3

Abdication

Even as late as the beginning of 1936, the Duke of York found it impossible to believe that, when it came to the point, his brother would not shed Wallis Simpson, or at least relegate her to a background role. Most of the British Establishment shared this illusion. It is held by some that several months before the Prince of Wales acceded to the throne Baldwin, the prime minister, Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other such dignitaries had decided that he had no long-term future as monarch and must be manoeuvred into retirement. This is patently not the case. Baldwin, in particular, had formed a favourable impression of the prince when they had travelled together in Canada and elsewhere. Until long after such hopes had ceased to be realistic he continued to believe that the prince would finally be induced to put his country before his love. Like the Duke of York, he could not encompass the idea that anyone in their proper mind would set aside the glories and responsibilities of the throne to indulge a private passion. The Prince of Wales, of course, was not in his proper mind: he was blindly, besottedly in love in a way beyond the comprehension of his more temperate brother.

The trouble was that the Prince of Wales believed that he had the right to a private life and that what he did with it was his own affair. His brother, more realistically, knew that the monarch could have no private life, or at least none outside the intimate domesticity of his family. He viewed his brother’s activities with disapproval and dismay. He did not refuse to meet the prince’s mistress but he made a point of trying to avoid events when they might be together. On one occasion at least the Yorks were dining at the Dorchester when the Prince of Wales and Wallis arrived with another party. Unobtrusively, the Yorks left within a quarter of an hour.¹ From time to time they visited the prince in his hideaway of Fort Belvedere, but such occasions became increasingly rare and discreet enquiries would be made before they set out to establish whether Mrs Simpson would be present.

What was already a considerable embarrassment became calamitous when King George V died at Sandringham on 20 January 1936. His end was sudden. Some believe that the Prince of Wales was taken by surprise and that, if his father had survived for another year or two, he would have found a way of extracting himself from the line of succession and leaving the throne to the Duke of York. It is possible that he played with the idea but it seems unlikely that it went far beyond that; in any case it was too late – like it or not, he was now King Edward VIII.

Even without the unsettling presence of Mrs Simpson in the background there would have been squalls ahead. One of his admirers told him that he was ‘the most modernistic man in Europe’. He took it as a compliment. His brother would have been dismayed if a similar charge had been levelled against him. The new king’s nature was iconoclastic, he relished change for its own sake. The Duke of York viewed change with suspicion and a measure of distaste. In each individual case he would need convincing that it was really necessary and that the discarding of old practices and traditions would not create more problems than it solved. He did not openly criticize any of the new king’s vigorous, if somewhat desultory, efforts to reform the running of the court – in his eyes that would have been disloyal – but his brother can have been in little doubt that the Duke of York was out of sympathy with the pattern of the new reign.

This was one of the reasons why he found himself increasingly distanced from the day-to-day running of the monarchy. He was not being kept in the dark about the affairs of government. On the contrary, he was shown most of the important official papers and was briefed regularly on affairs of state. Some even suspect that the king made a point of ensuring that his brother knew what was going on so as to prepare a way for his own eventual retreat. But the king himself rarely spoke to his brother about matters of moment; indeed, he rarely spoke to him at all. Apart from anything else, the king was almost entirely preoccupied by his own problems. He knew that any protracted conversation with the Duke of York was certain to turn to his relationship with Mrs Simpson, and he had no wish to see his family involved in such an issue. If he had to discuss the matter with anyone it would be with the prime minister; his mother and his brothers were left to fret in isolation.

Almost the only field in which the king did ask his brother to play an active role was in the reorganization of Sandringham. It was inevitable that a large house, lavishly maintained, with an estate primarily important for its shooting, would cost a lot to run, but under George V the expenses had become exorbitant. The new king threatened to sell it – to the dismay of his brother, some of whose happiest times had been spent there. He then entrusted the Duke of York with the job of making it run more economically. The duke disliked the task but at least preferred it to the alternative of seeing Sandringham lost for ever. He set to work conscientiously and produced a long list of potential reforms, most of which were implemented when he himself became king. He was offered no similar opportunity at Balmoral, where Edward VIII unleashed a fusillade of ferocious economies, many of them at the expense of veteran servants of the estate. ‘David only told me what he had done after it was over, which I must say made me rather sad,’ the duke wrote wistfully to his mother.² He was to be sadder still before many months had passed.

Ironically, in view of what was to happen, one activity in which the king was anxious to involve his brother was planning for the coronation, which was to take place in 1937. The king was bored by ceremonies, particularly religious ones, and he disliked Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would inevitably play a large part in the celebrations. It was not surprising that, after one token appearance at the Coronation Commission, he should have appointed his brother as chairman and washed his hands of the whole affair. In fact, most of the work was done by another body, the Coronation Joint Committee, which was run by the Duke of Norfolk; so though the Duke of York was more heavily involved than the king, it did not prove to be a particularly time-consuming exercise.

As 1936 wore on it became ever more evident that in the king’s mind nothing was more important than his relationship with Mrs Simpson. The Yorks continued to stand aloof. When the king hired a yacht, the Nahlin, and cavorted for several weeks around the eastern Mediterranean, it was very evident that Mrs Simpson was a member of the party, equally noticeable that the Yorks were not. Nor did they make more than a token appearance at Balmoral. ‘It is very sad,’ the duchess told Queen Mary, ‘and I feel this whole difficulty is a certain person. I do not feel that I can make advances to her and ask her to our house, as I imagine would be liked.’³ Up till this time the king’s affair with Mrs Simpson had been conducted more or less decorously and out of the public eye; but more and more he was thrusting it forward, as if he knew that the crisis must come sooner or later and for him sooner would be better. In September 1936 he was due to open a new hospital in Aberdeen. He cried off at the last minute on the plea of pressure of work and appointed his brother to act in his stead; then drove himself to Aberdeen to meet Mrs Simpson off the train.

After their Scottish season the Yorks returned to London to receive the dread news that Mrs Simpson’s divorce would be heard at the end of October and that it would be unopposed. Until then the duke had clung to the belief that his brother would somehow pull back at the last minute, that the ultimate calamity would be averted. Now for the first time he accepted that marriage with Mrs Simpson was highly likely, if not yet quite inevitable; and that, if it took place, it would almost certainly involve the king’s renunciation of the throne. Desperately he sought an opportunity to talk to his brother; surely it would still be possible to convince him of the error of his ways? ‘He is very difficult to see,’ he told Queen Mary sadly, ‘and when one does he wants to talk about other matters.’⁴ He set his thoughts out on paper: if the king took the trouble to read the letter he certainly paid no attention to it. When the Duchess of York joined in she gained no more success. ‘Please be kind to Bertie when you see him,’ she pleaded, ‘because he loves you and minds terribly all that happens to you … We want you to be happy, more than anything else, but it’s awfully difficult for Bertie to say what he thinks, you know how shy he is – so do help him.’⁵ Probably she expected no reply; certainly she got none.

It seems that even a week or two before the abdication the king was vacillating: not about whether he should marry Mrs Simpson – that was taken for granted – but whether he should brazen it out and maintain that he could both marry Mrs Simpson and retain the throne. At one point he actually insisted that, in such a case, Wallis Simpson should be queen, but in practice he seems to have envisaged the possibility of a morganatic marriage by which Wallis would become his wife but not his royal consort. He had powerful friends who urged such a course, Winston Churchill prominent among them. If the Duke of York had been personally responsible for deciding the government’s position on such an issue, he would have been dreadfully perplexed. He was greatly concerned about his brother’s happiness; he believed that Edward VIII, once he was free to concentrate on the task, would make an excellent monarch; he dreaded the thought of taking on a role for which he felt himself inadequate; and yet every sense he had of what was proper told him that the king would so degrade himself by marrying a twice-divorced American that he could not remain on the throne. Fortunately for him, he was hardly at all involved in the affair. Either through tact or because he was not particularly interested in the duke’s view, Baldwin left him on the sidelines. It was the king himself who broke it to his brother that the die was cast: ‘It looks to me now, the way things are shaping up, that I shall probably have to go.’ The duke, according to his brother, was aghast. ‘Oh,’ he expostulated, ‘that’s a dreadful thing to hear. None of us wants that, I least of all.’⁶

On 8 December 1936 the Duke of York dined at Royal Lodge with the king and the prime minister. The king was in sparkling form, according to his admiring brother, telling Baldwin things about the conditions in the mining areas of south Wales of which the prime minister was unaware. ‘And this is the man we are going to lose,’ the duke murmured in awe to Walter Monckton, Edward VIII’s most trusted adviser. He made one last futile effort to persuade the king to change his mind, then returned to London to break the news to his mother. ‘When I told her what had happened,’ he wrote, ‘I broke down and sobbed like a child.’⁷ But by now he had accepted the inevitable and resolved that he must go through with it. ‘If the worst happens and I have to take over,’ he had written a few days before, ‘… I will do my best to clear up the inevitable mess, if the whole fabric does not crumble under the shock and strain of it.’⁸

He believed that the whole fabric was indeed likely to crumble. He exaggerated the popularity of the king, exaggerated his doubts about his own inadequacy, underestimated the stability of the monarchy as an institution. He listened to his brother’s farewell broadcast to the nation on 11 December, was profoundly moved by it, and felt that it was likely to provoke a wave of sympathy which would make his task impossible. The king’s farewell was indeed poignant and touched many hearts, but the account of it which, in its chilling way, rings most true is that of the Conservative MP and socialite Chips Channon. Channon was dining with the Stanleys that evening and the party gathered around the radio to hear the words of the man who, a few hours before, had signed the Instrument of Abdication. ‘It was a manly, sincere farewell,’ wrote Channon. ‘There was a stillness in the Stanleys’ room. I wept, and I murmured a prayer for he who had once been King Edward VIII. Then we played bridge.’⁹ For Britain too there was time for a tear and then it was back to the bridge table. The people accepted what had happened, deplored it, lamented briefly and then put the matter behind them and got on with life.

Part of that life was the new king, George VI. He found it hard to believe that he could carry it off. To his cousin, Louis Mountbatten, he poured out his doubts: he was unprepared for the job, he said, he had scarcely ever seen a state paper, his brother had had more than forty years to prepare for the role, he had no experience except that of a naval officer. Mountbatten was more than happy to offer consolation. By a curious coincidence, he said, the future King George V had called on Mountbatten’s father when his elder brother, the Duke of Clarence, Prince Eddy, had died in 1892 and he had found himself abruptly transformed into the heir to the throne. Exactly like the new King George VI he had protested that he was unprepared for the role; all he knew in life was how to be a naval officer. ‘George, you’re wrong,’ Mountbatten’s father had replied. ‘There is no more fitting preparation for a King than to have been trained in the Royal Navy.’¹⁰ Whether or not George VI was wholly convinced by this reasoning, he seems to have found it comforting. History was to prove it true.