The King Who Had to Go

by Adrian Phillips

  The King was now behaving in a profoundly irrational fashion. He was trying to appeal to the public over the head of the government in a radio broadcast whilst holding his press baron allies back from launching the same appeal in their newspapers. The explanation is simple and damning: one was a step that Mrs Simpson wanted, the other was one that she was opposed to. His subservience to her meant he could not approach his position logically and assess the options available on either moral or pragmatic grounds. It is just possible that the Duke of Windsor’s later claim that he refused Beaverbrook permission to launch an all-out campaign in part because he did not want to divide the country is not necessarily entirely hypocritical. He was sufficiently unintelligent and under Mrs Simpson’s thumb to take any plan she came up with as infallibly good and thus not in need of any further assessment. She, in turn, seems to have assumed that a broadcast would protect her own image in a way that newspaper coverage did not. She would, of course, have been able to dictate the contents of a broadcast to the King whilst she would not be able to do the same with newspaper articles. By accident and quite untouched by patriotism, she had made the right choice for the country. Her preference for a broadcast over a newspaper campaign saved the country from open conflict. The King had ended up with the worst of both worlds: committed to a plan the government could block easily and deprived of the use of a weapon that they could not. This was all hidden from the government, which saw in the plan for the broadcast evidence that the King wanted to fight and feared that it would produce a press campaign as well.

  In many ways, the broadcast scheme was a rerun of the King’s enthusiasm for the morganatic idea after Mrs Simpson had adopted it, with the difference that this time it was her own suggestion and he himself was passionately excited about it. His desire to make the broadcast was so extreme that one of his household thought he was ‘quite “insane” on this issue’.26 He immediately set about trying to organise the practical details. The first step was to tell the Prime Minister what he intended to do, and Baldwin was summoned to an audience at 6 p.m. on Thursday 3 December at Buckingham Palace. Despite the constitutional issues involved, the King seems to have thought that Baldwin’s assent would be a formality. As had happened with the morganatic scheme, the King had made up his mind and did not want or seek any advice as to the wisdom of his plan. He behaved with the same unthinking impetuosity and launched the plan with no significant outside advice. His lawyers Walter Monckton and George Allen were allowed to help him polish the draft, but there is no sign that he wanted an opinion on whether the idea was a good one or not, still less on how to implement it.

  The King also sent his assistant private secretary, Sir Godfrey Thomas, to Sir John Reith, Director General of the BBC, to put in hand the practical preparations for the broadcast. When Thomas arrived at Reith’s office late on the Thursday afternoon he was in such a bad state that Reith had a whisky and soda sent up for him. Thomas told Reith that the King was going to ask the Prime Minister for permission for the broadcast, so they seem to have deferred any discussion of practicalities until it was given. Unknown to the King or Thomas, Reith was already one step ahead of them. Sir Horace Wilson had been informed of the King’s thoughts of making a broadcast soon after the King first told Baldwin on the Wednesday night, and had wanted to warn Reith immediately but could not find his home telephone number. Somehow Reith had independently picked up the possibility that the King might want to broadcast and had sought direction from his patron in the civil service, Sir Warren Fisher, the following morning, Thursday. Reith was summoned to see Fisher and Wilson, who told him to say that ‘…we must consult the P.M. before agreeing’ should the King ask to make a broadcast.27

  The King’s preparations for the audience with the Prime Minister to ask for permission to broadcast were so inconsiderate as to verge on insulting, and it began in an atmosphere of grim farce. The time was put back to 9 p.m., to give the King time to say goodbye to Mrs Simpson at Fort Belvedere before her long journey and to travel to Buckingham Palace. This message was given to Downing Street by Bateman, the former Royal Navy telegraphist whom the King had taken on to man a private switchboard at Buckingham Palace as part of the drive for security inspired by Beaverbrook’s obsessive fear of phone taps.28 He was already the object of suspicion in Baldwin’s entourage and it was seen as offensive for someone so junior to be used as the conduit between monarch and Prime Minister.29 The King’s household at Fort Belvedere was so small and the circumstances so exceptional that this was a pardonable breach of etiquette, but the reaction shows how little personal sympathy there was for the King at Downing Street. Baldwin and Dugdale were left with most of the evening to kill and first went for a drive in Hyde Park, which was enlivened by a collision with another car, and then to dinner at Buck’s Club, where the waiters tried to stop the Prime Minister from smoking his pipe in the dining room.30 When Baldwin was allowed to come to Buckingham Palace he was sent to the back entrance and, in a final humiliation, made to climb in through a window. As seemed to happen so often with the King’s attempts to preserve secrecy, all these arrangements failed and a press photographer caught a photo-flash picture of Baldwin huddled in the back of his small car. It is a tribute to Baldwin’s equanimity that he took all this in his stride and conducted the audience with calm and courtesy, although he did treat the following morning’s Cabinet meeting to an account of some of the unconventional preliminaries.31

  The King began the audience by thrusting a copy of the draft of his broadcast into the Prime Minister’s hands, but if he had entertained any hope that he would simply be allowed to make the broadcast, Baldwin dashed them firmly. The question was one for the Cabinet to decide, but after reminding the King that he had already told him that the members of the Cabinet, the leaders of the opposition and the Dominion Prime Ministers were opposed to marriage, he told him bluntly that the broadcast would be ‘…to go over the heads of his ministers and talk direct to the people … a thoroughly unconstitutional procedure’.32 The King was abashed enough to acknowledge the constitutional point, but Baldwin was not finished with his objections. The broadcast could even hurt the King’s cause: ‘…the King would be telling millions of people throughout the world, including a vast number of women that he wanted to marry a married woman.’ It should have been clear to the King that the whole idea of a broadcast was hopelessly flawed, but as Baldwin described the King’s reaction: ‘This was another instance of a certain lack of comprehension which he had observed in the King.’ There was no serious possibility that the broadcast would happen, but the King was so insistent that Baldwin agreed to discuss the idea in Cabinet the following morning, where it would inevitably be buried with full constitutional honours.

  The King certainly failed to understand that there was practically no possibility that he would be allowed to make the broadcast and he ploughed on undeterred, apparently assuming that the Cabinet would approve. After the audience just before midnight, he told Godfrey Thomas to telephone Sir John Reith to tell him to arrange broadcasting facilities at Windsor Castle because ‘…the King would probably broadcast tomorrow [Friday] night – the PM agreeing’.33 Thomas had only the King’s account of the conversation with Baldwin to go on, so may have been misled as to whether the broadcast had been approved, but after his conversation with the civil servants that morning, Reith was not going to do anything without clear evidence that the Prime Minister approved. All he did was to inform Fisher and Wilson of Thomas’s midnight call the following morning, Friday.

  At this point the King’s matrimonial concerns collided head-on with a far more important question for Britain’s future. By coincidence, on the evening of Thursday 3 December a huge public meeting was taking place at the Albert Hall. It was the culmination of a plan launched by Churchill in October to create a platform for advocates of rearmament from across the political spectrum to present their arguments.34 Churchill had very quickly recognised that Hitler posed immense danger, and since 1934 had been advoca
ting that Britain rearm in order to face the threat. He was far in advance of the government’s own very cautious measures of rearmament, and of public opinion, which was still overwhelmingly pacifist. Churchill’s goal for the meeting was to establish a consensus in favour of rearmament and demonstrate that it drew support from all areas of political thought. It was organised under the auspices of the League of Nations Union, who sent a high-level representative. The League was still immensely respected in Britain and viewed as offering a mechanism to resolve disputes between nations peacefully. The slogan for the meeting, ‘Arms and the Covenant’, explicitly referred to the League of Nations Covenant, and emphasised the need to back its measures with armed force if necessary as had conspicuously not been the case in the League’s futile and humiliating attempts to protect Abyssinia from Italian aggression earlier in 1936. So as to further broaden the appeal, Churchill insisted that it was chaired by Sir Walter Citrine, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, who was, to say the least, not one of Churchill’s natural allies. Ten years before, Churchill had been one of the then government’s most hardline opponents of the General Strike. Churchill was aiming at a curious fracture in politics on the Left. Sentiment in favour of rearmament was stronger amongst the unions than the Labour Party itself; doubtless the self-interest of workers in military-related industries played a part. Churchill had also succeeded in attracting a range of figures across the political spectrum: Sir Archibald Sinclair of the opposition Liberals and dissident Conservatives from both the right wing, Lord Lloyd, and the left wing, Harold Macmillan.35

  The timing was almost perfect. Three weeks before, Baldwin had contrived simultaneously to confess that his defence policy had been tainted with electioneering dishonesty and to admit that rearmament was an urgent necessity. Before the 1935 election, he had promised the country there would be no ‘great armaments’, but on 12 November in a speech to Parliament that he admitted was one of ‘appalling frankness’, he confessed that this promise had deliberately misled an electorate which he judged would have been hostile to military spending. In reality, Baldwin acknowledged that it was a necessary response to the scale of Nazi German rearmament. But for the abdication crisis, the phrase ‘appalling frankness’, which aroused widespread contempt and suspicion, could easily have become the epitaph of a singularly mediocre political career.

  Under other circumstances the meeting might have had a major impact on public opinion and even accelerated rearmament, but from the outset its prospects were poisoned by the crisis over Mrs Simpson. Citrine had already made clear to Churchill that he backed Baldwin’s line over her, but Churchill had reserved his position.36 Churchill arrived late at the Albert Hall full of thoughts of making a statement in favour of the King.37 He knew about the King’s plan to broadcast, that the King was determined to argue his case. Churchill told Citrine that he would be expected to make a statement. In effect, he was proposing to hijack his own meeting to support an entirely different cause. Citrine told him directly that if he did say anything in favour of the King, he would speak against him. This did deter Churchill from giving open support to the King against Baldwin, but he did make a point of mentioning the King in a neutral context. Churchill’s efforts in organising the meeting and Citrine’s efforts to keep Churchill went for nothing. Newspaper coverage of the meeting the following day was swamped by the crisis. There was no follow-through, and brief unity amongst political opponents lasted for that evening only.

  The government’s outright opposition to a broadcast by the King was entirely predictable, but even his friends were no more than tepid about the idea. They were anyway given very little opportunity to form or express an opinion. The King seems to have told Beaverbrook about his intention to make a broadcast in their many telephone conversations on the Wednesday and Thursday, but the conversation on the point was one-sided.38 It was only after his conversation with Baldwin at Buckingham Palace that the King took Beaverbrook further into his confidence. Perhaps he had recognised that he might need help to put over the message that he wanted to broadcast. Immediately after the audience, Monckton was sent to see Beaverbrook at Stornoway House with a draft of the broadcast and instructions that Beaverbrook was to discuss the draft with Churchill.39 It was not made clear to Beaverbrook that the King had already raised the idea with the Prime Minister. Beaverbrook had been irritated that the King had launched the morganatic scheme without reference to him, and the King had every reason to expect that Beaverbrook would have been similarly upset to discover that the broadcast proposal had been made to the Prime Minister without referring to him.

  It was near midnight on Thursday 3rd when Beaverbrook and Churchill finally met to discuss the King’s draft. They both agreed that the King should not give the text to Baldwin, but should simply read it to him, presumably on tactical grounds that the government would be able to pick the written text to pieces at its leisure even if they had no intention of letting it be broadcast. They knew that his chance of actually making the broadcast was vanishingly small, so delivering the text to Baldwin would merely have gifted the government advance warning of the case that he might find another way to present. They did not know that the King had already handed his draft to the Prime Minister. As it was, they recognised immediately that what the King proposed to say was ‘contrary to constitutional custom in Britain’ and, in almost exactly the same words that Baldwin himself used at the Cabinet meeting the following morning, ‘was in effect an appeal over the heads of the Cabinet’.40 The one and only change that they recommended was stylistic: to replace the word ‘Britishers’ with the phrase ‘British men and women’. Despite all this, Beaverbrook and Churchill were prepared to advise the King if the broadcast did indeed take place, although Beaverbrook later implied that this was only because the King had lied to him outright in saying that he had not shown the draft to Baldwin.41

  NOTES

  1. BBK G/6/23, Duke of Windsor draft memoirs, dated 15 June 1949

  2. Chamberlain diary, 2 December

  3. NA CAB 301/101, Col. Casten (?) report, 27 November

  4. BBK G/6/23, Duke of Windsor draft memoirs, dated 15 June 1949

  5. A King’s Story, p. 356

  6. Amery diaries, 28 December

  7. Boca, She Might Have Been Queen, p. 103

  8. Amery diaries, 28 December

  9. A King’s Story, p. 375

  10. BBK G/6/2-5, Beaverbrook notes of conversation with Brownlow, 23 September 1951

  11. BBK G/6/19

  12. A King’s Story, p. 360

  13. Channon diaries, 6 December

  14. BBK G/6/2-5, Beaverbrook notes of conversation with Brownlow, 23 September 1951

  15. The Heart Has Its Reasons, p. 278

  16. BBK G/6/19

  17. Chamberlain diary, 2 December; Donaldson, A Twentieth Century Life, p. 217

  18. Chamberlain diary, 3 December

  19. Hansard, 3 December; Nicolson diaries, 3 December

  20. Reith diaries, 3 December

  21. Channon diaries, 3 December

  22. Channon diaries, p. 91

  23. A King’s Story, p. 359

  24. A King’s Story, p. 361

  25. A King’s Story, p. 361; CHAR 2/264, Memorandum, The Abdication of Edward VIII

  26. Reith diaries, 3 December

  27. Reith diaries, 3 December; NA PREM 1/466

  28. NA CAB 23/68

  29. Dugdale diary

  30. Dugdale diary

  31. NA CAB 23/68

  32. NA CAB 23/68

  33. Reith diaries, 3 December

  34. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement, p. 110

  35. Macmillan, Winds of Change, pp 478f

  36. Citrine, Men and Work, p. 328

  37. Citrine, Men and Work, p. 357

  38. BBK G/6/19, Narrative

  39. A King’s Story, p. 365

  40. BBK G/6/19

  41. BBK G/6/19

  CHAPTER 12

  A PISTOL AT HIS HEAD

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  The Prime Minister thought there was a certain degree of danger in keeping the House of Commons in session without having anything to say to them. He did not want to put a pistol at the head of the King in this matter

  MINUTES OF CABINET MEETING ON 4 DECEMBER 1936

  WHILST IT LASTED, both the King and the government had been happy with the press silence, although the government had come around to seeing potential advantages from it breaking. When the silence ended, the advantage shifted firmly against the King. His unstated and barely thought-out project of biding his time in silence until the spring of the following year, when Mrs Simpson would be free to marry him and he would be able to confront the government with her as his wife immediately before his coronation, had vanished into oblivion. Apart from his confirmed allies, the press did not approve. The succession of panicky initiatives that the King launched daily was a cruel proof that he had no fall-back strategy. Like an animal caught in a trap, he was fighting blindly against having to make a choice between the throne and marriage to Mrs Simpson.