UNTIL THE VERY END OF KING EDWARD VIII’S REIGN HE could, when the circumstances were right, play the royal role with outstanding skill and gusto. On 11 November he went with the First Lord, Hoare, to spend two days with the Home Fleet at Portland. Away from what seemed to him his enemies at court and in Whitehall, visiting the service which was still closest to his heart, he relaxed, enjoyed himself, and gave vast pleasure to the sailors in so doing. Hoare wrote of ‘his surpassing talent for inspiring enthusiasm and managing great crowds’. At a smoking concert on HMS Courageous he announced that he was going to see what was going on at the other end of the hall. He pushed his way through and ‘started community singing to the accompaniment of a seaman’s mouth organ. When he came back to the platform, he made an impromptu speech that brought the house down … Here, indeed, was the Prince Charming, who could win the hearts of all sorts and conditions of men and women.’1
Prince Charming returned to Fort Belvedere, riding on a wave of euphoria, to find awaiting him a letter from his private secretary, Alec Hardinge. It warned him, in terms that to Hardinge seemed measured and sympathetic and to the King brutally offensive, that the government were growing alarmed at his relationship with Mrs Simpson, that an approach would shortly be made to him which – if rejected – might lead to the government’s resignation, and that the silence of the press could not last much longer and would probably break within the next few days. Hardinge ended with a plea that Mrs Simpson should leave the country without any delay.2
As a conscientious private secretary it was Hardinge’s duty to tell the King what was going on. The pity was that the news had to come from a man whom the King disliked and distrusted. If Godfrey Thomas had been in Hardinge’s shoes he would have insisted on telling the King face to face and would have spoken as a proven friend of many years’ standing. It might not have made any difference in the long run, but at least the private secretary might have remained at the King’s side during the coming crisis. As it was, the King’s reaction was to refuse to have anything more to do with Hardinge, whom he assumed to be Baldwin’s agent: ‘Who could have told Alec Hardinge all this but the Prime Minister?’ he asked Beaverbrook.3 Hardinge was hurt; his letter had not been intended as an ultimatum, he protested, but a friendly warning.4 He told Baldwin that he had heard no reaction of any kind: ‘This is rather what I anticipated, but it does not necessarily mean that the warning has been ignored.’5
Hardinge had written when he did because he had been told two affidavits alleging collusion in Mrs Simpson’s divorce proceedings were in the process of being filed. If these seemed to provide a prima facie case requiring investigation, the King’s Proctor would be bound to reopen the case and the King’s alleged misconduct with Mrs Simpson might be cited as grounds for annulment of the divorce.6 The possibility was widely mooted. ‘Will the King’s Proctor intervene?’ asked Ramsay MacDonald. ‘It will be a scandal if he does not.’ Hardinge said nothing of this to the King, but if Edward VIII was ignorant of the risk, his eyes were opened a few days later when Walter Monckton, the old friend and barrister who had been appointed Attorney General to the Duchy of Cornwall and in effect was to play the role that should have been Hardinge’s in the coming crisis, wrote to warn him that a temporary separation from Mrs Simpson would be the most prudent course. Nothing must be done to support the cause of those who wanted to upset the divorce and thus make it impossible for the King and Mrs Simpson eventually to marry. It would be difficult if not impossible to interfere with the progress of the divorce if the King remained on his throne and was thus immune from involvement in the legal proceedings. To be sure that he could marry Mrs Simpson, therefore, the King could not afford to abdicate; yet it was to become increasingly obvious over the next few weeks that abdication was the price he would have to pay if a marriage were to be possible.7 In any case, the danger of the divorce being upset should be minimized as far as possible. Though urging prudence Monckton did not at that stage take the threat very seriously. Nor did the Home Secretary, who considered the prospect of any private person intervening as being remote in the extreme.8
Hardinge’s letter persuaded the King that he could no longer remain inactive while events unrolled around him. On 16 November he asked the Prime Minister to call on him at Buckingham Palace. If he had not done so, the Prime Minister would soon have taken a similar initiative. Three days before he had presided over a conclave of senior ministers – Ramsay MacDonald, Simon, Runciman, Chamberlain and Halifax. Chamberlain had prepared two drafts for their consideration: a letter of formal advice to the King urging a rapid end to the liaison, and an informal letter telling the King of the first document’s existence and stating that, if it were presented and ignored, the government would resign.9 Baldwin sensibly pointed out that if the fact that the government had adopted so minatory an approach became generally known, it would put the public on the King’s side. He ensured that the drafts were buried with as little debate as possible. But he could defer action no longer; MacDonald caught the sense of the meeting when he wrote in his diary: ‘Agreed that the scandal should be ended and HM brought right up against it.’10
When Baldwin was given the opportunity to bring the King right up against it, the two men unsurprisingly left somewhat different accounts of their meeting. Baldwin told the Cabinet that the King had stated his definite intention of marrying Mrs Simpson. ‘You are right about public opinion in this country, so I shall go,’ he stated, adding plaintively that nobody minded if he had a mistress but they seemed to draw the line at a wife.11 Edward VIII in his account agreed that he did state his intention to marry and to abdicate if necessary, but went on to insist that this would be because of the attitude of the government, not because he believed it was really the will of the people – a subject about which he was satisfied he knew quite as much as Baldwin.12 The effect at any rate was the same: Helen Hardinge, overwhelmed by the secrecy of the information, wrote in her diary in French so as to baffle any spy, ‘Le Premier Ministre a vu le roi ce soir. C’est fini – le Souverain va partir.’13 She was premature in her conclusion, but Baldwin would not have disputed the essential correctness of her judgment. He told his colleagues that he doubted whether he had made any impression on the King; with this part of his presentation Edward VIII would undoubtedly have concurred.
The only two people in the Cabinet whom Edward VIII felt were truly his friends were Hoare and Duff Cooper. With Baldwin’s approval he saw them both. Hoare admitted ‘that I was more nervous of the meeting than I had been even of my first encounter with Gandhi’ (an analogy that must have startled the Duke of Windsor if he read Hoare’s memoirs when they came out in 1954).14 The King said that he had little expectation of finding Hoare a champion but had hoped that he might be at least an advocate for his cause.15 Hoare, however, was not to be drawn into such an exposed position. He insisted that the country would be solidly behind Baldwin in his opposition to the match, and when the King doubted this, added that the Empire would not stand for it. From this, he told Chamberlain, the King did not dissent.16 In his own notes of the meeting he added: ‘Decision irrevocable,’ and then, more revealingly, ‘No single middle-aged man willingly stays in a tomb.’17
Duff Cooper was predictably more stalwart, though to judge from the account written in his diary immediately after the conversation, not quite so ‘encouraging and optimistic’ as the King imagined.18 Edward VIII began by saying that his father’s position and popularity had depended on his happy married life and that he had concluded that it would be the same with him; he could not be a successful monarch except with a wife whom he loved. Cooper pointed out that the blame for the catastrophe if it occurred would fall on Mrs Simpson – a suggestion which shook the King, who said it ‘would be very unfair’ – and followed this up by painting a lurid picture of the existence of an ex-monarch, citing Alfonso of Spain as an example. ‘Oh, I shan’t be like Alfonso,’ expostulated the King. ‘He was kicked out. I shall go of my own accord.’ But what will you do? asked Cooper. ‘Oh, you know me, Duff. I’m always busy. I shall find plenty to do.’ Cooper relented; with time, he suggested, it might be possible to have both throne and wife. If Wallis went abroad, remained there for a year or so, anyway until the Coronation was safely over, then the country might grow reconciled to the idea. The King was not impressed by the proposal. ‘He said he would not like to go through a solemn ceremony like the coronation without being perfectly frank with the country … “Mind you,” he went on, “if I can stay and marry, Wallis is going to be Queen or nothing.” If he had the thought of a morganatic marriage, he had evidently dismissed it from his mind.’ Cooper’s parting shot was to remark how shocked the country would be if the King married a twice-divorced woman. ‘He winced at the word “twice” and said that the first marriage hadn’t really counted. What, if anything, he meant by that, I didn’t enquire.’19
Two days later Cooper took Mrs Simpson aside after dinner and tried to impress on her the importance of leaving the country. ‘She said he would not hear of it, and that if she went he would follow her.’20 Cooper believed that, on the contrary, if she went, there was at least a chance he would forget her, and used to claim that this was the thinking behind the advice he gave to the King. Wigram was less charitable about Duff Cooper’s motives. Edward VIII, he wrote, had seen Hoare and Cooper, ‘two careerists whom HM has been cultivating, probably with the object of having them on his side, should such a crisis occur’. Hoare, however, ‘is a man of religion, and reports say he took a firm line with HM’.21 About Cooper, clearly, he was less confident.
Briefly, the crisis was shelved while the King toured the mining villages of south Wales. As with his visit to the Fleet a week before, the occasion brought out the best in him: he was indefatigable, endlessly interested, sympathetic without being mawkish, bringing into the lives of the unemployed and destitute a ray of hope and the conviction that one person in high places at least cared about their plight. ‘The Welsh visit went extremely well,’ Hardinge told Baldwin; relieved no doubt to have something on which he could report favourably about his employer. ‘The reception was everywhere splendid and there was no discordant note.’22 Ministers were less pleased. ‘These escapades should be limited,’ MacDonald wrote in his diary. ‘They are an invasion into the field of politics and should be watched constitutionally.’23 The visit is best remembered for the King’s remark when confronted by one scene of particularly dismal urban squalor: ‘Something must be done.’*10 That he did in fact care, and was genuinely moved by what he saw, is incontestable: the visit had been ‘very strenuous and heart-rending’, he told his mother, ‘but the spirit of these poor people is marvellous’.24 That other matters swept the memory from his mind is no less obvious. But when he got back to London he was still full of it, and held forth endlessly on all he had seen at a dinner party the same night. He blamed the communists as much as the government for what had gone wrong; ‘agitation and bolshevism’ above all had ruined the chances of south Wales.25
A flurry of rumours, the most extravagant attributed, probably unfairly, to the Minister of Transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha, now circulated in London. The King had been given three weeks in which to renounce Mrs Simpson or face the resignation of his government. He had taken up the challenge, proposed to speed up the Simpson divorce, marry Mrs Simpson at Windsor, appeal to the nation. Winston Churchill had agreed to form a new ‘royalist’ government. The King, wrote Channon darkly, ‘is going the dictator way’.26 MacDonald was equally alarmed: ‘The danger is that a new Govt might get hold of the Executive and act as dictators. A person like Churchill might well put his hand to that job!’27 Monckton was sufficiently put out by such stories to write to Baldwin assuring him that the King’s position was unchanged. ‘He will not do anything precipitate or selfish, saving il gran rifiuto.’28 But it was soon apparent that the King was having second thoughts about the need for his abdication. Baldwin told Lang that this arose from the ‘evidence of his popularity’ he had encountered while on his Welsh tour. ‘On his return he seemed to waver.’29 Certainly the enthusiasm of the Welsh crowds had bolstered his confidence, but there was a more immediate cause for his change of mood. The idea of a morganatic marriage – that Mrs Simpson might be his wife but not his Queen – which he had told Duff Cooper was out of the question, had been revived and suddenly seemed less impossible.
It is surprising that he had not harboured the idea before. Three weeks earlier, Harold Nicolson had referred to ‘very serious rumours’ that the King would marry Mrs Simpson and create her Duchess of Edinburgh.30 Neville Chamberlain had heard the reports and taken comfort from Warren Fisher’s dogmatic assertion that ‘any woman whom the King marries is ipso facto Queen Consort … This makes a morganatic marriage, which I thought a dangerous possibility, out of the question.’31 King Edward VIII had probably rejected the idea as being unworthy of Mrs Simpson. During his visit to Wales, however, the press magnate, Esmond Harmsworth – acting, Leo Amery believed, on Churchill’s inspiration32 – had taken Mrs Simpson to lunch at Claridges and put the possibility to her. She was doubtful but did not rule it out, and her cautious acquiescence induced the King to reconsider a solution which would give him the companionship he craved while allowing him to retain the throne.
Precisely what the King’s attitude was towards the proposal is hard to establish. Both Lord Beaverbrook and Ulick Alexander quote him as saying, ‘I always thought I would get away with a morganatic marriage’33 – Beaverbrook, however, probably basing himself on Alexander’s testimony. The word ‘always’ begs a lot of questions but suggests an acceptance of the idea pre-dating his return from Wales. On the other hand, he told the lawyer William Jowitt many years later that morganatic marriage was something to which he would never have assented.34 Probably the truth is that he had played with the idea over many months, but only espoused it when all else failed; Mrs Simpson reported him as saying: ‘I’ll try anything in the spot I’m in now.’35
The more he thought of it, the more it appealed to him. By the time he saw the Prime Minister again on 25 November it had become a preferred solution. ‘He wanted Mrs Simpson to be a Duchess,’ Baldwin complained to a colleague, ‘not to be royal, but less than royal, but rather better than the ordinary Duchess.’36 It was not inconceivable; the Liberal politician Lord Lothian for one thought it a possible compromise, though difficult to sell to the middle classes or the Empire.37 Baldwin, however, found it repugnant. The mere fact that it was advocated by Harmsworth was enough to make him disapprove it: ‘a disgustingly conceited fellow and yet curiously timid at heart,’ he described the press magnate, while his paper, the Daily Mail, Baldwin told the King, was ‘the worst judge in England of what the people were thinking’.38 ‘Is this the sort of thing I’ve stood for in public life?’ the Prime Minister asked Thomas Jones,39 while he told the King that public opinion would not tolerate it. ‘I believe many people would be sorry to see me go,’ said the King wistfully. Baldwin agreed, but insisted that they would not be willing to see him stay on the terms proposed. Duff Cooper tried to persuade the Prime Minister that the idea was at least worth consideration, but found him adamant that neither the House of Commons nor the Dominions would accept it.40 At all costs Baldwin wanted to avoid an open clash between the monarch and his ministers. He told King Edward VIII of the words of a Clydeside MP: ‘I see we are going to have a fascist King, are we?’41
Once the proposal for a morganatic marriage was on the board, however, it had to be formally disposed of. Baldwin buried it with all due ceremony. Even before his meeting with the King he had sounded out the opposition. He called in Archibald Sinclair for the Liberals and Attlee for Labour and asked what their reactions would be if the King refused to give way and the government resigned. He felt certain that Sinclair would promise to back the government but was less sure about Attlee. There was a strong emotional attachment among socialists to Edward VIII, because of his stand on poverty and the unemployed, and many, like Francis Williams, editor of the Daily Herald, were at first inclined to say, ‘“Good luck to the King”, and let him marry whoever he pleases.’42 Attlee, however, unhesitatingly told the Prime Minister that the Labour voters would have no objection to an American marriage as such, but would not accept Mrs Simpson or a morganatic marriage. He found that he had correctly gauged his party’s attitude. ‘Despite the sympathy felt for the King and the affection which his visits to the depressed areas had created, the Party – with the exception of the intelligentsia, who can be trusted to take the wrong view on any subject – were in agreement with the views I had expressed.’43 ‘Our people won’t ’ave it,’ said Ernest Bevin bluntly,44 while Walter Citrine more rotundly told Baldwin that he was ‘undoubtedly interpreting the minds of people in the Labour movement’.45
Fortified by this support, Baldwin on 27 November raised the matter in the Cabinet. The morganatic marriage found not a single champion, Chamberlain being the most vociferous opponent: if it were accepted, he had written in his diary two days before, it ‘wd only be the prelude to the further step of making Mrs S Queen with full rights’.46 Even Duff Cooper accepted that it was no solution, he contented himself with pleading for a year’s delay on the grounds that ‘when the wrong people wanted to marry one another the best expedient was usually to persuade them to wait a year’.47 He reinforced his argument with the claim that the King ‘might destroy himself if by her action or ours he could not marry her’.48 He got no support – the situation had gone too far. The bogeyman who was invoked frequently during the meeting was Winston Churchill. When Baldwin had asked him whether he would take the same line as Attlee and Sinclair, he answered cautiously that ‘though his attitude was a little different, he would certainly support the Government’.49 But could he be trusted? If the government resigned in direct confrontation with the King, would Churchill resist the temptation to take up the gauntlet and endeavour to form an alternative ministry? If this happened, wrote the Secretary of State for India, Lord Zetland, ‘there would be a grave risk of the country being divided into two camps – for and against the King. This would clearly be fraught with danger of the most formidable kind.’50
It was time to bring in the Dominions. Beaverbrook, who had hurried back from the United States at the King’s behest, claimed to know that the telegrams requesting the opinions of the Dominion governments on the choice between abdication and a morganatic marriage had been phrased by Baldwin in such terms as to make it inevitable that they would opt for abdication. By allowing Baldwin to consult first the Cabinet and then the Dominions on such a basis, the King had deprived himself of any freedom of action. He would now be faced by the brutal choice between accepting the advice that would be given him or leaving the throne. Beaverbrook urged the King to have the telegrams recalled, but it was too late for that.51 In fact the drafts had been prepared by the Secretary of State for the Dominions, Malcolm MacDonald, and his Permanent Under Secretary,52 but they were undoubtedly couched in terms which expected a negative reply. After explaining the morganatic proposal the draft included the sentence: ‘I feel convinced that neither the Parliament nor the great majority of the public here should or would accept such a plan.’ To this the Cabinet made their position unequivocally clear by adding, ‘any more than they would accept the proposal that Mrs Simpson should become Queen’.53
The responses were predictable. The Australians were the most decided. The Prime Minister cabled that: ‘There would be outspoken hostility to His Majesty’s proposed wife becoming Queen, while any proposal that she should become Consort and not Queen … would not be approved by my Government.’54 The High Commissioner told Baldwin that he had been so distressed by events that he and his wife would probably have refused to attend the Coronation, to let things drag on would be disastrous, abdication was the only solution.55 There is always some doubt how far such lofty sentiments reflect the true feelings of the man in the street. It is worth quoting the despatch sent to Washington from the American mission in Canberra after abdication had become inevitable: ‘Australian opinion was virtually a unit in holding that no other solution was possible without weakening the ties of Empire … The Australian outlook on life is distinctly middle-class, and on morals is distinctly Victorian.’56 From Sydney the American Consul reported that ‘with the exception of the Radical Labor Group’ all elements considered abdication to be the proper solution.57
The Canadians were less forthright. Mackenzie King stated that they would prefer abdication to Mrs Simpson becoming Queen or Consort, but went on: ‘Were it believed King’s abdication was something imposed by his Ministers … and not a step voluntarily proposed by His Majesty himself for reasons of State, the whole matter would I believe be very differently regarded.’ If he did abdicate, the Prime Minister believed, his action ‘would win for him if that were possible an even greater measure of affection and influence than … he at present enjoys’.58 But for the two divorces, he told the US minister, ‘marriage to a woman of Mrs Simpson’s strong character and good influence on the King would have been well received’.59 A sidewalk poll in Ottawa showed that 75 per cent of the women thought the King should renounce Mrs Simpson, but 65 per cent of the men wanted him to marry as he pleased.60 On 8 December Baldwin asked Mackenzie King whether he could quote him as saying that Canadian public opinion had been seriously perturbed by the affair. King refused: ‘While anxious to be helpful, Canada and he would be put in a wholly wrong light if impression was conveyed that … Canadian opinion had been a determining factor in the situation.’61
South Africa was categoric. Abdication was the lesser of two evils: it will be a great shock, cabled Hertzog, but ‘marriage under the circumstances will prove a permanent wound’.62 There was no trace of any disposition on the part of the public to accept Mrs Simpson, reported the American Minister.63 The Prime Minister of New Zealand was less emphatic. Mrs Simpson as Queen was impossible, but as for a morganatic marriage: ‘The great affection felt in New Zealand for His Majesty and the desire of the people in this country for his happiness inspire the thought that some such arrangement might be possible.’64 The Governor General hurriedly stepped in to curb what seemed to him undue sentimentality. It was due, he explained, to the King’s inspiring personality and the great popularity he had won on his visit in 1920. ‘I pointed out to Mr Savage the great and insuperable difficulties which may arise from [the morganatic marriage] and added that a violent revulsion of feeling may and probably will take place.’65 For Ireland de Valera took a detached attitude; at first saying that, since divorce was a recognized institution in England, he supposed that a morganatic marriage was the solution. Since his object was avowedly to secure the removal of all reference to the King from the Irish constitution and he anyway later came down in favour of abdication, his attitude did not affect matters one way or the other.66
There was some but not much comfort here for the King; certainly Baldwin had grounds for contending that the Dominions would not accept Mrs Simpson either as Queen or as morganatic consort. Meanwhile the pace of events was quickening in London. Though the press still reported nothing, the numbers of those in the know multiplied by the day. Mrs Simpson began to receive posion pen letters, some threatening her with violence, and a stone was thrown through her windows. Churchill claimed that this had been organized by Beaverbrook, who wanted to get Mrs Simpson out of London. Beaverbrook denied it, but – according to Churchill – admitted that possibly someone from the Daily Express might have been involved.67 Never the most physically courageous of women, Mrs Simpson moved to Fort Belvedere, with Aunt Bessie as chaperone. For the royal servants, wrote Helen Hardinge sourly, this at least had the advantage that they were no longer required to ferry champagne and other delicacies from the Palace to Regent’s Park. ‘They had undertaken this task with a certain amount of bitterness, their employer having cut off their traditional beer-money a short time previously.’68
She left just in time. A few days later the house was beset by a booing, stone-throwing mob and police had to be drafted in.69 At last the silence of the press had broken. It was a miracle it had not happened before. For weeks Dawson of The Times had had a leading article set up demanding that the King make some reply to the calumnies published about him in newspapers overseas.70 The Archbishop had received sackfuls of letters, and was finding it ever harder to restrain the clergy, who wanted to denounce their erring monarch from their pulpits.71 The floodgates were, in fact, opened by a cleric, A. W. F. Blunt, the Bishop of Bradford, who had been much struck by the fact that a businessman a few weeks before had complained that it was all very well to say that he ought to take a religious view of the Coronation but what was the point ‘when the principal actor in it has no use for that sort of thing himself?’ Blunt claimed that he had thereupon written a sermon on the theme of the King’s duties as head of the Church of England, heard of the Simpson affair a few days before he was due to preach it, wondered whether to change his words but decided that they could not possibly be misinterpreted.72 The Archbishop did not accept these protestations. ‘Why can’t he hold his tongue?’ he snapped. ‘If he only knew all that I know …’73
The press had no doubt that they knew what the Bishop meant and treated his sermon as the starting pistol in a race to produce the most sensational reports. The Mail and Express spoke up for the King but did not commit themselves on exactly what course they were advocating, the more sober and non-conformist News Chronicle was surprisingly the only major daily newspaper overtly to support a morganatic marriage. The King did his sums, and calculated that the papers supporting him had a readership of some 12.5 million, while those ranged against him could boast only 8.5 million.74 ‘The Express, Mail … Mirror etc., have eclipsed themselves in sentimentality to such an extent as to be ridiculous,’ wrote Thomas Jones loftily.75 Lady Houston in the Saturday Review was ridiculous in another way: ‘Primed with instructions from Russia – to get rid of the King – Mr Baldwin has had a busy week – backwards and forwards – backwards and forwards – several times a day to hold a pistol to the head of the King, crying, “Do my will – or – abdicate”.’76 Sadly, Low’s cartoon was censored: three portraits on a wall – Mr Spencer, Mr Simpson and Edward VIII – labelled ‘The Wallace Collection’.77 Kingsley Martin in the New Statesman supported the morganatic marriage. He had almost scooped the whole of Fleet Street with an article on the constitutional issue which the King had seen, approved, and then asked to be postponed by a week in case its publication damaged the chances of a settlement. By that time it had been overtaken by events.78
The paper that the King feared most was The Times, both because of its national and international standing and because he regarded its editor, Dawson, as an arch enemy. Beaverbrook accused Dawson of being more responsible than anyone else for driving Edward VIII to abdication, he achieved it ‘by methods many would condemn’, and ‘he pursued his quest with a vigour that seemed more like venom’.79 This was characteristically extravagant, but Dawson certainly played a role more prominent than that of any other newspaper editor; he saw Baldwin frequently and Hardinge showed him a draft of his letter to the King before finally sending it. But though The Times made it very clear that it supported the government, it argued its case with reasonable restraint. On 2 December the King heard that The Times was about to come out with a fierce attack on Mrs Simpson and asked Baldwin to get it stopped. Baldwin protested that he could not control the press but told Dawson of the request. Dawson sent the Prime Minister a proof of his leading article to read to the King; it proved to be innocuous.80 What was less innocuous was the letter which The Times published in its first edition on 8 December, drawing attention to some alarmingly apt lines from Racine’s Bérénice, in which Titus puts his glory before his mistress and denies that he would ever be:
… so vile a thing
Tied to thy train – a hopeless, throneless King,
Loathesome to men below, to gods above,
A sad example of the sleights of Love.81
The letter was cut out of subsequent editions, but was in the version that caught up with Mrs Simpson in the south of France.
The hurricane of publicity that had now burst about the King and Mrs Simpson convinced him that it was essential to get her out of the country. She decided to join Katherine and Herman Rogers at their villa near Cannes. An old friend, Lord Brownlow, was asked to escort her and agreed without demur. He arrived at Fort Belvedere in time for dinner on 3 December to find the King ‘rather pathetic, tired, overwrought, and evidently dreading Wallis’s departure, almost like a small boy being left behind at school for the first time’. Dinner was a brief and melancholy feast: ‘Wallis deeply oppressed, the King nervous and, as ever, over-attentive to all of us, such as mixing the salad, pouring out the soda-water, and lighting cigarettes for all of us.’ After dinner the King took Brownlow aside to thank him and to urge him to take all possible care of his precious cargo – doubly precious, since Brownlow discovered once they were en route that Mrs Simpson was travelling with much of her jewellery; worth, he estimated, £100,000.82
When the moment came to leave, Mrs Simpson walked through the King’s bedroom on to the lawn without saying goodbye to any of the staff. ‘Well, that’s the end of that,’ one of the footmen said to the butler, Osborne. ‘Don’t be too sure,’ Osborne replied. ‘We’ll keep our fingers crossed.’83 Brownlow and Mrs Simpson clambered into the car and the King said goodbye. According to Brownlow, ‘he leant across to her to get one last touch of her hand – there were tears in his eyes and on his cheeks, and his voice was shaking. “Wherever you reach tonight, no matter what time, telephone me. Bless you, my darling!”’84 Brownlow wrote his account the following day, so probably his version of the King’s last words is more accurate than the Duchess’s: ‘I don’t know how it’s all going to end. It will be some time before we can be together again. You must wait for me no matter how long it takes. I shall never give you up.’85 But whether the King uttered these words or not, they were certainly what he thought.