“That may well be,” replied Wallis. “But just the same, I think he’s being sincere. He’s trying to warn you that the government will insist that you give me up.”
“They can’t stop me. On the throne or off, I’m going to marry you.”34
“Now it was my turn to beg him to let me go,” Wallis later recalled. “Summoning all the powers of persuasion in my possession, I tried to convince him of the hopelessness of our position. For him to go on hoping, to go on fighting the inevitable, could only mean tragedy for him and catastrophe for me.”35
Edward remained deaf to her entreaties. Taking Wallis’s hand, he said: “I’m going to send for Mr. Baldwin to see me at the palace tomorrow. I’m going to tell him that if the country won’t approve of our marrying, I’m ready to go.”36
At this, the first mention between them of abdication, Wallis burst into tears. “David was determined that I stay,” admitted Wallis. “He insisted that he needed me, and as a woman in love I was prepared to go through rivers of woe, seas of despair, and oceans of agony for him.”37 She had fallen in love with Edward and was now all too aware of the sacrifice this would entail. Yet the thought of the vicissitudes of her suffering never seemed to register with him. Surely, the greater act of love would have been for Edward to let Wallis go? Yet he did not seem to be able to see matters from any other perspective than his own. As far as he was concerned, he could not live without her and could not see that she might not be able to live with the consequences of his single-mindedness. Being blamed in perpetuity for stealing a beloved, popular king from his throne and almost destroying the British monarchy would prove to be a lifelong annihilating burden that Wallis was forced to bear.
Typically, Wallis later reproached herself—rather than Edward and his narcissistic neediness—for being deflected from her decision to leave England immediately. “I should have realised that this was the fateful moment—the last when any action of mine could have prevented the crisis.”38 She still could not fully comprehend that Edward was not going to let her go anywhere. Wallis also blamed herself for not realizing the true position of the king in the British constitutional system. Because she was accustomed to witnessing the apparent deference to his every wish, the fawning adulation that surrounded him, she was unaware of how vulnerable he really was and how little power he actually had vis-à-vis his ministers and Parliament. As a result, it was still inconceivable to her that his adoring public in Britain and the Empire would “ever allow anybody who had served and loved them so well to leave them.”39
The king summoned Stanley Baldwin to a meeting at Buckingham Palace on Monday, November 16, at 6:30 p.m. In the meantime, he tried to get hold of Beaverbrook, only to discover that he was halfway across the Atlantic on the ocean liner Bremen. A chronic sufferer from asthma, Beaverbrook was heading for the drier, healing climes of Arizona. Edward managed to persuade his powerful ally to head back to Britain when the ship set sail from New York twelve days later.
* * *
In his audience with Baldwin, the king came straight to the point. “I understand that you and several members of the Cabinet have some fear of a constitutional crisis developing over my friendship with Mrs. Simpson?”
“Yes, Sir, that is correct.” Baldwin went on to elaborate that he and his colleagues were disturbed and upset over the prospect of the king marrying a divorcée. Edward was taken aback because until that moment, the word marriage had not been mentioned between them. Baldwin, according to the king, then launched into a “dissertation concerning the moral outlook of the British people.”40
“I believe I know what the people would tolerate and what they would not,” the prime minister declared haughtily. “Even my enemies would grant me that.”41
Edward tried to explain his personal philosophy to the rigidly traditional Baldwin: that he found it less sinful to wish to marry the woman he loved than to take a mistress. Baldwin pointed out that the position of the king’s wife was different from the position of any other citizen in the country. It was part of the price the king had to pay. “Your wife becomes Queen; the Queen becomes the Queen of the country; and, therefore, in the choice of a Queen, the voice of the people must be heard,”42 maintained the prime minister.
As dispassionately as he could, the king responded that marriage had become an indispensable condition of his continued existence, whether as king or as man. “I intend to marry Mrs. Simpson as soon as she is free to marry. If I could marry her as king well and good; I would be happy and in consequence a better king. But if on the other hand the government is opposed to the marriage, as you prime minister have given me reason to believe that it would, then I am prepared to go.”43
“Sir, that is most grievous news, and it is impossible for me to make any comment on it today,”44 said Stanley Baldwin, visibly startled.
Although no one could see it at the time, due to the blinding social stigma of Wallis being a divorcée, Edward’s desire to have Wallis as his wife, rather than a mistress, was indeed decent and honorable. As he said, it would have been far more acceptable to the establishment for him to have been a known adulterer than to openly acknowledge the woman he loved and publicly commit to her. The subtext of his talk with the prime minister was: “I should have taken a mistress. A discreet house nearby, a key to a garden door, decorous associations—the relationship might be privately deplored, but it had notable precedents.”45
Although an often befuddled thinker, Edward was ahead of his time in his views on marriage and divorce. He hated much of what he saw of conventional morality. As a young Prince of Wales, he had found the idea of an arranged marriage “altogether repugnant.”46 He determined early “that my choice of wife would be dictated not by considerations of State but by my own heart.”47 Under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, as sovereign, he was actually free to marry anyone he liked except a Roman Catholic. It was Baldwin who said that marriage to Wallis Simpson would be impossible. Edward found it equally “outmoded and hypocritical” that no divorced person, even if the innocent party, could be received at court. He had set in mind that when he became king, he would end this form of social exclusion and ostracism. Yet the mores of the day were against him; his radical way of thinking was too avant-garde for the establishment, and unthinkable for the Church of England. (Indeed, the fact that the Church of England so abhorred divorce is something of an irony, since it had been founded upon an adulterous monarch’s desire to end his own marriage.)
“I never underestimated the weight and authority of the group whose views the Prime Minister represented,” he later wrote. “His senior Ministers, the men closest to him were deeply conservative, not alone in their politics but equally in their way of life. Behind them, I suspected, was a shadowy, hovering presence—the Archbishop of Canterbury. Curiously enough, I did not once see him throughout this period. He stood aside until the fateful fabric had been woven and the crisis was over. Yet from beginning to end I had a disquieting feeling that he was invisibly and noiselessly about.”48 Edward later said of Cosmo Lang that “he was a wicked man.”49
Edward recognized that he had placed Cosmo Lang in a “quandary.” Lang was preparing to use King Edward’s coronation as a sounding board for an emotional call for Christian revival, where the main theme would be to attack divorce. “Thus the Archbishop and I were both fighting for a principle; I to marry someone who possessed all the womanly qualities that I desired in a consort, and he to prevent the marriage because the lady had been divorced.”50
The king concluded his fateful meeting with Stanley Baldwin by agreeing that he would tell his mother about his decision and he gave the prime minister permission to tell one or two confidants. They agreed on Sir Samuel Hoare, the first lord of the Admiralty, and Duff Cooper, the war secretary. That evening, Lucy Baldwin wrote: “All the time the king was most charming but S said that king simply could not understand and he couldn’t make him. S said that he felt a streak of almost madness. The king was obsessed by a woman & that was t
he long & short of it. On leaving, the king held Stanley’s hand for a long time and there were almost tears in his eyes when he said goodbye.”51 The prime minister told his family: “The king’s face wore at times such a look of beauty as might have lighted the face of a young knight who caught a glimpse of the Holy Grail.”52
Later that evening, Baldwin bumped into Duff Cooper in the House of Commons. He told Duff about his meeting with the king. “As we separated he said that he was not at all sure that the Yorks would not prove the best solution,” Duff recalled. “The king had many good qualities but not those which best fitted him for his post, whereas the Duke of York would be just like his father.”53
After his meeting with Baldwin, Edward had the even more onerous task of telling his mother. Before dinner that evening, which he had prearranged with Queen Mary, he rang Wallis, anxiously waiting at Cumberland Terrace for news. For Wallis, it had been “a tense day,” as she worried how the meeting with Baldwin would go. “David was always guarded in his telephone conversations,” said Wallis. “Not only because of his innate reserve, but also because he could never be sure that someone was not listening in.” Edward was even more noncommittal than usual with Wallis, presumably in a bid not to further alarm her. “The succeeding days were extraordinary,” Wallis wrote. “I knew that momentous happenings were going on all around me. But to me, waiting alone Cumberland Terrace, these were only dimly outlined shadows.”54
At 8:30 p.m. on the dot, the king arrived at Marlborough House in white tie and tails to dine with Queen Mary. “With maternal intuition she must have guessed that I had something serious to tell—indeed, I rather suspected that she knew what it was, for when I entered her boudoir, I found my sister Mary there as well.” Grateful for Mary’s presence, the king was thoroughly put out to find his sister-in-law Alice also included. Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, newly wedded to his brother Harry, was “almost a stranger.”55
“He was in a great state of agitation,”56 remembered Princess Alice. Accounts of what happened next differ. The king believed “my mother put both of us at our ease by announcing, with a reassuring smile, that Alice was tired and would go to bed directly after dinner.”57 However, Princess Alice recorded in her memoirs that after dinner the king “asked his mother if I could leave the room as he had a very serious matter to discuss. Queen Mary was discernibly angered by this request, but with many apologies she asked me to go, which of course I did.”58
The four of them ate dinner, making polite conversation. Queen Mary expressed her pleasure that Edward had agreed to have the exterior of Buckingham Palace painted before the coronation the following spring. He conversed with his sister, Mary, a keen racehorse owner, about the Newmarket sales, Europe’s premier sale for thoroughbred livestock. His sympathies lay with “poor Alice. Shy and retiring by nature, she had unwittingly sat down at my mother’s table only to find herself caught up in the opening scene of one of the most poignant episodes in the annals of the British Royal Family.” According to Edward, as the party got up to leave the table, Alice “after making her curtsy, almost fled from the room.”59
The king retired with his sister and mother to Queen Mary’s boudoir. Queen Mary reclined on her chaise longue (where she often polished her nails, of which she was proud), while she listened to family discourse.60 “I told them of my love for Wallis and my determination to marry her and of the opposition of the Prime Minister and the Government to the marriage,” Edward later wrote. “As I went on and they comprehended that even the alternative of abdication would not deter me from my course, I became conscious of their growing consternation that I could even contemplate giving up the Throne for my forebears.”61
For Queen Mary, to whom “the Monarchy was something sacred and the Sovereign a personage apart,” the concept that Edward could shirk his duty as king was appalling. Edward tried to explain that, far from shirking his duty, he could not carry out his duties as king without the “help and support” of Wallis. In this sense, it seemed to Edward that his duty was to abandon the throne, while to his mother, it was equally plain that his duty was to stay on it.
“All the while I was waiting for the right moment to make a request that I did not believe would be refused,” recalled Edward. He asked his mother if she would formally receive Wallis, saying: “if you were to meet her, you would understand what she means to me and why I cannot give her up. I have waited a long time to find the person whom I wished to marry. For me the question now is not whether she is acceptable but whether I am worthy of her.”62
Queen Mary refused her son’s deeply held desire that she would accede to a proper introduction to Wallis. According to Diana Mosley: “She did not tell her son that she had given word to George V that she would never receive Mrs. Simpson—even though she had confided this to her lady-in-waiting, Countess Airlie, adding ‘He’s very much in love with her, poor boy.’ ”63 Queen Mary also remained silent about the late king’s prayer that the Duke of York should succeed him. Instead, she drew the harrowing evening to a close, wishing the king well for his next trip, a tour of the south Wales collieries.
The following day, Queen Mary sent her son a poignant little note: “As your mother, I must send you a line of true sympathy in the difficult position in which you are placed—I have been thinking of you all day, hoping you are making a wise decision for your future—I fear your visit to Wales will be trying in more ways than one, with this momentous action hanging over your head.”64
The seventeenth of November was a day of flurried activity in Parliament and at the palace. The king took his brother Bertie into his confidence. “Bertie was so taken aback by my news that in his shy way he could not bring himself to express his innermost feelings at the time,” Edward said. “His genuine concern for me was mixed with the dread of having to assume the responsibilities of kingship.”65 He confessed his fears to his wife, Elizabeth, the Duchess of York, who immediately wrote to Queen Mary:
My darling Mama,
Bertie has just told me what has happened, and I feel quite overcome with horror & emotion. My first thought was of you, & your note, just arrived as I was starting to write to you, was very helpful. One feels so helpless against such obstinacy.
She asked her mother-in-law if she and Bertie could visit her the following morning, before signing off: “God help us all to be calm & wise. Your devoted daughter in law, Elizabeth.”66
Meanwhile, the king sought the counsel of the only two men in the Cabinet whose advice he felt he could trust: Duff Cooper and Sir Samuel Hoare. “I was more nervous of the meeting than I had even been of my first encounter with Gandhi,” Hoare later admitted. However, he stuck to his guns, saying he would not be drawn into the king’s corner, insisting that the country would be fully behind Baldwin in opposing the match. Of the meeting, Hoare noted: “Decision irrevocable. No single middle-aged man willingly stays in a tomb.”67
Duff Cooper listened patiently to the king’s arguments: that he could not be an effective king without Wallis and that if he could not marry her and remain king, he must abdicate. Duff seems to have been the only person among the king’s circle of friends and confidants to emphasize “that the whole blame for the catastrophe if it occurred would be placed on Wallis both now and in history.”68 In response, the king “seemed a little shaken by this and said that it would be very unfair. I agreed, but repeated that it would be so.”69
It seems inconceivable that Edward had not fully considered that the woman he professed to love beyond all else would pay the highest price for his decision. “My father did give him pause, as this certainly had not struck him,” said John Julius Norwich. “But it did not give him pause enough. He was incredibly stupid. You don’t need to be intelligent to be king—you have many intelligent advisors—but you do have to put up with your life. This Edward refused to do.”70
Duff then asked the king if he had considered what sort of life his would be. “I had always thought that the life of an ex-monarch was the most miserable
that a man could lead,” recalled Duff. “Minor royalties could fall into the position of private citizens but those who had once been rulers could never find a normal place in society.”71 He quoted the case of the King of Spain. “Oh, I shan’t be like Alfonso,” Edward exclaimed. “He was kicked out. I shall go of my own accord.”72
Duff tried to persuade Edward to calm things down by taking his time. He suggested that he dismiss the idea of getting married before the coronation and wait a year. Why didn’t he go through with the coronation and then go to India for the durbar? If he ostentatiously separated himself from Wallis—who should maybe go to America but definitely leave the country—in a year’s time, his position would be immensely strengthened. The people would see that he had done his best to get on without her but that he had found that impossible. Sympathy for him would then be higher.
Again, Edward stuck to his own moral code, which had logic and emotional resonance. He felt it would be disingenuous and disloyal to his people to partake in such an official solemn ceremony as the coronation, while keeping the whole truth of the situation “up his sleeve.”73 Though blinkered, in some ways his stance was honorable. Of the religious service, he said: “The king is anointed with holy oil; he takes the Sacrament; and as Defender of the Faith he swears an oath to uphold the doctrines of the Church of England, which does not approve divorce.” For him to have gone through the coronation ceremony while harboring a secret intention to marry would have meant being “crowned with a lie on my lips.”74
“Whatever the cost to me personally,” he later said, “I was determined, before I would think of being crowned, to settle once and for all the question of my right to marry.”75
Aware that the British press would not remain silent much longer, Edward asked Duff Cooper if he could not make some sort of statement to appeal to his subjects. Duff considered this a tricky undertaking. “Although there had been a great deal of gossip the average man in the street still knew nothing,” Duff recalled. “And, frankly, it would come to him as a tremendous shock to learn that the King of England intended to marry an American lady who had been twice married already.” As he said this, the king “winced at the word twice and said that the first marriage hadn’t really counted. What, if anything, he meant by that I didn’t enquire.”76
The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor Page 16