It was with Mrs Corrigan that Diana first met Chips Channon. He was everything she liked in an admirer: rich, good-looking, amusing, devoted and unlikely to make any sexual demands. ‘You will be sorry to hear Chips has become my “inseparable”,’ she told Duff, ‘follows me like a little dog, and is a great solace.’ A regular feature of the Grand Tour which the Coopers undertook every summer became the Channons’ idyllic Austrian Schloss. ‘Everything here is quite Utopian,’ she wrote to her sister Marjorie. ‘Naked brown peasants and orchards and cows and mountains and early hours and blazing sun and swimming-pool and gaily populated lakes and strawberries and visits into the Balkans, brigands, passes and Zendan prisoners.’ She would get up at 7.30, swim, read till breakfast at nine with Viennese ham, honey and coffee, more reading and swimming till lunch, post-prandial doze in a hammock in the orchard, then a drive or walk, dinner, backgammon or paper-games and an early bed. All was of the most sybaritic and relaxing, ahead stretched ‘Venice for a few days, then driving back via Germany, a glimpse of baby, to the Wallaces in Scotland, then off in a yacht with Loel Guinness.’ Could life hold more, and yet: ‘I have a sick mind and am melancholic and always worrying myself to death about Duff or John Julius or Mother or something.’
Time had not cured her vulnerability to bouts of melancholy, particularly in August when her birthday was approaching. Once she appealed to a specialist in nervous disorders. He recommended hormonic treatment. This did not often produce cancer, he said, and when it did you could be sure the disease was latent anyway and much better brought to the surface. Diana was not so much deterred by this as by the fact that the injections would make her fat as a eunuch. She took her custom elsewhere and was told that her troubles were sexual. Since what she wanted was a cure, not an explanation, she moved on again and was issued with some pills which at least dulled the sharp edge of her agony.
Skiing worked even better. ‘How can I be so absurdly and acutely miserable in England and so conscious of the weight of misery falling away?’ she asked Duff shortly after arriving on the Swiss slopes. ‘It’s perplexing and despairing – for I want to love my life as it deserves to be loved. Age doesn’t worry me, deterioration of lovers, death of friends. It’s introspection, apprehension, disease and lack of interest.’ In Switzerland too Chips Channon was a regular host. She preferred the weather and the atmosphere of skiing to the activity itself. ‘Fair and determined,’ Channon called her, but she herself said, ‘The moment there’s a little più di velocità I lose my head, forget my morning instruction and come down on my face or bum.’ Once she was abandoned by the guide and Chips’s wife, Lady Honor, and had the most painful descent, humiliated, nose-bleeding, cold and lost. When at last she reached the bottom she was told the guide had said she had turned back. ‘Well, one can’t turn back,’ she commented plaintively. ‘At least I can’t.’
One of the prerequisites of really enjoyable travel for Diana was that somebody else should pay for it. Some of the best holidays arose out of Duff’s job as First Lord of the Admiralty. So did the most notorious, the cruise of the Nahlin with Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson on board.
EIGHT
ROYAL CIRCLES
Since childhood Diana had been on the fringes of the royal family. She had always been known to them by name and by reputation, the latter being viewed with some disfavour by the starchier members of the court. Then it began to be said that she would make a good wife for the Prince of Wales. That the King and Queen ever seriously contemplated this possibility seems unlikely. Certainly neither Diana nor the Prince was enthused by the idea. It was still gossiped about in a desultory way until the moment of her marriage, but no one in the know, least of all the two leading figures, took the gossip seriously.
The Prince of Wales re-entered Diana’s life in 1920, at a small luncheon given by the Laverys. ‘I found him quite wonderfully charming,’ wrote Duff in his diary. ‘Of course there is a leaven of snobbery, or I should prefer to call it loyalty, which magnifies the emotion one feels about him. He is shy but has beautiful manners. Diana was singularly self-possessed, considering how nervous some things make her.’ She was self-possessed because she did not find the Prince in the least intimidating. The King could inspire awe; perhaps when the Prince succeeded to the throne some of the mystery of majesty would wrap around him; but for the moment she found him agreeable and mildly pitiful. A few days later they met again at the Sassoons’. The Prince had Mrs Dudley Ward with him. Duff was in splenetic mood. ‘Philip Sassoon and his cousin Mrs Gubbay brooded over the scene like a couple of conspiring pimps, which they are. It made me shudder to see their evil, scheming, Semitic faces always watching those two sweet little Christians.’ He went on to attribute this intemperate outburst to the fact that Philip Sassoon had refused to lend him his car at the end of the evening.
Though they met occasionally over the years, Diana and the Prince never became close friends. The nearest approach to a real rapport came when they were both staying at the Angleseys’ house, Plas Newydd. The Prince poured out his heart over dinner, complaining of his miserable life. He never had a minute to himself; when at last he had arranged a day’s hunting Bonar Law was inconsiderate enough to die and do him out of it. ‘He described the gloom of Buckingham Palace; how he himself and all of them “froze up” whenever they got inside it; how bad-tempered his father was; how the Duchess of York was the one bright spot there. They all love her and the King is in a good temper whenever she is there.’ Possibly he regretted his indiscretions next morning; certainly he never repeated them. As the Nazi threat began to emerge and London society divided into the ‘sound’ and the appeasers, the Coopers, staunch champions of the sound, looked with some doubt on the allegedly pro-German tendencies of the heir to the throne. Duff never had cause for any confrontation with him, but the knowledge of their differences put a slight distance between them.
Though Diana had less in common with his brother Albert, future King George VI, she approved of him more whole-heartedly. Their first encounter had hardly been propitious. After a dance the Coopers swept into a car standing by the door, which they thought belonged to their friend June Chaplin. A few minutes later the Duke of York emerged, asked for his car and was told that it had been commandeered by Lady Diana Cooper. By the time it was returned the atmosphere was cool. Diana grovelled and got a most forgiving response, but still felt uneasy about future relations. She had no cause to worry; the Yorks went out of their way to be friendly when they met at the theatre and the Duchess noticeably took to Duff. ‘They are really a rather sweet little couple,’ wrote Duff. ‘They reminded me of us, sitting together in the box having private jokes – and in the interval when we were sitting in the room behind the box they slipped out, and I found them standing together in a dark corner of the passage, talking happily. She affects no shadow of airs or graces.’
By the time that George V died, the Prince of Wales was inextricably involved with Mrs Simpson. Diana already had had a brush with Mrs Simpson’s husband. He lured her on to the terrace at Blenheim after dinner, pawed her hungrily, called her his goddess and made a number of suggestions on how they might pass the night. By the time she escaped and got back to the house, all the other women had gone to bed and Duff was fuming, not so much from jealousy as because he felt he had been made to look a fool in front of the other guests. It was shortly after this that the Prince took them up again; probably because they were one of the few couples of position and respectability who fitted into the somewhat raffish ambience of Fort Belvedere. They were several times invited there for the weekend and were classified by London society, with Emerald Cunard, Chips Channon and a few others, as being members of the ‘Mrs Simpson camp’.
In fact Diana did not warm to Wallis Simpson. She found her lively and entertaining but never for one moment felt she was suitable as a wife for Edward VIII, let alone Queen of England. Indeed it did not occur to her that the threat was a real one until after most of her friends had debated the issue exhaus
tively for many weeks. She did, on the other hand, relish the fun and the consequence of weekends at Fort Belvedere. She first went there in July 1935, staying ‘in a pink bedroom, pink-sheeted, pink-Venetian-blinded, pink-soaped and pink-and-white maided’. Everything was done American style with vast dinners and light forage-for-yourself luncheons. The Edens arrived for tea at 6.30, and the period between 8.30 and dinner at ten was filled with endless drinking. Diana stuck to gin and pineapple but the Prince and Mrs Eden downed vast quantities of 100% proof whisky. ‘It’s a menace, there’s no saying no. The Prince prepares the potions himself with his own poor hideous hands and does all the glass-filling.’ Diana found endearing the Prince’s consciousness of his own ignorance: ‘What’s “ad hoc” mean, Duff? You can always tell me the things I don’t understand.’
Little changed superficially when he became King. On Sunday he wore the kilt and marched round the table playing the pipes, ‘Over the Sea to Skye’ and one of his own compositions. ‘It’s clever to have chosen the pipes as one’s show-off,’ Diana wrote to Conrad, ‘for which of us can detect mistakes or know good from bad artistry?’ But the relationship between prince and paramour had evolved significantly. The King danced attendance on Mrs Simpson with disturbing zest. ‘Wallis must not get too bossy,’ wrote Diana. ‘I had rather she had not said to him at dinner that she wanted to encourage his reading his papers and documents, that he was inclined to have them read to him – but that it was essential he should learn to master the points in them. She is right of course, as he made haste to say. “Wallis is quite right. She always is. I shall learn it quite soon.”’
In August 1936 Duff and Diana were summoned to join the King’s yacht, the Nahlin, on a Mediterranean cruise. The first indication they had that this might differ from other royal tours came when they saw the King scrambling down the gangway, naked but for straw sandals, grey flannel shorts and two crosses on a gold chain round his neck. Ominously, Mrs Simpson wore duplicates of the crosses on her wrist. The royal couple, as it became increasingly difficult not to consider them, were in the best suite at one end of the yacht; all the guests were at the other. Diana was not impressed by her companions. When they approached Ragusa after two or three days dawdling around the islands the women exulted at being at last near a civilized city. With field-glasses clapped to their eyes they scanned the waterline: ‘“I don’t see any hotels. Do you think that’s one? Can you read the name on that building? Could it be Excelsior or Imperial?” for all the world as though they had just come off the Gobi desert after weeks of yak-milk diet. The King seemed pleased with the place. “I think we’ll stay here a day or two and relax.” I longed to know what we’d been doing the last two days.’
As soon as the Nahlin had anchored Edward VIII went off in a rowing boat to look for a good sandy beach. By this time the boat was surrounded by curious sightseers, but they never guessed that ‘this hot tow-headed little nude in their midst’ was the King of England. Mrs Simpson ‘looked a figure of fun in a child’s piqué dress and a ridiculous baby’s bonnet. As her face is an adult’s face par excellence, the silly bonnet looked grotesque.’ Next morning Duff and Diana were up at dawn sight-seeing; the rest of the party surfacing at noon for a bathe. In the evening the King and his guests managed a cursory stroll round the town. The King walked ahead with the Consul and Mayor. He was, wrote Diana, ‘utterly himself and unself-conscious. That I think is the reason why he does some things he likes superlatively well, but it means he can’t act, and therefore makes no attempt to do a thing he dislikes well.’ The party’s appetite for baroque churches proved limited and soon they took refuge in a hotel garden where the King sent to the yacht for whisky, lemon, gin, vermouth, ice and a shaker and settled down to make cocktails. Diana found peculiarly irritating his habit of apologizing regularly for the boat, the food, the company and most of all for himself. ‘How he spoils everyone’s fun.’ She had decided that the King loathed her, but since another of the women on board believed the same was true of herself, she decided she might be exaggerating – ‘anyway, it doesn’t grieve me’.
At Corfu Duff and Diana were again away from the boat in the early morning on an expedition to the other side of the island, returning to dine with the King of Greece and his ‘six common English intimates, including a very good-looking mistress called Mrs Jones’. Edward VIII paid particular attention to the last and charmed her totally, while Mrs Simpson’s rasping wisecracks delighted the King of Greece. Diana felt the evening had been a success but trouble started when the party was back on board Nahlin. The King was fussing proudly over Mrs Simpson, and went down on his hands and knees to pull her dress from under the chair feet. She stared at him as one might at a freak: ‘Well, that’s the maust extraordinary performance I’ve ever seen’; and then she started to criticize his manner, the way he had talked to Mrs Jones, his attitude to the other king. Edward VIII began to look irritated and sad, and Diana left almost in protest, guessing the scene would continue for hours. ‘I feel the sooner the trip ends for us, the better,’ she wrote to Conrad. ‘It’s impossible to enjoy antiquities with people who won’t land for them and who call Delphi Delhi. Wallis is wearing very very badly. Her commonness and Becky Sharpishness irritate.’
The relationship between king and mistress was the principal fascination of the trip. On the whole Diana felt it would soon die a natural death, not from doubts on Edward’s part but because Mrs Simpson was losing interest in the affair. ‘The truth is she’s bored stiff by him,’ wrote Diana, after Wallis Simpson had refused, with some tetchiness, to go on a bathing expedition, ‘and her picking on him and her coldness towards him, far from policy, are irritation and boredom.’ As soon as the Coopers got back to London they were assailed by their friends, clamouring for news of the projected marriage. When they said they knew nothing at all about it and did not believe it anyway, they were greeted with incredulity. Obviously they had been sworn to secrecy. The Nahlin trip confirmed the popular belief that they were in the King’s camp in what Chips Channon saw as ‘a war to the knife between the past and the present’. Then, at a dinner for the Cavaliers – the supporters of the monarch, right or wrong – Channon found that Duff was a doubtful ally, ‘revolted by the King’s selfish stupidity’. Were the Coopers waverers, spies within the city walls? In fact they were as muddled as most people: loyal to the legitimate King; dismayed at the thought that he might insist on placing a twice-divorced American beside him on the throne; ready to consider any compromise that would avoid direct confrontation between crown and people. They differed from Baldwin only in that they did not rule out the possibility that one day, perhaps a year or more after the Coronation, the people might come to accept that Mrs Simpson could make a queen.
On 17 November 1936 Duff was called to the Palace. He concentrated on arguing that, if catastrophe occurred, history would put the blame on Mrs Simpson. He painted a lurid picture of the existence led by ex-monarchs, citing the misery of the King of Spain. ‘Oh, I shan’t be like Alfonso,’ said the King. ‘He was kicked out. I shall go of my own accord.’ ‘But how will you spend your time?’ ‘Oh, you know me, Duff. I’m always busy. I shall find plenty to do.’ He winced when Duff referred to Mrs Simpson as ‘twice married’ and said that the first marriage hadn’t really counted. Exactly what he meant by this Duff did not inquire.
Two days later Duff went to pick up Diana from the Channons’, where the King had also been dining. He found him in high spirits, though complaining about the failure of the Government to control the BBC. Duff tried to explain about its independence. ‘“I’ll change that,” he said. “It will be the last thing I do before I go.” He said this quite loud and with a laugh, as though he was looking forward to going.’ By this time both Duff and Diana had resigned themselves to the fact that abdication was the inevitable, perhaps even a desirable solution. Duff was moved but unshaken when Winston Churchill harangued him. ‘What crime,’ asked Churchill, ‘has the King committed? Have we not sworn allegiance to h
im? Are we not bound by that oath? Is he to be condemned unheard?’ Duff in the Cabinet still pleaded for delay but not in any real belief that the situation could be saved. On 5 December he and Diana lunched with Emerald Cunard, whose house was one of the last redoubts of the Cavaliers. ‘It was curious,’ Duff remarked drily, ‘how everyone who had sought the views of taxi-drivers, hairdressers, hospital nurses, clerks or servants, had heard exactly what they wanted to hear – that is to say their own opinions.’
After the abdication there was much talk of a black list; friends of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor who were not to be asked to royal functions. The newspapers were full of reports that Diana had curtsied to the Duchess of Windsor; a social misdemeanour which made it seem still more likely that the Coopers would be dropped. Diana was surprised how much the thought distressed her. Royal displeasure could be damaging to Duff’s career, but her main regrets were less practical than that. She disliked the idea that she was going to be excluded from a privileged minority, cut off from a circle to which she had the entrée as of right. The court of King George VI might not offer much in the way of fun, but it was still the court; she might grumble at having to go there, but the injury to her pride would be considerable if the opportunity to grumble were denied her.
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