpson. 'A Commoner has a Soul & is worthy in the sight of God,' she said, adding that
It is character that Counts here, Sc in the Great Beyond, not a Tytle [sic]. The greatest thing in life is love & sympathy, & Your Majesty should be allowed to choose your Queen and help mate in life. Mrs Simpson must be worthy, otherwise she would not appeal to Your Majesty. I fail to see what it has to do with the Cabinet or anyone.49
'The Lady of your choice having been in a humbler position one time', commented the wife of a man in the British Legion who had been out of work for six years, meant that she 'will know how to help you in doing what you have for the poor. Not like some who has never known what it is to want a meal, the same as I have . . . My wish is you will make the Lady of your Choice our Queen.'50 How different was this approach from that of Alice Keppel, who, said Lady Hamilton, was very amusing in a discussion of Mrs Simpson, 'saying it was her want of class that mattered so."1
However, Edward's support was by no means exclusively working class. One person wrote to say that among her acquaintances under fifty years of age, of all political views, there was scarcely one who did not resent the attitude of the Government. 'My friends', she added, 'are of the middle classes.'52 Some members of the upper classes supported Edward, sending him letters from their clubs in London or from their stately homes in the country. Their servants sent letters, too - the butler to Sir William and Lady Nora FitzHerbert in Derbyshire wrote to say that he was 'willing and ready to die if it will help Your Majesty or will assist in any way.'53 Concern for Edward was fuelled by a fear, based on recent events in the Soviet Union, that abdication might lead to revolution. The fact that the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II had been closely bound up with the 1917 Russian Revolution and the creation of a Communist state was seen as a grim warning. 'We want you, not the Duke of York,' wrote some British women from Trieste, Italy. 'The Czar resigned, and see what has happened.'54
What was becoming very clear was that, as a man in Glasgow pointed out in a letter to the King, 'Mr Baldwin announced that "the country" was against this, before taking any steps, before indeed any could have been taken, to find out the opinion of British electors. If a referendum were taken I think Your Majesty would win, and Mr Baldwin receive the kick in the pants he so richly deserves.'55
Friday 4 December had been 'another trying day', wrote Dawson, wearily. The 'Simpson Press had got going by this time, and there was a regular barrage of pleas for delay, for reference to the people, for anything that would keep a popular Sovereign (and, it was not obscurely hinted, get rid of a bad Prime Minister).'56 There was some outrage at the behaviour of The Times. 'The prejudice of "The Times" against Mrs Simpson', in the opinion of a letter-writer from London, 'is as unjustified as it is unrepresentative of public opinion." In the pages of his paper, Dawson defended the Government's position. Referring to the 'acute constitutional crisis' between the King and his Ministers, he argued that the situation had been misunderstood and that Ministers had not interfered in the private affairs of the Sovereign. It was simply, he said, that they had been asked a question and they had given their answer.58 The same day, he encountered hostility to the Government among his social peers. 'It was the celebration of Founder's Day at Eton,' he noted, 'and I spent most of the day there.' His neighbours at dinner included John Maynard Keynes, the prominent economist who contested the Treasury view that unemployment was incurable. In his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which was published in 1936, Keynes pioneered the idea of full employment. He 'seemed to suggest (as so many of the Liberal intelligentsia did)', said Dawson indignantly, 'that there was some deep laid plot on the part of the Government to get rid of the King.'59
Keynes was solidly for Edward VIII.60 'I thought today's leader in The Times absurd', he told his wife Lydia in a letter written that Friday. 'Won't sympathy gradually increase for the King against the Archbishops oozing humbug? If the Government offered him a morganatic marriage, that would be all right. But apparently - I don't know why - they refuse this.'61
Many intellectuals and liberals, among them George Bernard Shaw, shared Keynes's view on the royal crisis. 'On the one side there stands Dr Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury; on the other there stands George Bernard Shaw, Archbishop of Everywhere', said a letter to the King from South London. 'For God's sake,' it urged, 'choose Shaw!'62 When the writer Vera Brittain was in Dunfermline speaking about her new book, Honourable Estate, the Nonconformist minister with whom she was staying increased her sympathy for Edward VIII by his adamant disapproval of the lovers and his undisguised commiseration with Queen Mary - ' "I'm sorry for her", he said righteously. "She must feel she has utterly failed as a mother."H. G. Wells also sided with the King, against the Government. This was very irritating to Robert Bernays, the National Liberal MP for Bristol, especially after a conversation with him at a dinner party. 'I cannot stand Wells for any length of time', he complained in his diary. 'He is such a tremendous theorist and really knows nothing of modern conditions outside his coterie in London. He was talking the greatest nonsense about the King saying that as a whole the public would welcome the marriage.'64
The Archbishop of Can
terbury, Cosmo Lang, was starting to realize that it was not possible to count on the support of the public. In a diary he kept on 'The King's Matter', he recorded that on the afternoon of 4 December,
Young people, realized Lang in dismay, might say, 'He is doing the honourable thing. He wants to marry the woman he loves. Why shouldn't he?' This might be one bad outcome, he feared, of keeping the story from the public for so long. 'I suppose that those who, like myself, have known the whole business for two years', he thought, 'can scarcely realise the effect of this sudden crisis on minds wholly unprepared for it.. .'65 Certainly the sudden crisis seemed highly romantic to many of the population. 'Am told today', wrote the critic James Agate in his diary on 4 December, 'that owing to this affair of the King's marriage the big bookshops are completely deserted. I understand this. Why spend seven-and-sixpence on romance when you can get reality for a penny?"
By Saturday 5 December, Britain was utterly gripped by the royal love affair. 'Papers full of the harpy & the King', wrote Lucy Baldwin in her diary that day.67 The crisis was so terrific, complained Headlam in his diary, that Edith Londonderry 'feels that she and Charley must be in London - so the weekend party at Wynyard [in County Durham] has to be deprived of its host and hostess.'68 The royal crisis, noted Evelyn Waugh in a tone of some amusement,
has been a great delight to everyone. At Maudie's nursing home they report a pronounced turn for the better in all adult patients. There can seldom have been an event that has caused so much general delight and so little pain. Reading the papers and even listening to announcements that there was no news on the wireless took up most of the week.69
A taxi driver in London was reported as saying, 'We drivers ain't doing no business. We just goes out and collects the news and comes back to the shelter and discusses it . . . We says - let Him have her - Why shouldn't 'e be happy.'70
Nothing else, observed James Agate, was treated as of any importance, even cricket. 'England collapses on the first day of the Test match,' he observed, 'and Leyland rescues the side with a century. What Test match?' (The test series in Australia had just got under way.) In a reference to the legendary cricketer, Donald Bradman, he added, 'News came this morning that Bradman is out. But what people are asking is whether the King is going to be out.' The immediate effect of the rumpus, he said, was chaotic. 'I am very nearly run into by a man driving a car and reading a special edition of the evening paper at the same time - he has the paper spread over the steering-wheel! '71
That Saturday's Evening Standard printed an 'extremely witty' article by George Bernard Shaw which easily disposed, said Agate, 'of the objections to the lady on the score that she is an American and a commoner.'72 In this article, entitled 'The King, the Constitution and the Lady', Shaw set the nation's crisis in a fantasy - in 'the Kingdom of the Half Mad', where the King was not allowed by his Government and Church to marry a woman called Mrs Daisy Bell. Mrs Bell was an American who had been married twice before - 'and was, therefore, likely to make an excellent wife for a King who had never been married at all.' But, explained Shaw, you could never count on anything going off quietly in the Kingdom of the Half Mad, because
The Government, for instance, would let whole districts fall into ruin and destitution without turning a hair, and then declare that the end of the world was at hand because some foreign dictator had said bluntly that there were milestones on the Dover Road.
The King of the Half Mad told the Prime Minister and the Archbishop that he had to consider the views of 495 million subjects, only 11 per cent of whom were Christians. Therefore, he said, it was fine that the Church would not solemnize his marriage - for a civil marriage would enable him to be married legally without offending the religious feelings of a single soul in his Empire. When accused by the Prime Minister of being entirely mad, the King answered that 'To a little London clique some two or three centuries behind the times I no doubt seem so . . . The modern world knows better.' The Archbishop complained that the King's arguments were 'so entirely off the track of English educated thought that they do not really belong to your world and mine.' But the King retorted, 'Would it be too brutal of me to remind you that there are others' who might form a King's party? 'The people are behind me. You may have to resign in any case long before the Coronation.'73 Shaw's article was widely enjoyed. 'Thanks for sending Shaw's phantasy, which is the most real thing I have seen written about the situation', wrote the Labour politician Sir Charles Philips Trevelyan to his wife, Mary, it is saying in telling and literary form', he added, 'what I have been saying in half a dozen letters.'74
Charley Londonderry told Headlam that Churchill and Beaver- brook had been called by the King and were 'going to use this opportunity to have another go for SB.' These men, he said, would 'not stop at anything to secure their own ends'. This showed, thought Headlam, 'how little they know of public opinion - the country is not behind HM and the sooner he realizes it the better it will be.'75 It was certainly true that some of the country were not behind the King, as Headlam claimed. But it was clear that many others were. 'Whatever you may be told,' wrote a Brighton resident to the King on 5 December, 'the Truth is that the People of England - if their voice could be heard - have only one wish, and that is to see you a happy man ... & to have you & none other'. 'Good luck. Stand firm' urged a civil servant and his wife from Surrey. 'That part of your people which matters is behind you; but is desperately afraid you may not know it. We want a King who is a man and no hypocrite.'76
Some people took straw polls. Three-quarters of his friends and acquaintances, reported an Aberdonian, regarded the King's intentions with approval. A disabled ex-serviceman from Cheltenham believed that 90 per cent of Edward's subjects were behind him - 'for the sake of the workers,' he pleaded with the King, 'don't abdicate'.78 A letter from a jobless man in Lancashire claimed that at least 90 per cent of the unemployed and 'the man in the street' were with the King in his 'gallant fight against the combined forces of cant & humbug & hypocrisy' that were marshalling against him.79 '"Vox populi, vox Dei" - and rub it in', enjoined a postcard from Northampton to Winston Churchill, who was known to be backing the King.80
'God Save the King! Tell Us The Facts, Mr Baldwin!' proclaimed the headlines on the front page of Saturday's Daily Mirror. 'The Nation Insists', it continued, 'on Knowing the King's Full Demands and Conditions. The Country will Give You the Verdict!' The newspaper backed the King completely and published letters of support from its readers. 'This Crisis Can be Settled', urged the leader. 'No More Talk of The King's Abdication.' The vast majority of the people, it told its readers, 'hate seeing a man bullied when he thinks he is right. They respect the man who will stand up for his rights.'81 The Daily Express strongly criticized the Government's role in the crisis. 'Mr Baldwin and his Government', it objected, 'are making a direct challenge to the King':
The result is that if there was a crisis yesterday there is a worse one today. There is no need for it. This grave issue has not been forced upon us by outside events beyond our control. It is a man-made crisis, and made here at that. But as men have made it they are capable of ending it. This thing can be brought to a close whenever Mr Baldwin and his Government desire - by withdrawing their opposition to the King's intention of marrying.'
The paper insisted, 'We cannot afford to lose the King. We cannot let him give up the Throne.'82 As Lord Zetland, the Secretary of State for India, warned in a telegram to Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy, 'Government are being attacked . . . for their refusal to countenance proposal for Morganatic marriage, and they are charged with attempt to rush King into a decision to abdicate.'83
In the Beefsteak Club, said Virginia Woolf, 'only Lord Onslow 8c Clive [Bell] take the democratic view. Harold [Nicolson] is glum as an undertaker, and so are the other nobs. They say Royalty is in Peril. The Empire is divided. In fact never has been such a crisis.'84 But outside the Beefsteak it was a different story. When Archbishop Lang left 10 Downing Street in the middle of Sunday afternoon, a man ran out fr
om the crowd calling, 'We want King Edward.' Later that evening, while the Cabinet was in session, reported The Times, large crowds assembled in Downing Street and in Whitehall. The National Anthem was sung, and a section of the crowd started to chant 'We want the King.'85 There was a demonstration at Marble Arch by a group of young men and women carrying banners on which they had painted in red and blue lettering, 'After South Wales you can't let him down.'86 Outside the home of the Duke of York, on Piccadilly, a young woman clambered up the railings and held aloft a newspaper picture of the King for the crowd to see. Men removed their hats, and there were shouts of 'We want Edward!'87
'Whatever Your Majesty decides is right' was the message of a telegram sent from Queen Mary's Hospital for the East End.88 'Please, England cannot do without you, as surely you must see by the loyal demonstrations in the towns all over the country', appealed another subject.89 Similar sentiments were expressed all over the nation. 'The workers of Coventry are with you to a man (and woman)', urged a loyal supporter. 'Good luck! and confound the politicians.'90 From Leeds came this telegram: 'Baldwin and Bishops utterly wrong. Leeds people support Your Majesty.'91 From the Midlands a letter assured the King that
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