Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  When the news of the king’s death was announced, the demonstrations of grief were sincere not only across the British Empire but the whole world. King George V had been a bastion of strength throughout the long, difficult years of the Great War, and the people of the world mourned his loss. For a week before the funeral, Queen Mary appeared throughout London to show her gratitude to the people for their heartfelt condolences. Dressed in black with a long veil covering her face, she was surrounded by the women of the royal family. Witnesses stood in awe of Queen Mary, the Princess Royal, the duchesses of York and Kent, her sister-in-law Queen Maud of Norway, and George’s aunt Princess Beatrice as they moved through the city in an ethereal mixture of mourning and dignity. The draped coffin containing the king’s body was laid in the church at Sandringham, resting beneath the bas-relief gold altar and stained glass window that extended nearly the entire height of the church. Queen Mary’s sons took turns holding an almost round-the-clock vigil over their father’s coffin. The queen’s memory was forever ingrained with that sight. “Went to the Church after luncheon,” she wrote. “It all looked very peaceful—but so sad—My sons returned also Harry & Alice & Elizabeth. Did business with David who was most helpful and kind.”1328

  From the Wolferton train station near Sandringham in Norfolk, King George V’s body was taken to London on Thursday, January 23. Upon arrival, the new king and his brothers followed their father’s coffin on foot to the Palace of Westminster for the lying in state. During the procession, the Maltese cross on top of the diamond-covered Imperial State Crown, which had been sitting on the coffin, came loose and crashed on the ground. Everyone saw it as a bad omen for the new reign. They would not be mistaken.

  During the lying in state at Westminster, more than a million souls gathered to pay their last respects to the man who had ruled the British Empire for twenty-five years. For all his unflinching traditionalism, George also demonstrated an ability to be forward thinking. He had been “the first British sovereign to recognize that the royal family needed to be popular to survive. He was the first King to hire a public-relations officer, the first to make use of the talking cinema newsreel, the first to make use of the Christmas radio broadcast to the nation, and the first to insist that his relatives do something to make themselves look slightly more useful to help justify their gilded existences.”1329 Coupled with his legacy of stability for the institution of monarchy was the fact that he was also the longest-reigning king of England since George III, who reigned from 1760 to 1820—though from 1811 his eldest son acted as regent. In Life magazine’s special 2010 royalty issue, the king received an apt epitaph describing the challenges he faced in his long reign.

  [King George V] was suited like his father for a Victorian or an Edwardian time, but that’s not what the world would offer. He was a man of stamp collecting and game hunting, but socialism was on the rise—communism and fascism too—during his relatively long reign from 1910 to 1936. Meantime, the Great War ensued, the Great Depression hit, and the world was altered mightily. During World War I, he was the one who was compelled to shed his family’s Germanic name (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) and adopt a British-sounding one (Windsor). He coped as he could, but when he died, his country—and the world—was on the verge of an Armageddon like no other.1330

  The emotional funeral was held at Windsor Castle on the damp, misty morning of January 28. Chips Channon noted that the queen looked “more magnificent than ever.”1331 Her four sons walked behind the gun carriage bearing the king’s body to Westminster Hall. The silence in the streets was overwhelming. The whole of London seemed to come to a standstill.

  The funeral for King George V marked the final gathering in history of Old Europe’s royals, most of whom had reigned or been deposed during the First World War. Along with the kings of Norway, Denmark, Bulgaria, and Belgium were royal representatives of Italy, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Greece, Egypt, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Albania, and Russia. In a surprise move that suggested a decline in anti-German sentiments in Britain, the funeral also brought together a number of deposed German royals, including the Grand Duke of Hesse, the Duke of Brunswick, and perhaps most poignantly the middle-aged, arthritic, English-born Duke of Coburg who arrived wearing a German military helmet. The funeral was also the last time that the ex-emperor Wilhelm contacted his British cousins. He penned a note of condolence to Mary, and sent his grandson Fritzi—Crown Prince Willy’s fourth son—to the funeral. Afterward, the queen gave Fritzi—who would later marry a British woman and become a naturalized citizen—a gold box from George’s writing desk as a gift for Wilhelm. “Deeply moved by the kind thought that prompted you to send me this gift as a souvenir,” he wrote to Mary, signing the letter as her “devoted cousin.”1332 After King George V was laid to rest, Queen Mary wrote: “We left him sadly, lying with his ancestors in the vault. We returned to London by train & got home by 3.30.”1333

  In the days and weeks that followed George’s death, his grieving widow was overwhelmed by the “wonderful crowds of sorrowing people mourning their dear King.”1334 What truly took Queen Mary by surprise was the outpouring of affection toward her. She had long believed that her popularity was tied directly to being the king’s wife. But when he died, her own popularity continued. It touched a deep chord in her heart when she realized that the British people loved her for who she was, not for whom she was married to. In Parliament’s tribute to the late king, the government expressed its sincere gratitude that “even in her sorrow Queen Mary is spared to the people who love her.”1335

  29

  For the Love of a Woman

  (1936–53)

  The death of King George V marked the passing from the world stage of one of the last great monarchs of the Old World. Born during the reign of his grandmother Queen Victoria, and raised in an era when the sun never set on the British Empire, George played a key role in world affairs and shaped the course of history. But now, the accession of the playboy king—who took the name Edward VIII—ushered in a new period in England’s history, for many expected great things from him. In a mixture of hope and grief, Edward, dressed in an admiral’s uniform and accompanied by his brother Bertie, was solemnly proclaimed Britain’s new monarch by the Accession Council in “a fleeting, brilliant ceremony” the morning after his father died1336—Edward arrived at the ceremony in London from Sandringham by airplane, making him the first British monarch to ever travel by air.

  For the first time in a quarter century, Mary was not at the center of the British monarchy, though she remained its highest-ranking woman since Edward VIII had no queen. On the first Easter after George V’s death, Mary moved into Royal Lodge at Windsor Great Park with the Yorks, where she stayed for several weeks. “I feel that the Family, as a family, will now revolve around you,” the Duchess of York wrote to Queen Mary. “Thank God we have all got you as a central point, because without that point it might easily disintegrate.”1337 On May 25, Queen Mary participated in her first semiofficial public engagement since her husband’s death. Accompanied by her entire family, she traveled to Southampton at the invitation of the Cunard White Star Company to inspect their newest ocean liner, the RMS Queen Mary, which was scheduled to embark on its maiden voyage to New York two days later. The visit greatly boosted Mary’s spirits. The next day, May 26, the royal family assembled again, this time at Buckingham Palace, to celebrate Mary’s sixty-ninth birthday.

  Queen Mary spent the months that followed working on her late husband’s affairs, managing his will, and planning her eventual move back to Marlborough House—the traditional residence of the Prince of Wales or, should there be no incumbent, the queen dowager. She considered this of the highest priority, since Buckingham Palace was the home of the sovereign. She resolved to make the transition as smoothly as possible and was determined not to be a thorn in the new king’s side the way Queen Alexandra had been in hers and George’s.

  In July, Queen Mary returned to Sandringham for the first time since George’s death. This
was when the reality of her loss struck her, causing her to fight back sobs. Filled with compassion for his grieving mother, the king came to visit Mary often during the summer months. She wrote to Edward after one such visit.

  I fear I was very quiet today when you came to see me but I feel sure you realized that I felt very sad at leaving those comfortable rooms which have been my happy Home for twenty-five years, and that I was terribly afraid of breaking down—It was dear of you to come and see me off and I thank you with all my heart … It is very nice here and peaceful and I am sure I shall like it, but I miss dearest Papa quite dreadfully, even more than in London, and his rooms look so empty and deserted without him: I forced myself to go in and look round but felt very sad.1338

  With the arrival of autumn, so too came time for Mary’s permanent departure from Buckingham Palace for Marlborough House. The move on October 1 was a monumental undertaking for the sixty-nine-year-old queen dowager, who was bringing with her a personal suite of sixty-five staff, servants, and household workers. The night before she left Buckingham Palace, the queen made a telling entry in her diary: “Sad to think that this is my last day in the old Home of twenty-five years—Toute passe, tout casse, tout lasse!”1339

  As Queen Mary did her best to settle down to a retiring life at Marlborough House, and just as the nation seemed to come to terms with George’s death, a new and disturbing crisis arose. King Edward VIII had defied all sense of propriety and declared his desire to marry a commoner. The king’s decision would make him “arguably the blackest sheep in 300 years of royal-family history” in England.1340 The object of Edward’s affections was none other than the woman he had introduced to Queen Mary at a family wedding, Wallis Simpson, wife of the American businessman Ernest Aldrich Simpson.

  At the time of his accession, Edward was forty-one years old. He was a handsome, clean-cut man with deep blue eyes, a defined jawline, and blond hair. His love interest could not have been more different. The dark-haired, dark-eyed Bessie Wallis Simpson was a thirty-nine-year-old American from Baltimore. Despite her more feminine sounding first name, she preferred to go by Wallis because she claimed “Bessie … sounded too much like a cow.”1341 Edward and Wallis’s backgrounds drew a stark contrast to one another. Wallis, whose father died when she was young, spent her life relying upon the charity of other relatives. To make ends meet, her mother opened up their Baltimore apartment on East Biddle Street as a makeshift restaurant by cooking extravagant meals for the building’s other tenants. Despite her humble surroundings, Wallis “behaved like a genuine Southern belle, with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and somehow she managed to receive just about everything she demanded.” Eventually, she made her way to London, where she became popular in the social circles of the 1930s. Unlike many working-class Americans at the time, she was an excellent connoisseur of wine and a talented chef; thanks to her, British society was introduced to the concept of hot hors d’oeuvres. She was also the first person to coin the phrase “You can never be too rich or too thin.”1342 What made Wallis’s relationship with the king so unthinkable was not that she was a commoner but that she was once divorced and still married to her second husband. Up until the mid-twentieth century, divorce was a strict social taboo—King Edward VII once described divorce as an unseemly subject that should not even be discussed in front of women. Court cases involving divorce required witnesses to come forward and, as happened to many aristocrats, lawsuits were filed against adulterers.

  Like many royal mistresses before her, Wallis moved in court circles, thanks largely to her charm, joie de vivre, and nonchalance about her social status. It was only a matter of time before she caught Edward’s eye. The two met at a house party at Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire on January 10, 1931, when they were introduced by Edward’s then mistress Lady Thelma Furness, the American wife of the head of the Furness Withy shipping corporation. The king “was the open sesame to a new and glittering world,” Wallis would later reflect. “Yachts materialized; the best suites in the finest hotels were flung open; airplanes stood waiting … It was like being Wallis in Wonderland.”1343

  But unlike so many other royal dalliances throughout history, Edward and Wallis’s romance would eventually lead to the altar. Most accused Simpson of being a philandering gold digger who was anxious to be a queen. When asked by her son why she would not receive Mrs. Simpson, Queen Mary answered, “Because she is an adventuress.”1344 But Wallis Simpson’s supporters held to the belief that she never wanted to be queen but instead would have been happier as Edward’s official mistress. “I told him I didn’t want to be queen,” she insisted. “All that formality and responsibility … I told him that if he stayed on as king, it wouldn’t be the end of us. I could still come and see him and he could still come and see me. We had terrible arguments about it. But he was a mule. He said he didn’t want to be king without me, that if I left him he would follow me wherever I went.”1345

  Edward invited Stanley Baldwin, the British prime minister at the time, to Buckingham Palace in November 1936 for a special meeting. The king defied the country’s constitution and the laws governing the monarchy by announcing his intention to marry Wallis. Despite comprehensive coverage of their romance in the foreign press, the British media had remained eerily silent on the matter. So when Edward told Baldwin of his plans, the dumbfounded prime minister stammered out that the woman who marries the king “becomes the Queen of the country. Therefore in the choice of a Queen the voice of the people must be heard.”1346 Edward put forward the idea of a morganatic marriage, a union in which the couple was legally married but the wife did not share her husband’s royal title. Impossible, Baldwin replied. There was no precedent in English history for the wife of the king to be anything but a queen. Undaunted, Edward intended to go forward with his plan of marrying Wallis Simpson. His shocking announcement caused a quintuple crisis in Great Britain: societal, religious, legal, moral, and constitutional.

  From a societal perspective, the king had offended many of his subjects who were still members of the aristocratic system. Many of the monarchy’s strongest supporters felt snubbed by his disdain for tradition. Edward VIII was the first monarch in British history that wanted to marry a divorcée. The uninformed have often asked why could Edward VIII not marry the divorced Wallis Simpson if Henry VIII was able to marry six times? The answer is simple: Henry never divorced any of his wives. Upon forming the Church of England, he had four of his marriages annulled—declared invalid, as if they never happened.1347 Since Wallis Simpson’s first marriage was terminated in a legal divorce, and it was expected her second marriage to Ernest Simpson would follow likewise, Edward VIII was in unchartered—and unfriendly—waters. His Cabinet refused to sanction the marriage to Wallis. So too did the British territories. According to the 1931 Statute of Westminster, “any alteration in the law touching the succession of the Throne or the Royal Style and titles shall hereafter require the assent as well of the Parliament of all the Dominions as of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.” Canada, Australia, and South Africa unanimously declared they would not accept an American divorcée as their queen. From a religious stance, Edward, as the king, was also the head of the Church of England, and for him to marry a divorcée was completely against what the church taught. From a legal point of view, Wallis’s divorce was only considered valid in the United States. In England at that time, the only legal cause for divorce was adultery, and since this was not the case for Wallis, her divorce could be considered invalid and therefore throw her potential marriage to the king in jeopardy, creating a dynastic crisis. Edward’s decision also had profound moral and ethical consequences. The Privy Council, royal family, and many of the social elite knew Wallis to be very licentious in her behavior. It was a known fact that she had many lovers. With such actions, it was impossible for her to ever be queen. Finally, and arguably most significantly, Edward’s decision created a constitutional crisis when Stanley Baldwin threatened to resign if the king married Wallis. Such
a move would require the Privy Counsellors to resign as well, forcing the king to form a new government from ministers who would accept his marriage. Since few, if any, sanctioned Edward’s relationship with Wallis, the prime minister’s resignation would cause the government to collapse, threatening the very foundations of the British Empire. Clearly the king could not “both remain on the Throne and marry Mrs. Simpson.”1348 There was no choice. He would have to abdicate.