During 1945, several events occurred that even seasoned observers of political and national actions might once have dismissed as improbable. VE Day was received with the ecstasy it deserved, but Churchill’s defeat in the subsequent election was met with surprise. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war with Japan may have been the only viable solution to an intransigent issue, but with the introduction of atomic power into the theatre of battle, it is hard not to agree with its architect J. Robert Oppenheimer’s quotation from the Bhagavad Gita that ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds’. Less seismically but equally dramatically, 5 October saw an unanticipated return to Britain: that of the Duke of Windsor.
He travelled alone, staying with his mother at Marlborough House, and was received formally by his brother during his visit. He had the chance to meet the leading members of the government, along with his old nemesis Lascelles. But there were no accoutrements of a state reception or the publicity campaign he might have wished for. Even the Daily Express, for so long a supporter of both Edward and Wallis, offered no editorial comment or publicity when he arrived. He might once have expected his visit to be a front-page news story, complete with tub-thumping leaders about how ‘the Duke of Windsor’s presence in our country is a welcome one … let us hope it becomes a permanent fixture’. But war, and a new government, had distracted people’s attention. He was a relic of the previous world now, and treated with the mild interest that shop-soiled antiquities traditionally receive.
The duke had no particular expectations from his visit, which he had announced he would make back in August. Breezily he wrote to his brother to say that ‘I will be going to England later on business, and as it has been nearly nine years since I have seen Mama, I have written to ask her if I could spend a few days with her either in London or Badminton … I have also written the new Prime Minister advising him of my intention of going to Great Britain.’ He then offered his inimitable view on world affairs. ‘However, it will be a great relief to get this second World War over and done with, and with the discovery of the atomic bomb, I for one hope I shall have passed on before the next one!’1 There were those who may have privately wished for his end to have occurred during the most recent conflict.
Before he arrived, he expressed a hope that he might be made ambassador to Buenos Aires, but this was refused, both because Bevin felt unable to recommend such an appointment, and because Wallis’s continued unacceptability to the Court of St James’s meant that the Argentines would have been within their rights to refuse to acknowledge him. Lascelles characterised this prospect as ‘an intolerable insult to our Royal Family, and to our national prestige’.2
The private secretary had felt trepidation about his old foe’s return to the country, not least because the duke had, as usual, given some ill-advised press interviews, talking up what he expected to achieve from his visit. Nonetheless, as he wrote to the king, ‘the only person [these interviews] do any actual harm to is the Duke himself … the general public are “fed up” with such interviews … the only reaction of the average man is “Here’s the Duke of Windsor talking to the Press again. Why can’t he keep quiet?”’ He suggested that a blanket ban on speaking to the media would inevitably be leaked to the papers, causing further chaos. Therefore his advice was that ‘if you mention the Press at all, you might end by saying something to the effect that you hope he won’t let the newspapermen be a nuisance to him & that you are sure he realises that it does worry Queen Mary & other members of the Royal Family when they read about the interviews he is supposed to give them … as he knows well, the RF never have given interviews in this country, & can’t start doing so now’.
He counselled soft treatment – ‘if you wrote at all strongly, he might react by taking the line that, when he is about to come to England for the first time for years, in order to see Queen Mary, the first thing that happens to him is to get a “telling off” from the King’ – and concluded that the former monarch inevitably marched to the beat of a different drum. ‘This would be quite illogical – but then he is a most illogical person!’3
Snubbed once again, Edward submitted to the usual treatment. His accent was by now distinctly on the western side of mid-Atlantic – ‘more pronouncedly American than many Americans’, according to Lascelles – and his voice shriller. He was ‘noticeably, almost painfully’4 thin, and his once-youthful face was much lined, although he seemed still to radiate the untroubled serenity that he had displayed both as Prince of Wales and as king. In contrast, his younger brother was so tired that he quipped to Gloucester, without much humour, that ‘I shall be dead before getting [to Balmoral].’5
When the two men met for dinner on the evening of 5 October – the first time they had been in a room together since September 1939 – they were joined by the stately presence of Queen Mary, whether as peacemaker or referee. In the event, given the bad blood that had accumulated between the two over the previous six years, it proved to be a largely amicable encounter. Both sides had dreaded it, but the king later remarked that it had ‘gone off far better than he had expected’. He noted that ‘D was looking very well and talked a great deal about America.’ The duke asked Queen Mary if she would be prepared to receive Wallis, and ‘after some moments in a strong silence’, she answered that she would not, ‘as nothing had happened to alter the circumstances which had led to the abdication’. The matter was not raised again, and Edward now accepted that the duchess would never be received formally by his family or be awarded the title Her Royal Highness.
He had a subsequent meeting with his brother the following day, where the two men ‘discussed the whole matter very thoroughly and quietly’. The duke stated that he was now happily married and that he would not have been able to carry out his duties as monarch properly without his wife, to which the king replied, not without anger, that ‘you have profoundly shocked everybody here and in the Empire … you would not listen to your family, friends or advisers, & you have not thought out the consequences of your behaviour’. Edward was then informed that any job under the Crown was now impossible, given his previous status as sovereign, and was told – as if he needed to be – that his role in the Bahamas had been dreamt up to get him out of Europe during wartime.
The king did not note how the duke responded to these statements, nor how he reacted when his former equerry, Ulick Alexander, informed him that his permanent presence elsewhere in the world continued to be a prerequisite of his acceptance, grudging and patronising though it was, on such occasions as the present one. In any case, it was to be the last time the brothers ever met.
The most in-depth account of the duke’s thoughts and attitudes during his visit came from an interview he had with Lascelles on 9 October. The two men had not met in nearly a decade, and the rancour that had existed between them – although more on the private secretary’s side than the former monarch’s – was set aside for the ‘very friendly’ hour and a half that they talked. As with his dealings with the king and others, Edward was courteous, even when Lascelles spelt out harsh home truths to him, rather in the manner of Badger lambasting Mr Toad for his profligacy and irresponsibility.
Lascelles reported to the king that ‘I had always tried to tell the Duke the truth … though it was not a pleasant thing to say to any man about his wife; my conviction was that, if the Duchess were received by Queen Mary and your Majesty, public opinion would, on balance, react very unfavourably and even dangerously, though I couldn’t deny that there would be of course a minority who would think the other way.’6 Although he acknowledged that ‘it was primarily a family matter, on which my opinion didn’t matter’, he stated that ‘if the Duchess were to be formally “received”, it would have a very damaging, if not dangerous, effect on public opinion both here and all over the Empire’.
It did not cause Lascelles any particular grief to remind his former employer that ‘it was one of the curses of kingship that there is in this world one law for kings and another for commoners’. Edward took this ‘quite well’, but responded that ‘it was unfair to discriminate against his wife – X and Y and Z had all been involved in divorce cases, yet they were received’, and claimed that he should now be treated as a private individual. Lascelles answered, ‘No, you could never be a private individual. It is one of the hard things about kingship – if you are born a king, you stay a king til the day of your death, even if you have become an ex-king … I don’t pretend that this is fair and just, but it is so.’7
With his wife thus denigrated, the conversation turned to the possibility of the duke’s future employment in a British colony. As Lascelles said, ‘The British Empire is like the clock on the mantlepiece – it has to be kept ticking away, but the machinery is pretty delicate, & is going to get more so as the years go on; we had, so to speak, taken that clock to pieces a hundred times and tried our damnedest to fit into it an extra wheel – the wheel of an ex-King. We have always found that we couldn’t get that wheel in without damaging the works.’
‘The wheel fitted in all right in the Bahamas,’ the duke replied unabashed.
‘As far as your actual running of Governorship went,’ Lascelles answered, ‘nobody denies that you had been a good Governor, nor that you did remarkably well there. But your appointment to the Bahamas was an emergency solution to the problem of what to do with you in the war. The experiment worked once, but it can’t be safely repeated.’8
Before Edward could interject, Lascelles continued in a heartfelt manner, ‘I have been talking to you quite impersonally, and in general terms. I have said to you exactly what I should say to the present King if he suddenly told me that he proposed to hand over the throne to Princess Elizabeth, and asked me if there was any other job he could do elsewhere in the Empire; but now I am going to make a personal appeal to you. In 1936, you made a tremendous sacrifice, on behalf of the lady who is your wife … could you not now make another sacrifice on behalf of your brother who, nine years ago, in order that you might lead your own life, took on the toughest job in the world – namely the job of King of England … the heaviest possible burden of life-long cares, duties and hard work, a burden for which you had always been prepared, and he not at all: could you not now decide to try and make things easier for him, instead of making them harder? You know that your brother only refuses to receive the Duchess because he is certain that it is his duty to refuse; you know that he can’t offer you an official job because he is convinced that it would, in the long run, damage the Empire; you know that your idea of being a “younger brother” under the King simply wouldn’t work – wouldn’t it just be a good gesture on your part to accept these facts once & for all, and not continually embarrass the King by going on bringing them up for discussion, which can’t do anybody any good?’9
Lascelles had, inadvertently, exposed the weakness of the royal family. ‘The Firm’ could belittle the duke, patronise him and write him high-handed letters that refused to grant him the privileges and favours that he asked. But he could not simply be expelled from his position. It might have made matters much more convenient if he had renounced his title and its trappings altogether and lived as a private citizen, but as his great-great-nephew has subsequently discovered, a royal title is a life sentence without the possibility of parole. If its principal members refuse to behave themselves, there is little that can be done with them.
Edward asked if he might go to America and improve Anglo-American relations. Lascelles, refraining from suggesting that his marriage to Wallis had only made such relations worse, replied, ‘There is nobody who could have a better opportunity for doing this than yourself. You are past fifty-one, and behind you, you have thirty years of full and varied experience. With your name, and your resources, you could do a great deal of good in that particular direction. If you made your home in America, you could do a very great deal of good … you could do it with much greater freedom just because you won’t be an official. You could make your house into what the great houses of England used to be – common ground in which all the most interesting people of the day, English or foreign, are continually meeting each other.’ He reported that the duke was ‘quite interested by the ideas which I had tried to express’, but refused to commit himself to anything, and the conversation broke up amicably enough.
Edward telephoned Lascelles two days later, before his departure for Paris, in ‘friendly mood’, to say that he had spoken to the king on the telephone the previous night and to ask about whether he could be given diplomatic immunity from taxation.* The private secretary now professed himself ‘quite impervious’ to the old charm. ‘I believe I did some good’, he wrote. ‘It was a very interesting interview … [but] I found myself thinking several times during his long soliloquies that I might almost be listening to the Prince Regent of Monday night.’†10 He reported to the king that Edward spoke ‘rather bitterly’ of his former friend Churchill, and said, ‘I hope Your Majesty will think I took more or less the right line.’ He also alluded to the duke’s almost compulsive uxoriousness, saying, ‘A thing that struck me all through my talk with the Duke was his intense devotion to his wife. There is no doubt about that; and, as long as he & she are together, I don’t think anybody need worry about his being happy or not. All the more reason, therefore, that, having got what he wants, he should reconcile himself to accepting the drawbacks of his position as well as its advantages.’ He concluded philosophically, ‘One can’t have everything in this life.’11
When the duke returned to Paris, he wrote to his brother with warmth, but also pointedly. With a touch of condescension, he praised him for looking ‘so well and vigorous after the strain of the last six years of total war’ and stated stoutly that ‘my admiration for your fortitude knows no bounds’. He was unable to write without extolling his own virtues – ‘my life has not been easy-going either … I am satisfied that the job I undertook as your representative in a third-class British colony was fulfilled to the best of my ability’ – but he was more conciliatory than he had been before, accepting that the ‘frank discussion of personal and family matters with special regard to the future’ had settled certain issues. There was no talk between them of Wallis’s acceptance within the royal family, or her being given HRH status.
Instead, after reiterating his desire to serve both British and American interests in some bespoke quasi-ambassadorial role, the duke struck an almost philosophical note. He acknowledged that he would remain a wandering minstrel, singing for his supper in grand houses throughout the world (‘I am frank to admit that I was sorry when your answer was in the affirmative to my question as to whether my taking up residence in Great Britain would be an embarrassment to you, [but] I can see your point … I am prepared to put your feelings before my own … don’t forget that I have suffered many unnecessary embarrassments … uncomplainingly during the last nine years’), and then mused about the future he and his brother might face.
‘[We are] two prominent personages placed in one of the most unique situations in history, the dignified handling of which is entirely your and my responsibility, and ours alone. It is a situation from which we cannot escape and one that will always be watched with interest by the whole world. I can see no reason why we should not be able to handle it in the best interests of both of us, and I can only assure you that I will continue to play my part to this end.’12
It seemed as if, for the first time since the abdication, a truce had been declared between the warring pair. Even if there was no prospect of Edward being readmitted to the fold, if he remained tame and docile this was a more acceptable prospect than having him as an ungovernable and dangerous renegade. But what had not been mentioned at any point during his visit was that earlier in the year, Lascelles, the king and others had been shown all but incontrovertible proof that the former monarch had committed treachery against his country.
The so-called Marburg Files had been found in Germany in May 1945. Their name stemmed from their discovery at Marburg Castle, after which copies were made by the British. It soon became clear that the information within them, revolving around the Duke of Windsor’s involvement with the Nazis while in Europe, and specifically Operation Willi, was potentially devastating, both to any remaining reputation Edward possessed and to the wider post-war settlement. It was Bevin’s first major test as Foreign Secretary. If he failed, it would be an immediate indictment of Attlee’s new and progressive government. But it was far from obvious what the right course of action was.
Bevin communicated his thoughts as undramatically as he could to Attlee on 13 August. ‘I believe you will agree that the following exception will have to be made to the release of German documents to other governments … I suggest we should try to persuade the United States Government to cooperate with us in suppressing the documents concerned.’ He ran through the contents, including the ‘second and third hand reports and speculations about the Duke’s attitude derived from agents in contact with him’. While he took care to acknowledge that ‘the documents have no bearing on war crimes or on the general history of the war’, he also recognised that ‘they would possess the highest publicity value on account of the personalities involved and the type of intrigues described’. It was no surprise that he warned that ‘a disclosure would in my opinion do grave harm to the national interest’.
The files had to be suppressed. Bevin, still a newcomer to his post, trusted that the copy sent to the State Department in Washington would make it no further, but could not say the same for the originals in Marburg. He noted that ‘Access to the files there is easily obtained by American service and official personnel and that there is therefore risk of the documents being seen and mischief being done by an irresponsible disclosure.’13 He concluded by suggesting that the United States government should be asked either to destroy their copy of the files, or at the very least hand it over to Britain for safe keeping. The consequences of an English-language copy existing, he implied, would otherwise be ruinous.
Lascelles was shown the files, and his immediate response was to assume that the statements contained within about Edward and Wallis were accurate. As he wrote in his diary, ‘If the Windsors’ reactions were as implied in this correspondence (which both [Edward’s former private secretary] Godfrey Thomas … and I agree cannot be wholly discounted; internal evidence indicates that there is at any rate a substratum of truth in it) the result is, to say the very least, highly damaging to themselves.’14
He arranged for an interview to take place between the king and Bevin on 23 August. Attlee’s assistant private secretary, John Peck, recorded that ‘the King was much distressed’ to discover the news of his brother’s untrustworthiness. Monckton and Churchill were also consulted, and Peck noted that ‘Both of course agree absolutely that the file should be suppressed and we are so informing the Foreign Office.’ Monckton, who had some first-hand experience of the events described due to his involvement with them in August 1940, could only shrug and testify to the accuracy of the files. As Peck concluded, ‘it certainly reinforces the desirability of suppressing the Marburg dossier if possible’. Attlee wrote at the bottom of the memorandum, ‘I agree’.15
So there, uneasily, the matter was allowed to rest. The duke was thus able to sit around in Marlborough House and Buckingham Palace and be treated as an honoured guest. He even accompanied his mother on a tour of the bombed East End docks during his visit. No overt allusion was made to his wartime activities. Maintaining the status quo at all costs was the desired objective. Besides, the Marburg Files were either safely contained within official custody or, at worst, remained little more than an incomprehensible series of German-language documents that only the most curious might have obtained some use from.
It would have been bad luck for the files ever to have made it into the public domain. But luck, good and bad, was what would define the royal family over the next decade. They would meet with tragedy and disaster, as well as renewal and fresh hope for the future. And Edward, the king who had spurned his country and his throne, would continue to lurk in the shadows, an embarrassment to his family and his country alike. Only someone exceptional could manage to neutralise the threat he posed.
Thankfully, it would not be long before she emerged.