ON 16 JANUARY 1936 THE PRINCE WAS SHOOTING IN Windsor Great Park, ‘in the highest spirits,’ said Duff Cooper, who was a guest.1 A message was brought to him from his mother: the King was ill, he was breathless, had no energy, and was very sleepy during the day. He was in no immediate danger, but it would be a good thing if the Prince were to invite himself to Sandringham for the weekend.2 The Prince was there the following morning, to find his father half unconscious. Bronchial catarrh had affected an already weakened heart, he was visibly sinking and seemed unlikely to rally. On Saturday night the Prince wrote to Mrs Simpson to tell her that all hope for his father had been abandoned. ‘You are all and everything I have in life and WE must hold each other so tight,’ he concluded. ‘It will all work out right for us.’3
On Sunday the 19th the Prince drove to London to break it to the Prime Minister that his father had no more than a few days to live. Baldwin told Chamberlain next day that he had been pleased by his visitor’s attitude and ‘evident sense of his responsibilities’.4 The occasion was an emotional one; as he was leaving Mrs Baldwin said, ‘We have faith in you,’ and he pressed her hand in gratitude. But the Prime Minister had his reservations. ‘It is a tragedy that he is not married,’ he told Tom Jones. ‘He had been to see Mrs S before he came to see me. She has a flat now. The subject is never mentioned between us. Nor is there any man who can handle him.’5
Back at Sandringham a Council of State had been set up to fill the role of the dying monarch; the Queen and her four sons were its members and they passed the few hours of its existence in coping with the backlog of papers that needed the King’s attention. At tea time on 20 January, recorded the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, ‘The Queen was still amazingly calm and strong, the Prince of Wales full of vitality and talk, and touchingly attentive to the Queen.’6 There were only a few hours more to wait. At five minutes to midnight the King died. Queen Mary’s first act was to take her eldest son’s hand and kiss it. The Duke of Kent, who was standing next to her, followed her example. Like it or not, for better or worse, Edward had become King.
His grief seemed to some extravagant. ‘The Prince of Wales became hysterical, cried loudly, and kept on embracing the Queen,’ Wigram remembered.7 His emotion was ‘frantic and unreasonable’, wrote Helen Hardinge. ‘In its outward manifestation, it far exceeded that of his mother and his three brothers, although they had loved King George V at least as much as he had … While he demanded attention for his own feelings, he seemed completely unaware of those of others.’8 The death of a close relation takes people in different ways, some slip into almost catatonic shock, others – perhaps more fortunate – can let out their grief in noisy lamentation. The new King was of the latter school. It was natural for him to bruit his sorrow abroad, as natural as it was for his mother to take refuge in cool restraint. Even when he was most alienated from his father he had craved for his approval; that approval now could never be won. Instead he was thrust into that position of vertiginous eminence which he had always dreaded. He had had forty years in which to prepare himself for the moment when he became King, but when it happened it came with all the shock of the unexpected and the unknown. He was unsettled, he was frightened, and he was very much alone.
Since the reign of Edward VII the clocks at Sandringham had always been kept half an hour fast. The new King had barely left his father’s deathbed before he ordered that they should be put back to the proper time. ‘I wonder what other customs will be put back also,’ pondered Lang apprehensively.9 This act has been much criticized as being at the best insensitive, at the worst symbolizing a brutal rejection of his father’s standards. Helen Hardinge called it ‘a jarring descent to the trivial’ which caused much distress to the old courtiers and retainers,10 while Virginia Woolf imagined it to be the revenge of a man who had been ‘daily so insulted by the King that he was determined immediately to expunge his memory’.11 The haste was indeed maladroit; Edward VIII would have done better to leave the reform for a few days, if only to avoid reactions like those of Mrs Woolf. But in no way was it a gesture of defiance aimed at his family, or calculated to shock his mother. On the contrary the Duke of York professed himself delighted to hear what had been done and Queen Mary volunteered that she had ‘always loathed’ the eccentric system of Sandringham time.12
‘King Edward VIII,’ announced Baldwin rotundly in the House of Commons, ‘brings to the altar of public service a personality richly endowed with the experience of public affairs, with the fruits of travel and universal good will. He has the secret of youth in the prime of age. He has a wider and more intimate knowledge of all classes of his subjects … than any of his predecessors.’13 The first reaction to the accession of the new monarch was generally to join with Baldwin in praise of his qualities and his qualifications. ‘He starts with the great advantage of having visited every part of the Empire and of being personally known by all its inhabitants,’ wrote the Duke of Connaught. ‘He is too very well known by most of the people of the Kingdom and to be [sic] very popular with them.’14 Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, referred approvingly to his charm and ‘genuine solicitude for the unemployed’.15 The new King did, indeed, seem formidably well equipped for his new task. He was a better speaker than his father, quicker-witted, with incomparably greater charm. ‘He knows an enormous amount of general knowledge, never forgets names, knows statistics and really has the mind of the average man par excellence,’ wrote Cecil Beaton16 – and the mind of the average man par excellence was exactly what was needed by a constitutional monarch in the twentieth century. Paul Gore Booth, a young diplomat recently posted to Vienna, was struck the following year by his ‘extraordinary range of knowledge, experience and interest’, though detecting slight inaccuracies on any subject with which Gore Booth was particularly acquainted.17 His memory was agreed by all to be truly royal – ‘remarkable,’ said Esher, ‘astonishing,’ Helen Hardinge, ‘prodigious,’ his secretary Dina Hood.18 If a committee had been set up to devise a pattern for a modern monarch, it would have ended up with something very similar to what the country had now acquired.
George V was no democrat, Wigram wrote to the new Governor General in Australia; he ‘felt his people wanted him to keep up the state of a King … Now we have another type of King. One of the new generation, a product of the war. No King could have a better start than King Edward. He is well known and the whole Empire is solid behind him. He is keenly interested in social problems and the working classes. There may be diversity of gifts but I am sure there is the same spirit.’19 Anyone who knew Wigram would have detected the note of pious hope in that panegyric. He was not alone in his doubts. Baldwin freely admitted to those he knew well, and some he did not, his uncertainty about the future.20 ‘My heart goes out to the Prince of Wales tonight,’ wrote Channon, as George V lay dying, ‘as he will mind so terribly being King. His loneliness, his seclusion, his isolation will be almost more than his highly strung and unimaginative nature can bear.’21
In the little circle that made up informed London, there were rumours that Edward VIII would renounce the throne, or at least that he had only accepted it with reluctance. Alan Don, the Archbishop’s principal adviser at Lambeth Palace, was told that the new King was to turn Roman Catholic as the easiest means to escape from his unwelcome task: ‘This was told me by a Diocesan Bishop who had just been talking to an ex-Cabinet Minister.’22 Diocesan Bishop or not, Don rightly dismissed such prattle; but it is harder categorically to gainsay the belief of Alan Lascelles that the Prince had been caught napping by the King’s death and that given a few months more he would have opted out of the line of succession and retired into private life with Mrs Simpson. Once he had told Lascelles that he was keeping the Canadian ranch so as to have somewhere to which he could retire. ‘You mean for a holiday, Sir?’ asked Lascelles. ‘No, I mean for good.’23 Hardinge was equally certain that another six months would have seen the Prince out of the line of succession.24
One cannot ignore the opinion of men so close to the throne, nor can it ever be proved that they were wrong. The Prince of Wales must from time to time have contemplated the delights of a life free from pomp and the demands of duty, and played with the idea of escaping from the gilded prison of the Palace. In many ways he dreaded the prospect of the succession and would have postponed it as long as he could. Yet in the last resort it was his life, it was what he had been born for. To deny it was to deny his destiny. The time was to come when he would find the throne intolerable, but it was to take a stimulus far sharper than any which he experienced in January 1936 to drive him into abdication. What he hoped for when he acceded was that he would be able to run the monarchy in his own way, to preserve his privacy and his freedom of action, to live his own life within the walls of formality and tradition that encompassed him. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too; to be the King and yet retain the freedom of an ordinary mortal. Only when that proved impossible did abdication seem to him the sole remaining move that he could make.
For the moment he could still hope. He was borne along by the adulation and the heady scent of glory that encompasses any new incumbent of a throne. He had enough sense of history, enough pride in his ancestry and his country, to feel his spirit rise within him at Winston Churchill’s dedication of himself to his new King and his ‘heartfelt wishes that a reign which has been so nobly begun may be blessed with peace and true glory; and that in the long swing of events Your Majesty’s name will shine in history as the bravest and best beloved of all the sovereigns who have worn the island Crown’.25
The morning after George V’s death the King and the Duke of York flew to London – the first time that a British monarch had travelled in an aeroplane. ‘David very brave and helpful, for he has a difficult task before him,’ wrote Queen Mary in her diary.26 An early ordeal to face was the Accession Privy Council. More than a hundred of the country’s foremost dignitaries gathered at St James’s Palace to witness Edward VIII’s first public appearance. He was ‘solemn, grave, sad and dignified’, reported Duff Cooper.27 It was an occasion on which not to have been all those things would have called for comment, but the calm confidence of his bearing impressed everyone. His short speech produced more mixed reactions. Cooper thought it excellent and told Mrs Simpson so. She responded by repeating it word for word. ‘Apparently he had spent a very long time composing it – walking up and down the room and dictating it to her. But it had been his own idea.’28 ‘Happily-phrased,’ Amery thought it, even if Edward VIII had been defeated by the word ‘entituled’ and after one or two shots plumped for ‘instituted’.29*6 But to the more censorious Neville Chamberlain, the King looked nervous and uncomfortable. His speech ‘did not contain anything original or striking and made but little impression’.30
The proclamation of the new King by Garter King of Arms at St James’s Palace followed the next morning. Edward VIII arranged for Mrs Simpson to view the ceremony from a convenient window, then at the last minute decided to break with precedent by watching himself proclaimed and hurried across to join her. It was an unobtrusive gesture, but Diana Cooper spotted the two standing together at the window and mentioned it to her husband. ‘This is just the kind of thing that I hope so much he won’t do,’ wrote Duff in his diary. ‘It causes so much criticism and does so much harm.’31 Walking away from the scene of the proclamation, Wallis Simpson mentioned to Godfrey Thomas that it had brought home to her how very different the King’s life was in future going to be.32 Almost the only man who did not accept the truth of this was Edward VIII himself; if his life did not remain essentially the same it was not going to be for want of trying on his part.
Back at Sandringham George V’s body was carried on a gun carriage to the railway station three miles away, with the royal brothers and the late King’s shooting pony, Jock, walking behind. For four days the body was to lie in state in Westminster Hall while more than a million mourners filed past. It was as the cortège wound through the streets from King’s Cross to Westminster that the Maltese cross fell from the top of the Imperial Crown, which was resting on the coffin, and had to be surreptitiously retrieved by the Sergeant-Major of the Grenadier escort. Many people later claimed to have found something sinister in this widely reported accident, but for the most part their dire prognostications remained unuttered until the reign had prematurely ended. It was only a few days after the event, however, that Godfrey Thomas wrote: ‘I am not superstitious but it confirms me in my conviction that he is not fitted to be King and that his reign will end in disaster. Increased responsibility may work a miracle but I don’t think he will last very long. One could prop up the facade for a Prince of Wales – not so easy for a King.’33 That Edward VIII’s oldest friend and secretary for nearly twenty years could write in such terms within a few days of the accession was an augury for the future far more ominous than a few jewels tumbling into the gutter.
The King is usually credited with proposing that he and his three brothers, late one night, should replace the officers of the Household troops who normally stood guard around the catafalque and themselves take on the vigil. It was entirely his own idea, wrote Helen Hardinge, ‘and it showed how priceless his imagination could have been to his country … It was to us then an act typical of the new King at his best, and a hopeful indication for the future.’34 Praise was not often lavished on Edward VIII from this quarter and it seems churlish to seek to diminish it, but according to Lord Stair, who at that time was Adjutant of the Scots Guards, it was the Duke of York who conceived the idea and promised to put it to the King.35 Whoever first thought of it, however, Edward VIII espoused it enthusiastically, as something that was both an excellent piece of public relations and a gesture of genuine respect and affection for a departed father. Nothing was said about the plan in advance, lest it should be cheapened by publicity; Edward VIII gave Aird another reason, he was afraid that if the news leaked out, ‘King Carol of Romania might have come and insisted on standing on top of the coffin’.36
Once more the coffin took to the streets for its last journey to Windsor. Lady Ravensdale said the King ‘marched badly and looked bored’,37 but no one else seems to have seen anything amiss. Many years later he recalled that it was one of the only occasions in his life when he had felt absolutely alone. The worst moment came when the procession was rounding Marble Arch and the police cordon broke. The crowd swept towards the gun carriage and for a moment he thought that the coffin was about to be thrown to the ground while he stood by helplessly. So vivid was his recollection of the incident that when King George VI was buried he announced his intention of visiting every police checkpoint along the route to ensure that the same thing did not happen again.38
The harmony within the royal family that followed the death of the King did not survive for long. On 22 January George V’s will was read at Sandringham. Some £¾ million went to each of the royal Dukes and the Princess Royal; nothing was left to the eldest son. Only Queen Mary, the King and Wigram were present when the royal solicitor, Sir Bernard Halsey-Bircham, delivered this news – news, one suspects, only to Edward VIII. ‘Where do I come in?’ he asked. Wigram tried to explain that George V had assumed that he, as Prince of Wales, would have built up a substantial fortune out of the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall and had no need of any more. King Edward VII had similarly left nothing to his eldest son. The King was unconvinced. His anguish must have been heightened by the fact that it was only a few days since he had released his father’s estate from a loan of almost £90,000 made from the Duchy of Cornwall revenues in 1915 to enable the King to purchase additional land at Sandringham.39 He kept on saying: ‘My brothers and sister have got large sums, but I have been left out.’40
Alan Lascelles met the King as he left the room after the reading of the will, ‘striding down the passage with a face blacker than any thunderstorm’. He went straight to his room and for a long time remained secluded there, speaking on the telephone. Lascelles was convinced that up to this moment the King had intended to renounce the throne almost immediately but that now, encouraged by Mrs Simpson, he decided to stay on and extract whatever additional fortune he could out of it.41 Lascelles by 1936 was by no means disposed to give the benefit of any doubt to his former employer. Probably he attributed to the King clear-cut designs which in fact had hardly begun to form. But his father’s will had come as a painful shock to Edward VIII, a shock not diminished by the fact that he had already accumulated great wealth and could expect to do as much again out of savings from the Civil List and the Privy Purse. He had believed, and must have promised Mrs Simpson, that another huge fortune would soon be theirs; it was not to be, and the disappointment he felt for himself was a hundred times worse because it would distress and anger the woman he loved.
Among all the thousands of people who wrote to Edward VIII to commiserate with him on his father’s death, only one, Diana Cooper, referred directly to Wallis Simpson: ‘Wallis … is and always will be the most wonderful friend and help to me,’ he wrote in his reply. ‘She gives me the courage to carry on.’42 The day before he wrote this letter Baldwin had sent for Duff Cooper to say how disturbed he was about the affair. ‘If she were what I call a respectable whore, I wouldn’t mind,’ he said, a description which Cooper took to mean ‘somebody whom the King occasionally saw in secret but didn’t spend his whole time with’. Baldwin’s hope seemed to have been that Duff Cooper would talk to Mrs Simpson and persuade her to leave the country, for a time at any rate. ‘I shall certainly do nothing of the kind,’ wrote Cooper in his diary. He knew that it would achieve nothing except to poison his relationship with the new King.43 But still scarcely anybody believed that this was more than an embarrassing entanglement which might give rise to a public scandal but would not drag on too long. Time, in the end, would solve the problem; he would grow bored with her and seek a younger substitute. The worst that Lord Crawford could contemplate was that, if he were too openly criticized, he might ‘do something fatuous by talking of abdication: he has done so en famille before now’. That he might do more than talk of abdication seemed inconceivable; Crawford pinned his hopes on the influence of Queen Mary and, even more, on the King’s own fickleness.44
The affair was still far from being a public scandal. Only a handful of people in the British Isles had even heard of Mrs Simpson, and of these few believed she would present an insuperable problem. Tom Jones voiced a hope that many cherished when he wondered ‘whether it is going to be a case of the Prince in Shakespeare’s Henry IV and the King in Henry V’.45 Lord Harewood made the same point, claiming that Edward VIII would prove himself a better and wiser monarch than Henry V.46 The analogy between Mrs Simpson and Falstaff was far-fetched and flimsy and none of those who worked most closely with the King believed that he would banish her as Henry V had banished the fat knight. The most that they hoped was that he would continue to keep her in hugger-mugger and not flaunt her in the full light of day. Their hopes were soon to be eroded.