by A. N. Wilson
Being Prince of Wales isn’t a job, but David did his duty as heir to the throne with enough aplomb to make him a matinée idol on the world stage. He toured the Empire. He did his share of visiting different parts of Britain, making speeches, visiting ex-servicemen’s clubs, and the like. He was a good horseman. Slight and thin as he was, he made a nimble polo-player; he enjoyed point-to-pointing. He liked smoking. He wore outrageous clothes, jazzy socks, turn-ups on Oxford bags, bright tweeds, all the garments which would have made Jeeves wince had Bertie Wooster insisted upon wearing them. There was (a bit) more sex in Edward VIII’s world than in Bertie Wooster’s, though not nearly so much as in Edward VII’s, and the people among whom he moved were decidedly more mondains than Gussy Fink-Nottle or Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright. Among his best friends were Duff and Diana Cooper, Sibyl Colefax, Nancy Cunard, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. Chips was born in Chicago, the son of a businessman, but like many Americans in exile, he loathed his native land. ‘The more I know of American civilization,’ he wrote when he was twenty-eight years old, ‘the more I despise it. It is a menace to the peace and future of the world. If it triumphs, the old civilizations, which love beauty and peace and the arts and rank and privilege will pass from the picture. And all we will have left will be Fords and cinemas. Ugh!’
In Paris he had met Proust, and Chips’s famous diaries reveal an obsession with high society which is Proustian in its intensity, if not its artistry. Like Proust, too, he was bisexual, with a distinct preference for young men. He was the lover among others of George, Duke of Kent, and of Terence Rattigan. In 1933 he married Lady Honor Guinness, the eldest daughter of the 2nd Earl of Iveagh. In 1935 Chips became MP for Southend-on-Sea, a seat which had been occupied before that by his mother-in-law, Lady Iveagh, and before that by his father-in-law. His friend, a fellow MP, Harold Nicolson, described their house, 5 Belgrave Square:
Oh my God, how rich and powerful Lord Channon has become! There is his house in Belgrave Square next to Prince George, Duke of Kent, and Duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall-paintings. Then the dining room is entered through an orange lobby and discloses itself suddenly as a copy of the blue room of the Amalienburg near Munich – baroque and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no and all that. Very fine indeed!18
Being king gave Edward less time than he would have wanted for his amusing friends, and much has been made of his bored expression during the grotesque summer ceremony when 600 debutantes were ‘presented’ at court, or his failure, during a summer holiday in Scotland, to turn up and open a hospital. But the truth is, he did far more than Queen Victoria had ever dreamed of doing in the way of public duties, and he performed some of them with imagination and aplomb. His occasional lapses are not to be compared with the temper-tantrums and awkward shyness of his brother Bertie throughout his public life both as Duke of York and as George VI. Nor did not ever commit a gaffe such as his sister-in-law Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon perpetrated when visiting South Africa as queen empress, when the whole fiasco was over, and, with her umbrella, she rapped the knuckles of the little children who dared to stretch out to her in her limousine as she glided past them. Edward would have made a perfectly satisfactory king had he been allowed to stay in place, but history, extraordinarily babyish in this respect, has to depict him as a selfish sybarite, a Nazi sympathizer, a man who would have ‘brought down’ the monarchy, and his brother – a decent enough person in his way for someone all but talentless – as a sort of saint. Of course, had Edward VIII been allowed to stay on the throne, he would, just as much as his brother, have been a devoted wartime leader to his people, and it would have been he, and his queen, who were the beloved icons, adored by their own generation for their unselfish touring of bombsites, their visiting of hospitals, and their plucky refusal to leave Buckingham Palace even when it was bombed. As it happened this script was handed to Edward’s brother and his wife to enact. He was doomed instead to play another role, of exile, and oddball.
Quite how it happened, although or because it has been written about so often, is actually hard to explain. When one reads about the story, it really is as if none of the participants in the drama exactly knew what they were doing; as if they were being guided by completely irrational impulses.
If an ardent monarchist, yearning for the institution of kingship in a changing world to survive, had sat down and invented a person most likely to continue, while adapting, its historic role, they could hardly have found anyone more appropriate than the new king. He was handsome. The masses adored him. He was bright but not disconcertingly clever. He was weirdly willing to serve. On a private level at least, no Prince of Wales more completely lived out his motto, Ich dien.
At Fort Belvedere, the pretty little folly which he inhabited in Windsor Great Park, he was an affectionate and attentive host. When someone said they would prefer to drink white wine rather than champagne he did not bother a servant, he went and fetched it himself. This habit of pleasant courtesy continued throughout life. Once, lunching with a friend just outside Paris in his retirement years, David, by then demoted to being Duke of Windsor, saw that a minor crisis had occurred. It was hardly the Marriage Feast of Cana, but Daisy Fellowes wanted a glass of Coca-Cola and her hostess had none in the house. Immediately, the Duke of Windsor went to the telephone and rang his German butler. ‘Fritz, hier ist der Herzog,’ he was heard saying in his cockneyfied but fluent German. ‘Können Sie eine Flasche hier schicken?… Nein, nein, nicht Wein. Koka-Kola. Bitte sehr.’
Some time in May 1934, the prince’s mistress, Mrs Dudley Ward, was distracted by the illness of a daughter and remained out of touch with him for some weeks. When she rang the switchboard at St James’s Palace she spoke to the telephonist whose voice she had heard on an almost daily basis for many years. ‘I have something so terrible to tell you,’ said the young woman, her voice trembling with emotion, ‘that I don’t know how to say it. I have orders not to put you through.’
That was how his friend and mistress of over fifteen years learnt that she had been dropped. It had been some time in January 1932 that the Prince of Wales had first met an animated American lady, married to Ernest Simpson – in whose sister’s house he had met Mrs Dudley-Ward. The new woman in his life had been born on 19 July 1896 in Baltimore, and called by her parents Bessiewallis Warfield. She disliked the name Bessie and soon came to be known simply as Wallis. Though her own parents were not rich, she was born into a distinctly upper-class family, and her relations all lived in large houses with servants. After an unhappy marriage in America she had come to Europe, and in 1928 she had married Ernest Simpson. That marriage too was doomed to fail, largely through his unfaithfulness. The person who introduced her to Prince Edward was Lady Furness (Thelma), with whom he was having an affair, blighted, she was unkind enough to say, by his sexual incompetence. When Lady Furness had to leave England for a few months in the spring of 1934, she asked Wallis Simpson to ‘look after the Prince while she was away’. It soon became clear to the prince’s circle that he had fallen deeply in love with Mrs Simpson.
When Chips Channon first met Wallis Simpson on 23 January 1935 he found ‘a nice, quiet, well-bred mouse of a woman with large, startled eyes and a huge mole. I think she is surprised and rather conscience-stricken by her present position.’ By 11 May, he saw her rather as an adventuress in a Henry James story – his description would fit Mrs Headway in ‘The Siege of London’. ‘Never has he been so in love. She is madly anxious to storm society, while she still is his favourite, so that when he leaves her (as he leaves everyone in time) she will be secure.’19 At cocktails in her ‘little flat in Bryanston Court’ Chips noted the Prince of Wales wearing a short black coat, soft collar, checked socks and a tie. ‘He shook and passed the cocktails very much the “jeune homme de la maison”.’ Later, when the whole matter was over and the king had been driven into exile, Chips reflected:
I really consi
der she would have been an excellent Queen. She is never embarrassed, ill at ease, and could in her engaging drawl charm anyone … Her reserve and discretion are famous, and proved by the fact that no one knew of her impending divorce, also by the fact that she never confided in anyone her hopes of becoming Queen. I think that the idea grew, gradually. She was encouraged by the King to believe that he could marry her, and indeed there was nothing legal to prevent him doing so. Perhaps at first the idea was a joke, which blossomed into a plan.20
Certainly, by the time he became the king, Mrs Simpson was a fixture in his heart. What by the standards of the twenty-first century is so extraordinary is that the very existence of Mrs Simpson was kept out of the British newspapers. This was largely because Lord Beaverbrook approved of her and was on the new king’s side. But it was in part because no British newspaper would have considered it seemly to discuss the love life of the royal family, any more than it would have spilled the beans about the extramarital indiscretions of such well-known political philanderers as Lloyd George or Sir Oswald Mosley. Victorian double standards still ruled, and it was the king, not the newspapers, who broke the taboo. So, while the diaries of Chips Channon make it clear that London society, and political circles, gossiped constantly about the king and Mrs Simpson, the matter in general was unknown. Wallis had very openly accompanied the king on a Mediterranean cruise with a group of friends on board a large yacht called the Nahlin. Sailing along the Dalmatian coast they had been greeted by cries of Zivila Ljubav! (Vive l’amour), so it was no secret to the Yugoslavians – nor to the American press.21 But it was a secret in Britain, where Queen Mary or Mr Baldwin were as likely to shout Zivila Ljubav! as Allah akbar.
On 27 October 1936 Wallis was granted a decree nisi, which meant she could be fully divorced (decree absolute) by 27 April 1937: in time for the Coronation. It was then that the old men, especially Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, started to panic and to devise the systematic destruction of their monarch. Friends of the king, such as Duff Cooper or Winston Churchill, pointed out that if – as became clear – he was intent upon marrying Wallis, he could have a morganatic marriage. The archduke who was shot in Sarajevo had a morganatic wife, which would have meant, had he lived to become the Austrian emperor, that she would still have been his wife but not an empress. Wallis, similarly, in deference to those who believed that the titular head of the Church should not marry a divorcee, could have become the king’s wife, given any title they chose to invent, while he was crowned as king-emperor.
When this was put to the cabinet, only Duff Cooper approved it. Baldwin claimed he had sounded out the prime ministers of the Dominions and of the Empire. Those of Canada, Australia and South Africa were said to be definitely against Mrs Simpson marrying the king by any formulary whatever. The Prime Minister of New Zealand, who had never until that moment heard of Mrs Simpson, sat on the fence saying ‘his country would not quarrel with anything the King did, nor with anything his Government did to restrain him’.22
By the beginning of December Baldwin had lined up the Church, the Dominions and the Labour party against the king. He had done so because he knew that when the Press eventually broke its silence it would inevitably become a matter of public debate. Such a thing could very well have created a King’s Party in the country at large.
One part of the story, true but achieving almost instantaneously legendary status, was that the king went on a tour of the depressed mining villages of South Wales. He saw the Merthyr Tydfil Labour Exchange, and made a detour, not on his schedule, to see the Bessemer Steel Works at Dowlais. Where 9,000 men had been employed only a few years before was a desolate scene of wreckage, with hundreds of men sitting on piles of twisted metal and the rubble of demolished factory buildings. Seeing their king, they stood and sang hymns. The king stood bareheaded and said grimly: ‘These works brought all these people here. Something must be done to find them work.’
It was deemed to be an ‘inappropriate’ political remark. The Conservatives and the mainstream Labour party were united in the need for bumbling, ineffectual means of getting the unemployed back to work. Efficient, Keynesian experiments were things to be left to such extremists as the Blackshirts, who while making no headway whatever in parliamentary elections, created a somewhat sinister parody of Continental fascism on the street corners, and in the big meeting halls of the large cities. Was the king in sympathy with them, or indeed, was he in league with the German National Socialists themselves?
It is part of the mythology of the Abdication Story, trotted out with every new book on the subject.
This is one of those areas where supreme acts of historical imagination are required if one is not to sail off into fantasy. We look at the 1930s through the dark glass of the Second World War and its aftermath, so that sympathy with, or actual membership of fascist organizations is inevitably, and rightly, linked in our minds with the millions who died in the conflict, and with the systematic murder by the Nazis of 6 million Jews. It is a poor sort of memory which only works backwards, as the White Queen says to Alice, and the ‘fascist’ sympathies of King Edward VIII did not extend to condoning any of the National Socialist programme – though the Nazis were very keen indeed to exploit his name in their propaganda.
One has to recognize a climate in which the horrors perpetrated by socialism in Russia led quite reasonable people to fear that milder forms of socialism would inevitably lead to the same kind of mayhem and loss of life. In a debate in the House of Lords in 1934, Viscount Esher said: ‘The prosperous middle classes of this country will defend themselves, just as they did in the General Strike. On the other hand, it ought to be made clear to them, too, that the rise of Sir Oswald Mosley is nothing more than a reply to the policy of Sir Stafford Cripps [i.e. of the Labour party]. If they want to destroy Sir Oswald Mosley they can only do it by repudiating Sir Stafford Cripps. There is no other way of doing it. There are innumerable quiet people in this country who, hating both these gentlemen, will if they are forced to choose between them, I am glad to say, choose Sir Oswald Mosley.’23
The old King George V would probably have gone along with that, and there is no secret about the fact that when the new King Edward VIII was living in exile as the Duke of Windsor, he made friends with Sir Oswald and his wife, enjoying long conversations in which they set the world to rights. Twelve years after the war, Sir Oswald’s acerbic sister-in-law Nancy Mitford wrote to a friend from Paris: ‘The Mosleys … and the Windsors are literally never apart. They want us all to be governed by the kind, clever, rich Germans and be happy ever after. I wish I knew why they all live in France and not outre-Rhin.’24
It was disastrous to his historical reputation that after the abdication the Duke of Windsor and his new bride Wallis visited Germany and were photographed smiling and bowing to Hitler. By then it was perfectly clear what sort of regime Hitler had brought into being. The Nuremberg laws were fully enforced, and principled persons such as Harold Nicolson refused to go to the place. Others, however, such as Edward VIII’s friend Chips Channon, were bowled over by the magnificence of Nazi ceremonial, and while having no interest whatever in athletics, were held in thrall by those parts of the 1936 Olympic Games which contained pageantry, salutes to the Führer and so forth. When presented to Hitler, Chips had felt ‘more excited than when I met Mussolini in Perugia, and more stimulated, I am sorry to say, than when I was blessed by the Pope in 1920’.25
The 1930s were a period of desperate social and economic hardship for the working class. Men are seen here queuing outside the Labour Exchange in Stepney, East London.
The Jarrow Hunger March in October 1936 brought attention to the more prosperous southerners to the plight of the unemployed and their families
Extreme conditions called forth extreme politics. Adolf Hitler before the microphones in 1935.
The dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler viewing columns of German troops in Munich in 1935. Hitler’s ‘economic miracle’ in restoring Germa
ny to full employment was posited on militarism, a fact to which the rest of the world tried to blind itself.
Ezra Pound, greatest of modernist poets, spent much of the 1930s studying economics and denouncing Usury. His views led him to support the fascists, and his wartime broadcasts in favour of Mussolini caused outrage.
Sir Oswald Mosley moved from being a Conservative, to the rising hope of the Labour Party, before becoming an aspirant Fascist leader in Britain. His movement provided good theatre, and plenty of street fights, but his party the British Union of Fascists did not win a single parliamentary seat in an election.
John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) is surely the greatest English novelist of his generation
Stanley Spencer, seen here sketching as an official war artist in Clydeside, has a visionary picture of England which in some ways complements that of John Cowper Powys and his brothers
Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, stands on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London after a Maundy Thursday service in the late 1930s. His vitriolic denunciation of King Edward VIII after the Abdication was shocking to many.
King Edward Vili was a hugely popular King, dismissed by a highly unpopular coup d’etat by the Establishment. Here he is depicted with his chic American wife Wallis in September 1939.
The Rector of Stiffkey, when put on trial for conduct unbecoming a clerk in Holy Orders, claimed, ‘I do not know what the buttock is.’ He is seen here with a young friend.
The disastrous Teheran conference at which Churchill finally began to realize that the price of defeating Hitler had been to hand the world into the power of Stalin and the Americans
