Circumstances without Parallel
‘I meet you today in circumstances that are without parallel in the history of our Country . . . ’
—George VI, 12 December 1936, Accession Council
Thursday 10 December 1936. For 40-year-old Prince Albert, Duke of York, the distressing moment was almost upon him. It was a short drive through Windsor Great Park to reach Fort Belvedere from Royal Lodge. That morning a fog lingered in the Thames valley, lifting slowly to reveal the crenellated skyline of the rambling, turreted lodge. The Fort had been built as a folly but retained the forbidding air of a castle, in spite of Edward VIII’s lavish recent refurbishments. It had become the king’s ‘enchanted anchorage’, where he felt most himself, away from the formality of Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle and surrounded by his choice of friends.1 The Duke of York had not been welcome there, even in the final few days when he had tried repeatedly to talk to his brother. The press were camped outside the drive, flashbulbs poised to snatch glimpses of the princes’ lives for a worldwide audience who all knew that the British monarchy was being rocked to its foundations. Inside the grounds the commotion at the gates suddenly receded. The car door was opened for him and the duke was led through a dark hallway to an elegant octagonal room.2
Forty-two-year-old King Edward VIII was already waiting when the Duke of York arrived promptly at 9.30 am. For a man who was about to give up the throne he seemed to the duke to be ‘perfectly calm’.3 His older brother’s composure was remarkable, never deserting him in public, even at a momentous time such as this. The Duke of York noted that their two younger brothers, Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, and Prince George, the Duke of Kent, had not yet arrived. The ceremony would have to wait until, as officials from Downing Street had requested, all four royal brothers were present.
On Edward VIII’s writing table, the Duke of York could see five or six copies of the Instrument of Abdication laid out for signature by the king’s red leather dispatch box, along with several copies of the King’s Message to Parliament and each Dominion Parliament. The documents had to be signed by each brother, as one transferred a kingdom and empire to the other, witnessed by the next two in line. A few officials had already gathered and there was the ‘dignified, dull murmur’ of hushed conversations, a politeness that belied the strength of feeling in the room.4
Less than a year had elapsed since King George V had died. The Duke of York shared his mother Queen Mary’s bewilderment and shock that the monarchy was being plunged into its deepest crisis in generations. He viewed the abdication papers ‘with revulsion.’5 Queen Mary too was grief-stricken that her oldest son, who had been brought up to understand ‘the Monarchy was something sacred’, the sovereign bearing an obligation to put ‘Country before everything else’, could wish instead to marry a divorced woman already in possession of ‘two husbands living’.6 The ‘Great Silence’ of the British press on the new king’s private life had ended abruptly just days earlier at the beginning of December. The shaming tittle-tattle of ‘the king’s matter’ was splashed in headlines that reached the furthest outposts of the empire. Suddenly the monarchy was degraded, perhaps even destroyed. If the king should abdicate and it fell to the Duke of York to take over, ‘a change of this nature might shatter public confidence’ warned the Mirror on 4 December. ‘Similar situations in the past have arisen in Foreign Countries—the result has generally been that the armed forces have had the last word.’7 But in the octagonal room that morning there was no hint in Edward VIII’s bearing of the great strain he was under or the lack of sleep of the previous night as he had waited until the small hours for the hurriedly drafted documents to arrive from Whitehall.
A few moments later, the third brother, 36-year-old Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was shown into the room. The third son of George V and Queen Mary was an army man, slightly taller than the Duke of York and with the erect bearing of those accustomed to military drill. Gloucester was not close to his oldest brother but had expected him to do his duty and had found the events of recent weeks disturbing. ‘Everything seems different,’ he had confided to his mother from Balmoral earlier in the autumn.8 Gloucester recognised the time-honoured role required of a monarch. His father had understood his position as the figurehead for Britain and Empire but his brother was breaking all the rules. The last few days had been pandemonium. But Gloucester too appeared unmoved as he prepared for the unpleasant duty of witnessing his oldest brother’s signature.9
As the incoming monarch, the Duke of York knew he would have to rely heavily on the Duke of Gloucester to provide support in the daunting task ahead of restoring confidence in the monarchy. But his brother did not inspire confidence. Like his father he had a keen interest in ceremonial occasions and was conscientious about details of dress and uniform, but he did not appear to be blessed with the many other skills so badly needed for life in the public eye. Gloucester was often cast as the least intelligent of the brothers, who wanted nothing more than a quiet life in the army. It was well known he was most at ease in the company of his drinking friends and that their escapades were at times excessive.10 Yet this was the man who was about to be elevated to the next adult in line for the throne. The Duke of York wanted to feel the strength of reliable help from his brother Henry, but could he count on his support?
The fourth and youngest brother, the hedonistic and glamorous 33-year-old Prince George, Duke of Kent, was still missing. ‘George would be late,’ remarked Edward VIII, trying to lighten the mood.11 His lateness was in character. To the Duke of York, Kent was unpredictable, volatile, flamboyant in ways quite alien to his older and much more sober brother, a princely playboy to whose irresistible good looks a series of women, possibly men too, had surrendered. Kent appeared to have no sense of duty or boundaries; his closeness to his oldest brother was, to date, the pivotal guiding force in his life. How Kent would respond to his favourite brother’s departure was unguessable. As the new head of the family, it would fall to the Duke of York to keep his brothers in order and do all he could to enlist their support to face down the crisis. But he simply didn’t know if he could rely on Kent to play his part.
The Duke of York could not be certain he could even trust himself. In his eyes, his oldest brother had always possessed a star quality that he felt he lacked. At dinner with the prime minister just two nights previously York had fallen silent as Edward VIII was the ‘life and soul’ of the party. His fitness to rule seemed self-evident. The king had dazzled his dinner guests as he talked of labour problems in South Wales and every conceivable subject.12 The Duke of York believed he could never match his legendary older brother and knew there were grave concerns over whether he could replace him. For years he had lived with the constant unspoken reproach of failing to live up to people’s expectations of royalty. He appeared to many as the dull brother, reticent to a fault, perhaps even unstable. If the public knew him at all they knew him by virtue of a medium that did not flatter him.
The Duke of York’s first speech on the wireless at the closing of the British Empire Exhibition on 31 October 1925 had appeared to condemn him, announcing to all and sundry that this was a prince unfit to lead. It had been one of the largest exhibitions ever held, a triumphant showcase for the world’s greatest empire which stretched over a quarter of the globe. From every corner of the earth people had come to admire and celebrate. Thousands had filled the Wembley stadium in north London. Ten million more, an invisible host, were listening for his voice on the wireless. When the exuberant bands and parades had finished, and the crowds fell silent, the world waited expectantly as the 29-year-old Duke of York stepped up to the microphone. But his voice quite failed him. He opened his mouth; no sound came. The long silences, the agonising delivery of garbled sounds and half words transfixed the audience. The duke, representing the Crown with all its associated grandeur, appeared to be incapable of articulate speech. For the Duke of York the humiliation was unforgettable.
In the eleven years that followed he wrestled with the problem. He had suffered from a stammer for so long that it seemed an intrinsic part of his personality. If the unwanted spasms started in muscles of his mouth and jaw, his throat could close and he was lost; a helpless figure of ridicule, quite unable to control his speech on cue. His father’s exhortations to ‘Get it out, boy!’ had been no help. Nor were a succession of voice experts. Within six months of the ordeal at Wembley the duke engaged Lionel Logue, an Australian speech therapist who was building a reputation through his speech defect practice at 146 Harley Street. Logue had had success treating veterans of the Great War suffering from shell shock before he came to England and had developed a series of practical techniques to help his patients.13
The Duke of York had had eighty-two appointments at Logue’s London flat in Bolton Gardens or in Harley Street over the next fifteen months. Logue’s methods were unorthodox; they had practised breathing, tongue twisters, intoning vowels, even gargling—and the duke appeared to find his voice. On a state visit to Australia in 1927 he spoke well, his speech defect seeming under control. But with the heavy duties that now lay ahead, the Duke of York feared unpredictable setbacks. His stammer could reduce him utterly. He had a constant dread, difficult to face, that the fault lay in his mind and not in some more easily remedied mechanical dysfunction.14 Was his very obvious inability to express himself hiding more subtle and deeply ingrained flaws? And how could a man who was not even master of his own speech possibly step forward as the king, a symbol of leadership at the helm of the greatest empire in the world?
For the Duke of York, the trauma of the sudden exposure, trapped in the searching lights of the world’s press following the storm of interest created by his brother, was excruciating. While his brother, the abdicating king, was known the world over, he had managed to stay in the background. Pictures were hastily found of the new heir to the throne. The prospective ruler of a vast realm was unrecognisable. Lacking anything else to say, and to distract their readers from the thought that something might seriously be wrong, the press played the family card. ‘We Four’, ‘We Happy Four’, smiled from the pages of the papers: the awkward duke, his wife, Elizabeth, Duchess of York, and his pretty daughters, the princesses ten-year-old Elizabeth and six-year-old Margaret.
Overnight the family had become public property. His wife was shown holding her favourite Welsh corgi on a picnic blanket, looking warmhearted and motherly as she played in the garden with the dark-haired princesses in identical dresses also with pet corgis. She looked comely, not chic, but to the duke’s eyes utterly wonderful.
When he arrived in London on 9 December, even as the crowd gathered outside his home at 145 Piccadilly to shout ‘Long live King Albert . . . ’, the future king was a man on the edge of a precipice. For months he had seen the danger approaching and now the dreaded event was becoming reality. He was trapped, swept up in a confusion of expectations and demands. The punishing strain of the past week combined with the appalling prospect ahead proved more than he could bear. The Duke of York had maintained his dignity in public as he navigated through London crowds but by the time he had reached his mother, Queen Mary, at Marlborough House, he could no longer cope. His words failed as he tried to explain everything that had happened. Like a child, the future King of Great Britain, Emperor of India, Head of the Church of England and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, wept on his mother’s shoulder for an hour, caught up in private grief beyond a mother’s consolation.15
But now in the octagonal room the brothers were at a point of no return. In a matter of hours, the Duke of York would be king and there was no way of stopping it. Unless of course, as the papers speculated that morning, the king had ‘an eleventh hour change in his decision’, unable to give up the role he was born for.16
King Edward VIII’s apparent calm in the Octagonal Room was deceptive, something of a reflex action after weeks of indecision. He felt as though his entire life, ‘the ordered sheltered existence that I had known since birth—had blown up and was disintegrating’. For him the crisis had come to a head with a ‘violence’ that plunged him into a ‘state of siege’.17
As Prince of Wales he had been idolised, the face of the empire captured in posters and newsprint as one of the most photographed celebrities of his time. He was shorter than his brothers but exuded the confidence born of a lifetime’s assurance that he held the highest status, a birthright that utterly guaranteed his standing in the world. One friend of the family recalled his mother’s pride in her oldest son, ‘who had so long charmed the whole world’ and proved himself ‘a master technician of his rare and difficult trade’.18 For a generation of women the unmarried prince was the most eligible bachelor in history, his intoxicating royal charms immortalised in the dance-hall song: ‘I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales.’ In January 1936, after the death of his father, he had inherited not just a throne but twenty-five years of loyalty and devotion built up during his extensive travels across the empire. As he waited for his youngest brother in the octagonal room just 325 days into his reign, his downfall seemed so mind-numbingly precipitous it was as though his emotions had not yet had a chance to catch up with events.
Edward VIII felt he had been hustled into this position with undignified speed by ‘his’ Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin once he told him on 16 November that he wished to marry Wallis Simpson. The king was enthralled by her; for him a life of service to the State ‘would be an empty thing’ without her beside him.19 They had been introduced in 1931 by his mistress, Lady Thelma Furness, and gradually he came to appreciate Wallis’s ‘forthrightness’ and refreshing independence. She read four newspapers each day and ‘advanced her own views with vigour and spirit’. In his eyes her conversation was invariably ‘deft and amusing’. Standing behind his parents’ golden throne when she was presented at court, he had been struck by ‘the grace of her carriage’ and her intrinsic glamour.20 Untouched by stuffy English establishment culture, she exuded that inborn American sense of freedom and she made him feel free. Wallis was exciting. By the time he became king he was convinced he had found the one woman he could not live without.
Stanley Baldwin took a different view. The king was the Supreme Head of the Church of England which did not permit the re-marriage of divorced people who had living ex-spouses. Wallis had divorced her first husband, Winfield Spencer, a US Navy aviator, in 1927 and in 1936 was in the process of divorcing her second, Ernest Simpson, a shipping executive. Baldwin reasoned that the British public would not tolerate a divorced ‘Queen Wallis’. To Edward VIII, the prime minister appeared like ‘the Gallup Poll incarnate’ as he pontificated on the moral outlook of people across the empire and other insuperable obstacles, his fingers snapping with such frequency it appeared to him like an orchestral accompaniment to his theme.
During November 1936 Edward VIII also felt the ‘shadowy, hovering presence’ and looming disapproval of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, the Anglican Church’s most senior prelate.21 For the archbishop, the idea of the king marrying a divorced woman was utterly shocking; a scandal of a most deplorable kind. The Church had never recognised divorce. No British monarch in history had suggested marrying a divorced woman. Fanned by both the church and the state, the king’s wish to marry rapidly escalated into a constitutional crisis. In fireside chats of mounting tension, Baldwin had puffed his pipe, ‘his massive head wreathed in a cloud of smoke’, recalled the king, and patiently, cannily, with consummate skill, out-manoeuvred him. Too late, the king realised he had played into the prime minister’s hands when he gave his consent for his request to marry to be put before Cabinet and the prime ministers of the Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Irish Free State. On 2 December Baldwin relayed the responses to Edward VIII. There was no support for the British king’s proposal. The sanctity, honour and prestige of the monarchy was on the line. Baldwin delivered to the king in unequivocal terms his ‘advice’. The king had a choice: either the throne or Mrs Simpson. He could not have both.
The modernising King Edward chafed at the prime minister’s ‘advice’ and reeled at the constitutional stumbling that required he must follow it in all matters. ‘Now the word “advice” . . . has a special meaning when used in relation to the Sovereign,’ he wrote later. ‘Whenever the prime minister advises the king he is using a respectful form of words to express the will and decision of the Government.’ Not only was the king ‘bound to accept such “advice”’, but he could not seek ‘advice’ elsewhere.22 By 3 December the king felt the need of an escape route to avoid Baldwin’s constitutional crisis. He had a new plan: to appeal to the nation in a radio broadcast in which he would speak from the heart. He would wait overseas for the country’s verdict. With the ease of organising a picnic, his staff had planes at the ready, hotels booked in Switzerland and a generous supply of money from Coutts Bank.23 He planned to tell the world of his great love for Wallis. Let the people choose whether he should return from abroad with his choice of bride.
Baldwin was appalled. He pointed out to the king that this would require going over the heads of his ministers, ‘a thoroughly unconstitutional procedure’.24 If the king took this step and failed to follow his advice, Baldwin and his Cabinet might be forced to resign. The country would be split, asked to choose between the king and parliament. The king’s desired course of action could put the political neutrality of the monarchy at risk.
The king felt tortured by moments of unbearable doubt. His future, once secure, suddenly seemed ‘wraithe like’ and uncertain. In the previous few days he had longed to talk it over with Wallis, but she had left England to avoid the worst of the furore and was staying with her friends, Herman and Katherine Rogers, on the French Riviera. Edward VIII was desperate to see her: without her he felt incomplete. He lived for the moment when he could hear her voice. Palace lines were kept clear for her use. His day was ruled by the chance of speaking to her, his agitation spiralling out of control if there was any delay. The king could only be calmed by one consuming thought: what would ‘the most wonderful woman in the world’ tell him to do?
When finally on 7 December Wallis announced she would withdraw from the situation the king interpreted her actions with profound emotion. She was prepared to sacrifice their love to prevent him giving up the throne. How could he possibly give her up? All he had to do was sign the documents to open the door to a living paradise with the woman he loved.
At 10 am Prince George, Duke of Kent, was shown in to the Octagonal Room. The youngest prince, with his film-star looks and champagne charisma, was, on this morning, uncharacteristically subdued. The Duke of Kent was generously endowed with the very kingly qualities that appeared to be lacking in the sombre Duke of York and the unprepossessing Duke of Gloucester, and he had always been closest to his oldest brother. It was a measure of their warm friendship that for many years his own special room was permanently reserved for him at the Fort, known as ‘Prince George’s Room’.25
Christmas card of Fort Belvedere, from the Prince of Wales to his friends Betty and Ormond Lawson-Johnston in 1933 (Private Collection of Mrs Lawson-Johnston))
Kent had cancelled all his appointments and ‘tried again and again’ to see the king during his agonised ‘self-imposed isolation’ bunkered up at the Fort in the last few weeks. He wanted to reach his brother before he made an irrevocable decision. Eventually unable to keep away, Kent had turned up at the Fort ‘uninvited and unannounced’ on Tuesday 8 December.
‘“What the dickens are you doing here?” said Edward VIII.
“Whether you want to see me or not I have come,” replied Kent.’26
Kent understood the agony of mind his oldest brother was going through even though he had been held at bay. The king’s interest in Mrs Simpson was all-consuming. Every available minute had been spent with her and he had seen little of him.
Kent had only met the king at public functions and ‘had not been allowed to exercise any influence over him’.27 The king had seemed ecstatic and isolated from reality on 19 November when he told Kent that he intended to stay as king and marry Wallis. Kent was stunned. ‘What will she call herself?’ he gasped. ‘Call herself?’ replied the king. ‘What do you think—Queen of England of course. She is going to be Queen. Yes and Empress of India. The whole bag of Tricks.’28
For a short while it almost seemed possible. Over the unforgettable weekend of 5 and 6 December there had been an outpouring of support. A ‘King’s Party’ had emerged from the endless quicksands of Westminster, nurtured by the famous backbench MP Winston Churchill, whose friendship with the ‘P of W’, as he called him, dated back to the 1920s and who had once predicted that Edward VIII’s name ‘would shine in History as the bravest and best loved of all sovereigns who have worn the island crown’.29 Although out of office, Churchill still had a powerful voice and influential friends and was in possession of a warm heart where they were concerned. He argued for the king, rallying his high-powered friends to his cause.
Kent could see the ‘King’s Party’ was taking shape rapidly in the hands of the press. With the support of Churchill’s ally, Max Beaverbrook, who owned the Express group there was an unexpectedly large hoorah for the king. In the hands of the press Kent’s brother was transformed into a heroic ‘David’ making a dignified stand against the ‘Goliath of Church and State for love’.30 Large crowds gathered outside royal residences waving banners in his support, united in rousing singing of ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. The national anthem was played early in news halls and cinemas to catch the public mood. In New York audiences cheered when images of the king and Mrs Simpson were shown on newsreels. In London graffiti appeared on walls: ‘Stand by the king’. ‘Our England loves its king,’ pronounced the Daily Mirror.31
Would his headstrong oldest brother exploit the ‘King’s Party’? The press spelled out the implications. If the king married Mrs Simpson, explained the Mirror on 4 December, Baldwin would be obliged to resign. The king would need to ‘seek an alternative Government to support him . . . the issues involved would require a General Election . . . The King’s Party would appear . . . the country would be sharply split in two . . . ’ The Mirror even contemplated the prospect of a ‘Royal Dictator-ship’ where the king ‘driven by fury of circumstance’ could attempt to govern without Parliament. ‘In these days of personal dictatorships (consider the present European scene), that is not completely impossible.’ The man in the street was interviewed and uninformed opinion was united by the sentimental cry: ‘let our king be happy’.32 All this would be better than abdication which was ‘simply the greatest tragedy that could befall England’. ‘Tell us the facts, Mr Baldwin,’ stormed the Mirror on 5 December. ‘The country will give you the verdict.’33
When Kent was finally admitted into the king’s hallowed sanctuary at the Fort on Tuesday 8 December he found his brother in a state of exhausted anguish, his decision to leave all but final. The king’s flagging hopes had been revived at the weekend with the outburst in his favour. Churchill had reasoned with Baldwin that the king must not be presented with an ultimatum and hounded into a decision. Edward VIII felt he had seen the backbench MP ‘in his true stature’. When Churchill talked about the monarchy, ‘it lived, it grew, it became suffused with light’. For him, there was a principle at stake.34 ‘The hereditary principle’ should not be left to the ‘twisting, crooked tricks of the Government’.35
The king had received a letter from Churchill that showed how ardently he had taken up his plight in a campaign which he outlined with spirited military bluster: ‘News on all fronts. No pistol to be held at the king’s head,’ Churchill began. The king must be given more time and he had ‘no doubt that this request for time will be granted . . . On no account must the king leave the country [Churchill’s italics]. Windsor Castle is his battle station (poste de commandement) . . . ’ Finally he reassured the king: ‘Good advance on all parts giving prospects of gaining good positions and assembling large force behind them.’36
But events spiralled against the king after the weekend. Churchill was howled down in the House of Commons on Monday 7 December, dismissed as the man whose judgement had once again let him down. ‘In three minutes his hopes of return to power and influence are shattered,’ observed one MP.37 To many he appeared finished politically, ruined by his ill-advised support. The serious papers, too, argued strongly for abdication. When Kent met his brother on Tuesday 8 December, it was beyond doubt that the king could not marry Wallis and keep his throne. He had to choose.
Kent soon found there was nothing he could say that would induce his brother to give up Mrs Simpson. ‘As I made up my mind two years ago, why should I change it now,’ Edward VIII repeated to Kent.38 He seemed unable fully to grasp the position he was in or to comprehend the future. Being cloistered at the Fort with the king was like being in ‘bedlam’, according to one witness, the king agitated, chain-smoking, stressed beyond reason.39 Kent heard the devotion in his brother’s voice as he spoke on the phone to Mrs Simpson. He only had time for her; his great imperial inheritance was worthless. Kent confided later that day to Dugdale, Baldwin’s parliamentary secretary, that he had talked with the king ‘for a longer time than he had enjoyed for over two years. Whilst he deplored the situation and expressed in most emphatic terms his opinion of Mrs Simpson, he said that in his view nothing would move the king in his determination to abdicate at once.’40 Not even the king’s closest brother could avert the catastrophe.
The Duke of York meanwhile knew only that his youngest and oldest brothers had been ensconced together with the prime minister and various officials. Was it possible that the whispers from various factions at the time, some of which suggested that the crown should pass not to him but to Kent contained a vestige of truth? It was rumoured that the prime minister wished to alter the succession to bypass Edward VIII’s unsuitable second and third brothers, the Dukes of York and Gloucester, so that the youngest, with his regal attributes and natural ability, could inherit the throne.41 Might not the abdicating king, in the face of uncertainty, have an interest in seeing his favourite brother on the throne? Was it possible that Kent had talked of such a drastic step? In the Octagonal Room that morning, the Duke of Kent certainly looked and sounded like a king. Could he be trusted to support the incoming monarch?
With Kent’s arrival the formalities could commence. For those in the room an air of unreality took over as the instrument for ridding the throne of its monarch, never before enacted throughout England’s long centuries of royal rule, was set in motion. The time had come for the very modern Edward VIII to put his signature upon the pages of history. The king moved forward to the writing table.
Nothing in his father’s reign had prepared Albert, Duke of York for such a calamity. Although painfully aware of his own weaknesses as a prospective monarch, he was also familiar with his oldest brother’s failings and felt he must atone for them.
Edward VIII had appeared to approach the role of king like a spoilt child at a party: the presents were all magnificent but they were the wrong ones. His laziness and unwillingness to co-operate was widely rumoured in court circles. Documents of State were returned unread. Representatives of august institutions as diverse as the Quaker Society of Friends and the Bank of England were instructed that they must address the king together. He offended the Church by his failure to attend services regularly or take communion on Sundays. The Duke of York, conscientious and hardworking, knew that people now looked to him to put these matters right.
More important still, his brother had blundered in foreign policy, a serious failing at a time of rising international tension. York knew their father had occasion to reprimand his oldest brother in June 1935, when he was still the Prince of Wales, following his speech to the British Legion in which he had expressed a desire ‘to stretch forth the hand of friendship to the Germans’ without reference to official British policy.42 Adolf Hitler’s rapid consolidation of power in Germany since he became Chancellor in 1933 was casting an ominous pall over Europe. The Führer’s passionate speeches made promises to the German people that threatened boundaries, challenged treaty obligations and endangered peace. By 1935, when his brother expressed his pro-German view, the German dictator had acquired total power as Head of State, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, as well as Chancellor. He had just reintroduced conscription in Germany and announced the official constitution of the German air force in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles signed after the First World War.
Apparently blind to the danger of Hitler’s ruthless ambitions, Edward VIII continued to signal his pro-German views openly, ignoring their late father’s warning, as though he had the authority to influence foreign policy. At an official function early in his reign, the king made a point of singling out the German Foreign Minister and feting him with a lengthy exchange in German, while other diplomats were impolitely kept waiting. This kind of encouraging signal to Germany from Britain’s monarch had been duly noted by foreign governments across the world.43
The Duke of York could see that even his brother’s selection of friends drew attention to his pro-German sympathies. His equerry, Major Edward ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, had been featured in the Tatler on 30 May 1934 at a Blackshirt dinner organised by his brother-in-law, Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the Fascist movement in England.44
Fun-loving Fruity was far closer to Edward VIII than the traditional palace staff who might have guided the king more soberly through the labyrinthine complexities of his new role. The Duke of York knew that it was not for the British monarch to impose his own opinions on foreign affairs. Too clearly, York saw his older brother’s misguided behaviour and took it upon himself to do better. He felt his responsibility keenly. ‘I hope that time will be allowed me to make amends for what has happened,’ he told the prime minister.45
The Duke of York did not know that the telephone at the Fort was already a symbol of the extent of the distrust that had sprung up between the monarch and his ministers. But he did know that of all the errors his brother had made in his first year, there was just the one fatal thing that he could not survive. She was the unseen presence in the octagonal room that morning. She was the catalyst who had brought the four brothers to this catastrophic watershed.46 ‘Mrs S’ had reduced his older brother to a point where he would sit there before them and sign away his birthright.
New evidence shows that in the days before the abdication, the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, known to his colleagues as ‘the Snake’, or even ‘the Snakiest of the lot’, made arrangements for the British government to bug the king’s calls from the Fort to Mrs Simpson, who was on the continent.47 In the eyes of senior ministers the monarch had lost his wits under her beguiling influence. He was taking advice from Mrs Simpson, and not his ministers, as he was constitutionally obliged to do. In tapping the king’s calls to Mrs Simpson, the Home Secretary hoped to stay one step ahead of the wayward monarch. The relationship between the king and his ministers had broken down.
Sir John Simon’s order to bug the king’s calls was sent to Sir Thomas Gardiner, Head of the British Telephone Service: ‘The Home Secretary asks me to confirm . . . that you will arrange for the interception of telephone communications between Fort Belvedere and Buckingham Palace on the one hand and the Continent of Europe . . . ’. This order was deemed so sensitive that it has been buried in a Whitehall vault for seventy-five years and has only recently seen the light of day. (The National Archives)
‘The domination of the King’s mind by her mind was a matter of general comment,’ recorded Captain Thomas Dugdale, Baldwin’s parliamentary private secretary, who accompanied the prime minister on his visits to the Fort in the final week.48 She was widely credited as the brains behind his campaign to marry her and keep the throne. As every possible option raised by the king to retain his throne and marry Mrs Simpson was painstakingly ruled out by Baldwin, she had urged him to appeal to the country over the heads of his ministers. He was after all the king, ‘the adored Apollo’, the admired ‘Prince Charming’, the man who had justly won the love of the Empire. His popular appeal would sway the country. He must hold out for his rights, Wallis reasoned.
Even when abdication became inevitable, ministers found Mrs Simpson urged the king to demand certain conditions before his departure ‘with great persistency’, recorded Dugdale. ‘Most important of all in her eyes, that there should be adequate financial provision . . . to set up a rival court, to exercise influence,—in fact to achieve her obvious ambitions.’49 Was it possible that the king was in love with a ‘gold digging adventuress’?50 Just how profitable the set-up was for Mrs Simpson was surmised by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, who considered that ‘she had already ruined him [the king] in jewels and money’. How much more harm could she do? Captain Dugdale came to a harsh conclusion: she was ‘selfish, self-seeking, hard, calculating, ambitious, scheming and dangerous’.51
Edward VIII’s pen moved noiselessly over the paper, as he signed ‘Edward R.I.’ for the last time. Each paper was clearly headed ‘Instrument of Abdication’. The king did not even stop to read it. He knew its contents intimately. His casual air that morning as he signed away his birthright matched the coolness he had shown in his approach to the responsibilities of kingship. When the king had finished writing he stood up and yielded the chair to the Duke of York. It was his turn to sign, and then each of his brothers in order of precedence; first Gloucester, and then Kent.
For the Duke of York, watching his brothers sign was ‘a dreadful moment and one never to be forgotten’.52 The whole fabric of monarchy might ‘crumble under the shock and strain of it all . . . ’53 The abdication was causing widespread anti-monarchy feeling. He was aware of the activities of James Maxton, chairman of the Independent Labour Party, who caught the mood of many when he argued in favour of sweeping away the institution. ‘It would be the will of the mass of the people,’ argued Maxton, ‘to replace the monarchy with a more stable and dignified form of government of a republican kind . . . ’54 York did not feel equipped to step into the shoes of a man widely perceived as the most popular in the British Empire. The task ahead seemed oppressive.
He knew his wife, Elizabeth, viewed the prospect with ‘horror and emotion’.55 All week she had been ill in bed with flu. Privately she was ‘terrified’ for him. The unspoken fear, never acknowledged but always shaping her thoughts, was that her husband was now cast in a role for which he was eminently unsuited. The strain would be more than he could bear and she would lose him.
Nothing of this was even alluded to at Fort Belvedere. Politeness and courtesy prevailed. There was an air of goodwill. The ex-king stepped outside the octagonal room to take in the cold morning air, with the relief of a swimmer ‘surfacing from a great depth’.56 The four brothers shook hands and parted without fuss or rancour.
Queen Mary set the tone for the royal family’s response in a public statement in which she spoke of the ‘distress which fills a mother’s heart when I think that my dear son has deemed it to be his duty to lay down his charge’. Women were crying in the street, sharing in her grief, as Queen Mary emerged from Marlborough House dressed in black, her funereal ensemble softened only by the black fur trim. A snapshot appeared of the faces of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret peering anxiously from the top window, watching their grandmother leave with great solemnity through a respectful crowd.57
A sense of awed shock also pervaded the House of Commons, as Stanley Baldwin delivered his account of the momentous drama against the sound of stifled sobs from one or two MPs in the packed galleries. But in the debate that followed not all MPs wished to express their respect.
‘Mrs Simpson has a social set, and every Member of the Cabinet knows that the social set of Mrs Simpson is closely identified with a certain foreign Government and that the Ambassador of that foreign Government . . . ’
Mr Gallacher, the Communist MP for West Fife, was shouted down, his sentence incomplete.58 It was the first public statement that lent support to a disturbing rumour that the real reason Mrs Simpson was hounded not just from the throne, but from the country, was that she was pro-Nazi and having an affair with Hitler’s new ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Gallacher was silenced before the words had left his mouth, but his claim was left unchallenged, the accusation still hanging in the air.
For the incoming king the accounts in the press of the events in the House could only add to the degradation of the monarchy. Was it possible that there was any truth in the wild allegations? Beneath the gentle sounds of polite court gossip ran a vein of red-hot whispering suggesting that she was involved with Von Ribbentrop. This graceless 43-year-old Nazi with a receding hairline, expanding waistline and narrowing lips, did not look the part of a celebrity lover but the former whisky and champagne salesman now enjoyed a position of great power. He had won the trust of Adolf Hitler and understood how much the Führer wanted Britain’s agreement as he pursued a policy of rearmament and the acquisition of Lebensraum or ‘living space’ for the German people. The new German ambassador to Britain was said to be adept at turning on his own unique brand of icy charm for the leading lady in Edward VIII’s circle. Mrs Simpson had received invitations to the most important events at the German Embassy. She had been courted and flattered with many gifts of flowers from Ribbentrop. In an interview with the FBI, one distant royal relation, Charles Alexander, Duke of Württemberg, later claimed that Ribbentrop sent Wallis seventeen carnations every day: ‘The seventeen supposedly represented the number of times they had slept together.’59
Ministers knew that Wallis had taken it upon herself to facilitate a meeting between Ribbentrop and the former Prince of Wales at Lady Cunard’s, prompting the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden, to despair that such diplomatic gaffes made ‘parliamentary government impossible’.60 The suspicion that Wallis might even be acting for the Nazis was aroused when the Foreign Office intercepted messages from Ribbentrop, who saw in the political manoeuvres to stop Wallis becoming queen ‘a desire to defeat those Germanophile forces which had been working through Mrs Simpson . . . ’61 The Duke of York had had several private meetings with the prime minister during the abdication week but whenever Baldwin was questioned about ‘Mrs Simpson’s dossier’ and whether it shed any light on such claims, he always denied it.62
The atmosphere remained charged in London. Vast crowds gathered in the centre of the city following Baldwin’s announcement as though expecting further shocks. People crammed into Downing Street and were only cleared at ten in the evening when the police put up a cordon. A few minutes later several hundred Fascists, who supported Edward VIII, ran down Whitehall from Trafalgar Square brandishing newspapers.
Winston Churchill rallied to the side not of the new king but the departing monarch. He went to the Fort on 11 December to look over his last speech. During their lunch together Edward VIII ceased to be king, and the fact that the moment passed with no significant ritual to mark the occasion moved Churchill. While they had been idly chatting something unique had occurred. The royal heritage, that unbreakable bond between a king and his subjects, had been severed. The unseemly speed with which the king had been forced out of office into exile brought to Churchill’s mind the execution of Charles I in 1649. As he left the Fort, he was quietly murmuring the words from a famous political poem by Andrew Marvell on the death of Charles I, tapping with his stick to dramatise the words and underline his feeling that justice had not been done:63
He nothing common did or mean,
Upon that memorable scene . . .
That evening Windsor Castle was quiet and dark as the ex-king, now renamed His Royal Highness, the Duke of Windsor, crossed the large quadrangle and made his way up an ancient stone staircase to the Augusta Tower. Technicians from the BBC were waiting and he took his position behind the microphone.
‘At long last I am able to say a few words of my own . . . ’ he began. He explained that he would ‘now quit altogether public affairs’ and declared his allegiance ‘with all my heart’ to the new king. Then came the famous words which would define his short reign: ‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love.’64 The world listened, spellbound, to hear the sovereign who would give up his throne for love, taking in the inflections in his voice as he spoke of ‘the woman I love’, and the heart-thumping break at the final ‘God save the king’ speaking of his profound emotion. And so began the myth of the greatest love story of the twentieth century, although many who witnessed the event were of the impression that an unknown American woman on the wrong side of forty with a questionable pedigree had just stolen the king of England.
Before the exhausted ex-king set sail for the continent he made his polite farewells to his family, formally bowing like a subject to the Duke of York. Only the Duke of Kent broke through the stifling politeness of it all as he shouted out in pain on seeing his oldest brother go: ‘This is quite mad . . . It isn’t possible! It isn’t happening.’65
The former king had chosen the cliffs of Dover as his Christmas card that year but later that night on board HMS Fury the dim outline of the ‘White Walls of England’ shrank swiftly from view in the darkness until the cliffs were a mere thread of white on the black water.66 The duke was at sea. He seemed unconcerned, drinking brandy with the crew as his old life slipped away from him.
At 11 am on 12 December 1936, the Duke of York made his way to St James’s Palace to his Accession Council. He looked worn, concerned that his voice, so hesitant and odd, would let him down. Not to be in charge of his words at such a time, never sure if his carefully constructed sentences would seem normal or whether the whole speech would disintegrate, was a terrifying ordeal. The eyes of the Privy Counsellors were on the new king.
He started slowly. ‘I meet you today in circumstances that are without parallel in the history of our Country,’ he began. ‘With my wife and helpmeet by my side, I take up the heavy task that lies before me . . . ’
The relief in the room was palpable. The ancient ritual was accomplished. Tradition was upheld. The Duke of York chose the name ‘King George VI’ to imply a continuity he hardly felt with his father’s regime. Pathé newsreels trumpeted the proclamation of the new king in the cinemas. Across the empire, prayers were offered to God to support the new ‘King’s Majesty, to replenish him, enrich him and strengthen him’.
But behind the scenes, the new George VI was inconsolable. ‘This is absolutely terrible . . . I never wanted this to happen; I’m quite unprepared for it,’ he poured out his heart to his cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten. ‘I’m only a Naval Officer, it’s the only thing I know about,’ he lamented.67 Quite apart from the burden of his new role as monarch, he could scarcely be sure he would be able to manage his own brothers. His uncle, Lord Athlone, witnessed the ‘dear old boy’ endeavouring to take control on his very first night with an ill-judged outburst against the dukes of Gloucester and Kent. ‘He fairly went for his brothers,’ observed his uncle, ‘saying: “If You Two think that, now that I have taken this job on, you can go on behaving just as you like, in the same old way, you’re very much mistaken!” he cautioned. “You Two have got to pull yourselves together.”’68
Before him, the daunting prospect of his coronation loomed. He had not felt the need to consult Logue for some years, but now always hovering over him was the thought of all the public appearances with the obligatory speeches that would be an inescapable part of his life. Ever since his stammer began, such occasions were almost unendurable. His fear was that at some important function, attempting to deliver a beautifully chiselled speech, words would not come. Worse, the words that would leave his lips could be tortured, twisted sounds. He would stand in anguish talking rubbish, his jaw clicking out of control. Panic would set in. At the very worst it could even end in an epileptic fit, his dignity in tatters, apparently unfit to be king. He knew that this was whispered about him; certain factions continued to speculate whether they had the right man on the throne. Lionel Logue recognised the acute nervous strain his former patient might be experiencing and wrote to offer his services once more.69
In his Abdication Broadcast on 13 December the Archbishop of Canterbury took it upon himself to draw attention to the new king’s weakness. ‘When his people listen to him they will note an occasional and momentary hesitation in his speech,’ announced Cosmo Lang. ‘But he has brought it into full control and to those who hear it, it need cause no sort of embarrassment, for it causes none to him who speaks’.70 The archbishop was trying to offer his support, but to the sensitive George VI, by drawing attention to his speech defect, he might just as well have trumpeted to the empire that the new king was unfit to rule.