by Roy Jenkins
Chamberlain obviously thought the King should be dealt with more like the Poplar Board of Guardians than like Hitler. Baldwin was horrified by these draft documents. They offended his sense of emollience and he also realized that, if submitted and published, their clamant discourtesy would almost certainly have the effect of swinging opinion towards the King. He took the documents away and metaphorically buried them, but not before they had made him realize that he could not allow the matter to drift for much longer.
The same realization came to the King, pushed towards his precipice by Hardinge harshly telling him that he could not go on without a decision. A second meeting between Sovereign and Prime Minister (on the King’s initiative) took place on 16 November.2 At this meeting the question of marriage was raised (there is a conflict of evidence as to by whom). The King asked whether it would be approved, and Baldwin skilfully replied that it would not be acceptable to the country, thereby keeping any question of the Government’s own veto in the background. The King then said he would abdicate in order to marry. According to his account to the House of Commons, Baldwin replied: ‘Sir, that is most grievous news, and it is impossible for me to make any comment on it today.’ According to Mrs Baldwin, whose account was more immediate, the words were: ‘Sir, this is a very grave decision and I am deeply grieved’; but the significant difference is that she adds: ‘and he went on to tell him that according to some legal opinion the divorce ought not to have been granted, that there were certain aspects of it that in any ordinary case would not have gone through.’ This was perhaps the one element of veiled blackmail in Baldwin’s dealing with the King, the faint suggestion that if he was too awkward with the Government he might end up without either the Throne or the freedom to marry Mrs Simpson.3
Between then and the next meeting on 25 November the idea of a morganatic marriage was put into the minds of both the King and Baldwin. The King was attracted, Baldwin was not. The King pressed for formal consideration, to which Baldwin agreed, although pointing out that this would involve both the Cabinet and the Dominion Prime Ministers. On 27 November the Cabinet was accordingly officially informed of the whole matter for the first time. Except perhaps for Duff Cooper, who was the closest to the King, they were all against the morganatic proposal. So, too, were those of the Dominion Prime Ministers who had a view. Lyons of Australia was particularly strong, Mackenzie King and Hertzog of South Africa a shade less so. De Valera was only interested in using the crisis to loosen the links of the Irish Free State with the Crown, and Savage of New Zealand, somewhat surprisingly, veered between unconcern and bewilderment.
Baldwin’s object was then to resolve the crisis with reasonable speed without appearing to force the hand of the King. He had audiences on 2 and 4 December. On the first occasion he gave the King the result of the consultations with the Cabinet and the Dominions. That killed the morganatic marriage plan. He then vetoed the King’s request to be allowed to make his own appeal to the British people. A King, he said, could only do so in terms approved by his ministers. The King then said: ‘You want me to go, don’t you?’ Baldwin answered with commendable frankness: what he wanted, what he thought the King himself wanted, was for him to go, if he had to, as quietly as possible, and thereby to make things easier for his successor.4 On the following evening the King, detecting a hint of impatience in the Prime Minister, said with some bitterness: ‘You will not have to wait much longer, Mr Baldwin.’
Both King and Prime Minister were becoming a little strained. Baldwin was being buffeted from several sides. An arrow shot almost accidentally by the Bishop of Bradford had given the press an excuse to break their self-imposed conspiracy of silence and bring the whole matter into the public domain. A substantial part of the Cabinet was pressing for a quick outcome. The Chancellor of the Exchequer showed that the traditions of ‘Brummagen’ radical commercialism had not died with his father by being most worried about the effect of continued uncertainty upon the Christmas trade. The opposition were loyally supporting the Government, but were also pressing for a definitive statement. Churchill, on the other hand, with the support of the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and, more surprisingly, the News Chronicle, was feeling his way towards a King’s Party. In the House of Commons on the afternoon of Thursday, 3 December, he got a sizeable cheer when he spoke against any ‘irrevocable step’.
Baldwin rightly thought that this particular bubble would be pricked over the weekend. MPs would be steadied against the King by their constituents.5 By the Monday they were to shout down with peculiar virulence a similar although more long-winded question by Churchill. Nevertheless, Baldwin felt his time was running short. This led him to make his one dangerous error of the whole affair. A possible intervention of the King’s Proctor to upset the divorce had for some time been lurking in the Government’s mind. It was of course the point of Baldwin’s remark to the King on 16 November. The Attorney-General had, under instructions, done a good deal of work on the issue. The Government had played with it as a possible weapon against the King. Now it was suddenly turned against them. The advice was that the Proctor could not act against his nominal royal master. But once the King had abdicated he would cease to have this protection. Walter Monckton, his legal adviser, seized the point, and on Saturday, 5 December, asked almost as a condition of Abdication, that a special bill should be introduced to make the decree immediately absolute, and thus remove the danger.
That evening, in his small black police car, Baldwin trundled again down the new arterial road through the western suburbs for another uneasy interview at Fort Belvedere. Baldwin agreed that the request for a special bill was reasonable and said that he would commend it to his colleagues. Next day in Downing Street he ran into solid opposition. The arguments against putting through Parliament a blatant twisting of the general law, which would smell only too strongly of a corrupt bargain, were overwhelming. Probably Baldwin saw their force himself. Certainly he did not fight very hard. But his authority within the Government slipped momentarily, and worse still, there was a danger that the whole Abdication timetable might be upset. Monckton, when brought into the meeting of ministers (it was not a full Cabinet) to be told of the adverse decision, said that it might delay matters by weeks. Fortunately for Baldwin, Monckton misjudged his client. The King had settled himself into such a groove of petulant determination that there was no question of the rejection of the bargain deflecting him for even a few days. He was equally uninfluenced by a curious offer of withdrawal which Mrs Simpson made from Cannes on the Monday.
Tuesday was the last day of uncertainty. In one sense Baldwin felt much more confident. Monday afternoon in the House of Commons had been as great a triumph for him (although he had said practically nothing) as it had been a disaster for Churchill. ‘The stationmasters’ had clearly done their work. Henceforward he could be assured that a King’s Party would get nowhere in Parliament. But he was worried about the King’s mental state, and to what this might lead. He decided to deal with the problem in a way which imported a substantial element of farce into the overcharged atmosphere, although his object was not to provide light relief. The King, he decided, ‘must wrestle with himself in a way he has never done before, and if he will let me, I will help him. We may even have to see the night through together.’5 Accordingly Baldwin packed his suitcase, instructed his parliamentary private secretary to do the same, and set off yet once more in the small black car. When the King saw the luggage being unloaded he was horrified. It was tactfully conveyed to Baldwin that he would be welcome to stay for dinner but not afterwards. His attempt at a soul-searching vigil had been frustrated. It was in any event unnecessary. The King seemed decided, friendly and even buoyant. There was no bitterness between them at this stage. If that came, it came later, when the King had time to go over events and perhaps have his grievances kindled. When, late that night, they parted for the last time, Baldwin’s words were a little rehearsed,6 but there nonetheless appears to have been genuine emotion on both sides.<
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Yet the question remains as to what Baldwin thought he might have attempted in a long night of ‘reasoning together’. G. M. Young is explicit. He tells us that Baldwin later told a friend: ‘Only time I was frightened. I thought he might change his mind.’6 Unfortunately the friend is anonymous, and Young, that strangely and personally chosen official biographer, cannot always be regarded as a witness either of truth or charity. But on this occasion the weight of reason is decisively on his side. Surely Baldwin, whatever his desire earlier in the imbroglio, cannot at this stage have wished to go back to the Cabinet on the following morning and announce that a wayward King, who had already compromised his position with most opinion both at home and in the Dominions, had suddenly changed his mind, at least temporarily, and, having attracted the maximum publicity to his preference for Mrs Simpson over the Throne, was now prepared to ditch her and try to pick up again the pieces of kingship. This for Baldwin would surely have been the worst of both worlds. Yet it was precisely what the Cabinet went through the motions of trying to achieve at its meeting that next (Wednesday) morning. It sent through Baldwin a submission to the King of which the key paragraph read:
Ministers are reluctant to believe that Your Majesty’s resolve is irrevocable and still venture to hope that before Your Majesty pronounces any formal decision Your Majesty may be pleased to reconsider an intention which must so deeply and so vitally affect all Your Majesty’s subjects.7
Within a few minutes of receiving this the King had written back regretting that he was unable to alter his decision. It is difficult to believe that the submission, valuable for the record and indeed used by Baldwin in his House of Commons speech the following afternoon, would have been sent had Baldwin not satisfied himself the night before what the answer would be. This was, indeed, little more than common prudence.
On the Thursday (10 December) Baldwin presented the King’s message of renunciation to the House of Commons, and followed it by his own account and justification of events. It was a remarkable speech on at least three counts. First, major constitutional and political pronouncement though it was, certain to be studied and analysed for years to come, he delivered it with hardly a note. He had made some, but he first left them behind in Downing Street, and then, when they had been retrieved, allowed them to rest, unreferred to, on the despatch box. What he gave was a chronological narrative, apparently searching his memory as he went along. At one stage he turned to the Home Secretary, sitting beside him, and said: ‘It was that day, was it not?’ Art and nature were most skilfully intertwined.
Second, he navigated his way through complicated channels and delicate shoals without any jarring note. Nearly everyone-except Mrs Simpson—got a tribute. They all appeared to be appropriately and spontaneously phrased. No foot was put wrong. Third, the effect upon the House was profound. When, towards the end, he said, ‘I am convinced that where I have failed no one could have succeeded,’ this appeared not a boast, but an understatement. When he sat down it was almost impossible to continue even a pro forma debate. Attlee wisely suggested a ninety-minute adjournment before attempting to do so. Baldwin was aware—as emerged from a corridor encounter with Harold Nicolson during this adjournment8-of how great had been his triumph. He was probably also aware that it was to be his last on any comparable scale.
The speech lasted exactly forty-five minutes, which, particularly as Baldwin spoke slowly, was not long. The language was not majestic, nor the order wholly logical. But the effect was almost magical. The contrast between Baldwin’s deflation at the end of 1935 and his prestige at the end of 1936 was as sharp as can possibly be imagined. He was again exhausted. Lord Dawson of Penn, that specialist in the industrial diseases of politicians, joined in the general chorus of congratulation but also told him, speaking medically and not politically: ‘You will pay for this.’ But he did not do so immediately. He had a good Christmas. ‘We had a wonderful day yesterday…,’ he wrote to Tom Jones on Boxing Day. ‘The sunrise was as the opening of the gates of heaven itself and the glow it threw on the western hills transfigured the whole landscape for half an hour. The strange unearthly light lasted nearly all day.’9
What precisely was Baldwin’s achievement in the handling of the Abdication? It was perhaps best summed up by Sir Donald Somervell, the Attorney-General, who was closely yet not responsibly involved throughout, and who was therefore an informed and detached witness:
Baldwin [he wrote] was the man who enabled the crisis to be surmounted with the minimum of discredit. He decided, and finally decided, the following as soon as they appeared for decision:
(1) That Mrs Simpson could never be Queen.
(2) That the King would not give up the chance of marrying Mrs Simpson.
(3) That a morganatic marriage was impracticable.
(4) That the decision must be the King’s own decision. He may have realised earlier than most of us that the King was in the long run unfitted to be King. If so it is all the greater tribute to his qualities that he never took a step to force the issue or to encourage abdication.10
This is a fair tribute. MacDonald, had he still been Prime Minister, would have lost the issue in verbiage and drowned himself in self-pity. Neville Chamberlain, had he already succeeded, would have alienated the country by treating the King like a negligent Town Clerk of Birmingham. Attlee, had he won the 1935 election, would have taken exactly Baldwin’s line in substance, but at that stage in his career would have done so without assurance or persuasiveness. Churchill, had he by chance been already in power, would simply have been wrong.
This last comparison provokes one further reflection. In the three and a half years between his abdication and the summer of Dunkirk, King Edward, had he remained on the Throne, might have developed differently. He might have shed his Lindbergh-like naiveté and enthusiasm for simple solutions which made him an easy prey to authoritarianism and the meretricious appeal of Nazis and fascists. He might, but equally he might not. And had the latter been the case, Churchill, almost his only substantial political ally of 1936, would in 1940 have been confronted with a very awkward decision as to whether to intern his sovereign. It would, to say the least, have added a further complication to the problems of 1940. Britain was almost alone amongst European states in surviving the convulsions of 1939-45 without a change of regime. Two Americans made substantial contributions to this continuity. The first, obviously, was President Roosevelt. The second, inadvertently, was Mrs Simpson.
In the midst of his Abdication preoccupations Baldwin made one major speech on another subject. This was on 12 November, in the debate on the Address at the opening of the new session. Rearmament was the dominant issue, at least within the Conservative Party. Immediately before the summer recess, and as one of his last acts before his two and a half months of asylum, Baldwin had devoted two days to receiving an almost unprecedented deputation on the subject. Austen Chamberlain and Salisbury were the nominal leaders, but Churchill was the moving spirit, and delivered a prepared private oration lasting over an hour. There were fifteen or so others present, many of them Privy Councillors, all of considerable party or national weight. Baldwin, supported by Sir Thomas Inskip, listened during three- or four-hour sessions on each of the successive days. He said little, as might have been expected, although one of his obiter dicta is remarkable both for its potential value, had it been publicly known, to the Soviet apologists of 1939-40, and for the slovenliness, almost the vulgarity, of language for the occasion. ‘I am not going to get this country into a war with anybody for the League of Nations or anybody else or for anything else,’ Baldwin is recorded as saying. ‘If there is any fighting in Europe, I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.’11
Against this background Baldwin in November felt under some pressure from his backbenches, particularly as his speech had been preceded by a denunciation, at once contrived and powerful, from Churchill. Baldwin’s reply was not very different from words he had used to the July deputation, but this tim
e of course he was speaking in public and with his words immediately available for all to refer to:
I put before the whole House my own views with an appalling frankness [he typically but unwisely began the crucial passage]. From 1933,1 and my friends were all very worried about what was happening in Europe…. You will remember at that time there was probably a stronger pacifist feeling running through the country than at any time since the War. I am speaking of 1933 and 1934. You will remember the election at Fulham in the autumn of 1933, when a seat which the National Government held was lost by about 7,000 votes on no issue but the pacifist….
That was the feeling in the country in 1933. My position as a leader of a great party was not altogether a comfortable one. I asked myself what chance was there … within the next year or two of that feeling being so changed that the country would give a mandate for rearmament? Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and we must rearm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.12
There was no great immediate excitement, but the passage, and particularly the last sentence, reverberated against Baldwin for many years to come. It led Churchill, twelve years later, when Baldwin had just died, to publish, in the first volume of his Second World War, one of the most polemical and therefore famous of all footnote references. ‘Baldwin, Stanley, confesses to putting party before country, p. 615,’ it ran. G. M. Young did not contest this judgment, which has led subsequent biographers7 to attempt elaborate textual exegesis in order to show that Baldwin’s remarks were venial because he was referring to a hypothetical election in 1933 or 1934, and not to the actual one in 1935. By then he was prepared to advocate rearmament.
