ON JANUARY 20th, just five minutes before midnight, King George V died at Sandringham House and his widow, whose sense of duty had never at any time been jeopardized by sentiment, instantly turned from the deathbed to kiss the hand of the young man at her side. He was embarrassed but she was right. The following morning Britain and the Empire contemplated the features of King Edward VIII. They were the most familiar features—blue eyes, retroussé nose, wistful mouth—in the whole world, and the Press was unanimous in declaring that kingship became them. The new King was forty years old but an unparalleled expenditure of celluloid had arrested the years in his case, and his subjects, hallucinated by a photogenic fairy-tale which had begun in 1911 at Caernarvon Castle, watched tenderly as a slight blond youth ascended, with what appeared to be becoming reluctance, the remote eminence from which death alone could release him. Or so it was believed.

The new King flew from Norfolk to his Accession Council in St. James’s Palace in an aeroplane, so creating the first of a series of precedents which were to land him in a dilemma usually reserved for the characters of Dornford Yates. That afternoon, in the Banqueting Hall of St. James’s, a hundred Privy Councillors swore allegiance to the High and Mighty Prince Albert Edward Christian George Andrew Patrick David, their only lawful Liege Lord. But all the new King saw was a large group of elderly men wearing on their faces the expression of the last reign and hiding in their hearts some astounding suspicions.

The next day Garter King of Arms, attended by Heralds, Pursuivants and Trumpeters, came out on to the balcony and proclaimed the new King-Emperor. Watching the pageantry from a little disused room in Friary Court was Lord Beaverbrook’s sister-in-law Helen FitzGerald and a small pin-neat American woman with smooth dark hair. Suddenly the King came into this room and was greeted with confused curtsies. The Guards Band played the National Anthem and the strange group was imprisoned in the huge sumptuous noise, after which King Edward touched the arm of the spruce little American, whose eyes now glittered with unshed tears, and said, ‘Wallis, there will be a difference, of course….’

Not many hours later King George’s body was drawn through the streets of London on a gun carriage and was followed on foot by the new King, who looked extremely worried, rather than grief-stricken. The Imperial Crown rested on the coffin. Suddenly the mass of jewels quavered and came apart, and the great Maltese cross on top of the Crown, which consisted of a square sapphire framed in two hundred diamonds, toppled to the ground. The King watched it flash past his feet and lie in the gutter with split-second symbolism before, with no appreciable faltering of step, a sergeant-major scooped it up and put it into his pocket.

It was barely a month after King George’s body had vanished from view on silent rollers at Windsor that King Edward made it plain to the Court and to the country that he intended to have his cake and eat it too. He would be King but he would also, when it suited him, be private. At first nobody demurred. George V, it was recalled, had spent much of his reign living the life of a country squire in Norfolk and the new King’s desire for privacy was equally understandable. But when this privacy was seen to be gardening in a grubby shirt, and sometimes in no shirt at all, immolation in an architectural folly called Fort Belvedere in a distant corner of Windsor Great Park, walking to appointments from Buckingham Palace in the rain, eating little dinners in London flats, not going to church, making short shrift of a morning of loyal addresses by receiving a number of distinguished delegates en bloc and generally simplifying life, voices were raised in alarm. What worried the old guard was that there were no precedents for the King’s behaviour. Was he like his grandfather? Hardly. Edward VII was cheerfully fleshly. He was an opulent man never very far from fat diamonds, rich gravy, champagne and generous women, whereas his grandson enjoyed the mock-virgin pallor of Syrie Maugham’s white rooms, being one of the boys, using his hands, cutting the cackle and substituting the matey gesture for the Royal condescension. Was he, though God help them there, like George IV? Not remotely. Prinny was a man of remarkable taste who had a mysterious passion for blowsy dowagers. King Edward had no taste in the truly aesthetic sense and in his friendships with women he preferred a certain brittle containment. Physically fragile himself and only five feet six inches tall, he seemed to be always pushing away the overwhelming things of State, the huge dignities and dignitaries, the ‘suitable’ women and the enormous houses in a continual gesture of noli me tangere. It worked quite well during the long prentice years when he was Prince Charming. He was allowed his flippant magic because it worked. For nearly the whole of the twenties he wandered among the Dominions and Colonies on a dazzling progress in which his boyish impromptus were recognized as Empire-binders of a spectacularly successful kind. He mixed but remained ever separate; it was the secret of his triumph. Successive governments cashed-in shamelessly on the Prince of Wales’s popularity and more and more tours were arranged for him. Then, in April 1930, when he was thirty-five, occurred a curious conjunction of feeling and event which can now be recognized as the first soft notes of the overture to the drama of 1936. The Prince suffered some kind of disenchantment in his role of Empire spell-binder and became introspective and vaguely bewildered. The possessive hands which he so dreaded had become very pressing during George V’s illness in 1928, when the King had nearly died, and had never quite withdrawn. His mother talked tactfully but frequently of suitable princesses. His youngest brother George seemed also to have been involved in this wave of benevolent criticism and stampeded to the Prince of Wales’s side. Prince Edward’s desire for a place where he couldn’t be got at now became something of an obsession. He had to retrieve all that was left of his true identity from the most successful journalistic legend of the century. None of the rented houses he had rested in between voyages would do for his purpose. He needed a retreat with an uncompromisingly inviolate quality—and found it in Fort Belvedere.

The Fort was a Grace and Favour oddity on the Sunningdale edge of Windsor Great Park and in April, 1930, it fell vacant. The Prince at once asked his father if he might have it. ‘What could you possibly want that queer old place for? Those damn week-ends, I suppose,’ said the King. The Fort had been built by George II in 1750 as a military look-out post and it had been used by troops returned from quelling the ’45. It still had a line of four-pounder guns left there by Butcher Cumberland. Wyatville had added a tall tower and on this Edward flew the flag of the Duchy of Cornwall—even when he was King—to make it clear that it was a private house. Eventually, ‘the Fort laid hold of me in many ways. Soon I came to love it as I loved no other material thing….’ Shortly after it was furnished and renovated the young Prince George moved in with him and only left when, in 1934, he married Princess Marina.

The stage being set, it was now the time for the play to begin. The chief characters were so utterly isolated that had their mésalliance depended upon the art of fiction rather than the accident of fact it is doubtful whether it could ever have taken place.

On July 21st, 1928, a young couple were married at Chelsea Register Office. Each had been married before and the wedding was quiet. They went to Paris for their honeymoon and came back to house-hunt, settling in 12 Upper Berkeley Street. Ernest Simpson was an English shipbroker who had spent most of his business life in the States. His wife, born Bessie Wallis Warfield, was a sagacious Baltimore woman of little real culture but plenty of the kind of charm which pays the biggest dividends outside its national habitat. At first the only other person Mrs. Simpson knew in the whole of London was her husband’s sister, Mrs. Kerr-Smiley. The middle-class friends to whom Mrs. Kerr-Smiley introduced her vivacious sister-in-law were quiet conventional people to whom Mrs. Simpson’s fresh unguarded transatlantic talk sounded so unusual as to be clever. She gave little dinner parties and served American food; she played bridge and listened with an immediate hypnotic interest to the accompanying title-encrusted talk.

‘Seeing a key to the British riddle, I formed the habit of reading most of the London newspapers. I studied them from front to back; and there was one organ of the British Press that instantly absorbed my curiosity—the Court Circular….’

The approach to the Court Circular came about like this. The Simpsons tended to find their easiest social relationships amongst the officials at the American Embassy. The First Secretary was Benjamin Thaw, who was married to Consuelo Morgan, one of the celebrated Morgan sisters, the others being Mrs. Vanderbilt and Lady Furness. Lord Furness was a shipping millionaire with a house at Melton Mowbray where the Prince of Wales was often to be found. One day in November, 1930, the Thaws rang up the Simpsons to say that they couldn’t join the Furnesses for the week-end because Benny Thaw’s mother had been taken ill. So would Wally and Ernest go in their place? The Prince of Wales was to be present. Wally wavered but Ernest said, ‘Of course we’ll go. All that is expected of you, darling, is that you be yourself.’ In the swaying train from St. Paneras to Melton Mowbray, Benny Thaw, who it appears had not gone to his sick mother after all, taught Mrs. Simpson to curtsy and at seven o’clock that evening she did it to a small fair man in very loud tweeds. Their first conversation was about central heating.

In 1931 Mrs. Simpson borrowed Lady Furness’s feathers and was presented at Court—in spite of the anti-divorcee rule. On January 30th, 1932, came the summons to Fort Belvedere. The party included Lady Furness and the Thaws. They found the Prince doing embroidery on a sofa, an art his mother had taught him, he said. It was an enchanting week-end with the Prince wearing the kilt, taking Turkish baths, billhooking the shrubbery and dancing to ‘Tea for Two’ on the gramophone. Mrs. Simpson was shattered. She had expected a cross between the activities of the Hell-fire Club and the Tower of London, and had found instead a decorous and determined innocence. She played up to it gamely and then found herself swept helplessly into the Berkshire charade. The Prince came to her little dinners in Bryanston Court, and then adopted the habit of dropping in at all hours. Early in 1934, Lady Furness was called back to the States for business reasons and before she sailed she confided her anxieties about the Prince to her very good friend Mrs. Simpson. The conversation ended with Wallis saying, ‘Oh, Thelma, the little man is going to be so lonely,’ and Lady Furness insisting, ‘Well, dear, you look after him for me while I’m away. See that he does not get into any mischief.’

Lady Furness was much shaken when she came back from America and saw what had happened. ‘Wallis of all people!’ she said. And that was the general verdict—Wallis of all people.

Twenty years later the Duchess of Windsor was to provide as candid a comment on what to most people was an incomprehensible love affair as any that were written before or since.

‘The only reason to which I could ascribe his interest in me, such as it was, was perhaps my American independence of spirit, my directness, what I would like to think is a sense of humour and fun, and, well, my breezy curiosity about him and everything concerning him. Perhaps it was this naturalness of attitude that had first astonished, then amazed, and finally amused him. Then, too, he was lonely, and perhaps I had been one of the first to penetrate the heart of his inner loneliness, his sense of separateness. Beyond this point my speculations could not carry me; there was nothing else that was real or tangible to nourish them.

‘I had no difficulty in explaining to myself the nature of the Prince’s appeal over me. Over and beyond the charm of his personality and the warmth of his manner, he was the open sesame to a new and glittering world that excited me as nothing in my life had ever done before…. It seemed unbelievable that I, Wallis Warfield of Baltimore, Maryland, could be part of this enchanted world. It seemed so incredible that it produced in me a happy and unheeding acceptance…. All I can say is that it was like being Wallis in Wonderland.’

*

In November, 1934, Prince George left Getting-Away-From-People-House, as his brother called Fort Belvedere, for his marriage, and Peter Pan, as Mr. Simpson called the Prince of Wales, was left alone. In May, 1935, King George and Queen Mary celebrated their silver jubilee amid scenes of unparalleled affection. The Simpsons were invited to the State Ball at Buckingham Palace and it was here, as she danced with the Prince before his glacial parents, that Mrs. Simpson felt the first tremors of the earthquake to come.

For the few months that were left of the old King’s reign the Prince and Mrs. Simpson behaved as exemplarily as the situation would allow them to. It was always Mr. and Mrs. Simpson in the Court Circular and although there were signs at Bryanston Court that the charming bookish husband was beginning to feel the indignity of the role he was bound to play in order to preserve so delicate a status quo, it was none the less his gentle poise which was the chief provider of the freedom his wife and the Prince of Wales were to enjoy all through 1935. For him, too, there was no precedent. What was a chap to do when he came home from the office to find the heir to the greatest empire the world had ever seen taking pot-luck with his wife? Only bow himself out to his room on the pretext of finishing off some important work, which is what he did. ‘Until now (one evening Mr. Simpson had banged the door), I had taken for granted that Ernest’s interest in the Prince was keeping pace with mine,’ Mrs. Simpson was to declare naïvely.

If Mr. Simpson chose to have an understandably blind eye concerning the matter, there were others who did not. Indeed, could not. The Prince of Wales, for twenty tentative years the ‘world’s most eligible bachelor’ and the white hope of a fragmented generation which escaped the massacres in France, was suddenly seen to be tenderly attached to a diminutive American woman with a bitten-back smile and a monumentally complacent husband. Although the British Press maintained an absolute reticence concerning the matter, United States and Continental newspapers suffered no inhibition whatsoever in getting out their biggest, blackest type. Facts and rumours poured in and Miss Ellen Wilkinson, forcing the pace, demanded to know why the magazines she received from abroad had large holes cut in them.

When the Prince became King the situation was well out of hand and he tried to face up to it realistically. There was now a considerable nucleus of people in politics and society who knew what the average person still had no inkling of, that Mr. Simpson’s enigmatic wife must—since what was there to prevent her?—become the Queen of England. Whoever the King married became Queen automatically. This fact was not hidden from Mr. George Allen, the King’s solicitor, when he asked, ‘Are you quite sure, Mrs. Simpson, that you want a divorce?’

Meanwhile, the King began to slash away rather recklessly at the conspiracy of silence which hedged him in, just as he once bill-hooked the stagnant laurels at the Fort with his own hands in his determination to open that private prospect to sweetness and light. He took Wallis to meet the Duke and Duchess of York, driving her to Royal Lodge in a new motor-car. Realism had been called for and had apparently been proffered, for Wallis was to write, ‘I left with the distinct impression that while the Duke of York was sold on the American station-wagon, the Duchess was not sold on David’s other American interest.’

Neither was Stanley Baldwin, when he met Mrs. Simpson about a month later after the King had told her, ‘It’s got to be done. Sooner or later my Prime Minister must meet my future wife.’ Mr. Simpson was present.

So much now had to be done—and swiftly, before the tempest broke. On July 9th the King gave another Wallis-launching dinner party at his old home, York House. Sir Samuel Hoare was present and remembered Wallis, ‘not only for her sparkling talk, but for her sparkling jewels in very up-to-date Cartier settings’. This time Mr. Simpson was not present. Moving from the matrimonial home to the Guards Club he was no longer obliged to play gooseberry.

About three weeks after this dinner party the King, feeling more confident about things than for months past, sailed off for a holiday cruise in Lady Yule’s yacht, the Nahlin. The party included the Duff Coopers, the Herman Rogers and Wallis. The cruise of the Nahlin constituted the last wild fling in the rebellious idyll which had begun at Fort Belvedere in 1930 but the ship’s determined gaiety was trammelled by skeins of melancholy not unlike those which subdue the lovers in Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera. This foreboding did not inhibit the King-Emperor from appearing on the bridge of the Nahlin almost naked as the yacht slipped through the close confines of the Corinth Canal, to the fascination of thousands of Greeks and the horror of the Duff Coopers. Everywhere the Nahlin docked it was besieged by photographers and reporters as the scandal was fed to an already glutted American and Continental Press. There was one photograph in particular which told everything, Wallis with her hand on the King’s bare arm, a gesture which carried with it plain for all to see, not an ordinary indiscretion but a settled, enduring relationship—and, moreover, a relationship which had already endured for some time. The hand was not that of a mistress but that of a wife.

British citizens in the United States now thought it about time that the Government at home had some idea of what was happening and shoals of letters containing Press-cuttings poured into Downing Street. Nothing happened because the House was in recess and Stanley Baldwin himself was in Aix, taking the waters, a habit from which only something such as the Second Coming was likely to deter him.

After the cruise Mrs. Simpson went to Paris and there she read about herself in the newspapers for the first time. She was deeply shocked. Back home in London, the King dined with his mother who then began the superb series of non-sequiturs with which she armed herself to face the music to come. ‘Didn’t you find it terribly warm in the Adriatic?’ she asked.

While the Nahlin was cruising, Mr. Goddard, Mrs. Simpson’s solicitor, had commenced divorce proceedings against Mr. Simpson at Ipswich, a court chosen for its obscurity but which also meant that Wallis would have to live within its jurisdiction for a few weeks. So a cottage was discovered for her at Felixstowe. The hearing, at which she was represented by Norman Birkett, took place on October 27th with only two women spectators, the judge’s wife and a friend. The judge frightened her by his apparent hostility and she was even more frightened when he hesitated before saying in a bitter voice, ‘Very well, decree nisi.’ She drove back to London and to the new house she had taken, 16 Cumberland Terrace, feeling soiled and sad. The case was barely reported and appeared in the most insignificant print, this being the result of a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ organized by Lord Beaverbrook and the Hon. Esmond Harmsworth at the request of the King.

The King spent the previous week-end—‘those damn weekends’—at Sandringham but he had no sooner arrived than a message came asking him to meet the Prime Minister immediately and secretly. On Tuesday Stanley Baldwin arrived at Fort Belevedere at ten in the morning and asked the King for a whisky-and-soda, after which he smoked his pipe furiously. Gradually, after pointing out to the King the danger in which the Monarchy stood, he came to the gist of his visit, which was that Mrs. Simpson should be prevailed upon to withdraw her divorce petition. The King’s reply was adroit to trickiness. He had no right to interfere with the affairs of ‘an individual’, he said. It would be wrong to attempt to influence Mrs. Simpson just because she happened to be a friend of the King’s.

So as things stood the King’s Coronation, at which he was to swear to uphold the Church and Defend the Faith, was fixed for May 12th and the future Queen of England’s second decree absolute was due towards the end of April. The Press pullulated with what it knew and still must not say, and the King opened his first and last Parliament. And on November 13th, as he was about to take his bath at Fort Belvedere, where he still insisted on living in spite of the fact that Queen Mary had at long last moved her stupendous collection of bric-à-brac from Buckingham Palace to Marlborough House, he received a letter from his new Private Secretary which staggered him by what he regarded as its effrontery. This was the letter.

Buckingham Palace,   
13th November, 1936.

Sir,

With my humble duty.

As Your Majesty’s Private Secretary, I feel it my duty to bring to your notice the following facts which have come to my knowledge, and which I know to be accurate:

1. The silence of the British Press on the subject of Your Majesty’s friendship with Mrs. Simpson is not going to be maintained. It is probably only a matter of days before the outburst begins. Judging by the letters from British subjects living in foreign countries where the Press has been outspoken, the effect will be calamitous.

2. The Prime Minister and senior members of the Government are meeting today to discuss what action should be taken to deal with the serious situation which is developing. As Your Majesty no doubt knows, the resignation of the Government—an eventuality which can by no means be excluded—would result in Your Majesty having to find someone else capable of forming a Government which would receive the support of the present House of Commons. I have reason to know that, in view of the feeling prevalent among members of the House of Commons of all parties, this is hardly within the bounds of possibility. The only alternative remaining is a dissolution and a general election in which Your Majesty’s personal affairs would be the chief issue, and I cannot help feeling that even those who would sympathize with Your Majesty as an individual would deeply resent the damage which would inevitably be done to the Crown—the cornerstone on which the whole Empire rests.

If Your Majesty will permit me to say so, there is only one step which holds out any prospect of avoiding this dangerous situation, and that is for Mrs. Simpson to go abroad without further delay—and I would beg Your Majesty to give this proposal your earnest consideration before the position has become irretrievable. Owing to the changing attitude of the Press, the matter has become one of great urgency.

I have the honour …

Alexander Hardinge.1

P.S. I am by way of going after dinner tonight to High Wycombe to shoot there tomorrow—but the Post Office will have my telephone number, and I am of course entirely at Your Majesty’s disposal if there is anything at all that you want.

This letter infuriated the King and dismayed Mrs. Simpson. He saw in it some collusion between his Private Secretary and his Prime Minister and promptly decided to tell his troubles to Walter Monckton, an old Oxford friend, instead of to Hardinge. Mrs. Simpson panicked to the extent of saying that she thought the advice in the letter was right and that she ought to leave the country. The King wouldn’t even think of such a plan and there was a scene in which he ordered her to do no such thing—‘I won’t have it.’ After positively begging Beaverbrook to return home—he was Arizona desert-bound on the Bremen in search of asthma relief—in order to postpone the Fleet Street conflagration, the King sent for the Prime Minister.

Baldwin arrived, only a different Baldwin. This time there was no whisky-grabbing, only plenty of finger-cracking and plain words. Baldwin told the King that whoever he married would become Queen. It was as simple as that. This was the first time the word ‘marriage’ had been used and it rolled between them like a mine between a sturdy puffing tanker and a pleasure craft. When Baldwin said, ‘I believe I know what the people would tolerate and what they would not’ the explosive sphere was flipped expertly into the King’s path. The King paused and then by a single bleak sentence brought the Prime Minister to heel. ‘I am going to marry Mrs. Simpson and I am prepared to go,’ he said. Baldwin later described this as the ice being broken but the King was nearer the truth when he said that the interview left him feeling like Eliza on the icefloe.

This meeting had a poignant effect on the King. Just being able to say so immensely sacrificial a thing as giving up his Throne for his lover put him back in his own eyes on the chivalrous eminence from which he had conquered the world in the old Prince Charming days. The scandals of the present faded and Baldwin said that ‘his face wore such a look of beauty as might have lighted the face of a young knight who had caught a glimpse of the Holy Grail. No reasoning or pleading by family or friend could penetrate that rapturous mist. He was alone with his vision….’

That evening the King told his mother of his decision. She heard it through the mask-like calm of her now undeniable façade and the great misery she felt was all the more harrowing for its being denied the ordinary human outlets. The next morning, when she received the Prime Minister, she took shelter behind a rough Georgian homeliness. ‘Well, Mr. Baldwin,’ she said, ‘this is a pretty kettle of fish.’

The King then saw his three brothers. The Dukes of Gloucester and Kent provided the extremes of reaction which he anticipated, the former feeling little and not pretending to feel more, the latter feeling everything and still to his own mind not feeling enough for this adored brother. There remained the Duke of York. He, poor man, was so overwhelmed as to be for a time quite outside feeling—little or much. All his life he had been passed over by what brother David was to call the ‘Royal show’. It had become the thing for cameras to turn away when he approached. A convention of privacy had been observed for so long where he was concerned that to the country at large he was almost meaningless. The nervousness in his wide-eyed and bony face was so near the surface as to evoke an unflatteringly obvious consideration for it in the faces of those who met him. He also possessed a slight speech defect which had been much commented on by those who had not heard it. He and his pretty Scots wife lived in Piccadilly in circumstances that, when compared with those of the Prince of Wales, amounted to semi-retirement. Now it was proposed that he should wear the Crown. He was filled with dread. Constant tact from others had had the effect of making him too modest and he had quite lost sight of his own merits, if he ever knew them. He was, in fact, ideally suited for the British Throne. But there is little to show that King Edward understood this when he allowed the Crown to pass to such a flinching head and much to show that although he shared the common belief in his brother’s frailty he did not allow this to influence him when it came to burdening the helpless Duke with kingship.

Friends now took the principal characters in the great drama aside to proffer various kinds of ingenious advice. Duff Cooper told the King that as Mrs. Simpson’s decree absolute could not be granted until April, the whole matter should remain ‘abstract’ for five months, the plans for the Coronation got on with and the temperature accordingly lowered. Esmond Harmsworth took Mrs. Simpson to Claridge’s and explained to her what ‘morganatic’ meant. Would she mind being Duchess of Lancaster, say, instead of Queen? She thought it ‘strange and inhuman’.

The King, however, now beginning to seize on any suggestion that could release him from the impasse, let Harmsworth go to Downing Street with his blessing. Then came the King’s big mistake. By telling Baldwin that he was willing to submit the morganatic marriage proposal not only to the British Cabinet but to all the Dominion Cabinets as well, he knew that he would have to act on their ‘advice’. Beaverbrook returned the next day and saw at once the error in letting the morganatic marriage question be decided at Cabinet level. His plan was a brilliant romantic Press presentation of what he called the ‘King’s Case’. Both Duff Cooper and Winston Churchill were to be in different degrees associated with the ‘King’s Case’ but while these plans were yet embryonic the Prime Minister acted. Mrs. Simpson was with the King at Fort Belvedere when the heavens burst.

The signal for the flood which was to wash the King away came from where it was least expected. No one, certainly not Stanley Baldwin, terrified the King more during his unique tribulations than Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The Times, whose behaviour during the Abdication crisis would have done credit to Sir Francis Walsingham. How far his pen was levered to dislodge his King is still conjectural but even if one has to leave the reckoning at its editor’s known activities it shows that The Times had during the thirties an authority which was little short of scriptural. All through the last days of November King Edward waited and trembled for the appearance of the awful first leader he had reason to suspect was already written and set up. And November passed and nothing appeared.

And nothing might have appeared for ten or more days had not Dr. Blunt, the Bishop of Bradford, told his diocesan conference that he wished that the King ‘would show more positive evidence of his awareness of the need for Divine guidance….’ All the Bishop meant was that the King should attend Church regularly. He had never heard of Mrs. Simpson. All he was concerned with was the use of the Coronation service as a symbol of national spiritual resurgence. The Church of England in 1936 was in the doldrums because of the way its teachings had managed to accommodate the blood lust of the militarists during the First World War. The Archbishop of Canterbury and saintly men like Dr. Blunt saw in the coronation of a popular young King a wonderful means to reconcile the cynical to a Church which had learnt a lot since 1918. The key figure in this spiritual awakening was, of course, the King himself. Much of Archbishop Lang’s subsequent behaviour, with its apparent lack of ordinary charity and barely suppressed fury, can be attributed to the fact that he saw a woman wrecking the best opportunity the Church was likely to have in his lifetime for rehabilitating itself in the affections of ordinary people. The Bishop of Bradford knew nothing of any woman. All he knew was that mentions of the King at Matins were few and far between.

It was unusual to criticize the King at any time but in the unnatural silence of the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ even the mildest reproach was inflammable. The destruction of Prince Charming by the same machine which had invented him was a repellent business. Having put him together, the Press knew how to take him apart, and this it did while the world gasped. The country was bewildered and angry that things had reached so extreme a pass before it had been given the least hint of the business. The King’s popularity was tremendous. Who were the Press lords and the politicians that they should keep this near-perfect King’s love from his subjects? the people asked. And they turned avidly to their newspapers to treat tolerantly their monarch’s boyish infatuation with a post-war Lily Langtry, for this is what they expected. What they saw was utterly incomprehensible.

A severe, governessy face stared back at them. It was unassuming, unbeautiful and unquestionably the face of ‘a lady’. By looking hard it was possible to see that the King’s friend was elegant and probably wise. The gossip columnists did their best to build her up to consort level but always the delicate structure toppled the moment they added the salient truth. The lady was one and a half times divorced. If only Mrs. Simpson had looked like a woman who had two husbands and was contemplating taking a third it was just conceivable that there might have been a generalized good word for her. But she didn’t. She looked instead like a woman whose impenetrable natural dignity was at odds with her history, and the conjunction of the two states, incontrovertible in either case, made her appear sinister. The Duke of Windsor, after twenty years of marriage to her, was to write, ‘In character, Wallis was, and still remains, complex and elusive….’ A pretty-faced nobody in the same situation would have received kinder treatment.

By December 4th the Press was overflowing with her pictures but even at her most informal she remained, to the public at large, inscrutable. Her house in Cumberland Terrace was stoned and she awoke to find herself notorious. The King, anxious for her safety, took her and her chaperoning aunt, Mrs. Merryman, to Fort Belvedere, where the scene was like the most extreme kind of comedy-thriller, with the King calling himself ‘Mr. James’, loyal unto-death telephonists clinging sleeplessly to switchboards, cars doubling out of the tradesmen’s entrance with the King and gliding out of the front gates with the cook, and everything in a state of unadulterated drama. On Thursday Mrs. Simpson was driven from the country, ostensibly by Lord Brownlow in her own Buick, in actuality by the ferocious Press. She and the King’s equerry crossed to Dieppe, that sanctuary-post for so many generations of defaulting Anglo-Saxons, and drove the 650 or so miles to Cannes in circumstances nearly as harrowing as those of Marie Antoinette during her flight to Varenne. At Lyon she heard for the first time the description of herself which was to pursue her for the rest of her life. A man caught a glimpse of her as she shrank back into the car and shrilled convulsively, ‘Voilà la dame!’

‘“Voila la dame!”’ she wrote. ‘For a long time that curious cry was to reverberate in my memory. This, I reflected bitterly, was what I had been finally brought to—no longer Wallis Simpson, no longer just another woman, but the woman. I was marked.’

Back home the King was taken to task severely for not being his age. Forgetting that it alone was responsible for ‘H.R.H. Peter Pan’, the Press insinuated that the King was too old for the love game. Dominions newspapers were particularly severe on this point. ‘It is almost inconceivable,’ scolded a New Zealand paper, ‘that in less than a year of the death of King George, the Throne should be shaken to its foundations by indiscretions which age, experience and cognizance of his exalted office should have warned King Edward to avoid …’ and the dreaded first leader in The Times went out of its way to remind the King that ‘he had reached middle age without the blessing of a happy marriage’, while the Melbourne Argus declared that ‘Australians are astounded at being required to look at their idol from an entirely new angle’.

The King’s defenders ranged from Winston Churchill, whose passionate interpretation of history lent his grief a classic quality, to Sir Oswald Mosley and his egregious cockney Nazis, who marched up and down Whitehall with a portrait of the King chanting,

The Beaverbrook-Rothermere Press came out for the King in frankly sentimental terms and many private individuals, such as a Miss Lucy Houston, who hawked her own pamphlet through the West End (‘The King’s Happiness Comes First’) did their bit. Among the arguments for keeping the King, at least until after his coronation, was one which pointed out that a Yorkshire pottery firm would have at least a quarter of a million mugs left on its hands if he left the Throne now.

While all this was going on the Crystal Palace burnt down at Sydenham and Queen Mary, sensible of the value of an ordinary gesture at an extraordinary time, drove out to see the iron and glass miracle which had so perversely gone up in flames. This cheered everybody up enormously.

Still believing that there must be a hard core of genuine affection in the dismally collapsing tinsel image of himself, the King decided to challenge his people’s love. If it was only a fraction of what they had declared it to be over twenty adorative years would they not take his side against the chilly forces of his ministers? He decided to broadcast to the nation and plead like an ordinary man for the simple cause of being able to marry the woman he loved. His words, which he intended to have polished by Winston Churchill, would cut across the sophistries of priests and politicians and the wave of devotion they would inspire would reduce the whole issue to manageable proportions. Excited by this idea, he left Fort Belvedere for Buckingham Palace for his fifth meeting with Mr. Baldwin. The Prime Minister did not care for the imaginative element which was beginning to creep into the King’s proposals, but he said nothing. After grudgingly allowing Winston Churchill to be the King’s adviser he said he would have to discuss the broadcast suggestion with the Cabinet. He then drove away from the Palace. So did Edward, never to set foot in it as monarch again.

The next day found the King of England virtually a prisoner in a mock Gothic folly in Windsor Great Park. All consideration and restraint had gone and an army of photographers and reporters besieged the Fort. The papers arrived and the King and Walter Monckton pored over them. The Times and Telegraph reflected the official attitude but the King and his friend were thrilled to see that such unlikely weeklies as the New Statesman and the Tablet supported the marriage. Again hope rose and when news came in that great crowds were singing the National Anthem and ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ outside the Palace there was a heady moment when the battle seemed almost won. But in the afternoon it became plain that all was lost, crushed irrevocably by Baldwin in a statement to the Commons.

‘Suggestions,’ said the Prime Minister blandly, ‘have appeared in certain organs of the Press … that if the King decided to marry, his wife need not become Queen. These ideas are without foundation. There is no such thing as what is called morganatic marriage known to our law … the lady whom he marries, by the fact of her marriage to the King, necessarily becomes Queen…. The only way in which this result could be avoided would be by legislation dealing with a particular case. His Majesty’s Government are not prepared to introduce such legislation.

‘Moreover, the matters to be dealt with are of common concern to the Commonwealth as a whole, and such a change could not be effected without the assent of the Dominions. I am satisfied, from inquiries I have made, that this assent would not be forthcoming. … I have no other statement to make.’

This was the end of the ‘King’s Case’. Everything was now pellucid, bitterly and mortifyingly so. The King was still smarting from the nerveless and unanswerable logic of the Prime Minister’s speech when its author drove up to the Fort in the too-small car which Edward found so ridiculous. He brought with him a précis drawn-up by Sir John Simon which told the King what he might and might not do. So was salt rubbed in the Royal wounds. After this, thinking that the audience was at an end, the King began to rise but was checked by a gesture from Mr. Baldwin2. There was one other thing. Could the King give the Government his decision without delay, if possible during the week-end?

His decision … when only that morning he had indulged in the sweet morganatic pipe-dream! The King needed all his strength to say, ‘You will not have to wait much longer, Mr. Baldwin.’

The King hardly slept that night. After breakfast he told Walter Monckton to go to London immediately to warn the Prime Minister that when he came to the Fort that afternoon ‘I shall notify him formally that I have decided to abdicate’. The King also begged a favour—that a second Bill should be submitted to Parliament with the Abdication Bill, to make Mrs. Simpson’s divorce absolute immediately, so that he could go straight to her and be married. When Monckton had left, the King sent an agent to Switzerland to find a hotel near Zurich. ‘For me the golden thread of my inheritance had snapped.’

At ten o’clock on December 10th, 1936, King Edward, the Dukes of York, Gloucester and Kent, Sir Edward Peacock, Walter Monckton, Ulick Alexander and George Allen met in the drawing-room at the Fort. Fifteen documents lay on the table before them. Each document said the same thing.

The King signed his name fifteen times neatly—almost casually—and then went out into the garden. At Mr. Baldwin’s suggestion that he might like to add something personal for Parliament to hear, the King wrote two little notes, one commending his brother and the other exonerating Mrs. Simpson from taking any part in persuading him to abandon his Throne. When the time came the Prime Minister read out the first note and totally ignored the second.

Mr. Baldwin’s speech was a masterpiece, a marvellous performance. He made it after question time to a packed and utterly silent House. He had few notes and the novelist manqué in his nature warmed to the unique drama he alone could unfold. His great audience listened spellbound. When he sat down emotion seemed to have drained away all movement and comment, and Clement Attlee was like a man trying to make himself understood in an airless void as he sought permission to have the House suspended until six o’clock, when a very upset Winston Churchill spoke of ‘this melancholy and bitter conclusion’ and Jimmy Maxton seized what he obviously thought and hoped was a moment of monarchlessness to advocate a republic. This was nothing against Colonel Wedgwood’s inspired lack of tact when he said that though ‘tomorrow they would take the Oath to the new King but if they sometimes raised their glass to “the King across the water”, who shall blame them?’ which brought ministerial cries of ‘Oh!’, as well it might.

Mr. Gallacher the communist was surly and said that it had all been too much for him and that, anyhow, he had known about Mrs. Simpson for over a year. And Mr. Buchanan of the Independent Labour Party and Member for the Gorbals, exploded. ‘If he is a tenth as good as you say, why are you not keeping him? Because you know he is a weak creature. You want to get rid of him and you are taking the step today.’

*

The Crown passed from him as he sat at luncheon with Winston Churchill at precisely 1.52 p.m. This was the moment when the Clerk of the Parliaments droned ‘Le Roy le veult’ to the Abdication Act. And so Edward was prince again and free. His tremulous happiness was in marked contrast with that of his companion, who was near to tears and murmuring Marvell. The last hours were precipitous with poignant functions. There was a broadcast to make. His mother—and many other people—begged him not to make it. ‘Do please take my advice,’ pleaded Queen Mary. But of course how was she to know that the whole awful joy of his late action was that he never need take advice again? The Director of the B.B.C. himself arranged the broadcast from Windsor Castle, earning from Punch:

The broadcast was kindly received rather in the way a curtain speech is received. The drama was at an end. Satiety had been reached—some thought over-reached—and the chief actor who had held the stage for ten amazing days seemed to lose all significance as he stepped from his wonderful trappings. Earlier in the day Churchill had tapped out with his walking stick the elegiac lines,

and there was, too, something of the scaffold about the deliberately amateur speech, with its commendation of his mother and his heir and the subtle manner in which he forgave his enemies by pretending that they did not exist. Only a few yards away lay the body of Charles I and it was asking too much of Winston Churchill to forget the fact when he helped another small sad King to make his farewells. The greatest subconscious emotion the broadcast stimulated was probably to remind the remnants of the lost generation that their youth, too, was over. The living symbol of their reaction was middle aged. The Times itself said so.

A few hours later the Prince, created Duke of Windsor on the spur of the moment, sailed away in the destroyer Fury and went to stay with the Baron Eugene de Rothschild in Austria. Sixty other castles were reputed to have been put at his disposal. Nothing was done to hasten Mrs. Simpson’s divorce absolute and the couple had to wait until May 4th before they were reunited. They were married in circumstances which all the art of Constance Spry and Main-bocher could not redeem from shabbiness. A North-country clergyman, the Reverend R. Anderson Jardine, ran the gauntlet of his bishop to perform the ceremony and the final snub arrived with Walter Monckton in the form of a letter from George VI telling his brother that his title of H.R.H. could not be extended to his Duchess. This little action ruined the day. Edward was then forgotten. Perhaps Royalty, having to spend so much of its time fountaining honour and magnanimity over its inferiors, has to be indulged on the rare occasions when it turns on the cold tap over its equals.

The new reign was refined and correct without being in the least stuffy. Queen Mary loomed over it, her stature so increased by her recent stoicism that even physically she gave the impression of being ten feet tall. The new consort dismissed the vague epithet of ‘charm’ and swiftly established herself as enchanting. Her racy culture and quite staggering personality took everybody by surprise, not least her relations, and soon the memory of svelte little suits was obliterated by daring finery. The King’s slight incoherency endeared him immediately to a nation which has never quite trusted conversational ease in men and his very real goodness surprised and delighted everybody. They were crowned on May 12th, for it was thought that quite enough things had been changed over the past six months without altering the Coronation date. The evidences of his brother’s reign, the shortest for 453 years, were tactfully scanty. Some very attractive stamps had been issued but no general coinage. The only pillar-box with the cypher ER was at Ilford.

As for the Duke and Duchess, they became homely, so it is believed. Nearly thirty years may have sanctified their union but has only deepened their enigma. Their tragedy has the polish of an old Lubitch film. Looking back on it we know our hearts should feel more and our senses be entertained less, for this was a King and this was ‘the girl for whom he gave up his Throne’, as they said. Perhaps the key to the sadness is that it is not communicable and the version which throbs in our ears from the distant thirties retains the chic melancholy of ‘These foolish things….’

‘And would your life have ever been the same if you had broken it off?’ asked Ernest Simpson. ‘I mean could you possibly have settled down in the old life and forgotten the fairyland through which you had passed? My child, I do not think so.’

Notes

1 ? (Hardinge letter). Quoted from A King’s Story by H.R.H. The Duke of Windsor (Cassell, 1951).

2 Mr. Baldwin’s speech to the Commons is quoted from Hansard, November 1936.

3 Chapter 11 (passim). Extracts are taken from A King’s Story by H.R.H. The Duke of Windsor (Cassell, 1951) and The Heart Has Its Reasons by the Duchess of Windsor (Michael Joseph, 1956). Also from The Times, December 1936; Hansard; etc.