The King Who Had to Go

by Adrian Phillips

  There is no sign that the government as a whole was aware that the King was near the end of his tether. If Baldwin did, he kept this to himself. The hardliners failed to understand that the King’s indecision and panicky initiatives were the symptoms of despair; he had never been popular amongst them and he had already burned through whatever fund of sympathy he might have had. They interpreted the shifts in the King’s position as evidence of untrustworthiness rather than the alternation of pessimism and petulant defiance. Chamberlain saw the King’s anxiety on the Wednesday night to make a broadcast to the Empire ‘to tell them that he intended to marry Mrs. S. but without announcing his abdication’ as a deeply suspicious sign, and when he put the request directly to the Prime Minister the following evening it was yet another instance of his reneging on a promise to abdicate: ‘As I had feared H.M. had turned right round again.’1 The King had achieved nothing except to feed the impatience for him finally to go.

  It was not just the King himself whom the hardliners criticised. They blamed the King’s Party for his changes in mind. He appeared to have lived up to the fears that Monckton had expressed on the Wednesday night that he would ‘listen again to his bad advisers Esmond & Max. The tragedy was that he had no friends & that was why he turned in his desperation to men who comforted him by suggesting that he could count on the country rallying to him.’2 In the eyes of the hardliners, the crisis was beginning to morph from the problems arising from the complications of the King’s private life into an all-out battle with unscrupulous men bent on manipulating the constitution to achieve power. The immediate focus of this concern was the press. The end of the press silence had transformed the crisis into a public one and the only practical way in which the public could be reached in those days was through the newspapers. The King’s allies were newspapermen and their titles addressed the politically fickle mass market, whilst the government’s newspaper allies addressed the reliable upper end of the market. There was a significant undeclared middle ground in between. Downing Street and the hardliners were unsettled by the possibility of an all-out campaign for the King against the government that Beaverbrook wanted to mount but, unknown to the government, was blocked by the King from mounting. In the same way that they were imagining evidence of treachery on the King’s part, they were imagining signs of a newspaper assault against the government. Downing Street was immensely sensitive to the stance taken by the newspapers, and its reading of the Harmsworth and Beaverbrook papers of Friday 4 December was that they had come out on the King’s side.3 Beaverbrook’s incurred particular odium for repeating their master’s mantra that the King did not require ministers’ approval for marriage. Downing Street was being oversensitive. Whatever shift there might have been in the stances of the Express or the Daily Mail was imperceptible to a senior backbencher and firm supporter of the government’s line on Mrs Simpson, Leo Amery, who saw them as ‘sitting on the fence’.4 Downing Street did not appear to take much comfort from the line taken by the Labour movement’s Daily Herald, which followed its political leaders in broadly backing the government.

  The hardliners were exaggerating the danger, but it did exist. Beaverbrook was keen to unleash an assault and set about organising his own potential allies. He had not been deterred from pursuing the King’s cause by his downbeat conversation with him on the Wednesday night: ‘On the Thursday morning I went to work on the newspaper proprietors likely to support our cause.’5 What the government did not know was the extent to which Beaverbrook was handicapped by the King. Like many before him, he was now confronted by the King’s unshakeable obstinacy:

  I was personally forbidden by the King to explain that no constitutional situation had arisen. He was the source of my information and I had to obey him.

  All through these days the King constantly interfered with the presentation of the case by the newspapers which he could influence. For days the papers which I control were completely ineffective on that account. And here let me dispel any misunderstanding. That influence was entirely directed (1) to dampening down controversy; (2) to avoiding conflict with the government and Mr. Baldwin, and (3) to limiting as far as possible the references to Mrs. Simpson. All three seemed to be major propositions with him, in moments when abdication should have been the principal consideration.6

  Beaverbrook stopped short of saying that toppling Baldwin should also have been a consideration, but his sneer at the King’s desire to avoid a fight with the government betrays his true agenda. Beaverbrook never seems to have grasped that he had been brought into the affair because Mrs Simpson thought he could keep the press silent about her, and everything else was secondary. This was also hidden to senior staff of the Beaverbrook organisation, who felt that their boss was behaving indecisively and should have come out wholeheartedly in favour of the King, albeit because they scented an opportunity for large extra sales and not because they supported the King.7

  The disagreement between the King and Beaverbrook was not the only fault line within the King’s Party. Beaverbrook envied the greater freedom enjoyed by Harmsworth, who was not restrained by direct contact with the King, but he did not appear to be aware that Harmsworth was not entirely his own master.8 The Sunday Dispatch was a fading star in the journalistic firmament, but its editor, Collin Brooks, was a trusted personal adviser to Lord Rothermere. Brooks refused point-blank when Harmsworth asked him to write an article supporting the King.9 Ultimately, the father remained in charge, however passionate his son might have been to help the King.

  Perversely enough, it was the News Chronicle, the newspaper with only a very weak connection to the King’s Party, that was causing the government the greatest concern. Unlike the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, whose proprietors were fully in touch with what was passing between King and government, Sir Walter Layton, owner of the News Chronicle, had only Beaverbrook’s appeals for help to go on, and Beaverbrook cannot have given him a full or frank account of what had happened to the morganatic proposal when he saw him on the Thursday to solicit his help.10 His paper was the only one that had come out immediately in favour of the morganatic proposal on the Thursday – in the government’s eyes ‘the one amazing exception’ – presumably left unaware by Beaverbrook that the government had buried the idea the day before.11 The attitude of the News Chronicle was disappointing, as at one level it should have been a natural ally to the government’s moralistic stance. It had strong ties to non-conformism, which was supposedly solidly aligned against the marriage to Mrs Simpson as well as holding left-of-centre political views. In the Friday edition, the News Chronicle had tempered its view by accepting that the King should follow ministerial advice, but in Downing Street’s eyes at least, the Beaverbrook and Harmsworth newspapers had swung behind the morganatic proposal.

  Sir Horace Wilson’s reading of the situation was even more extreme and focused on the proposed broadcast. He ‘knew from other sources that the King was being urged to press his request: it was one phase of the attempt to set up a “King’s Party”’.12 Having teetered on the edge of inaccuracy since the inception of the operation, MI5’s reports had finally come up with a picture that was almost the opposite of reality. Wilson was painting the King’s allies as the enthusiastic promoters of a constitutionally dubious project, rather than the hapless followers of another hare-brained scheme that had been half-explained to them too late for them to give any meaningful advice on it. This fitted comfortably with the near-paranoid image that Wilson had formed of an unscrupulous and resolute conspiracy to topple the government by whatever means it could find. MI5 had either fallen into the classic intelligence trap of allowing their informant to work out which way their thinking went and inventing material which would be well received because it confirmed this preconception, or it had accepted as true material that was simply wrong. Given the King’s blind and overwhelming enthusiasm throughout the Thursday for the idea of a broadcast, it is quite possible that he had convinced himself that his allies would share this enthusiasm and
had told this to MI5’s informant. Perhaps it was a combination of both. Yet again, the government – or at least its hardliners – found itself making decisions on the basis of narrowly procured and untested covert intelligence rather than analysing the verifiable facts that were available to it.

  When the Cabinet met at 10.30 in the morning of Friday 4 December at the Prime Minister’s room in Parliament with the ostensible purpose of discussing the King’s wish to broadcast, the crisis had taken on a quite different aspect since the meeting two days before. The previous meetings had been little more than confidential briefing sessions on how the Prime Minister was dealing with the King. The Cabinet now faced a public crisis and began to operate as a body to make decisions, albeit in an increasingly chaotic atmosphere. There were two items on the agenda. One was a piece of formal Cabinet business: to respond to the King’s request to make a broadcast. The other was informal and unstated: Baldwin wanted to flag to the Cabinet that abdication was the most likely outcome to the crisis. He began, as he had done at the previous meetings of the Cabinet on the crisis, with a narrative of events. Significantly, he then went through, in detail, the four options that he had presented to the King on the Wednesday: renunciation of Mrs Simpson, marriage in defiance of the government, morganatic marriage or abdication, presented in a way that led to the almost inescapable conclusion that abdication was by far the most likely outcome. Baldwin and the King had discussed these options and one or the other had dismissed each of them as impossible except for abdication and marriage to Mrs Simpson. As to the formal business of the meeting, he had only brought the broadcast to the Cabinet for discussion because ‘[t]he King had used every argument to urge the broadcast and asked him [Baldwin] to consider it. He had promised to do so.’13 The discussion was a formality; there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the proposal was unconstitutional. Even Duff Cooper, the nearest thing that the King had to a supporter in the Cabinet, knew this:

  There was no doubt … in the mind of any member of the Cabinet that this broadcast could not be allowed. So long as the King is King, every utterance that he makes must be on the advice of Ministers who must take full responsibility for every word. If, therefore, we could not advise him to make this speech, we could not allow him to.14

  The mood and dynamics of any discussion can be fragile things especially in as fraught a situation as the Cabinet faced that day, and they are as vulnerable to accident as to deliberate intervention. It would have been a simple matter to drive the final nail in the broadcast’s coffin by reading out the King’s draft, but Sir John Simon had forgotten to bring it with him. However, he had remembered to bring his own analysis of the legal position, with which he proceeded to divert his colleagues when Lord Swinton was unwise enough to ask him what it was. If there had ever been any risk of the ministers not grasping that the King’s request was impossible, it was firmly laid to rest. Simon’s failure to bring the King’s draft was the first step on an ever-steeper downward slope that was to take the meeting a long way from another orderly sitting that followed the Prime Minister’s script. The hiatus whilst the draft of the broadcast was sent for broke the smooth flow of the meeting and, by chance, coincided with the intrusion of parliamentary vulgarity on the orderliness of Cabinet. A message was brought in that Attlee wanted to follow up his gentle enquiry of the previous day and ask another question in the House, and the Prime Minister was duty bound to leave the Cabinet meeting, and deliver an answer even if it was as empty as his previous one. When Baldwin arrived in the Chamber and replied to Attlee, Churchill then pressed again his demand of the previous day, with equal lack of success. The whole proceeding took no more than quarter of an hour.

  The discussion resumed and Simon read the King’s draft using it as a launch pad for a two-pronged assault on the King. He tutted at the King’s ignorance of constitutional law, so lamentable in someone who had been taught law at Oxford University by no less a luminary than Sir William Anson, the author of that standard work on the topic, The Law and Custom of the Constitution. An ignorance, Simon insinuated, which was shared by the King’s lawyer and Oxford contemporary, Walter Monckton. Simon then moved on from Inns of Court cattiness to the more telling point that the King appeared to have backtracked on his willingness to abdicate. The King’s claim, ‘I could not go on bearing the heavy burdens that constantly rest on me as King unless I could be strengthened in the task by a happy married life; and so I am firmly resolved to marry the woman I love when she is free to marry me’, showed that he still aimed to marry Mrs Simpson and remain on the throne. Despite the verdict of the Dominion governments and what Baldwin had told him about its prospects in Britain, he was also still pursuing a morganatic marriage: ‘Neither Mrs. Simpson nor I have ever sought to insist that she should be Queen.’ Not only did this sound like an attempt to appeal over the government’s head to be allowed to make a morganatic marriage, but the scheme was now inextricably linked to the King’s Party, and as such anathema to the hardliners.15

  The combination of the constitutional position and what the King actually intended to say should have been sufficient to dispose of the proposal in short order, but a mix of punctiliousness and political ambition added another twist to the discussion. The Imperial complication made itself felt, once again more by accident than by design. Perhaps inevitably the question was raised by the Dominions Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, son of Ramsay MacDonald and one of the youngest members of the Cabinet. His father had insisted that he be a member, otherwise his political claim to the position was minimal. He was naturally alert to the Empire dimension to the issue and keen to make his mark as a politician in his own right and not merely as a dynastic appendage. He pitched in by expressing his doubt that the British Cabinet could advise on such a constitutional question without ‘consultation with the Dominions’, and this triggered an unfocused and rambling debate as to how the obstacle could be overcome that drew in about half the ministers present. His point was quite true, but it did not help find a solution to the urgent problem, so somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the Cabinet’s discussion that morning was taken up by the Dominion dimension. Little by little the talk broadened out to ticklish and more detailed questions of how the advice against the broadcast was to be delivered and even how the abdication itself was to be effected. Whenever it looked as though a conclusion had been reached, MacDonald steered the conversation back round to the Dominions.

  Whilst this was going on, events at the other end of Whitehall were about to change the tenor of the meeting one more time. The hardline civil servants, possibly in collusion with Chamberlain, found a pretext to heighten the tension. Earlier that morning Sir John Reith had telephoned Wilson and Fisher to tell them of Godfrey Thomas’s midnight phone call asking him to make the practical preparations for a broadcast by the King. Reith was unable to reach Wilson immediately, but left a message at Downing Street requesting some official statement to broadcast. Reith did not ask for instructions as to what he should do about the broadcast: after his earlier conversations with Fisher and Wilson, it was perfectly clear that he would only initiate the broadcast with the government’s authority.16 When Fisher and Wilson did call Reith back, they confirmed that no such authorisation had been given, so there was no risk of an uncontrolled broadcast. That should have been the end of the matter, but the civil servants still decided that the incident was important enough to interrupt a Cabinet meeting.17 How they could have concluded that there was an urgent threat is mysterious. At first glance it did seem to be an attempt by the King to defy, or at least pre-empt, the Cabinet’s decision, but on closer examination the concern appears to be badly overdone. The connection between the King’s Party and the broadcast was tenuous to say the least. The clue to the true purpose of the civil servants’ intervention is that the message they sent to the House of Commons was delivered to Neville Chamberlain, their ally in Cabinet, rather than to the Prime Minister.

  Chamberlain was called out of the room around noon to t
ake the message and re-entered in a coup de théâtre with an announcement that played to the unfocused and latent fears of many of the ministers that the King’s affair would be exploited to trigger a full-scale constitutional crisis aimed at forcing a change of government. Curiously, Chamberlain did not even mention the King’s proposed broadcast. Instead, he warned the Cabinet in general terms of a conspiracy by the King’s Party. In Maurice Hankey’s cautious prose, Chamberlain ‘had learnt from the Chief Whip that Mr. Winston Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook were in close consultation and were working together on the lines adopted by the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the News Chronicle’.18 In Duff Cooper’s memory, the conspiracy that was reported to the Cabinet embraced the King himself: ‘…the King was busily engaged in taking counsel with Max and Winston.’19

  None of the accounts of the meeting attempted to give a verbatim account of what Chamberlain said, but his intervention transformed the meeting from a rambling discussion of ways and means into an outright crisis session. There is a distinct flavour of stage-management to the way in which the hardliners had exploited Thomas’s midnight call as a tool to inject a panic factor. Somewhere along the line things had become exaggerated and what Chamberlain said to the Cabinet was very different to the events that had triggered the message being sent to him, but it is impossible to trace at what point this change occurred. No copy appears to have survived of the message that Wilson sent to the House of Commons, so it is not even clear whether it described Thomas’s midnight call or merely said a conspiracy was afoot. It is tempting to speculate that the message did indeed mention the broadcast, but Chamberlain decided not to mention it because its value as a panic factor had been severely eroded. Earlier in the meeting Lord Halifax had asked Baldwin whether there was any risk of the King in his overwrought state defying the Cabinet and going direct to Sir John Reith. Baldwin told him firmly that the King would only be allowed to broadcast with the government’s authorisation.