Relations between the Duke of Windsor and the rest of the royal family at the beginning of 1946 resembled the experiences of participants in a gruelling war. There were periods of inertia, occasional inconclusive scuffles and long-distance incidents of sniping, and then short, intense rounds of combat, from which both sides would emerge exhausted and demoralised. Victory for either party seemed impossible. Yet dealings between them had not always been so dismal, and one courtier was testament to this. In 1920, when Lascelles was only thirty-three, he was offered the job of assistant private secretary to the then Prince of Wales, on a salary of £600 a year. In this more starry-eyed incarnation, Lascelles wrote that ‘I have got a very deep admiration for the Prince’, whom he praised as ‘the most attractive man I’ve ever met’,1 and began working for him in December that year.
The relationship between the two lasted until January 1929, when a disillusioned Lascelles resigned, believing that his master’s self-absorption, lack of any sense of duty, and general moral vacancy – to say nothing of an absence of Christian faith – made him wholly unsuited to be king. It was a significant turnaround from the beginning of the decade, but when Lascelles had stated that ‘I am convinced that the future of England is as much in [Edward’s] hands as in those of any individual’2, he was more accurate than he could have imagined. While, two and a half decades later, the duke was no longer the figure he once was, he still held enormous symbolic importance throughout the world. It might have been easier to have ostracised and ignored him, but such things were not realistic. Even as he and his wife became ever more irksome and demanding, they still had to be afforded the treatment that a former monarch merited.
‘I am afraid you are wrong about England’, Wallis wrote to her aunt on 3 January 1946. She complained that her husband’s home country had been deliberately inhospitable towards him, but also stated that ‘the game is how attractive will they make it under those conditions – plus the fact that they really do not want him to have any official recognition anywhere.’ Both she and the duke were weary of the situation, and it was an additional frustration that Churchill could not help them (‘he has little power now and when he did took the same line as the King and Govt’).
Nonetheless, she reported, in her usual stoical fashion, that ‘the Duke goes to London tomorrow for another crack at the Court and the powers that be3.’ It was a sign of the changing times that, after a prolonged (and enforced) six-year absence from his former country, that the duke could now visit Britain twice in a matter of few months without the attendant controversy that once greeted him. Yet the tolerance that he now received was also marked by weariness. He could not be forbidden to come to the country that he had once ruled, but he was shown – repeatedly, if needs be – how little interest anyone now had in him. The star attraction had long since been demoted to supporting turn status, and now was in danger of being excised from the show altogether.
There were, in any case, more important issues at hand for his brother to consider. Shortly after President Truman had met him on board the Renown, the king was shocked to discover, on 21 August 1945, that the president had signed a document – almost without thinking – that ended the Lend-Lease agreement that Roosevelt had been responsible for in 1941, which had offered Britain a vast amount of food, oil and equipment in order to maintain the war effort. It is possible that Truman’s actions were dictated by a newfound disdain for a country that would eject a prime minister who America knew and liked from office, apparently without any gratitude for his services during the war, but it is more likely that it was simple indifference displayed towards their former allies. After all, the Second World War was over. Wasn’t it time for the United States to look back to their own borders, and to their own interests?
Although Attlee visited Congress in November 1945, and established a working relationship with both Truman and the Democratic Party, the king was aware that the situation for Britain was dismal, and showing no signs of improvement. While he had come to respect his premier, not least over their shared attitudes towards the duke, he did not share the prime minister’s politics. He believed that, rather than dealing with the legal restraints on trade unions or increasing nationalisation of the country’s means of production, the crucial actions that had to be taken were to build houses, to replace both the countless homes that had been destroyed in the war and those that should have been constructed long before that.
The new spirit alive in Britain made the king feel marginalised and without an obvious outlet for his views. While Churchill and Chamberlain had both allowed him to believe that he had an active influence in politics, Attlee politely made it clear that the role of the constitutional monarch – especially with a Labour government – was to listen and agree, rather than to attempt to impose his own perspective on matters. Mountbatten’s hopes that the king might be able to exert a more interventionist stance were not met. There were numerous instances of minor humiliations. It was made clear by the formerly unquestioning royal servants that they believed they deserved a pay rise, and that in this new egalitarian age, they would have no other option than to join a union if their demands were not met. And although both Churchill and the king had agreed that Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris should receive a peerage, as well as a promotion to Marshal of the RAF, the peerage was vetoed by Labour, on the grounds that the destruction Harris’s raids had caused was ultimately disproportionate, not least in the case of Dresden, which was turned into rubble by the concentrated bombing it received.*
The king may have suggested to Lascelles, in a letter sent from Sandringham over Christmas 1945, that ‘I am not downhearted or pessimistic as to the future’.4 Save the possibility of his eldest daughter’s romantic happiness, there was, however, little concrete evidence that things would improve on either a personal or national basis. He and the queen did what they could, once again inviting people to ‘dine and sleep’ at Windsor Castle – a tradition that had passed into abeyance for decades – but the prospect of the Duke of Windsor dining and sleeping at Windsor, or anywhere else for that matter, was an unhappy and vexing one.
When Edward arrived in Britain on 7 January 1946, having flown from Paris, he found himself received with reluctance by the king and various government ministers. He stayed at his mother’s residence of Marlborough House, this time without her present. Lascelles summarised the former monarch’s embassy with his usual pithiness. ‘[Bevin] intended to tell the Duke plainly that he couldn’t recommend any form of attachment to the Embassy in Washington.’5 Although the following day saw the king and duke on sufficiently amicable terms for the former to show the latter into Lascelles’ office for a meeting before a state banquet to mark the inauguration of the United Nations organisation, nothing could be achieved. As Lascelles noted, ‘[the duke] thought that he had made some progress in converting [Bevin] to his Washington plan’, but given the Foreign Secretary’s comments about the impossibility of such a scheme, the duke’s hopes remained, in Lascelles’ summation, nothing more than ‘wishful thinking’.6
The duke’s visit was a waste of time and effort. The king noted, pithily, on 8 January, ‘David came to see me. He is here for a few days. He is still adamant about wanting to be attached to the Embassy and has left an aide memoire both with Attlee & Bevin.’*7
Edward was informed by the politicians that he would not be able to accept an invitation from his friend John Marriott, officer in charge of the Guards division in Germany, to visit the army stationed there. Memories of his previous trip to Germany, less than a decade before, and his meeting with Hitler – to say nothing of further embarrassing associations with that country’s citizens and sympathisers during the war – meant that there was no way that even a private visit could be made. Attlee and Bevin also knew that the duke would never maintain a low profile. Press conferences, interviews and further scandal would all undoubtedly have followed.
Edward returned to France, dejected, jobless and demoralised, and Wallis summed up the situation in a letter to her aunt on 25 January. ‘The English are determined not to give the Duke a big or important job for the reason they think it would take from the King – this in high circles is frankly said. The belief is that 2 Kings can’t operate therefore the Duke having made his decision should eliminate himself. In the meantime they search for some camouflage type of position. We have definitely refused any colonial governmentship [sic]. What is the use to bury ourselves away for nothing?’ She decided that, if ‘camouflage’ could not be found, their options were either to lead a private life, ‘taking taxes into consideration’, or, as the atomic bomb alternative, ‘go to England for six months privately naturally and see what the effect would be’.8 She did not mention that such a return would almost certainly be vetoed by an appalled government, and their wanderings would recommence immediately.
Yet as the duke’s ambitions of an ambassadorial post appeared frustrated, there seemed to be a sudden shift in his fortunes. The flamboyant and unconventional Archibald Clark Kerr assumed the post of ambassador to the United States from Lord Halifax, and seemed to be a man who would understand the duke’s position, given his own eccentricities. Rather than the usual standard-issue Etonian, Clark Kerr was a left-leaning iconoclast. He took delight in boasting that he was tougher than even Ernest Hemingway, and his constant companion was a young Russian named Eugene Yost, who served as his personal masseur and valet; he quipped that Yost was ‘a Russian slave given to me by Stalin’. Perhaps surprisingly, given this association, he had once been a suitor of Queen Elizabeth’s, and had an equally unlikely wife, a Chilean aristocrat named Doña María Teresa Díaz y Salas. All in all, Clark Kerr – newly created Baron Inverchapel – was the friend the duke needed at this particular juncture.
Emboldened, Edward wrote to Lascelles optimistically on 28 January to say that ‘it would be my judgement that Archie would personally place no obstacles in the way’, and that although the two had not met in several years, ‘I have known him on and off all my life … of course, people change, but I would be surprised if he and I could not make a success of the experiment’.9 He also informed his brother on 2 February that ‘in my opinion unless Archie had changed since 1932, he and I could work together very well in America along the lines of my two Aide Memoirs’.10
The knowledge that he and Wallis would be giving up their Parisian residence on the Boulevard Suchet at the end of April had galvanised his wish for something to be done, and British attempts to frustrate his hopes of a quasi-ambassadorial post of this nature had not been helped by Bevin’s suggestion that the decision lay, to an extent, in the gift of the new ambassador. There seemed, at last, a chance that the duke’s schemes might come to fruition.
Lascelles was unconvinced. He wrote to Sir Pierson Dixon, Bevin’s private secretary, on 5 February, to say that ‘[the duke] is delighted to hear of Clark Kerr’s appointment … he is sure that C.K. will take a sympathetic view of his proposals for his own future, if he returns to U.S.A. The Duke intends to come to London to see C.K. … I don’t know to what extent C.K. is in the picture about all this; but it seems to me that it would be a kindness to him to put him there, before his interview with the Duke.’11
It swiftly became clear that Clark Kerr, for all his eccentricities, could be an important figure in this regard whichever side he took, and so Bevin acted swiftly. He sent him a telegram on 10 February stating ‘the Duke of Windsor has been pressing the Prime Minister and myself to arrange that he should be given some employment in the U.S.A, “comprised within the ambit of His Majesty’s Embassy without anything official being designated”’, and that ‘His Royal Highness has been given no encouragement to think that such an appointment would be possible … it obviously raises a most difficult and delicate question of responsibilities between His Royal Highness and His Majesty’s Representative at Washington’.12
The explicit purpose of Bevin’s telegram was to appraise Clark Kerr of the likely approach by the duke; the implicit one to make sure he was on side. And despite his past friendship with Edward, the British ambassador knew what was required of him. He accordingly replied on 12 February, ‘Many thanks for letting me know. I fully share your view.’13 Yet it was difficult simply to put the former monarch back into his box, not least because he was able to telephone the king and argue his case once again. The following week, Lascelles and Pierson Dixon discussed the duke’s ongoing conversations with his brother. Their concern was that Edward’s charisma – and persistence – might lead to the king offering him a position, in an unguarded moment, that could not then be delivered.
As Pierson Dixon’s memorandum to Bevin of 19 February, helpfully marked ‘top secret’, suggested, ‘The King had asked Sir A. Lascelles two questions to which he was not able to give an answer … [firstly] how much does Lord Halifax know about the position, [and secondly], how is the Duke to go to America without a job, seeing that he himself had told the American press, on leaving the U.S.A., that he was going to England to discuss the possibilities of getting a job?’ Pierson Dixon knew that Lascelles had his own plans in this regard – ‘it would be easy to arrange that HM Ambassador at Washington should, if necessary, let it be known to the American press at the time of the Duke’s return to the U.S. that, in view of His Royal Highness’s position, it was not possible to give him any employment under the Crown’ – and that, while Lascelles was keen that the duke and duchess return to America, given the delicacy of matters in France, it could not be with any official imprimatur. Bevin despairingly scrawled on the memo that ‘I cannot find him a job … it is impossible.’14
Nonetheless, the Foreign Secretary was fair-minded, or at least thorough, and so he contacted Halifax – himself a former Foreign Secretary – to solicit his opinion as to the best way of proceeding. Bevin wrote, with careful tact, to the outgoing ambassador to say, ‘You may be already aware that the Duke of Windsor has been pressing that he should be given some employment in the United States of America.’ He did not call it a sinecure, but he did not need to. Instead, he emphasised that he and Attlee were opposed to the idea, writing, ‘it obviously raises the most difficult and delicate questions of responsibilities between His Royal Highness and His Majesty’s Representative at Washington’, and that he and ‘Clam’ felt ‘it is indeed impossible that His Royal Highness, as former King of England, should exercise any office under the Crown in foreign countries where His Majesty is already represented by the Ambassador’.15
Halifax replied contemptuously on 5 March. His dealings with the duke had been coloured by his partial responsibility for him when Edward had been governor general in the Bahamas, and he had become angered at his colleague’s arrogance, lack of consideration to his fellow man and inability to do the job to its required standards. It was therefore with righteous irritation that the ambassador wrote, ‘the Duke has more than once spoken in the same nebulous terms to me, leaving the general impression on my mind that what he contemplated was some kind of roving public relations work by way of visits, speeches, interviews and appeals’.
Halifax was unconvinced. ‘With every desire to assist in [the] solution of the baffling personal and political problems that the Duke’s future presents, I cannot but think that anything of this sort would lead to inevitable trouble. It would almost certainly cause embarrassment to the Ambassador and to the Consul, each of whom would be likely in different degrees to find it difficult to keep the Duke on [the] approved line or correct him if he got off it … and if he was to do anything in that line, it would presumably be necessary for him (which would no doubt mean the Duchess too) to see important policy telegrams so that he could see what the form was.’ Given the duke’s commonly known and lamented political sympathies, which had included a level of support for Nazism that was considered inexcusable even before the outbreak of war, it was unsurprising that Halifax could write, ‘I should myself feel little confidence in his discretion in all this field.’
There was also a wider issue. Relations between Britain and America were amicable, but Truman was not Roosevelt, and the end of the Lend-Lease agreement had created lingering diplomatic tension between the countries. Halifax therefore anticipated the potential embarrassment that the duke’s licensed presence in the United States could cause when he wrote, ‘there remains the estimate of the effect that [the duke and duchess] would produce on the American picture. This would no doubt be good and bad. All his personal qualities would win friends; but extent of their press reports of society engagements in Newport, New York and Long Island would, as they have done before, tell heavily the other way.’
Halifax’s verdict was straightforward. ‘I do not think that any Ambassador would be at all happy to have the Duke serving under him in any recognised capacity officially or non officially; and that most Ambassadors would hope that his sojourns in United States would be neither too frequent nor too protracted.’ He ascribed this judgement to ‘instinct and experience amassed here of what makes for smooth working and what does not in United States’, before concluding, ‘I am profoundly conscious that it makes no contribution to the solution of the general question … but I am afraid the conclusion in my mind is very clear.’16
It was with relief that Pierson Dixon wrote to Bevin to say, ‘Both Lord Halifax and Sir A. Clark Kerr share your view that the Duke’s proposal is unworkable. On the strength of these opinions by the present and future Ambassadors to the U.S., you may wish to press the King (with the PM’s concurrence) to tell the Duke definitively that no prospect of employment in the U.S. can be held out.’ Pierson Dixon was pushing at an open door; he subsequently wrote at the bottom of the telegram that ‘the King is proposing to do this’.17
The king, in truth, was caught between a natural desire to help his brother – and, in so doing, end the chaos that the duke’s presence in his life seemed to provoke – and the professional advice that he had received. While he was able to have what Edward described as a ‘perfectly amicable telephone conversation’ with him on 23 February, during which he suggested that he would be able to offer more concrete news in due course, he realised that he would be hopelessly compromised if he attempted to do anything; he knew that the kind of roving freelance ambassadorial role the duke craved would set an impossible precedent. After all, his younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, then serving as governor general of Australia, might have desired a similar sinecure, and he would have been unable to deny him.
Therefore, he wrote back to Edward on 20 March to say, ‘I have discussed the matter again with both Attlee & Bevin on more than one occasion (hence the delay) & they are both adamant in thinking that this moment, it would not be a good thing for a near relative of mine to be attached to the British Embassy in Washington in an official position. I have used all my persuasive powers with both of them to make them see our point of view.’ Acknowledging that ‘I know this will be a blow to you & I am so sorry that I have not been able to arrange it for you’, he stated, ‘much as I could have wished for you to have had this post, I have the feeling that, with the present state of the world as it is, you could do more with your contacts in America in a private rather than in an official capacity’, before concluding, ‘I am disappointed that our plan has not come to fruition.’18
Before Edward received this reply, he wrote with irritation to the king on 21 March, as he and Wallis prepared to leave Paris, bound for La Croë in the South of France. Chiding him for not giving him any news, the duke wrote, ‘Your silence is discouraging and hardly in the spirit of our two talks in London … it is difficult for me to believe that the appointment in America really does hinge on the feelings of Halifax’s successor, for your command in this personal instance would be obeyed’. Perhaps egged on by Wallis, he seemed to have forgotten his own experiences in this regard. Constitutionally, the king could not take such decisions unilaterally, but instead they had to be approved by his government and ministers.
Although Edward paid lip service to this (‘no-one realises better than I do the strain that present world political conditions impose on Heads of State and their Ministers’), it all came down to his own desires. ‘I have been waiting for more than five months for a decision on the question of my employment … I will continue to bear myself in patience until I hear that Archie Clark Kerr has returned to London from Indonesia. If you then still remain silent on the subject, I can only conclude that you and your advisers have turned down the offer of my services, which places me in a position from which I must retreat without loss of dignity to myself or my qualifications.’19 Although the letter used George’s familiar name of ‘Bertie’ and was signed ‘David’, it was just as aggressive as the letters the duke had sent the king in the grim years following his abdication, and just as fruitless. The duke and duchess accordingly left Paris on 1 April: jobless, disappointed and bitter.* They would know this state of affairs well over the coming years.
When the royal family were not concerned with the perennially troublesome duke, there were lighter things to consider. Princess Elizabeth attended a lavish dinner party hosted by Channon on 2 February, which the diarist modestly described as ‘a shimmering sea of splendour’; he compared his royal guest to ‘a gay partridge’, whom his friend Peter Coats ‘rather got off with’.* The evening concluded at 3.30 with a rendition of ‘God Save the King’, and Channon walked home reflecting happily on the evening’s success; he concluded that ‘never has there been so much excitement about a ball’, perhaps because he and Coats added Benzedrine to the cocktails. However, ‘nobody noticed’,20 and, presumably Elizabeth did not find herself inadvertently pepped up and ready to party after taking a drink with particular vim in it.
Such escapism was rare. As Queen Elizabeth wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, in anticipation of her visit to Britain, ‘So much has happened to this poor battered world since those days when you visited us at Buckingham Palace, & now so many hopes are centred on this great “getting together” which starts next week.’21 The ‘getting together’ to which she referred was the United Nations, which had been created the previous October in San Francisco, with the stated aim of bringing about international cooperation, peace and harmony.
It was a noble and high-minded endeavour, and one that would help change the world. The king had delivered a message of support at its foundation, saying, ‘I commend this cause to all my peoples. It is their cause and the cause of men and women of goodwill everywhere. If all play their part, the United Nations can be made the guardian of peace, the instrument of progress and a means by which the foundations of a new era in the history of mankind can be established.’22 Yet its existence did not obscure the fact that things at home were in a desperate state.
At the beginning of 1946, as his elder daughter was offered spiked cocktails at parties and flirted with bisexual young men, the king attempted to exert influence over his recalcitrant government. He did this by combining a mastery of detail with a desire to catch out insufficiently briefed ministers. Morrison wrote in his autobiography that ‘I was impressed with his up-to-date knowledge; he must have been an assiduous reader of official papers. On occasion he enjoyed trying to trip up his ministers by asking about some detail of which he had good knowledge, but of which they might be ignorant, despite the fact that it affected their office.’ Morrison was not to be beaten – ‘I got into the habit of checking up details of such people and matters as I surmised might be the subjects of this friendly contest of knowledge’23 – but the king remained cautious and often unconvinced by the reforming Labour Party. He had told Attlee firmly, on 20 November 1945, that ‘he must give the people here some confidence that the Government was not going to stifle all private enterprise … everyone wanted to help in rehabilitating the country, but they were not allowed to’.24
The relationship between monarch and premier, which had begun inauspiciously, was now closer, but still did not compare to that between the king and Churchill, who was still an informal but trusted counsellor. Lascelles wrote in his diary on 26 February that ‘the King’s complaint that he can never get anything out of [Attlee] is well-founded. He is agreeable and friendly, but closes each subject with a snap of his jaws, and if you don’t try and launch a new one yourself, the rest is silence.’25 Even by the summer, the king was still uncertain about his premier, writing in his diary on 24 August that ‘Attlee still seems to be in a maze.’26
It was as a response to this torpor that the king responded enthusiastically to a suggestion by Jan Smuts, president of South Africa, that he should visit his country on a formal royal tour. Although Smuts’s initial proposal of a visit in the autumn of 1946 was thought by Lascelles to be impractical, a trip in the spring of 1947 was considered more appealing, not least because it would allow the princesses to undertake their first overseas trip: an effective means of both demonstrating soft power and also introducing the girls to a far wider audience than they had ever reached before. While the fifteen-year-old Princess Margaret was wilful and mischievous – ‘Margaret was a great one for practical jokes’,27 Crawfie sighed, before adding that ‘she was now at a girl’s most awkward age, neither quite a child nor quite grown up’28 – Elizabeth was growing into her role as future monarch, and an opportunity such as this would be invaluable for her.
The trip was planned for February the following year. Amid the greyness and devastation of Britain, it would be something to look forward to; it was formally announced on 15 March, and Lascelles was pleased to announce that ‘it has had a good press’.29 Yet the news was overshadowed by a speech that Churchill had made just over a week before. In December 1936, shortly before the abdication of Edward VIII, the then backbench MP had warned of the rise of Hitler and fascism: ‘Danger gathers upon our path. We cannot afford – we have no right – to look back. We must look forward.’30 At a time when appeasement was widely believed to be the best – indeed, the only – option, he was a lone voice. Less than a decade later, it once again became incumbent on him to speak an uncomfortable truth, and to do so with his habitual economy and skill of phrase-making.
In March 1946, the seventy-one-year-old Churchill was weary. He had written to the Duke of Windsor the previous December, apologising for not being able to assist more effectively with the duke’s quest for an ambassadorship, and stated, ‘The difficulties of leading the opposition are very great, and I increasingly wonder whether the game is worth the candle.’ He claimed that he only continued in his present role ‘through a sense of duty’, and a desire not to ‘[leave] friends when they are in the lurch’.31 He might have added that he also wished to continue to serve in the national interest, and to make occasional appropriate interventions on the world stage. On a visit to Westminster College in the small town of Fulton, Missouri, on 6 March, he had his chance.
Although he had dealt with Stalin and Russia in his capacity as wartime prime minister, he had never warmed to Britain’s temporary ally, whom he had called ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. Now, matters had changed irrevocably, and with Hitler and fascism defeated, the world faced a new adversary. With none other than the president as a warm-up man – when he had invited him, Truman had written, ‘This is a wonderful school in my home state. If you come, I will introduce you. Hope you can do it’ – the former premier delivered what he would later call ‘the Sinews of Peace’ speech. It became more famous throughout the rest of the world for his description of how ‘from Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent’.
Churchill acknowledged his ‘strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime colleague, Marshal Stalin’, and stated explicitly that ‘I do not believe Soviet Russia desires war.’ Nonetheless, he saw the country’s territorial ambitions as terrifying. Speaking of the way in which Russia had dominated eastern Germany, he remarked, ‘this is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up … nor it is one which contains the essentials of permanent peace’.
He implicitly compared the present situation to the build-up of the Second World War, and stated, ‘[War] might have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honoured today; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.’ His warning was simple. ‘We surely must not let that happen again.’
The speech was criticised in many quarters in America, with the Chicago Sun newspaper saying that Churchill’s true object was ‘world domination, through arms, by the United States and the British Empire’, and calling it ‘an address of threat and menace, which would pose the British and American peoples against Russia to win “peace” for a “century” through an alliance of the fortunate of the earth’. The paper decried the speech’s ‘poisonous doctrines’,32 leading Churchill to respond, robustly, ‘as the views expressed here are the stock Communist output, I feel it might be an embarrassment to you if your publications were in any way connected to me’.33
Yet the king found the speech impressive and apt, and during an audience with Churchill at Windsor upon his return told him frankly that he believed it had done much good in the world and that ‘Stalin’s tirade against W personally* showed he had a guilty conscience.’ In his diary that evening, he wrote approvingly that ‘the whole world has been waiting for a statesmanlike statement’.34 The duke concurred, informing Churchill on 5 May that ‘I welcomed your bold speech at Fulton, the frankness of which impressed me profoundly. No one but you has the experience to tell the world the true implications of Soviet foreign policy and being out of office, you were free to do so.’35
He concluded, ‘I can see no hope of avoiding a third global war in our time unless our two countries can think and act in closer harmony than they used to.’36 For now, an uneasy state of detente existed, between nations and families alike.