The Windsor Faction

by D. J. Taylor

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  The

  Windsor Faction

  D. J. Taylor

  All yours, Benjy!

  The object of life, after all, is not to understand things, but to maintain one’s defences and equilibrium and live as well as one can; it is not only maiden aunts who are placed like this.

  —William Empson,

  Seven Types of Ambiguity

  Always the following wind of history

  Of others’ wisdom makes a buoyant air

  Till we come suddenly on pockets where

  Is nothing loud but us.

  —W. H. Auden,

  ‘Paid on Both Sides’

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1: The Monkey at the Temple Door

  Chapter 2: Duration

  Chapter 3: Behind the Counter

  Chapter 4: Sussex by the Sea

  Chapter 5: Beverley Nichols’s Diary I

  Chapter 6: Lost Girls

  Part Two

  Chapter 7: All the Conspirators

  Chapter 8: Palace Days

  Chapter 9: Bishop’s Park

  Chapter 10: Beverley Nichols’s Diary II

  Chapter 11: Party Chambers

  Chapter 12: December

  Chapter 13: A Departure from the Script

  Part Three

  Chapter 14: Beverley Nichols’s Diary III

  Chapter 15: The End of Something

  Chapter 16: Some of the Time

  Chapter 17: Goodbye Mrs McKechnie

  Chapter 18: Returning

  Chapter 19: Emerald Isle

  Chapter 20: A Change of Climate

  Chapter 21: A Room with a View

  Chapter 22: From a View to a Death

  Chapter 23: Beverley Nichols’s Diary IV

  Epilogue: 1941

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  December 1936

  There was supposed to be a troop of marines attending, in full regimental dress, but with the coming of the rain they had all drifted away. Instead, the gravel path to the church was guarded by a couple of police constables. They were big men, made bigger by the triangular oilskin capes they wore against the drizzle, and one or two of the more nervous mourners had settled for an alternative route that ran across the field and the stile-gate at its corner. The policemen stood together, heads bowed as if conferring, but said nothing. Sometimes they walked a little way down the drive and then, reluctantly, as if thinking better of this, toiled back again.

  Beyond the church, squat, Romanesque, and unwelcoming, the land rose dramatically to a landscape of low hills and arsenical-looking grass. Despite the rain it was unusually hot for the time of year and there was mist stealing up from the fields, which made them seem ominous and sub-tropical. An explorer in khaki shorts and a pith helmet appearing suddenly from the back of the thorn hedge would not have seemed out of place. One of the fields had been set aside for use as a car park and the slamming of the car doors was keeping the flock of rooks that lurked there on their mettle.

  The members of the press corps were gathered by a low wall on the church’s nearer side. The policemen had not spoken to them, but indicated by gestures that they could come no closer. They were about a dozen strong, and included a handful of photographers, although nobody worth photographing had yet arrived.

  ‘Why are you wearing a black arm-band? Nobody said anything about black arm-bands.’

  ‘My editor said it was de rigueur. He said it was the sort of occasion where a man would be judged by his turn-out.’

  ‘I see.’

  The volume of traffic was beginning to increase: Rolls-Royces, Daimlers, an antique shooting brake that almost went over into the ditch. The chauffeurs hung about in groups and smoked cigarettes. It was nothing to do with them. Sometimes, when a particularly auspicious-looking vehicle hove into view, the pressmen would break off their conversation and set off in pursuit, until a glance from one of the police constables sent them back.

  ‘Who’s that man there? Over by the rhododendrons?’

  ‘Oh, he’s from the American Embassy, I think.’

  ‘Is Kennedy here?’

  ‘I don’t think they’d let him come, do you?’

  Several of the embassies had sent representatives. Their pennants drooped on the bonnets of the ambassadorial limousines: blue and white; red, gold, and azure; scarlet and black. A farm labourer walked past the outer edge of the car park, head down and incurious, wheeling a bicycle. The rain was coming down heavier now, and the mist had begun to recede. From the church tower, muffled at first, then with increasing resonance, a bell began to toll.

  ‘Depressing noise, that bell. Just the sort of thing that makes you want to go and cut your throat.’

  ‘Well, what did you expect? A line of chorus girls and a chap in an evening suit singing “Dapper Dan Was a Very Handy Man”?’

  The men of the press corps were civil to each other. They had been following this story for nearly a year. Its premature conclusion had shocked them. They needed all the information they could gather.

  ‘Terrible thing to have happened.’

  ‘Terrible.’

  ‘My editor said it was a well-known fact she was suffering from tertiary syphilis.’

  ‘My editor said that when they opened her up for the operation they found she was three months pregnant.’

  ‘My editor said she had a death wish. Had all her pugs put down the day before she died, and then spent £2,000 of His Majesty’s money at Cartier.’

  ‘Our man in Washington said a chap at the FBI said she’d been bumped off by MI6.’

  On a pond a quarter of a mile away, a pair of swans settling themselves on the surface of the water like pieces of origami; jingling along the tarmacked road from the village, a landau pulled by grey horses; some scraps of confetti, left over from a wedding, staring up incongruously from the grass. One or two genuine celebrities began to arrive: a famous Bond Street couturier; Lady Furness, magnanimous in black; Major Metcalfe, inscrutable in a top-hat. The press corps looked on with respectful interest.

  ‘Wasn’t she the one who started it all in the first place? Asking her to look after him while she was away on holiday?’

  ‘I heard there was money changed hands. Pimping for the heir to the throne, you might say.’

  ‘That’s pitching it a bit strong, surely?’

  ‘Not as strong as my editor wanted to pitch it. Only he thought he’d have trouble with the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

  ‘Either of the ex-husbands here?’

  ‘Haven’t seen them. You’d have thought Mr S. would be here. Perhaps they smuggled him in through the vestry with the choirboys.’

  Lady Colefax. Lady Cunard. A continental royal or two whose names no one could remember. The Cinque Port Warden …

  ‘A fellow told me they were burying her at Frogmore.’

  ‘Frogmore! Heaven knows how they got permission for that.’

  ‘Well, he’s the King, isn’t he? He doesn’t need permission.’

  ‘Even so, Frogmore.’

  … The Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, vice the Governor, indisposed. The Leader of the Labour Party. Mr Chamberlain and his flaxen-haired son. And finally, making a great deal of noise on the gravel, preceded by a motor
cycle outrider, a funereal pennant flying on its prow, the hearse …

  ‘Will you look at that—a coronet of lilies. There’s a piece of cheek.’

  ‘Would they be Baltimore lilies, do you suppose?’

  ‘Ask Schenectady over there. He’s an American. He’ll know.’

  They were Welsh lilies, sent up that morning from Pembrokeshire. The rain continued to drip over the reporters’ notebooks, obstructing their attempts at shorthand. It was nearly twenty-five past two. The noise of the bell had ceased. Inside the church, organ music had begun to sound. Somehow, there was a sense that a vital part of the jigsaw had yet to be fitted into place, that church, mourners, coffin, cameramen were as nothing in its absence. Then at last, so haltingly that its passage along the asphalt lane might have been a slow-motion shot from a cinema film, another car came gradually into view.

  ‘So he’s come, then.’

  ‘He could hardly have stayed away in the circumstances.’

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘Even so.’

  The bell had begun to clang again. Three fields away the rooks stirred uneasily. The policemen, no longer conferring but straight-backed and attentive, saluted wildly.

  The car looked as though it might be going to proceed all the way to the church door and then thought better of it, rocked a little on its chassis, and came to a halt.

  And so they buried Wallis Warfield of Baltimore, lately of Claridge’s Hotel, formerly the wife of Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer, and subsequently of Mr Ernest Simpson, after whose death, like a vast medieval siege engine grinding into gear, slowly yet inexorably a great many things happened that would almost certainly not have taken place had she lived.

  MRS SIMPON’S DEATH

  By whatever yardstick one chooses to evaluate it, Mrs Simpson’s death can only be regarded as a tragedy of the first order. To her circle of intimate friends, it is an unmitigated hurt. To the much larger collection of persons who knew her in society, it will be a source of unaffected sorrow. To the King who hoped to make her his wife, it is an appalling blow. We cannot pretend to have liked Mrs Simpson, or thought her influence anything other than injurious, but the fact remains that her passing encourages a substantial number of people to reflect on the transience of human affairs and the undoubted truth that a star which at one moment burns brightly in the evening sky may at the very next second plunge dramatically to earth. To them we offer our heart-felt commiserations.

  The doctor called to Mrs Simpson’s suite at Claridge’s on the evening of 13 December diagnosed acute appendicitis, and an ambulance was immediately summoned to take her to the Middlesex Hospital. Whether the apparent delay between her admission and the decision to operate has any significance, we are not at liberty to say. But it is a fact that she died not of peritonitis, nor of surgical complications, but of heart failure on the operating table, and that no blame can be imputed to her medical attendants either during the surgical procedure or in the days leading up to it.

  It would be wrong of us, at this solemn moment, not to recall her many admirable qualities. She was, by all accounts, a staunch, though occasionally capricious, friend, a witty conversationalist, and an accomplished hostess. Whatever her failings, a woman who had brought a King and Emperor to such a pitch of infatuation that he was prepared to forsake his throne for her should never be underestimated. At the same time it would be equally wrong to ignore the fact that her passing is highly convenient. Here, not to put too fine a point on the matter, was a monarch prepared to abandon every responsibility brought to him since his boyhood in pursuit of an alliance which the vast majority of his subjects would have deplored. It is neither disloyal, nor merely callous, to suggest that if Mrs Simpson’s unlooked-for passing has not saved a nation from disaster, then it has at any rate saved His Majesty from himself.

  Mrs Simpson is barely a week in her grave. This is a time for grief and sober reflection, not fanciful prognosis. Let us not forget, amid these constant references to a King’s sorrow, that there were two other men united with her in the sight of God, with their own misfortunes to bear. But in tragedy there very often stirs resolve. We live at a time of grave social and political difficulty, where the ghosts of an old Europe gibber and fret as a new continent begins to take shape around them, in which it is essential that the compact forged between a monarch and his people should not be put asunder. Mrs Simpson was a good friend to the King, and the value of her friendship to him should not be belittled. But now he needs a better one.

  Spectator, 22 December 1936

  4 January 1937

  On the way down to the fort, bumping into each other’s hips on the Daimler’s shiny leather seats, they played the poetry game.

  ‘Now here’s one,’ he said. ‘Oh, to be in England/Now that April’s there/And whoever wakes in England/Sees, some morning, unaware …’

  ‘Tennyson?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Coventry Patmore?’

  ‘Now you’re being silly. It’s Robert Browning. Y-your turn.’

  ‘All right: Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding/Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West/That fearest not sea rising, nor sky clouding/Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest?’

  ‘That’s easy. Bridges.’

  ‘I can see I’m going to have to keep that copy of Palgrave locked up if I want to win this.’

  Later, when the gravity of the situation occurred to them, they stopped playing the poetry game and stared unhappily out of the window at the passing countryside. Here in Virginia Water the winter had raised its head suddenly and bitten hard. The verges were white with frost, and on the village greens they came upon people breaking up the ice on the ponds. They passed a road sign with the fort’s name on it, and the realisation that their quarry was in plain view encouraged them to talk again.

  ‘Where on earth did he go at Christmas?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows.’

  ‘Did he see Mamma?’

  ‘You know very well he didn’t. Mamma would have said.’

  ‘I suppose he went off somewhere with that dreadful Major Metcalfe.’

  ‘I don’t think he went off anywhere. I think he just broods.’

  ‘I wonder what Mamma makes of it.’

  ‘She told me she thought it was for the best. One of the ladies-in-waiting said she’d told her that Wallis … dying like that was an act of providence.’

  They were in sight of the fort now. The Duke thought, as he always thought at these times, that there was something absurd about its crenellations, its high turret, the expanse of wild garden that unfolded behind it, here in anodyne Surrey. Gingerly, for the ice still lay on the rutted gravel, they got out of the car and stood looking around them, a little disappointed in the end to discover that everything was exactly the same as they remembered it.

  ‘I never understood why your father ever let him have this place.’

  ‘I never understood either. I remember him saying at the time that it would only be used for i-immoral purposes.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. He made rather a good job of clearing up the garden.’

  ‘There was something f-fanatical about that. Don’t you remember that time the Stamfordhams came here for dinner and he was scything away the bracken and wouldn’t see them, and had the servants bring him a cup of tea and an orange?’

  For some reason the air seemed to grow colder the nearer they approached the house. There was no one much about. The footman who opened the door seemed new to the work. Unrecognised and unannounced, they made their way along the dark hall and into the drawing room, where a small fire burned in the grate and the day’s Times lay rustling its pages on an occasional table. The breeze that disturbed it was coming from the drawing-room windows, which were half open and urged them out onto the terrace.

  Ten yards away, a slight figure in a
brown overcoat, hair flying away from the side of his head as the wind lifted, was inspecting a rusty saw, staring at it in a way that suggested it was Excalibur, newly plucked from the stone. Not for the first time, the Duchess was reminded of a small boy, rather frightened and uncertain, half-drowned in secret grief.

  ‘David, my dear fellow …’

  ‘Bertie … Elizabeth …’ He brandished the saw for a moment, rather as if only courtesy forbade him from cutting the pair of them in half on the spot, and then put it down on the corner of a stone settle. It descended onto the terrace with an almighty clatter. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  It was difficult to know how to answer this. The Duchess took the measure of her brother-in-law who, she decided, looked thinner, older, and more tired, but by no means as dishevelled and detached as people had maintained. The saw was still quivering on the flagstones like a living thing.

  ‘Oh, David,’ she said, half-humorously, ‘you are dreadful. Really you are. You go to ground like an old badger in its sett and don’t see anyone. And such a terrible thing to have happened, too. We felt we simply had to come down and see you.’ At the back of the Duchess’s mind was the memory of a letter she had written him two months before, when the crisis was at its height, which her brother-in-law was supposed to have torn up and thrown away in disgust. ‘Anyway,’ she went on brightly, ‘we thought you might like to see us. Mamma especially asked us to come.’

  It was about three o’clock now, and the light was already beginning to fade over the garden. This gave the icy grass a sinister fairy-tale look, as if the Queen of the Snows might suddenly emerge from the undergrowth, grasp the King by the hand, and drag him off into some penumbral cavern far underground.

  ‘I had a letter from Mamma,’ he said. The peevishness had gone, to be replaced by an immense old-world courteousness. ‘Do you know what she wrote? She told me—no, she begged me—those were her exact words—to do my duty.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘Yes. Wasn’t that odd of her? Do you know what I said when I wrote in reply? I told her that I hoped she would do hers.’