His search had ended late in his tenure as Prince of Wales, when he discovered, or was discovered by, Mrs. Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson, a charming Baltimore adventuress of genteel if threadbare origins who had learned, like Becky Sharp, to live by her wits. Beginning her womanhood “in greatly reduced circumstances,” Baltimoreans said, she supported herself “in greatly seduced circumstances.” Wallis lacked beauty but possessed something rarer. She was smart. Violet eyes, dark hair, a magnolia complexion, and a stunning figure, combined with the great gift of being a good listener, made her popular everywhere. In 1916 she had married a naval officer. Divorcing him, she eloped with her best friend’s husband, Ernest Simpson, a wealthy shipping man. Simpson’s work often brought him to London; he was always accompanied by his wife, and upon being introduced to her at a garden party, the Prince of Wales found he could not take his eyes off her. How often they saw one another, or in what circumstances, is unknown, but after Edward became monarch she began divorce proceedings against her second husband. The divorce case was a seamy one of middle-aged adultery, and as it began toiling its way through His Majesty’s courts of law that year, there were those who trembled at the possibility that His Majesty himself might be named in the proceedings.148
Early in February 1936, less than a month into the new reign, Stanley Baldwin was told that his new sovereign intended to marry Mrs. Simpson as soon as her decree was final. The bearer of the news was a third party, however, and the prime minister dismissed it as incredible. Sir Walter Monckton, Edward’s chief confidant, later wrote: “I thought throughout, long before as well as after there was talk of marriage, that if and when the stark choice faced them between their love and his obligations as King-Emperor, they would in the end make the sacrifice, devastating though it may be.”149
Nevertheless, Monckton was troubled, and on July 7 he called on Churchill to seek advice. Clementine once called Winston “the last believer in the divine right of kings.” It was almost impossible for him to think unkind thoughts about any occupant of England’s throne. But he was aware of Wallis. At the time of George V’s death, he later wrote in an unpublished memorandum of events, “it was known through wide circles of politics and society” that Edward “had formed a deep attachment for Mrs. Simpson.” However, he continued, “although branded with the stigma of a guilty love, no companionship could have appeared more natural, more free from impropriety or grossness.” If the man existed with whom Wallis had enjoyed a platonic friendship, his name is lost to history. Yet Churchill wrote that first as prince, and now as king, Edward simply “delighted in her company, and found in her qualities as necessary to his happiness as the air he breathed.” Winston drew the peculiar inference that her presence was “a safeguard.”150
At No. 11 Morpeth Mansions that Tuesday evening Monckton told him all he knew, which was less than the whole truth. Mr. Simpson was now living with another woman, he said, and on the strength of that Wallis was seeking her freedom. Monckton added that while the King had no thought of marrying her, his strong “possessive sense” would be gratified were she a free woman. Indeed, even now he contemplated inviting her to Balmoral Castle, the royal residence in Scotland.151
Churchill frowned. His view of what happened when two worldly figures of opposite sex were alone together may have been distorted, but he knew what was and was not done in public. The divorce itself, he said, would be “most dangerous.” Gossip was one thing; court proceedings were “in another sphere.” If the woman gained her freedom under Wallis’s circumstances, “it would be open to any Minister of Religion to say from the pulpit that an innocent man had allowed himself to be divorced on account of the King’s intimacies with his wife.” He urged “most strongly” that “every effort should be made to prevent such a suit.” He also opposed, with all his vigor, any appearance by Mrs. Simpson at Balmoral. Edward must be reminded “that his friendship [with Mrs. Simpson] should not be flaunted in the eyes of the public.” Later, he wrote, he learned that this advice “was not at all pleasing to Mrs Simpson,” who had “expressed surprise that I should have been ‘against her.’ ” Thursday evening Churchill dined with the King at York House. Edward had not yet received Monckton’s report; he asked Churchill whether they had met. Winston nodded. What, asked Edward, had they discussed? Churchill answered in one word: “Gossip.” Later he wrote: “His Majesty looked at me hard, but did not pursue the subject.” And when Monckton did relay Winston’s advice, the King ignored it.152
On October 4 Wallis took a house in Regents Park, and three weeks later at Ipswich she was awarded a decree nisi. It could not become absolute, and she could not remarry, until six months had passed. Nevertheless, the story was on the front page of every American newspaper. Not so in England. The British press, responding to a personal appeal from their sovereign, suppressed the story. In fact, when Churchill wrote that the affair was common knowledge among “wide circles of politics and society,” he was referring to the people he knew, the highest reaches of the upper class. The rest of Britain was ignorant of the marriage crisis. Even Anthony Eden was unaware of it until Baldwin, returning from vacation on October 12, astonished him by asking: “Have you had any letters about the King?” The young foreign minister replied: “No, not so far as I know; why should I have?” The answer awaited Eden, he later wrote, when he returned to the Foreign Office and “found there had been letters from overseas, where there was no press restraint…. They wrote of the King and Mrs. Simpson and her impending divorce suit and they were critical.” Throughout the summer and early autumn, the Dominions and the Americans had been following with keen interest what H. L. Mencken called “the greatest story since the resurrection.”153
Afterward Philip Guedalla said of Baldwin that he had handled the King “with a firmer touch than [he had] the King’s enemies.” Weary and fragile though he was, baffled by the glowering events on the Continent, the Dear Vicar nevertheless retained his sensitive domestic antennae. “Here, indeed,” Macmillan recalled, “was a matter upon which his special talents and his lovable personality had their full play. The King’s problem was, at it were, a supreme ‘family’ problem. Nobody could handle this kind of thing more skilfully or more sympathetically than Baldwin, or with a surer touch.” He had been praying for the chance to score one last triumph. He could have hoped for none greater than this.154
But monarchs, even constitutional monarchs, are intimidating to those who have been brought up to revere the Crown, and this sovereign was displaying a cunning, evasive side no one in Parliament had noticed in him before. He had lied to Monckton, to his solicitor, and to his own family. Despite his solemn assurances, the terrible truth was that his intentions toward Wallis were honorable. He did intend to marry her. Finally, he laid the awful truth before his mother. Queen Mary, seething with rage and grief, told him that it was his constitutional duty to inform the prime minister at once.155
On Monday, November 16, he did so. Baldwin was convinced that Britons would not have Mrs. Simpson on any terms—as queen, as titled consort, or as morganatic wife. Had he been discreet, His Majesty might have kept her as his mistress, but since she was already a household word in the United States and the Dominions, sooner or later Fleet Street would make her a British celebrity. Moreover, any surreptitious arrangement was unacceptable to the King. She must become his wife, he insisted, and must share his throne. Baldwin told him that was unthinkable. The King remained adamant. Obviously, there was only one solution. Edward VIII must abdicate and be succeeded by his brother the Duke of York, “Bertie,” as King George VI. Apparently both His Majesty and the prime minister recognized the inevitability of this from the outset, but neither could mention it to the other, let alone outsiders. In Cannes, whence she had gone, “the Baltimore woman,” as the press now called her, was unaware that her next name was likely to be, not Wallis Regina, but Mrs. Windsor.
Baldwin’s next move was obligatory; he had to report this conversation to the cabinet, leaders of the opposition
parties, elder statesmen, and key figures in the House of Lords. Thus informed, Lord Salisbury led a small group of outraged senior parliamentarians to No. 10 the next day. It was their position, Salisbury said, that though they would not be shocked by a commoner who wanted “to marry his mistress,” the situation was very different when “a man born to sublime responsibilities” was “ready to jeopardize them, as it seems, in order to gratify his passion for a woman of any sort.” Salisbury had invited Churchill to join this delegation, but Winston had declined. He agreed with the delegates, he explained, but were he to commit himself now, he “would lose all influence over the King.” Instead, he planned a personal appeal to His Majesty, arguing that just as millions of other Englishmen in his generation had “made every sacrifice in the War, so he must now be willing to make this sacrifice for his Country.” Here Winston encountered a problem. He had a good case, but to state it he must see His Majesty, and Baldwin wouldn’t permit that; he was keeping Edward secluded in the royal lodge at Ford Belvedere. Anyone wanting to call on him must be screened by the prime minister, who had approved only a handful of applicants, notably the Archbishop of Canterbury and Geoffrey Dawson of The Times.156
At this point a certain illogic began to creep into Winston’s thinking. On Wednesday of the following week, Baldwin, seeking nonpartisan support in Parliament, told Churchill, Attlee, and Sinclair that should the King refuse to abandon his marriage plans, he and his cabinet would resign; he asked what their response would be. Attlee and Sinclair quickly replied that neither would accept the seals of prime minister. Churchill said his attitude was “a little difficult,” but he would “certainly support the Government.” He was convinced that the King would abandon his marriage plans. At the same time, he saw no reason why, after Wallis was again free, they should not “continue to see one another outside marriage.” Even if one accepts his view of their relationship as a sexless friendship, this would constitute an invitation to scandal which, as he himself had told Monckton, could only tarnish the Crown. Furthermore—and here he raised an issue which would loom ever larger as the crisis grew—Churchill deplored talk of a swift decision. He saw no reason to be “hasty.” This was merely a royal “infatuation.” In time, he predicted, two or three months at most, it would pass and His Majesty would come to his senses. Baldwin, who had studied the expression on the King’s face when he spoke of Wallis, knew better.157
Churchill did see that the essential “difficulty,” as he wrote Salisbury, had risen since Wallis’s decree nisi. It was a “point of honour that a man should marry the woman who divorces herself or is divorced on his account.” This problem was “insuperable, unless the lady in question herself spontaneously gives the release.” He therefore approved the dispatch of a mission to Cannes with that objective. One was formed. Lord Beaverbrook led it; he was perhaps the only man in Edward’s kingdom audacious enough to ask his monarch’s intended “to renounce all idea of marriage, morganatic or otherwise, with the King.” All she had to do, he explained, was withdraw her petition for an absolute divorce. Winston believed that would end the crisis. His hopes were high. In a letter praising Beaverbrook he wrote: “He is a tiger in a fight… a devoted tiger! Very scarce breed.” But if Beaverbrook was a tiger, Wallis was a man-eater. She coldly informed him and all the other King’s men that should their sovereign decide to marry, she would place no obstacles in his path.158
Until now the public had been unaware of the impasse. Their ignorance ended on December 2, when the Right Reverend Alfred Blunt, bishop of Bradford, inadvertently touched off a furor by criticizing the King’s poor churchgoing record. The press seized upon the occasion to comment on Wallis in Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Darlington, and Birmingham newspapers. No power on earth would keep the crisis out of The Times the next day. The cabinet met in emergency session. Duff Cooper proposed that the coronation move forward as planned and the marriage issue be raised after the King had been crowned in May. But he was a minority of one. Were his course followed, the others told him, the monarchy, the very symbol of unity, would become the eye of a storm tearing Britain and the Empire apart, with the possibility that a King’s party might be formed—a throwback to the days when the royal court vied with the House of Commons in governing the nation. Duff Cooper was also reminded that the prime minister had other duties, among them rearmament and foreign policy in Spain, Geneva, and Ethiopia. This was incontestable. Macmillan sympathized with the King, but he later emphasized that “apart from the personal problems involved, grave injury was done to the public interest from a wider point of view. During many weeks—the whole of the late summer and autumn—the Prime Minister and his leading colleagues… were occupied with the complications and distractions of this affair at a vital period.”159
Baldwin declared the matter must be swiftly resolved. The cabinet agreed. That evening the King once more told the prime minister that his decision to marry Wallis was irreversible; Baldwin again replied that the government’s position was unalterable. The need for a solution being urgent, there was no point in continuing the deadlock. But Churchill did not know that. As Baldwin and Edward conferred, Winston rose in the House to ask that “no irrevocable step” be taken until Parliament could be consulted. His appeal was greeted by angry murmurs. He and Beaverbrook then met with the King’s solicitor and endorsed Edward’s wish to address the nation. Within the hour Baldwin vetoed any royal broadcast as “thoroughly unconstitutional.”
The Times leader the following morning—the day of the Albert Hall meeting—was the opening gun in Dawson’s campaign against the marriage. He wrote of “a grave constitutional issue” arising from “a conflict between the KING’S intentions and the advice of his Ministers,” and observed that “the high office which HIS MAJESTY holds is no man’s personal possession. It is a sacred trust, handed down from generation to generation.” The path of a sovereign was not easy, particularly one “who has reached middle age without the blessing of a happy marriage,” but His Majesty must understand that the monarchy itself would be “weakened if ever private inclinations were to come into open conflict with public duty and be allowed to prevail.” Edward was stung. In his memoirs he would write bitterly: “The press creates; the press destroys. All my life I had been the passive clay that it had enthusiastically worked into the hackneyed image of a Prince Charming. Now it had whirled around and was bent upon demolishing the natural man who had been there all the time.”160
Emotionally, Churchill was becoming a loose cannon, making contradictory statements as he tried to reconcile the unsuitable marriage with his devotion to the Crown. Lunching with Sir Walter Citrine, he said very quietly, “I shall defend him. I think it is my duty.” It was also a violation of his assurance to Salisbury, and Citrine, startled, said, “What? Irrespective of what he has done?” Winston, according to his companion, “looked grave, and, putting his hands on his breast, he said with emotion, ‘He feels it here.’ ”161
Those closest to Churchill were appalled. His daughter Mary recalls that Clementine “disagreed profoundly. She saw something else very clearly, too,” Mary remembers. “She realized that Winston’s championship of the King’s cause would do him great harm, and that he would be accused of making political capital out of this crisis.” Harold Nicolson wrote that Churchill’s “line” was “let the King choose his girl.” But there was more to it than that. Later Winston’s physician observed: “King and country, in that order, that’s about all the religion Winston has.” Yet he, too, missed the point. Part of it was Churchill’s deep, unquestioning loyalty to those he had befriended. One of his secretaries recalls that even if a man had publicly disgraced himself, he would say, “I don’t want to hear it. This man is my friend.”162
Lady Violet Bonham Carter, after trying to reason with him about the issue and being “met by black hostility,” concluded, as Clementine had, that he was “quite oblivious” to the public’s distaste for “a hole-and-corner morganatic marriage.” Violet wrote that �
��his championing of Edward VIII was inspired by a romantic loyalty. He would have been prepared to stand alone beside his King against a world of arms.” Winston himself said much the same thing later: “I should have been ashamed if, in my independent and unofficial position, I had not cast about for any lawful means, even the most forlorn, to keep him on the Throne of his fathers.” This was intuitive, not reasonable; it was as though the King had called: “Now who will stand on either hand / And keep the bridge with me?” Two had sprung forward: Beaverbrook and Churchill. But their incentives were very different. Later Beaverbrook said he had been trying to “get” Baldwin. Winston, aroused, hotly replied: “I wasn’t trying to ‘get’ anyone. I wanted to save the King.”163
It couldn’t be done, and when, the day after The Times editorial and the Albert Hall rally, Edward asked the prime minister if he might see Churchill, as “an old friend” with whom he might “talk freely,” Baldwin agreed. He knew he had won. He had just told His Majesty that the cabinet wanted a decision during the weekend—it was now Friday—or, if possible, this evening. Edward had replied: “You will not have to wait much longer.” He hadn’t wanted the crown; he wouldn’t fight for it. Conservative MP Henry Channon wrote in his diary: “The King told [the Duke of Kent] that over two years ago while he knew he was an excellent Prince of Wales and liked the job, he nevertheless felt that he could never ‘stick’ being King as he put it, he was afraid of being a bad one. He could never tolerate the restrictions, the etiquette, the loneliness; so perhaps if the issue had not arisen something else would have.”164
Alone, 1932-1940 Page 33
