SHORTLY AFTER THE NEW GOVERNOR ARRIVED IN NASSAU HE found himself required to present a large photograph of the Queen to the Duchess, in her role as President of the Red Cross centre. The portrait, he explained, had been requested by his predecessor: ‘I only regret that he is not here to perform the unveiling ceremony,’1 he stated, with no doubt conscious ambiguity. He had forgiven his family nothing. Nor was the atmosphere notably warmer in England. Lascelles was amused when the Dean of Windsor, in a moment of aberration, invited his congregation to pray for Edward, Prince of Wales – ‘not at all a success,’ commented Lascelles.2
In August 1942 the Duke of Kent was killed in a flying accident. In their common grief it seemed as if mother and son might be brought closer together. ‘My thoughts go out to you, who are so far away from us all,’ wrote Queen Mary, ‘knowing how devoted you were to him, and how kind you were to him in a difficult moment in his all too short life, kindness I for one shall never forget; he always remembered it, for he was very fond of you.’ ‘I hope you will often write to me now, as you used to do,’ she continued, and then, most significant olive branch of all, ‘Please give a kind message to your wife, she will help you to bear your sorrow.’3
The Duke’s reply was quite as warm. ‘Loving thanks for your sweet letter,’ he wrote, ‘shining with your indomitable spirit of course, which is of the greatest comfort to me.’ The difficult times he had gone through with his brother had brought them close together: ‘He was in some ways more like a son to me, and his charm and gaiety brought great happiness to York House those years he lived with me.’ ‘I have written to Marina,’ he went on – perhaps the letter was blown astray by some wind of war, for he was often unfairly accused of having failed to send even a brief message of condolence to his sister-in-law. The Duke of Kent’s death had brought home to him forcibly ‘the utter useless cruelty of this ghastly war … Remembering how much you and I hated the last war, I can well imagine how our feelings about this one must be the same – a deep-rooted conviction that it could have been avoided and then an intense craving for an end to all this misery, but which I am now afraid cannot come to pass until we have once and for all time frustrated the World domination plans of a single nation.’ He promised to write regularly in future, and said how much he was longing to see her again, while ‘always hoping that maybe one day things will change and that I shall have the intense pride and pleasure of bringing Wallis to see you’.4
Whatever her views on the final sentence, Queen Mary was delighted with the rest of her son’s message. ‘A perfectly charming, sympathetic letter,’ she described it to the Countess of Athlone,5 hoping that it would be the precursor of a warmer relationship in the future. If she saw the Duke’s letter to King George VI, she must have realized that there was deep bitterness still to overcome. As he had done to his mother, he stressed how close he had felt to the Duke of Kent, but then continued: ‘It is, therefore, a source of great pain to me now to think that on account of your “attitude” towards me, which has been adopted by the whole family, he and I did not see each other last year when he was so near me in America.’6 The promised letters to his mother never came, or only in the shape of cursory notes. She had hoped for more, Queen Mary told Princess Alice, ‘but oh! dear no, nothing of the kind, most disappointing. I believe he is angry because Bertie will not let her be called HRH, but why should she?’7
So long as this issue was unresolved – as the Duke saw it – or remained immutably settled as it had been in 1937 – as the King felt – there could be no true reconciliation between the Duke of Windsor and his relations. He never rested in his efforts to right what he felt to be a grievous offence against his wife and used every contact he enjoyed to bring pressure on the royal family. At the end of 1942 he persuaded Churchill to raise the issue again; foolishly, to Lascelles’s mind – ‘God knows, [it] is not going to make the world a better or worse place, whichever way it be answered.’8 Even to consider the problem upset the King, Lascelles noticed. The King refused to reopen it. He was ready to leave the matter in abeyance, he told Churchill, ‘but I must tell you quite honestly that I do not trust the Duchess’s loyalty’.9
In the autumn of 1943 the issue re-emerged in a different guise. For some time the Duke had been playing with the idea that there might be oil in commercial quantities to be found on his Alberta ranch. Towards the end of 1942 a geologist conducted a survey and reported that prospects were good. The Duke involved some rich American friends in the affair and set up a company to drill for oil. But now problems arose. The lease granted him by the government of Alberta exceptionally included mineral rights, but it ran only so long as the ranch was farmed by the Duke or a member of the royal family. If the Duke died, the Duchess would inherit. What would happen then? The Duke wrote to King George VI to explain the problem, and to ask that, even though she was not to be granted the title of HRH, his wife should be officially designated as a member of the royal family.10 His lawyer, Allen, raised the matter with Lascelles.
There was a real legal issue involved, but it was also an ingenious way of inserting the thin end of a wedge which ultimately seemed likely to win the Duchess her coveted distinction. Lascelles was immediately suspicious. The Duke’s request implied that the principle by which the status of the Duchess had been decided might be changed on purely commercial grounds. Hostile American newspapers would be entitled to say that being a Royal Highness depended on whether or not there was money in it. ‘To me, the Duke’s suggestion seems indefensible from every aspect.’11 It was, anyway, no concern of the King’s, Lascelles argued; the question of the Duchess’s legal status was one for the Canadian courts, or possibly for the law officers of the Crown.12 The latter considered it and dodged the issue by saying that there was no legal definition of the royal family but that, anyway, the Duke’s lease did not carry the implication which he had read into it – there was no reason why his heir should be a member of the royal family.13 ‘No action on my part can affect the issue,’ the King told his brother.14
The problem now vanished away, with a softness and silence that suggested Lascelles might have been right in his surmise that for the Duke the question had been more one of his wife’s position than of the legal title of his heir. By the beginning of 1944 negotiations with the government of Alberta had been completed, on terms, the Duke told Malcolm MacDonald, as satisfactory as could be expected from ‘these exceptionally difficult and obstinate politicians’.15 Drilling began, and a year later prospects looked bright. ‘It would indeed be a pleasant surprise to wake up finding oneself an oil magnate instead of the impoverished owner of a mere cattle ranch!’ the Duke told Queen Mary.16 But there was to be no such happy ending. Oil was discovered but only in tiny quantities and the Duke found himself not only no oil magnate but $100,000 dollars the poorer. The Duchess’s inheritance would hardly have been worth going to law for.
The Duchess herself had decided to intervene in her husband’s long-drawn-out battle with his family. She profited by the fact that the Bishop of Nassau was departing for England and was an old acquaintance of Queen Mary, to send her mother-in-law a letter by his hand. The Bishop, she said, would be able to tell Queen Mary whether ‘all the things David gave up are replaced to him in another way, and the little details of his daily life … The horrors of war and endless separations of family have in my mind stressed the importance of family ties. I hope that by the end of the summer we will be nearer that victory for which we are all working so hard and for which England has so bravely lighted the way.’17 ‘It is a nice letter,’ admitted the King. His suspicions of his sister-in-law, however, were not to be so easily overcome. ‘I wonder what is the real motive behind her having written,’ he went on. ‘… I must say I do feel a bit suspicious of it!!’ He added a postscript to say that he had just seen the Prime Minister, who had received a letter from the Duke asking for a change of post. ‘A coincidence!!’18
King George VI did not relent with the passage of time. In September 1944 Churchill visited the United States. A meeting with the Duke was part of his schedule. ‘The King sent a most cold reply to the PM’s request for a fraternal greeting to the Duke of Windsor,’ reported Colville.19 At their meeting, and subsequently by letter,20 the Duke urged Churchill to take up once more with the King the question of the Duchess being received at court and given the title of Her Royal Highness. The Prime Minister had little enthusiasm for an errand that he was certain would prove fruitless, but he did his best. The King, recorded Lascelles in his diary, ‘apart from his engrained dislike for the woman, and also apart from his recollection that the D of W has, on more than one occasion, been extremely rude to (and about) the Q, Q Mary and other royal ladies, thinks that such a gesture is wrong in principal*14 and would imply that the abdication had been all a mistake’. Lascelles’s suggestion was that the King should tell Churchill that, on personal and family grounds, he was averse to meeting the Duchess, but would of course do so if asked to by the government. That would mean the Prime Minister could only bring further pressure if the Cabinet endorsed his attitude, something which Lascelles was sure they would refuse to do (Churchill had already told the Duke as much two years before, when he regretted that ‘it would be impossible to move the War Cabinet in that direction, and I should deprecate even bringing the matter before them’21). Churchill’s sentimental loyalty to the Duke, Lascelles told the Home Secretary, John Anderson, was ‘based on a tragic false premise – viz that he (Winston) really knew the D of W, which he never did’. Lascelles also warned both Churchill and Anderson that ‘constant harping on this problem might have a really serious effect on the present King’s health’.22
Probably Lascelles’s advice made little difference; the Queen told him a few days later that she and Queen Mary had drawn up and signed a statement to the effect that ‘they were not prepared to receive the Duchess, now, or at any time, for the same reasons that they would not do so in 1936’.23 Churchill passed the news on to the Duke; personally he regretted the decision, he said, ‘but my judgment may well be, as indeed it proved at the Abdication, quite different from that of the great mass of the British people’.24 The Duke can hardly have been surprised but he was still bitterly distressed, particularly by Churchill’s suggestion that it was not just his family who took this line but the British people as a whole. They would never return to Britain so long as that was the state of things, he told the Prime Minister.25 He sent a copy of Churchill’s letter to his mother. Was she really so inflexible? he asked. When they returned to Europe he would visit her alone. ‘In view of your attitude it would be a very big concession on my part to go to see you; at the same time we could talk things over quietly and who knows but that an exchange of viewpoints … might not well be enlightening to both of us.’26
It was not only about his wife’s status that the Duke constantly pressed Churchill. Almost before he had arrived in the Bahamas he was looking around for some other post where his talents could be put to better use. In October 1940 Philip Guedalla, now head of the Latin American section of the Ministry of Information, tried to put the Duke in charge of a high-powered mission that was to tour that area. ‘The very fact that it would certainly be more interesting wartime employment for us, and possibly more useful, is just the reason why they would never send us to South America,’ wrote the Duke sadly.27 Whether or not he interpreted the reasons correctly, he was right in his conclusion: Lord Willingdon headed the mission. The Duke continued to play with the idea of some sort of roving ambassadorship in Latin America, however, and mentioned it to Monckton in September 1942.28 The possibility had already been discussed and dismissed in London. Eden told Churchill he could see no advantage in the proposal; it would arouse American suspicions and, anyway, ‘Any prominent visitor to Latin America must be able to speak with authority and first hand knowledge of what we are doing to win the war. Through no fault of his own, the Duke of Windsor could not do this.’29
Eden’s memorandum presumably arose out of a letter the Duke had written to Churchill a little earlier in which he said that he could not contemplate remaining in the Bahamas for the duration of the war and asked for another job, preferably in the United States or Canada.30 ‘But what kind of work can he do and under whom can he work?’ asked the King. ‘Neither country will relish “her”.’31 Churchill suggested Southern Rhodesia as an alternative but Smuts quickly blocked the proposal. It would have a bad effect on public opinion; baffle the natives, who would not understand how a former monarch could be subordinate to a Secretary of State; and embarrass those whose object was the continued co-operation of South Africa in the Commonwealth. ‘This is decisive,’ minuted Churchill.32 He could report no progress when he met the Duke in Washington in July 1942, but found him better disposed to the idea of staying in the Bahamas with occasional visits to the United States. Churchill told the King that he had noticed the Duke was uncertain of himself when not with his wife or under her influence. ‘D was still very anti-me,’ recorded the King, ‘which Winston tried to put right.’33 The respite did not last long, by November the Duke was again clamouring for a change: ‘The calibre and intellect of my associates … are not of a high order, and I miss the stimulation that is afforded by collaboration with men of affairs to which I have hitherto been accustomed.’34
The Duke deluded himself that Beaverbrook would be a useful ally in his quest. In fact Beaverbrook had no intention of interfering, but shrank from saying this openly. When in New York at the same time as the Duke in April 1943, he told his henchman David Farrer to say always that he was ‘out for a walk’ if the Duke called. Eventually he relented and agreed to have a meeting. Farrer rang the Duke’s suite and asked for the equerry. ‘The Duke speaking,’ came the reply. Farrer lost his head, blurted out ‘Oh God!’ and put down the receiver. ‘What the Hell do you think you’re doing, speaking to the Duke like that?’ asked Beaverbrook indignantly.35 Whether or not as a result of the ensuing meeting, he did speak to Churchill; and whether or not through Beaverbrook’s intervention, Churchill did bestir himself again to find another post. The result, in June 1943, was the offer of the Governorship of Bermuda: technically a promotion, but to an island which, though it had a better climate than the Bahamas, was even smaller and more remote. ‘It seems to me that Your Royal Highness would have the opportunity of developing American contacts which would be of importance to us at the present time,’ suggested Churchill.36 The Duke was not impressed by this justification of a proposal which he felt to be on the verge of an insult. He refused politely enough37 but the draft letter to Churchill which he prepared but never sent a year or so later, in which he referred to the offer as being ‘further proof … of the limitations placed on my capabilities’,38 showed his real feelings.
He sent this draft to George Allen, in May 1944, with a covering letter in which he said that he was thinking of resigning and settling in the United States until such time as he could decide about his long-term future. ‘If I got a job in America, there would be a good chance of the Duchess getting lost, taxwise, in the Diplomatic shuffle’; as for his own dollar securities, these had all been transferred to Beacon Agencies in 1942 – ‘you will recall that my object … was to insure against the possibility of a more hostile British Socialist Government forcing me to surrender all my dollar holdings’.39 It is unclear whether the job he had in mind was private or in the public service; presumably the former, since in the same letter he referred to the fact that ‘family jealousy would oppose any suggestion of an appointment worthy of my experience’ such as a ‘roving commission’ in the United States.
Allen was dismayed by the financial implications of this proposal. He warned the Duchess that if they settled in the United States they would face the possibility of ‘almost complete confiscation of the whole of your current joint income as well as the danger … (since you are an American citizen) of a claim for payment of tax on your back income’.40 As to the idea of finding some job in the United States in which the Duke would be sheltered from avaricious taxmen by an umbrella of diplomatic immunity, Allen wrote that he had consulted Beaverbrook, who felt that it would be unfair to the British Ambassador. What about governing Newfoundland? Beaverbrook had asked: ‘It will be a real man’s job,’ or perhaps acting as Governor General of the proposed West Indian Federation?41
As the end of the war approached, the court became ever more preoccupied with the Duke’s future. Lascelles was resolute in his determination that no public employment should be offered him. The two possibilities that would most appeal to the Duke were that he should be given some representational role abroad, or return to Britain to live as the younger brother of the King. Both were impracticable, Lascelles concluded: a man who had renounced the throne could not represent the monarch, and there was no room for two Kings in England. The only solution was for him to live abroad as a private individual and develop his own interests.42 Churchill was unconvinced. One could not rule out the provision of some representative role being found for the Duke, he retorted, and as for residence in England: ‘Nothing that I am aware of can stop him returning to this country.’43 Nor was the King so rigid as his private secretary; at about this time he asked Halifax whether the Duke might not after all be made an ambassador in Latin America. ‘I did not encourage the idea much,’ recorded Halifax.44
The Duke and Churchill met again in September 1944, and the Duke wrote to him the following month. He could see it was too early, he said wistfully, to decide what kind of a job there might be for him after the war: ‘I would not wish to be unemployed if there was any sphere in which it were considered my experience could still be appropriately utilized.’ But he could agree with Lascelles on at least one point; there would be no question of his seeking to live in England again unless there was a drastic change of heart in the Palace. He could not resist a gibe at his brother on this score: ‘Having been given to understand that they are by now so well and firmly established in the hearts of their people, I would not have thought that my presence in their midst could any longer be considered so formidable a nuisance to the solidarity of the monarchy.’45 Churchill was still anxious to help, and realized that the time was approaching when it would not be possible to postpone the issue further. The Duke was now not only talking of resignation but actively discussing the kind of successor who was needed. He should be rich, he stressed, since Nassau was expensive and the need to entertain Americans was pressing; even more important, he should be drawn from outside the Colonial Service, since otherwise he would follow too slavishly the bidding of the Colonial Office. The Bahamas were different to other colonies, and the new Governor must act accordingly.46 ‘That special negro problem is a grim legacy which my successor must inherit,’ he told Churchill, ‘and in his post-war approach a career man might not possess the firmness, tact and vision that will be required to uphold the rightful power and prestige of a local white community … in the face of growing criticism in the House of Commons and the preaching of Harlem negro agitators.’47*15 When Stanley visited Nassau in January 1945 the Duke formally announced his resignation, and fixed it for the end of April, a few weeks before the five-year term of office traditional for a Governor would have run its course. A decision of some kind must rapidly be taken.
King George VI had made up his mind what was desirable. Lascelles told Stanley that ‘the best solution was the one I have always advocated – that he make himself a home in the USA’,48 and the King came to share this view. When Churchill was due to meet the Duke in Washington, the King urged him to ‘put forward my conviction … that his happiness will be best served by making his home in the USA’.49 The Prime Minister was not disposed to take such instructions meekly: ‘With humble duty,’ he replied, ‘Mr Churchill feels that if he delivered himself of such a message, it might well have the effect of leading HRH to establish himself in England.’ Besides, he added with a touch of menace: ‘Mr Churchill has never abandoned the idea of the Duke discharging Ambassadorial or Governor functions if suitable openings can be found.’50
They were brave words, but when it came to the point ‘suitable openings’ proved as hard to find as ever they had been in the past. The Embassy in Washington had now been tacitly dropped from the list of possibilities, though Stanley thought the Duke still hankered after it.51 Mackenzie King and other eminent Canadians had made it plain that the Duke would not be welcome as Governor General in Canada.52 Churchill at one point suggested that he might become Governor of Ceylon – ‘despite the fact that a perfectly good one has been newly appointed,’ commented Lascelles.53 Another variant was to make him Governor of Madras. Lascelles did as much as anyone to counter these proposals, arguing – with considerable force – that such an appointment would make the position of the Viceroy impossible and that ‘as we are continually kicking Indian princes off the gaddi because they make unwise marriages, the Windsors’ position would be, to say the least, equivocal’.54 There were, indeed, excellent arguments to be advanced against any individual job that might be suggested; and yet Churchill had reason for stubbornly insisting that the Duke did deserve something, and that considerable talent would be going to waste if nothing were provided. Even Lascelles noted in his diary that Oliver Stanley had reported the Duke not merely looked remarkably well and young and was obviously still in love with his wife, but that he was ‘a competent Governor and knew all there was to know about his islands’.55
If nothing official could be found for them to do, the problem of where the Windsors were to live became an urgent problem. They had houses in France which had now been liberated, but the political future of the country was obscure and the French themselves were not over-enthusiastic about the possibility that the Windsors might soon be in their midst. Oliver Harvey reported a conversation with Massigli, de Gaulle’s Ambassador in London, in which it had been made clear that the Windsors should stay out of France until the situation cleared up: ‘What M. Massigli had evidently in mind, although he did not say so, was that he feared the Duke and Duchess might seek to renew acquaintance with many who had turned out to be collaborators, and this would cause a most embarrassing situation.’56 ‘Any such objection could, I think, easily be overcome,’ stated Lascelles blithely,57 but it still put a disturbing question mark over the long-term projects of the Windsors.
Nothing had been decided when the Duke’s resignation was publicly announced except that the Windsors would go first to the United States for a holiday. When asked his plans by the Daily Tribune the Duke answered vaguely that he expected to travel a lot: ‘The Duchess likes travel and as for me I have never before spent five years in one place. And I hope that I shall never be in one place that long again.’58 He was particularly anxious that nobody should imagine he had either been pushed into premature retirement or had abandoned his post for selfish reasons. The first text of the ‘Note for the Guidance of the Press’, which had been drafted in Nassau, contained the sentence: ‘Others who, like the Duke, have freely given their whole time and energy during the war to special service under the Crown, have already found it necessary, with the approach of the end of hostilities in Europe, to resume charge of their personal affairs.’ Someone in Buckingham Palace suggested substituting ‘willingly’ for ‘freely’, presumably in recognition of the salary that the Duke had drawn. Churchill said that the tone of the whole communiqué was far too defensive.59 No amount of guidance could anyway stop the American press announcing that the Governor had been amazed when his resignation was accepted, that Churchill had promised him a more important post, and that he had already applied and been rejected for the posts of Governor General of Canada and Viceroy of India.60
The Windsors left Nassau on 3 May 1945. At the last meeting of ExCo which he attended, a resolution was passed mouthing all the appropriate clichés about the Duke’s ‘untiring effort’, and ‘wisdom, foresight and ability’, and the ‘affection and gratitude of all sections of the community’.61 No doubt they were sincerely meant, and no doubt the Duke was duly touched. It is reasonable to assume, however, that he took greater satisfaction from the words of his old adversary Etienne Dupuch in the Daily Tribune. He had been critical of the Duke’s original appointment, wrote Dupuch, and he had deliberately constituted himself a thorn in his side. But he had soon become convinced that the Governor was ‘genuinely trying to do his best for the islands and the people – and especially for sections of the Colony that had long been neglected by selfish political interests centred in Nassau’.
There had been occasional clashes between the Duke and certain powerful interests. ‘These clashes could have led to serious political consequences for the Colony. But, while the Duke has always been strong, definite and unswerving in his purposes, he has always been a gentleman under the most trying circumstances. The polished approach he has given to these situations has taken them far on the road to accomplishment without precipitating an open break with anyone.’
The Bahamas were now enjoying a period of great prosperity.
This situation is no accident. His Royal Highness has used his influence in the higher councils in the United States and in Great Britain to put the Colony where it is today. Obstacles that no ordinary Governor would have tackled in these difficult war times, His Royal Highness has taken in his stride and there has been no blowing of bugles at these accomplishments. They have just happened …
We know of many views held by His Royal Highness in which we are in strong disagreement but we have grown to respect him because he is no politician – he doesn’t bluff and he is no hypocrite. Never matter how strongly we may disagree with a man, we can admire him if he lays his cards honestly on the table for all to see, and leaves no doubt in the public’s mind as to the honesty and earnestness of his purpose.
We were sorry to see the Duke come to the Colony as its Governor. We are more sorry to see him leave.62
The sentiments could perhaps have been expressed with greater elegance, but it was not a bad epitaph to have earned after five difficult years.