The King Who Had to Go

by Adrian Phillips

  The King’s cause had a dangerous attraction to Churchill. In 1911, Churchill had been Home Secretary and had organised Edward’s investiture as Prince of Wales. Ever since, he had viewed him with a friendly eye. To some extent, he was fatally taken in by Edward’s charm, which worked on him long after the abdication. In the words of Lascelles who knew both men well: ‘Winston’s sentimental loyalty to the D. of W. was based on a tragic false premise – viz. that he (W.) really knew the Duke – which he never did.’28 Throughout the crisis, Churchill’s actions were marked by a quixotic personal loyalty to the young King. In the summer of 1936, Churchill was still close enough to the King to write a speech for him to deliver at a ceremony for Canadian veterans at Vimy Ridge, but like many relationships, his had suffered from the advent of Mrs Simpson. In July, this became an outright breach when Monckton sought Churchill’s advice about whether Mrs Simpson should divorce and whether she should be invited to Balmoral. Doubtless, Monckton hoped that Churchill would use his influence to try to deter the King. Churchill did not intervene directly, but firmly advised Monckton against both ideas. Churchill was unaware that the King and Mrs Simpson had decided by early May that she would visit Balmoral.29 Churchill’s opposition was enough for Mrs Simpson to class him as ‘against her’, and contact ceased until the crisis broke.30

  In the aftermath of the crisis, Churchill played up his doubts about Mrs Simpson, at one point claiming ‘never for one instant did I contemplate such a dreadful possibility [Mrs Simpson as Queen]’.31 In fact, Churchill’s attitude to the King’s affair with Mrs Simpson was considerably more ambivalent. Hardinge’s wife described his attitude at a dinner party early in the reign:

  Winston Churchill was one of the few people around the dinner table that night who found Mrs Simpson acceptable. Curiously enough, he considered that she just did not matter and had no great significance; he believed that, in the ultimate analysis of the Monarchy, she simply did not count one way or the other. Moral and social considerations apart, he considered her presence to be irrelevant to King Edward’s performance as Sovereign.32

  He said at least once that he saw no difficulty in the King marrying ‘his cutie’.33 It entirely escaped him that the choice of a royal consort went far beyond a personal choice. In the eyes of a moderately sympathetic MP, he took the line ‘let the King choose his girl’.34 From early in the crisis, Churchill had attracted suspicion by holding back from the consensus that the King’s behaviour had to change. He had declined to join a delegation of senior Privy Councillors organised by the arch-conservative grandee Lord Salisbury that saw Baldwin on 17 November to express their disquiet at the King’s behaviour and, implicitly, at the failure of the government to do anything about it. His next step away from the common line was even more drastic. Around the time that the morganatic marriage was proposed, Baldwin had begun to take precautionary steps against the risk that the King might decline formal advice and force the resignation of the government. As though following the script written by Gwyer in his analysis of the constitutional position, he had set out to obtain ‘the concurrence of the leaders of the Opposition’ to issuing formal advice; in practice, commitments not to form an alternative government. Clement Attlee, the recently chosen leader of the Labour Party, and Archibald Sinclair of the opposition Liberals fell in practically unhesitatingly. Churchill appears to have stopped well short of giving such a promise; ‘his outlook was rather different’, although he would support the government.35 He was more cooperative when Baldwin, according to Beaverbrook, ‘specifically and positively banned’ him from seeing the King, from which he does not appear to have demurred.36

  Churchill’s willingness to support the King against the government was a catastrophic error of judgement, and it showed him in his best and in his worst light: passionately espousing what he saw as a just cause, but with minimal political calculation and a degree of naked opportunism. His old political sparring partner Leo Amery faced the difficulty of reaching a final verdict on these contradictions in his diary:

  Winston is never so excited as when he [is] doing a ramp for his own private ends … Winston has thought this a wonderful opportunity of scuppering B[aldwin]. by the help of Harmsworth and Beaverbrook. What a fool he is when it comes to any question of political judgement!37

  Amery softened his opinion four days later after Churchill was shouted down in the House of Commons: ‘I may have been a little unjust to Winston in thinking his action entirely due to the desire to work up an anti-Baldwin campaign. He is personally very fond of the King and the thought of the King’s difficulties may also have helped to upset his judgement.’38

  Churchill was also an obvious bogey-man for more junior ministers fearful of their positions should the government change. As the recognition that a major crisis was afoot spread to the lower end of the Cabinet table, he featured largely in the nebulous forebodings of ministers. Even before Esmond Harmsworth launched the morganatic scheme, Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Secretary for War, was babbling drunkenly that ‘the Conservatives will resign, and that the premiership will be hawked about to anyone who will take it and that Winston Churchill will summon a party meeting, create a new party and rule the country!’39 The Minister for Agriculture, Walter Elliot, more soberly in both senses, was ‘full of fears as to what Winston Churchill would do in conjunction with Lord Beaverbrook as to forming a King’s party’.40

  Churchill, Beaverbrook and the Harmsworths were soon lumped together under the damning epithet of the ‘King’s Party’, with its echoes of irresponsible, anti-democratic factionalism from the time of the English Civil War. It is not clear who first coined the phrase, but it probably first appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper closest to the government through the crisis.41 It was inevitable that Civil War era notions would come back into fashion when hints of dissent between King and Parliament arose. Wilson was certainly an early adopter and used it almost invariably in his notes to refer to the King’s supporters. The word ‘Party’ conveniently emphasised the idea of coherence and common purpose, which was conspicuously lacking in reality. To the hardliners in Downing Street, they were ‘gangsters’ plotting evil deeds. By failing to rally round to the Prime Minister’s line unambiguously, Churchill had branded himself as a threat to national security in Wilson’s eyes.

  The combination of Churchill with the press lords was an appalling prospect. Again, Tommy Dugdale’s wife combined the insider view from Downing Street and the authentic voice of traditional Tory squirearchy:

  The King, having kept bad company, had bad advisers. Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express and the Evening Standard; Mr. Esmond Harmsworth (son of Lord Rothermere) of the Daily Mail and the Evening News; and Mr. Winston Churchill of nothing in particular, but whose name carries a certain publicity. None of these men is English in the sense that Mr. Baldwin is English … They are three men in public life unashamedly out for themselves, all wanting to make personal capital out of a public tragedy.42

  Chamberlain had no reason to doubt it when Baldwin had told him that he was definitely going to abdicate after the audience provoked by Hardinge’s letter. The King’s apparent change of mind came as a ‘bombshell’ to Chamberlain when Fisher told him about it on the morning of 25 November.43 Once again, a civil servant proved to be far in advance of the government’s second-ranked minister. The news ended the second phase of Chamberlain’s intrigue, which had got as far as persuading Baldwin to accept another meeting with the cabal for the following day, presumably to implement the plans for effecting an abdication rapidly and secretly that Chamberlain and Wilson had been drawing. Instead, all the cabal got was a briefing by the Prime Minister on Downing Street’s vision of the background to the morganatic scheme and the King’s Party. Chamberlain was instantly suspicious of the morganatic scheme, which he saw as merely ‘prelude to the further steps of making Mrs. S. Queen with full rights’.44 He was less obviously perturbed at the threat supposedly posed by the King’s Party, but did take the precaution
of warning his half-brother off. Sir Austen Chamberlain was still one of the Conservative Party’s elder statesmen and had openly criticised Baldwin’s feeble foreign policy earlier in the year, but he entirely supported the government’s line toward the King. Neville then returned to the charge of making the idea of abdication into a hard fact by pushing through the practical arrangements:

  I asked [Baldwin] if we should not now set the procedure legislation timetable &c as I was apprehensive that the K. would not stay even if we got him back to abdication & we ought to be ready to act swiftly. S.B. agreed vaguely but at once changed the subject.45

  Baldwin’s stonewalling against Chamberlain’s chivvying shows how far he was prepared to go to put the full responsibility for abdication on the King’s shoulders alone. Moreover, he still did not see abdication as entirely inevitable. He was far less alarmist than Wilson and saw far more clearly the real risks than Chamberlain. Dugdale’s wife drew a contrast between Baldwin’s ‘statesmanlike assurance’ and ‘courage to carry inaction where others would run’, and the hardliners.46 He had no fear of the King’s Party. Baldwin was aware that Churchill and Beaverbrook were working together and did see a degree of conspiracy in the activities of the King’s supporters, but his attention was predictably focused on the press lords: ‘There is a “set” which is backing the marriage. I don’t know but I suspect that the Beaverbrook–Rothermere press will take that line.’47 He was unremitting in his contempt for Harmsworth, but read quite correctly Churchill’s weakness and ineptitude as an intriguer:

  I know my Winston. When he came to see me he looked like a cat that has been caught coming out of the dairy & thinks you haven’t seen her but you had. And again when L.G. [Lloyd George] is out for mischief you can see the wash of his periscope but when W. is trying to torpedo you half his hull is out of water.48

  Baldwin’s political flank rested on very solid ground. He could depend on the support of the main opposition party. The day after the King asked Baldwin to consider the morganatic scheme formally, Baldwin had asked Attlee outright whether he would be prepared to form an alternative government. Even though Attlee had been in office only a few months and had been a far from obvious choice as leader, he unhesitatingly gave a commitment not to, without even asking anyone else in the Labour Party, still less consulting the National Executive Committee, its formal controlling body. Afterwards, he explained himself to the National Executive Committee in a long memorandum, but there is practically no sign that he had judged the party’s opinion incorrectly. Sir Walter Citrine, the pragmatic General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, had already told Baldwin that he was reading Labour opinion correctly when he visited Chequers soon after Baldwin’s first conversation with the King, and endorsed his strategy.49 Some of the party’s more intellectual wing including Hugh Dalton, who had stood against Attlee in the leadership contest, were tempted to exploit the King’s image as a champion of the industrial poor, but the Labour movement as a whole was still very conservative on social questions at the time. Its nonconformist roots showed through.50 Attlee’s decision to fall into line behind the government was one of the crucial decisions in the crisis. Even judged by the harsh standards of political expediency, it was the right one; the balance of risk and reward was overwhelmingly against taking any risk. The King was left with no prospect of support from the political mainstream. Churchill later expressed his outrage that Baldwin had gone directly to Attlee without any public airing of the matter, but it is hard to find any constitutional flaw in what he did. The only difficulty he encountered within the Labour Party was to be accused by the left-winger Aneurin Bevan that he had been overly deferential to the monarchy.51

  NOTES

  1. Duff Cooper diaries

  2. Nicolson diaries, 28 October, p. 276; Bruce Lockhart diaries, 13 November, p. 357; Chamberlain diary, 25 October

  3. Bloch (ed.), Wallis and Edward, p. 253

  4. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 55

  5. The Heart Has Its Reasons, p. 269

  6. A King’s Story, p. 342

  7. NA PREM CAB 301/101, Grant memorandum, 8 December

  8. Dugdale diary, Sitwell, Rat Week, pp 35–6

  9. NAA M104, Bruce memorandum, 15 November

  10. MacDonald diary, 21 November

  11. Jones, A Diary with Letters, p. 288

  12. Windham Baldwin papers, 11/1/1 Monica Baldwin, ‘An Unpublished Page of English History’

  13. The Heart Has Its Reasons, p. 269; A King’s Story, p. 342

  14. A King’s Story, p. 342

  15. NA CAB 23/68

  16. NA CAB 23/68

  17. Graves & Hodges, The Long Weekend, p. 361; Williams, The People’s King, passim

  18. A King’s Story, p. 346

  19. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 51

  20. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 54

  21. Sebba, That Woman, p. 184

  22. Churchill to Clementine, 27 November, quoted in Gilbert (ed.), Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill 1922–1939

  23. NA PREM 1/466

  24. Sunday Times, 26 April 1964

  25. Butler, The Art of the Possible, pp 88f

  26. Dugdale diary

  27. Colville diary, 10 May 1940

  28. Lascelles, King’s Counsellor, p. 270

  29. Mrs Simpson to Bessie Merryman, 4 May

  30. Churchill memorandum, CHAR 2/264

  31. Lascelles, King’s Counsellor, p. 414

  32. Hardinge, Loyal to Three Kings, p. 102

  33. Lesley, The Life of Noël Coward, p. 210 of Penguin 1978 paperback

  34. Nicolson diaries 7 December

  35. Dugdale diary

  36. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication Of King Edward VIII, p. 65

  37. Amery diaries, 4 December

  38. Amery diaries, 4 December

  39. Channon diaries, 22 November

  40. Dugdale diary

  41. Davidson, Memoirs of a Conservative, pp 414–15

  42. Dugdale diary

  43. Chamberlain diary, 25 November

  44. Chamberlain diary, 25 November

  45. Chamberlain diary, 26 November

  46. Dugdale diary

  47. Jones, A Diary with Letters, p. 288

  48. Chamberlain diary, 2 December

  49. Citrine, Men and Work, pp 327f

  50. Attlee, As It Happened, p. 103

  51. Harris, Attlee, p. 165

  CHAPTER 9

  THE BATTLE FOR THE THRONE

  * * *

  The Battle for the Throne has begun. On Wednesday evening (I know all that follows to be true, though not six people in the Kingdom are so informed), Mr. Baldwin spent one hour and forty minutes …with the King and gave him the ultimatum that the Government would resign, and that the press could no longer be restrained from attacking the King, if he did not abandon the idea of marrying Mrs. Simpson.

  CHIPS CHANNON, DIARY, 28 NOVEMBER 1936

  ON THURSDAY 26 November, Baldwin changed his mind on a very important point. He decided that the time had come to bring the full Cabinet into the debate on how to handle the crisis. The number of insiders expanded dramatically. Up to then, barely ten individuals in government had known anything approaching the full picture. Everyone else, Cabinet ministers included, had been no better informed than any member of the public in touch with Society gossip. Like the hardliners, Baldwin had hoped to settle the problem in private, albeit without pushing for a solution, but he now saw the chances dwindling. Just the day before, he had turned down the idea of informing the Cabinet because he judged that it was too prone to leaks, and with the large number of people involved, the story would get out. The easy explanation for Baldwin’s change of mind is that he had concluded that the story was going to get out anyway, that he had abandoned any hope of settling the affair informally with an absolute minimum of discussion. It meant that he
had become more pessimistic. Almost any outcome that involved public knowledge would not be a happy one; in practice this meant either a full-blown constitutional crisis or abdication. Baldwin wanted neither, but there was only a limited amount that he could do to prevent either. In both cases, Baldwin knew that he would need his whole government fully in his confidence, so like a good chess-player, he reluctantly made a move that was inevitable, before circumstances forced him to.

  No single event triggered Baldwin’s decision. The King’s request for the morganatic proposal to be considered formally was probably the most important individual factor, but it was not the most important one. The only practical decision taken at the Cabinet meeting, when it occurred, was to refer the question of a morganatic marriage to the Dominion governments, although the substance of the proposal itself was not discussed at the meeting.1 The Statute of Westminster had created a constitution for the Empire in 1931, which gave the Dominions an explicit right of approval for ‘any alteration in the law touching the Succession to the Throne or the Royal Style and Titles’, so this was a necessary formality. More important, the crisis had grown to an extent that made Baldwin decide that it could no longer be handled by the tiny number of individuals directly involved up to then. MI5 intelligence and outright rumour were stoking fears of a constitutional crisis engineered by Winston Churchill and the King’s Party for their own ends. According to one report, a group of the younger Cabinet members had met to discuss what line to take on the question, frustrated that the Prime Minister was not providing a lead. The foreign press had also interested itself in the question again, this time in potentially a far more sinister fashion than retailing prurient gossip.