1936
‘THE MORE I THINK OF IT ALL,’ WROTE EDWARD, Prince of Wales, shortly after the First World War, ‘the more certain I am that . . . the day for Kings & Princes is past, monarchies are out-of-date.’ The Prince was touring the Empire to thank countries like Canada and Australia for their help to Britain during the war, but while publicly smiling, he was privately miserable. ‘What an unnatural life for a poor little boy of 25,’ he wrote after a busy day of shaking hands and posing for photographs. ‘I do get so fed up with it & despondent about it sometimes, & begin to feel like “resigning”!!’
Handsome and charming, with a winning smile and a taste for cocktails and jazz, Edward Prince of Wales was the first young British royal to be a media celebrity. He was cheered and fêted wherever he travelled: his brightly coloured sweaters and his snazzy plus-fours* were copied as the latest fashion statements. But the more famous he grew, the more hollow and valueless he felt. ‘How I loathe my job now,’ he wrote, ‘and this press-“puffed” empty “succès”. I feel I’m through with it and long to die.’
The Prince resented the intrusion of the media. ‘I can put up with a certain amount of contact with officials and newspapers on official trips,’ he explained to one of his staff. ‘It’s when they get in on my private life that I want to pull out a gun and kill.’ He was a young man in pain, the world’s first and most spectacular case of celebrity burnout.
The Prince got little sympathy from his gruff father King George V, who had steered the British monarchy through the years of war and revolution that had brought down two European emperors and eight ruling sovereigns. In July 1917 the King renounced his family’s German titles and dignities deriving from the House of Hanover and adopted a new, thoroughly British-sounding name, the House of Windsor. At the same time he had reinvented the style of the monarchy, with more emphasis on duty, going out to meet the public and ‘setting a good example’. When the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, complained that heavy drinking among munitions workers was hampering the supply of ammunition to the Front, the King banned alcohol from royal occasions, offering his guests water, lemonade or ginger beer for three years until the war ended.*
The old King was particularly unhappy at his eldest son’s mistresses – a series of glamorous married women with whom the Prince was seen around the nightclubs of London. British newspapers discreetly looked the other way, but the disapproving father prophesied trouble. ‘After I am dead,’ he said gloomily, ‘the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.’
George V died in January 1936, and at first Britain welcomed the modern style of the new King Edward VIII. Unlike his father, who had always refused to fly, Edward liked to travel by aeroplane, and, in another daring departure, would sometimes appear in public without a hat. But in December the Empire learned to its horror that his modern tastes extended to a tough and wise-cracking American girlfriend, Mrs Wallis Warfield Simpson, who had already divorced one husband and was in the process of divorcing Mr Simpson, her second.
Many people liked the fact she was American – the newspapers, who finally broke their silence five weeks after Mrs Simpson appeared in the divorce court, expressed their approval of her nationality. But ‘two husbands living’ presented an insuperable obstacle to a society that viewed divorce as a moral and social catastrophe. How could a double divorcee be bowed and curtsied to, or represent Britain to the world? For a start, royal etiquette prohibited divorced or even separated persons from being received at court.
After canvassing his cabinet colleagues and opinion around the Empire, the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin told the King he would have to choose between his throne and Mrs Simpson – and Edward VIII did not hesitate. Whenever the King talked of Wallis, Baldwin later told his family, his face wore ‘such a look of beauty as might have lighted the face of a young knight who had caught a glimpse of the Holy Grail’. On 11 December the King formally abdicated the throne, and gave his reason in a live broadcast to the nation. ‘You must believe me when I tell you,’ he said in a voice heavy with emotion, ‘that 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.’
While Edward’s supporters seized joyously on the L-word, proclaiming his sacrifice the love story of the century, his critics found the romantic talk vulgar. They blamed Mrs Simpson, the wicked woman who had led the King astray. But if, sixteen years earlier, Edward had been genuine when he talked of ‘resigning’ from his ‘unnatural’ and ‘out-of-date’ job, then Mrs Simpson was not the reason for the abdication. She was the excuse he had finally found – his blessed release from the fearful and empty destiny of being royal.