OF ALL THE DUKE OF WINDSOR’S ACTIVITIES IN THE YEARS between the abdication and the war, it is his visit to Germany in October 1937 which is the best remembered. The image lingers, as from a flickering newsreel, of his shy smile as he shook hands with the Führer, of the half-sketched and aborted fascist salute, of glowing words in praise of workers’ housing and the miracle of full employment. Such images, superimposed on what we know today of the vileness of the Nazi regime and the inevitability of war, create a picture of a man condoning atrocities and giving comfort to Britain’s enemies. In fact, when the Duke visited Germany, most members of the Conservative government would have agreed with him that Britain could live with German aspirations, that war was not inevitable, and that Soviet Russia posed at least as great a threat to national security. His tour was ill-timed and ill-advised, but it was not a crime.
A failure to take advice was indeed at the heart of the Duke’s problems. Six months earlier Brownlow had passed on a message from Baldwin, warning that ‘prolonged visits or close contacts in Fascist countries would be unwise’ because they would alienate left-wing opinion and make his return to England more difficult.1 Since then there had been little contact with British ministers and when the Duke did encounter one he was careful not to raise the issue, knowing that what he would hear would be unwelcome. Chamberlain would have advised against the tour, but not from hostility to Germany. He would have felt that the Duke’s proper course was to lie low, to withdraw from public life as he had promised in his abdication speech, to shun the headlines. A visit to the United States would have seemed equally unwise. The Duke wanted no such counsel, so asked no question. Instead he relied for advice on Charles Bedaux, the millionaire efficiency expert who had lent the Windsors his château for their wedding and now presented his bill; gift-wrapped so subtly as to be most appealing to the Duke but still calculated to cost its recipient very dear.
Bedaux had substantial business interests in Germany which had been imperilled by the hostility of the present regime. He was working his way back to favour and was anxious to do anything he could to ingratiate himself still further. To organize a visit by the Duke of Windsor would earn him much credit in Berlin; the Germans could be trusted to extract the maximum propaganda advantage from the Duke’s presence, and they would be enabled to keep close links with a man whom they believed could one day still be of great use to them. Bedaux also genuinely believed that there was urgent need for a third force that would stand aloof from the great power blocs and provide an impetus towards peace. His ideas were vague, but of one thing he was sure; in any such movement both the Duke of Windsor and Charles Bedaux should play a prominent role.
The Duke shared both the fatuity and the basic benevolence of this vision; he believed that he had a part to play in reconciling Britain and Germany and that his contribution could be as valuable as it would have been if he had remained on the throne, perhaps even more so. The ostensible object of his visit, in which he was genuinely interested, was to study the housing and working conditions of the German labour force. He was convinced that the Nazi government had done wonders in improving the lot of the working classes, and he wanted to know how, and whether, the same techniques could work in Britain. But beyond this, he felt that he should improve his knowledge of and acquaintanceship with the German leaders, so that one day he could use his influence to good purpose. The time might come, he felt, when only he could avert a war.
There was another, less altruistic reason for his readiness to fall in with Bedaux’s plan. After twenty years of grumbling about the pressures of public life, he found his isolation from it irksome. He wanted to step back for a while into the centre of the stage. Still more, he wanted to be there with his wife beside him. He wanted to prove to the Duchess that, even though she had not married a King, she was at least the wife of someone who commanded the respect of a major power. He could never do that in Britain and, following the lead of his family in London, the French aristocracy and ruling class treated him with cautious restraint. In Germany at least he could be sure of a proper welcome and, more significantly, so could the Duchess. Philip Guedalla noticed that he did not like to hear unfavourable comment about Germany: ‘One feels that he has ties of family hard to break.’2 It is doubtful whether the ties of family counted for much; for the Duke Germany was contented, prosperous, self-disciplined, and eager to welcome an ex-monarch with the deference to which he had once been used but now had to live without.
The visit to Germany was to be balanced by a similar tour of the United States, again centred on study of workers’ housing and conditions. In the case of Germany Bedaux effected the introduction and then stepped discreetly aside; in America he hoped to play a more prominent role, personally conducting the Duke around the industrial concerns where his efficiency methods had been adopted. It seemed to the Duke an unexceptionable proposal which would save him both money and effort. He was soon to revise his ideas.
The first word of the intended visits came to London from Washington, where Victor Mallet at the British Embassy commented in mid-September that if the Duke were to arrive ‘all the old bally-hoo’ would be revived. At the time of the abdication Edward VIII’s solicitude for the Welsh miners and the supposed indignation of Baldwin’s government at his outspokenness had been much featured in the American press. His plan to research the life of the American working man would inevitably revive the story.3 Hardinge sourly minuted: ‘After the experience of the South Wales miners last year, the so-called investigations into the life of the American working-man are not likely to have much effect in this country.’4 The King anxiously asked Monckton whether he thought the rumours true. ‘I don’t think it wise,’ he remarked.5 Nor did Monckton. He planned to tell the Duke as much, and when a projected visit to Paris was cancelled at short notice, guessed that it was because his ex-monarch had set his heart on making the trip and did not want to hear any advice against it.6
The first official notification the British government received was a letter from the Duke to the British Ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson. ‘Although our two weeks tour is being organized under the auspices of the Reich, it will naturally be of a purely private nature,’ wrote the Duke.7 Vansittart was put out that the Foreign Office should have been given no advance warning: ‘The direct approach to our missions, without our knowledge, is hardly fair.’8 The Duke felt that the Foreign Office had made no effort to keep in touch with him, so why should he consult them? The demands of courtesy had been satisfied by a letter to the British Ambassador. Henderson – himself as well-disposed towards the Germans as was the Duke – replied that he would be on leave at the time; an alibi which was genuine but must have caused him some relief. His personal view, though, was that the visit could well be useful: ‘There is much in the legislation of the Nazi government which is worthy of study, though our Labour MPs did not like it when I said so in a speech some months ago.’9
On 3 October came the first public declaration: the Windsors, read a statement issued to the press in Paris, would shortly be visiting Germany and the United States ‘for the purpose of studying housing and working conditions’. Wigram seethed with indignation. It was a most arrogant and undignified announcement, he told King George VI; it implied that the Duke was the sole champion of the working classes and that if they would get him back to Britain he would look after them. It was a ‘dangerous, semi-political move’.10 There was nothing in the text of the statement which overtly supported Wigram’s interpretation, but Monckton also believed that it implied the Duke hoped to acquire knowledge which might one day be of use to him in his work in Britain. Even if the statement had been more tactfully phrased, Monckton would still have deplored the enterprise. He believed it was wrong for the Duke to embark on ‘public (and advertised) political work’ so soon after he had announced his intention of retiring to a private station.11
Meanwhile in Germany plans were being made to ensure that the Duke saw what the authorities wanted him to see and that his favourable reactions were given ample publicity. He had asked to meet the Führer, and Hitler who, as his adjutant Captain Wiedemann put it, had ‘always had a certain weakness for the Duke of Windsor’, willingly consented. The Nazi leaders were lined up to play their part in the welcome and Dr Robert Ley, head of the Labour Front, was detailed to act as cicerone (an unfortunate choice, since he was a drunken and brutal boor, but probably inevitable given the nature of the visit). Hitler insisted that all the planning should be done in strict secrecy, nothing should be made public until the Duke had notified the British Ambassador and the King in London.12
The more King George VI heard of his brother’s plans, the more dismayed he became. ‘A bombshell and a bad one,’ he described the news to Monckton.13 He resented the fact that he had been given no notice of the tour and was emphatic that no official support should be given to it. ‘The world is in a very troubled state …’ he told Queen Mary, ‘and David seems to loom ever larger on the horizon.’14 Oliver Harvey, Eden’s private secretary, discussed with Hardinge what the Embassy in Berlin should do. He assumed that someone from the staff should be at the station when the Duke arrived, but Hardinge ‘was inclined to doubt whether even this courtesy should be shown, lest it might appear as giving a British official nature to the tour’.15 Ogilvie Forbes, the chargé d’affaires in Henderson’s absence, protested at this. ‘It will be extremely embarrassing and painful for me if I am instructed to ignore His Royal Highness’s presence, for this will not be understood here. Moreover, I am rather under an obligation to His Royal Highness.’16 He won his point, a junior member of staff was sent to the station, and Ogilvie Forbes himself later called on the Duke at his hotel. He contrived to make it abundantly clear that he disliked his instructions and several years later the Duke remembered with appreciation the way he had turned what might have been ‘a somewhat cold interview’ into ‘a very pleasant evening. I am afraid that it was a series of similar gauche blunders committed by the Foreign Office that is greatly responsible for the appalling mess the world is in today.’17
Phipps in Paris passed back to London reports that Ribbentrop was exultant about the forthcoming visit: ‘Ribbentrop believes that HRH will some day have a great influence over the British working man and that every effort will be made … to make HRH even more pro-German than he is already supposed in Germany to be.’18 The Ambassador warned the Duke that the Germans were masters in the art of propaganda and would be quick to turn to their advantage anything he said or did. The Duke replied that he was well aware of this, would be on his guard and would make no speeches.19 On the whole he seems to have stuck by these good intentions, though Ogilvie Forbes reported that the German government were making the most of their visitor.20 The Duke probably committed himself further than was wise, but the Germans did not hesitate to put into his mouth statements of an effusiveness which he could hardly have intended. As a prime example of his gullibility his critics usually quote a speech he was supposed to have made in which he declared that, in all his travels, he had never seen an achievement so great as that brought about in social conditions by the German government: ‘It … is a miracle; one can only begin to understand it when one realizes that behind it is one man and one will!’ The thoughts may have been his but their expression in public was not. The words quoted were not spoken by the Duke but were an interpretation of his reactions rendered by Dr Ley at a meeting of the Labour Front in Leipzig some days after the Duke’s departure.21 Writing to Lindsay in Washington the Duke merely remarked temperately that the visit was proving most interesting and that he was being given every facility to study housing conditions.22
All the evidence suggests, however, that he throughly enjoyed his time in Germany. He was conspicuously cheerful throughout the tour. According to the Daily Express, the Duke visited a beerhall in Munich, drank three pints of beer, put on a false moustache, joined in a sing-song, and made an impromptu speech saying how much he liked the city.23 There are no other recorded instances of such unbridled merriment, but all went very well. The local authorities had been instructed that the Duchess was always to be referred to as Her Royal Highness; a courtesy which by itself would have been enough to make their visitors look kindly on the inhabitants of the inner ring of Dante’s Inferno, let alone the German people. He must have been flattered too by the eagerness of the Nazi leaders to fête him. They dined with Hess, whose wife Ilse remembered the Duchess as ‘a lovely, charming, warm and clever woman with a heart of gold and an affection for her husband that she made not the slightest attempt to conceal’. The Duke’s abdication, Frau Hess considered, had been brought about by ‘his own sound attitudes on social issues and his pro-German inclinations’.24 Göring said much the same thing to his wife before the Windsors dined with them. The German government, he told her, had earnestly hoped to see Edward VIII remain on the throne. ‘The natural opposition between British and German policy … could,’ said Göring, ‘easily be set aside with the aid of such a man as the Duke.’25 The two men played happily with the toy railway set up for Göring’s nephew, and the aeroplane which flew across the room on a wire scattering wooden bombs on the trains below.26 More sinister was the map on the wall, on which Austria figured as part of Germany. The Duke questioned this and was told it was inevitable that the Austrians would soon decide to throw in their lot with their neighbour.27
The high spot of the tour was a call on Hitler at his mountain redoubt of Berchtesgaden. Hitler was conspicuously affable, though he mildly irritated the Duke by insisting on using an interpreter rather than speaking directly to him in German.28 According to the interpreter, Hitler seemed to take it for granted that the Duke sympathized with the ideology and the practices of the Third Reich, but the Duke kept off politics and said nothing which could have justified the Führer’s assumption.29 After they left, the Duchess, who had not been present at the interview, asked what Hitler had talked about. ‘What he’s trying to do for Germany and to combat Bolshevism,’ said the Duke. ‘And what did he say about Bolshevism?’ ‘He’s against it,’ replied the Duke briefly.30
From the Duke’s point of view, the most dangerous consequence of his visit was that it confirmed the Germans in their belief that he was an advocate of their cause and could still be of great use to them. Albert Duckwitz, the well-informed Counsellor at the German Embassy in Copenhagen, told his American colleague that the Duke had ‘exhibited a special sympathy and understanding of Germany’. He represented ‘a section of liberalism’ in England that had always been friendly towards Germany and was becoming still more so. ‘The Duke of Windsor is by no means finished in his work.’31 Bruce Lockhart reported to the Foreign Office that the Germans were still convinced that the Duke would ‘come back as a social-equalizing King –’ and inaugurate an ‘English form of Fascism and alliance with Germany’.32 It was an illusion which was to have embarrassing results before too long.
Apart from this, the worst that can be said about the German visit is that the Duke closed his eyes to most of what he did not wish to see, and allowed himself to be paraded as an admirer of the economic miracle and as tacitly condoning the brutal side of the social experiment. ‘He did not understand half of what he saw or what was said to him,’ commented the youthful Nigel Law, the whole visit was ‘lacking in dignity’.33 Yet it was no covert fascist but Winston Churchill who, briefed by his son Randolph who had accompanied the tour, wrote to congratulate the Duke on its success. There had been loud cheering in the cinemas when newsreels of the Duke’s tour were shown. ‘I was rather afraid beforehand that your tour in Germany would offend the great numbers of anti-Nazis in this country, many of whom are your friends and admirers, but I must admit that it does not seem to have had that effect, and I am so glad it all passed off with so much distinction and success.’34 When there was criticism, as by Herbert Morrison in the left-wing magazine Forward,35 it related mainly to the fact that the Duke was pushing himself forward into the public view, not that he chose to do so in Nazi Germany.
‘The American journey,’ Churchill went on, ‘I feel sure will be prosperous, and you will get a reception from that vast public which no Englishman has ever had before.’ The second leg of the Windsors’ pilgrimage caused even greater pother at court than had the first. Lindsay, the British Ambassador, wrote from Washington to say that he felt he should accommodate the visitors, present them at the White House and ‘at the least give them a large Belshazzar’.36*12 The ever vigilant Hardinge hurriedly intervened; Lindsay should do nothing of the sort, at the most he might tell the White House that he believed the Duke wanted an interview and leave it to them to follow the matter up if they so wished.37 Lindsay was horrified and, being in England, was summoned to Balmoral for a conference on the subject. He was confronted by the King and Queen, Hardinge and Lascelles, and for three hours argued that to cold-shoulder the Duke would stir up sentiment on his behalf in the United States and damage the reputation of the British monarchy. The three men were obdurate. The Duke was behaving abominably, he was trying to stage a comeback, his friends and advisers were semi-Nazis. The Queen took a different line. ‘While the men spoke in terms of indignation, she spoke in terms of acute pain and distress, ingenuously expressed and deeply felt. She too is not a great intellect but she has any amount of intelligence du coeur … In all she said there was far more grief than indignation and it was all tempered by affection for “David”. “He’s so changed now, and he used to be so kind to us.” She was backing up all that the men said, but protesting against anything that seemed vindictive … And with all her charity she had not a word to say for “that woman”.’38
The final decision was that Lindsay should give a medium-sized dinner party for the Windsors but not accompany the Duke to the White House. It would be best, the Ambassador was told, if the President merely asked the Windsors to tea.39 Encouraged by a report from the American Ambassador in Paris however, to the effect that the Duke was in excellent form, drinking almost nothing, deeply in love, and genuinely interested in workers’ living conditions,40 Roosevelt was not prepared to be so discourteous. He accepted the tea party, but refused to receive the Duke without the Ambassador being in attendance. Lindsay sympathized with him. ‘The Palace secretaries are extremist,’ he wrote, ‘the Foreign Office still more so. All are seeing ghosts and phantoms everywhere.’41 The President would probably have had his way if events had not made the question academic.
It was becoming every day more clear that Churchill’s cheerful prophecy about the American tour was going badly wrong. William Shirer, an American journalist who reported the Duke’s visit to Germany, was one of the first to see the danger. ‘A curious thing for the Duke to do, to come to Germany, where the labour unions have been smashed, just before he goes to America,’ he wrote from Munich. ‘He has been badly advised.’42 On 23 October the New York Times took up the tune; the Duke’s visit to Germany had aided the regime and shown him to be a firm friend of national socialism. The reaction of the American press as a whole had been hostile, a friend warned the Duke. Most reports implied that he was ‘in complete sympathy with the German National Socialist movement. The present regime in Germany is unpopular in the United States, and in the large industrial cities feeling runs very high.’43
The visit to Germany might have been forgiven if the Duke’s programme in the United States had been in different hands. Bedaux, however, was anathema to organized labour in America. A Special Branch report on him said that the application of his methods nearly always led to increased production and lower costs, but also to strikes and disputes. If the Duke allowed his name to be associated with that of Bedaux he would quickly lose his popularity among the working classes.44 The American chargé in Berlin claimed that Bedaux was running the Duke, and probably paying his expenses for the tour of the United States (as, indeed, to a large extent he was). Bedaux intended to make the Duke the standard bearer for his movement to bring about world peace through labour reconciliation.45 An American diplomat in Paris went still further and suggested that Bedaux was trying to build up the Duke’s reputation as ‘a great and sincere friend of the working man’, with a view to his eventual restoration to the throne.46
As reports filtered back from America that the labour unions were beginning to express themselves publicly against his visit, the Duke took alarm. At a dinner of the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris on 27 October he stressed that he would be going to the United States as ‘a completely independent observer, without political considerations of any sort or kind, and entirely on my own initiative’.47 It was too late. A week later Lindsay was reporting that public opinion was hardening: ‘Ridicule has increasingly been thrown on a project which has not been regarded as seriously possible in the circumstances in which it would be carried out. Language about Duchess has been unfriendly. But most of all his prospects have been damaged by association with Bedaux …’ The Ambassador had now concluded that the tour could only reflect discredit on the Duke and had better be abandoned.48 The longshoremen in New York threatened to boycott the Duke’s ship; Jewish organizations made noises of disapproval; the Baltimore Federation of Labor passed a resolution deploring the Duke’s association with Bedaux and Nazi Germany and rather unkindly deprecating a visit by the Duchess who, ‘while resident here in no way showed the slightest concern nor sympathy for the problems of labor or the poor and needy’.49
Lindsay, who had at first expected to be embarrassed by the triumphant success of the tour, by the time it was cancelled feared that it would be ‘such a ghastly failure as to be a disaster in the opposite direction’. He drew some consolation from the fact that Bedaux was the principal target of the critics, the Duchess next most vulnerable while the Duke was only abused by association.50 This would have been scant comfort to the Duke, who could have endured a certain amount of unfavourable publicity himself but shrank from exposing his wife to anything so unpleasant. By now he was agitatedly consulting anyone whose opinion seemed of value. Bedaux was sending alarmed telegrams from New York urging that the visit be cancelled; Lindsay refused to give formal advice but contrived nonetheless to make his opinion crystal clear. William Bullitt, the American Ambassador in Paris, continued to maintain that the visit should take place, but his was a lonely voice. It is said that the Duke was finally persuaded to abandon the tour when he tried to telephone Bullitt, by mistake got through to Phipps, was advised strongly to remain in Europe, and assumed in some surprise that Bullitt had changed his mind. This seems hardly likely, though Phipps if asked would certainly have taken such a line; Monckton believed that the decisive voice belonged to a New York solicitor who worked closely with the Duke’s lawyer, Allen.51 Whatever the immediate cause, the Duke called off the trip; The Times on 6 November carrying his statement, in which he once more denied that he was ‘allied to any industrial system’ or ‘for or against any particular political or racial doctrine’.
The Duchess wrote to Bedaux’s wife to regret that ‘our lovely innocent trip should have met with so disastrous an end’.52 Inevitably the Duke blamed Bedaux for the debacle, though he held back from any direct reproach, and said he hoped they could meet again when the press furore had died down.53 If only he had known how unpopular Bedaux’s methods were in the United States, he would never have contemplated making the visit under such auspices, he told a friend in Washington.54 He should have known and could have found out if he had asked the right people, but he had set his heart on making the trip and did not wish to expose himself to any voices of caution or discouragement. The Duchess told Monckton that they blamed nobody but themselves, a piece of humility from which Monckton drew some comfort: ‘It is all to the good if their confidence in their unaided judgment and in that of those whom alone they have consulted in this matter is shaken.’55 Hardinge derived special satisfaction from the fact that most of the criticism had come from the left: ‘These expressions of opinion from the different wings of the Labour party, as whose champion the Duke, apparently, would still like to pose, should have a very salutary effect, and prove the death knell of the “slumming party” with all its insincerity and ballyhoo.’56
Roosevelt was more sympathetic. He told Lindsay that it would not upset him if the visit were never put on again but he still thought it might pass off all right if properly sponsored.57 To the Duke he sent a personal message, saying how sincerely sorry he was that ‘certain factors’ had prevented the tour, but hoping that it would soon take place.58 He showed his letter to the Under Secretary of State at the State Department: ‘I think the letter you have drafted could not be nicer,’ was the comment, ‘and I think it will be helpful in hastening the obliteration of recent occurrences.’59
It was to take a long time to obliterate the memory, and the Duke never ceased to feel that he had been misunderstood and misused. He was despondent and uncertain how best he could retrieve the situation. A curious and somewhat shadowy story dates from this period. William Tyrrell, a former British Ambassador in Paris, was staying with Phipps at the very end of 1937 and told a member of the Embassy staff that he had seen the text of an interview a journalist from the Daily Herald had had with the Duke of Windsor. In this the Duke was supposed to have said that ‘if the Labour party wished, and were in a position to offer it, he would be prepared to be President of the English Republic’. Tyrrell persuaded the editor to suppress the interview.60 The Duke’s words come to us as recorded by an unknown journalist, read by Tyrrell, related by Tyrrell to an unknown diplomat and finally passed on to Phipps. The game of Chinese Whispers is not a satisfactory basis on which to build a history. But the Duke’s despair was so pronounced and his rancour towards his family so embittered, that it is not inconceivable he said something of the kind. Exactly what he meant by such words, whether indeed he had considered them carefully or at all, it is impossible to decide. Given the newspaper for which the interview was given, it is probable that the statement came in answer to a question designed to produce that very response. It need not be taken too seriously. But it should not be ignored.
He was, however, quite as ardent an appeaser as Chamberlain or any member of his government. When the Germans were threatening Czechoslovakia and the crisis was at its most dangerous, he contemplated a visit to Germany to offer his services as a mediator and to ‘expostulate with Hitler’.61 His friends argued that any such visit would be disastrous for his reputation in Britain and might ‘revive the legend of his Nazi sympathies’.62 Probably he would have allowed himself to be discouraged, though he genuinely believed he could offer a useful contribution and was tempted by the thought of making so dramatic a return to the centre of the world’s stage. Fortunately he was anyway pre-empted by Chamberlain, who himself flew to Munich to see Hitler. It was a gesture that appealed strongly to the Duke. ‘It was a bold step to take,’ he told the Prime Minister, ‘but if I may say so, one after my own heart, as I have always believed in personal contact as the best policy in “a tight corner”. It would not surprise me if there were, amongst your colleagues, some who debated the wisdom of such dramatic last-hour tactics, but you followed the dictates of your conscience in the same fearless way in which you have faced up to all the complex phases of foreign politics that have confronted you in the last year.’63 (On this at least he and the King were agreed. King George VI wrote to offer Chamberlain his ‘most heartfelt congratulations’. He had earned ‘the lasting gratitude of his fellow countrymen’.64) To Monckton he described Chamberlain’s intervention as a stroke of genius: ‘I really cannot understand our old friend Winston Churchill’s attitude, which is hardly worthy of the brilliant and experienced politician that he is.’65
He was more than ever convinced that war was unacceptable as a means of settling disputes, that Russia was a more dangerous enemy than Germany, and that if there had to be a war, it should be between the Germans and the Russians. ‘Another world war would see the Democracies go down with the Totalitarian States, and Victory go only to Communism,’ he told Bruce Lockhart.66 In May 1939 he was offered a chance to address the world on the theme of peace when the National Broadcasting Company of America invited him to broadcast to the United States from Verdun after a visit to the battlefield. His speech was short, eloquent, uncontroversial and written entirely by himself. For two and a half years, he said, he had kept out of public affairs and he proposed to go on doing so; he spoke for no one but himself, ‘as a soldier of the last war, whose most earnest prayer is that such a cruel and destructive madness shall never again overtake mankind’. No one wanted war, yet the world seemed to be drifting inexorably towards it. He appealed to all statesmen to ‘act as good citizens of the world and not only as good Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Americans or Britons’. One way to help avert war would be to eschew all harmful propaganda: ‘I personally deplore, for example, the use of such terms as “encirclement” and “aggression”. They can only arouse just those dangerous political passions that it should be the aim of us all to subdue.’67
The flaw in this argument is that, whatever term might be used to describe it, ‘aggression’ is what in fact the Germans were displaying in their foreign policy, and Hitler was not going to be diverted from his plans by a few well-intentioned words. To many who heard the broadcast, however, it seemed the voice of sanity and to offer some hope to an increasingly distracted world. Letters of appreciation flooded in; not only from the United States but from France, Holland and Poland – in all which countries the speech had been relayed – and from Britain – where the BBC had appealed to Hardinge for advice and had then decided not to carry the broadcast. There was also criticism; not so much of the content of the speech as of its timing and the fact that it had been delivered at all. His decision to broadcast was to be regretted, wrote the Express. He should have left such matters to the King.68 By ill luck a visit the King and Queen were to pay to the United States had been rearranged so that they were actually at sea en route to New York when the broadcast was made. The Duke took the line that it was too late for him to cancel the arrangements. ‘What a fool he is and how badly advised; and everyone is furious he should have done it just after you left,’ wrote the Duke of Kent to King George VI. ‘If he had mentioned you in it, it wouldn’t have been so bad, and why he broadcast such a peace talk only to America, where they have no intention of fighting, I don’t know.’69
The short answer to the Duke of Kent’s question was that nobody else had offered him the chance or was likely to do so – least of all the British. It was hardly the Duke of Windsor’s fault if the BBC refused to let the British people hear his words. He believed that he had something of real significance to say and that, coming from him, it might be listened to. He was perhaps naive, but at least he was trying to do something positive to avert war. Hardinge found ‘the idea that it can possibly do the slightest good simply ludicrous’.70 One may wonder whether it is better to act, and run the risk of being ludicrous, or to remain inactive, and accept supinely whatever blows fate has to offer.
However great the risks might be, the Duke continued to believe that war would never happen. Even on 1 September 1939, when The Times correspondent in Nice phoned him to report that the Germans had invaded Poland, he commented impatiently: ‘Oh! Just another sensational report.’71 But his optimism was not so blind that he did not plan for the worst. At the time of Munich he argued that, since the British government were responsible for him and the Duchess having to live abroad, they must also accept responsibility for getting them and their possessions out of France if need arose.72 In August 1939 he appealed to Chamberlain to let him know what was going on, so that he could plan for any eventuality.73 Monckton for his part badgered Horace Wilson to make plans for the Windsors’ repatriation in case of war. On 26 August he wrote to suggest that the Duke gave some thought to the type of public work he might undertake in such an event: ‘It would, I feel, assist very much in the eyes of the public if you came back to do some specific task which you had offered to do in the emergency.’74 Before the Duke could reply, war had begun.
On 24 August 1939 a woman styling herself ‘Mother of four children’ wrote to the Duke from Yorkshire: ‘I am making a desperate appeal to you, on behalf of the children of all nations concerned, to use your influence in the cause of peace. As no member of any government can possibly now appeal to Hitler, I beg of you, as a private individual and lover of humanity, to fly to Germany and have a personal interview with him before it is too late.’75 It was already too late, but the day after he read this letter the Duke telegraphed Hitler: ‘Remembering your courtesy and our meeting two years ago, I address to you my entirely personal, simple though very earnest appeal for your utmost influence towards a peaceful solution of the present problems.’76 The message had hardly been despatched before the prefect of Nice, warned by the Post Office, telephoned to ask whether the Duke was indeed the ‘Edward Hertzog von Windsor’ whose telegram had just gone off. If so, he wished to express his deep appreciation and gratitude. Hitler’s reply was predictable, the only surprise was that he found time to send one: ‘You may be sure that my attitude towards England is the same as ever … It depends upon England, however, whether my wishes for the future development of Anglo-German relations materialize.’77 The Duke expected no more, but he was satisfied that, however futile it might be, this last plea for peace was one that he had to make.