Chamberlain’s intervention put the hardliners firmly in charge of the meeting with he himself leading the charge to force the King’s hand and make his choice almost immediately, in practice to abdicate. ‘The Prime Minister should bring His Majesty sharply up to the point that he must make his decision that very day.’20 He raised the dangerous spectre of the King’s Party: ‘some irresponsible people [who advised the King] that he could get away with it.’ The implicit threat that they posed was linked to the vital urgency of severe measures: ‘In the interests of the Country and of the Empire it was impossible to delay any longer.’ Moreover he was not just acting on his own analysis of the situation: ‘…the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury [the Chief Whip] had received a private message from a well-informed person who said that the Cabinet should play all their cards now.’ After months of biting his lip at what he saw as Baldwin’s temporising, Chamberlain could give full rein to his instinctive desire to tell the King that enough was enough. Support amongst the other ministers was practically unanimous. Halifax proposed that the King be threatened directly with the government’s resignation if he did not make his mind up and at least one other minister echoed the proposal. Leslie Hore-Belisha spoke for the self-interest of the junior members of the Cabinet with the terrifying prospect that the King’s Party might rapidly deprive them of their jobs: ‘…if the Government were to resign before the weekend, the King might be able to obtain other Ministers who would advise him to go on with his course.’
Baldwin fought a doomed solo rear-guard action to hold the hardliners at bay. Even his admission that he had told the King informally that it would be better for him to go had been more or less ignored. He got no support at all when he told the Cabinet ‘He did not want to put a pistol at the head of the King in this matter’. That, it seemed, was exactly what the overwhelming majority of his colleagues wanted to do. No one came to the Prime Minister’s assistance. Duff Cooper made no contribution to the discussion. He had been squashed in his attempts to speak out for the King at the two previous meetings and he was swinging away from his previous support for the King anyway. At a dinner party given by the Channons that evening, everyone else was a ‘Cavalier’ but Duff Cooper was ‘revolted by the King’s selfish stupidity’.21 Even the news that a line was open to the King’s Party in the shape of an invitation from Winston Churchill to the Chief Whip for lunch failed to calm the fears of Baldwin’s colleagues.
Almost every member of the Cabinet was certain that not only did something have to be done, but it had to be seen to be done. The government would have to say something. Gradually the urge to make some kind of statement took the upper hand over the urge to wring an immediate decision out of the King. The possibility that the government might soon resign if the King did not buckle had been raised a number of times, but no head of enthusiasm for an outright ultimatum had developed. In the mysterious way that ideas emerge unheralded from group conversations, the idea began to take shape that the Prime Minister should make some statement to the House before it adjourned for the weekend at 4 p.m. that day. The proposal would not block the possibility of insisting the King should be forced to decide and was certainly not in any way touted as a middle way. The most dovish argument that anyone came up with was Sam Hoare’s that it would buy the Cabinet an extra day or so that it could give the King to choose. In reality, a statement by the Prime Minister offered a more effective way of putting pressure on the King than giving him an ultimatum in private. It would, of course, be a public announcement, and it was Simon, the courtroom lawyer, who spotted the opportunity to hold the King’s feet to the fire. Reviving the morganatic proposal in the draft broadcast had opened a weak flank in the King’s position, which could be attacked ruthlessly. The statement would make entirely plain that the morganatic proposal was impossible: ‘It would also enable the Government to get the position clearly to the public and the Empire that Mrs. Simpson could only become the wife of either the King or of a private person who had been King.’ It went without saying that Mrs Simpson was not acceptable as a Queen so this was virtually a statement that the King had to abdicate if he wanted to marry. The House of Commons and the world were to be given a summary of the alternatives available to the King with which Baldwin had begun the meeting, the stark choice of renouncing Mrs Simpson or abdicating. Baldwin’s faint plea that he ‘saw some risk in starting in three hours’ time to make a statement without adequate opportunity to think the whole matter over’ was brushed aside. The Cabinet wanted the King to choose, and it made a formal decision that the Prime Minister should make a statement. The hardliners had won, but their victory was not quite total; Baldwin was to urge the King to choose soon, but he was not to deliver an outright ultimatum with a deadline of midnight, instead:
That the Prime Minister should the same day represent to the King the dangerous political situation which might arise throughout the Empire if the present uncertainty as to His Majesty’s intentions in the matters arising out of his intention to marry continued, and should ask His Majesty to notify his decisions … at the earliest practicable moment, and, if possible, in time for announcements to be made in Parliament on Monday, December 7th…22
Baldwin’s hand had been partially forced, but the Cabinet had not forced him to send an outright ultimatum. The Cabinet could disperse with a sense of having pushed the Prime Minister into a resolute move, but it would be some hours before it took effect, and the spectre of the King’s Party was still stalking the land.
Its two leaders kept up the fighting talk over separate lunches with representatives of the government. Churchill subjected the Chief Whip, David Margesson, to a variation on the same overblown rant to which he had treated Duff Cooper to the effect that the King was being ill-treated and pushed into a corner.23 Beaverbrook talked up the strength that the King had drawn from press support but kept quiet about the fact that Monckton had just cut off communication with him and that the King had given him to understand that he was going to abdicate. He did, though, give faint clues of the weakness of the King’s Party’s position, in two shifts in his own position. He introduced the idea ‘that the crisis might yet be resolved by an act of renunciation on the part of Mrs. Simpson’.24 In effect, he was trying to capitalise in advance on Lord Brownlow’s effort to persuade Mrs Simpson to give up the King, which Beaverbrook had set in train when it became obvious that the King was not going to give his party the help it wanted. The unmistakable sign that the King’s Party was on the ropes came when Beaverbrook tried to swing Hoare round to ‘tak[ing] a greater interest in the cause of His Majesty’ on the grounds that he was a ‘likely selection’ if the King had to send someone else as Prime Minister.25 It is a tribute to Beaverbrook’s delusional confidence in his status of kingmaker that he was now hawking the incumbency of 10 Downing Street to his third candidate in the space of a week and that he should imagine that Hoare would be taken in. It was not a temptation that Hoare found any difficulty in resisting, and the King’s Party had to continue with its proven line-up.
More junior members of the government overrated the strength of the King’s Party just as badly as the hardliners. When Chamberlain had made his dramatic re-entry to the Cabinet meeting that morning he had had easy material with which to work. Rumours of what the King’s Party were up to had also reached the back benches, albeit in rather less alarmist fashion. Leo Amery offered his support to Baldwin against ‘rumours that had reached me that Winston was trying to work a big intrigue through the press’.26 However doomed and feeble the King’s Party might have been in reality, there were still acute fears of the havoc it might wreak as became clear when a group of the younger members of the Cabinet known as the ‘Servants’ Hall’, which included Hore-Belisha, gathered to discuss the situation. Churchill remained the prime bogey-man. Their fears rivalled the worst imaginings of the established hardliners. Duff Cooper was one of the group, but he had been far closer to the heart of the affair almost since the beginning and he was taken aback:
…that some of them took a much more alarmist view than they had expressed in the Cabinet. They thought a coup d’étât was not impossible. They suggested that the King might accept the Prime Minister’s resignation and send for Winston. It was not impossible for Winston to form a Government; he might come out with a popular programme for speeding up re-armament and more drastic measures for dealing with the distressed areas. If he were defeated in the House of Commons he could go to the country. The prospects of a General Election on the King’s marriage were not agreeable to contemplate. An attempt might even be made to upset the Parliamentary system altogether. It had disappeared in other countries recently: why not in this? Beaverbrook and Rothermere would work with Winston: so would the Fascists; so might some elements of the left.27
Malcom MacDonald’s self-important interjections into the Cabinet’s discussion had been a grating distraction as the ministers struggled to find a solution, but there was a sound kernel of truth in his insistence that the Dominions be involved in the process, and one of the meeting’s formal decisions was to inform the Dominions. The first task that fell to Baldwin after the Cabinet meeting was thus to tell his Dominions colleagues that the British government had decided to take action unilaterally. It was unlikely that any of them would disagree with what was planned, but attention had to be paid to the Statute of Westminster. Baldwin’s telegram to Joseph Lyons, the Australian Prime Minister, hinted strongly that Cabinet had forced his hand by juxtaposing the statement of the British Cabinet’s decision with his personal apology: ‘Cabinet therefore feel that it is necessary that I should make a statement in the House of Commons before it adjourns this afternoon until Monday … I greatly regret not being able to consult you prior to the statement…’28
The King’s reaction when Monckton brought him the news from the Cabinet meeting that the broadcast would be blocked shows that Simon had been entirely correct in questioning the King’s ability to understand the constitutional position. The King had been fully braced for the government to reject the broadcast, but he was surprised at the elementary constitutional arguments lying behind the refusal. The fact that a broadcast would have been an appeal over the head of the government, which had been instantly obvious to both ministers and the King’s allies, entirely escaped him; to the King, Baldwin had acted because he was scared of losing. ‘To let me address my people would have involved risks that Mr. Baldwin and his colleagues were apparently unwilling to take. With its rejection disappeared my only possible means of rallying the whole nation.’29 Quite how this ambition could have been squared with the King’s professed desire to avoid strife is mysterious.
Baldwin’s statement to Parliament had been drafted by Sir John Simon and bears the imprint of lawyerly finality, disposing for good of the morganatic proposal:
Suggestions have appeared in certain organs of the Press yesterday and again to-day that if the King decided to marry, his wife need not become Queen. These ideas are without any Constitutional foundation. There is no such thing as what is called a morganatic marriage known to our law. … The King himself requires no consent from any other authority to make his marriage legal, but, as I have said, the lady whom he marries … necessarily becomes Queen. She herself, therefore, enjoys all the status, rights and privileges which, both by positive law and by custom, attach to that position … and her children would be in the direct line of succession to the Throne.
The only possible way in which this result could be avoided would be by legislation dealing with a particular case. His Majesty’s Government are not prepared to introduce such legislation. Moreover, the matters to be dealt with are of common concern to the Commonwealth as a whole, and such a change could not be effected without the assent of all the Dominions. I am satisfied, from inquiries I have made, that this assent would not be forthcoming. I have felt it right to make this statement before the House adjourns to-day in order to remove a widespread misunderstanding. At this moment I have no other statement to make.30
When Baldwin delivered the statement at 4 p.m., it was received with cheers in the House but it revolted Churchill, to whom it seemed like part of a monstrously unfair cabal against the King. Immediately afterwards Amery
went into the smoking room where I found Winston completely on the rampage, saying that he was for the King and was not going to have him strangled in the dark by Ministers and bumped off without a chance of saying a word to Parliament or to the country in his own defence etc. etc.31
A more measured criticism came from the King’s friend Chips Channon, who criticised Baldwin’s ‘unsmiling and ungracious’ delivery of a statement ‘which slams the door to any possible compromise’.32 Baldwin’s statement was the first piece of hard official comment on what was going on, and the House of Commons had been awaiting it tensely from the moment that it was announced. The direct and unambiguous statement was what was needed. The House as a whole was just as keen as the hardliners to bring the affair to an early close.
The statement was the high point in the hardliners’ campaign for tough, active measures towards the King. They were beginning to recognise the inherent risks in their more extreme positions. When Chamberlain was told what Churchill had said to Margesson, he thought ahead to how the conspirators might present their case: ‘The plan was to represent S.B. as having forced the K. to take a vital decision without adequate time for consideration and to protest against this “bumping off ” of a friendless and impassioned youth who was passionately & romantically in love’.33 Chamberlain spotted the danger that Churchill might claim that the King had been forced into a corner, and he developed second thoughts as to the wisdom of the Prime Minister actually delivering the ultimatum for which he had been pushing at the Cabinet meeting that morning. He had finally understood the basic flaw in the hardliners’ position, which had been obvious to Baldwin throughout and which had driven his strategy of letting the King make his own decision. Chamberlain claimed in his diary to have made Baldwin reassemble the Cabinet and soften the decision that it had taken on the point:
Some prudence would be required in forcing the issue since with an unscrupulous & desperate K. and a man like W. determined to take any risks in forming a Govt & trying to soothe the country with some vague undertaking from Mrs. S. or the K. or both there was a real danger that we might find we had left the helm too soon. … I then got S.B. to assemble the Cabinet again & I proposed that we should modify our morning’s decision to this extent, that no ultimatum shd. be delivered but that the K. should be told of the Cabinet’s view that the situation admitted of no long delay, that we should like to have his decision by tomorrow (Saturday) night but that in any case it ought not to be withheld for more than a few days. This proposal appeared to be received with some relief & was unanimously agreed to.34
Hankey’s minutes of the Cabinet meeting mention Chamberlain arguing for a deadline on Saturday night and also refer to some slight changes having been made after the meeting to the formal advice that the Cabinet was to give on the broadcast, but nothing about any recall meeting took place. That said it is hard to read any indication of consensus having been reached from the minutes and it is possible that the formal Cabinet conclusion as to what the Prime Minister should tell the King reflected some discussion afterwards.
Even though Monckton had warned him in advance, the King took Baldwin’s statement as a body-blow. Coming as it did only a few hours after the Prime Minister had repeated his non-committal answer to Attlee’s question as to whether there was a conflict between sovereign and government – hours in which there had been no material discussion between the King and the government – it was an escalation that came from the blue. As had happened with Hardinge’s letter, the Commons announcement appeared to the King to ratchet up gratuitously the confrontation between him and the government. In his memoirs, the then Duke of Windsor insinuated that Baldwin had sprung a surprise: ‘Thus Mr. Baldwin dealt the first crushing blow … A few hours later, in the House of Commons, h
e struck again.’35 Even stripping away the loaded language and suggestio falsi it is clear that the King was shaken by the statement. Once again the hardliners had ended up injecting a confrontational element into the dialogue because they disagreed with the way Baldwin was handling the affair and were unconcerned as to how it would look when they forced their own strategy. Publicly discarding the morganatic proposal was in practice an ultimatum, and no attempt had been made to prepare the ground: ‘…there was to be no conciliation, no palliation, no marriage. The challenge was unequivocal. It was abdication for me or resignation for him.’36 The discussions in the Cabinet meeting that morning were, of course, hidden to the King, and he blamed the statement entirely on the Prime Minister, almost exactly reversing the true course of events: ‘Now he maneuvered [sic] with a swiftness and directness that astonished even his colleagues.’ The misreading of what had happened would be comic but for its contribution to the fund of bitterness against the government that was already accumulating. Even when he was given a copy of Simon’s unarguable analysis of the constitutional position, the King sought to blame the move on tactical considerations, letting slip his delusion that the public would have supported him. He wrote in his memoirs:
But the learned expressions … struck me, on second thought, as being a less than adequate explanation of why my proposal had not been accepted. Mr Baldwin may have prided himself on his knowledge and understanding of what the British people thought and felt. But it was now abundantly clear that he wanted no test of their sentiments at this critical moment. He and his colleagues were therefore guarding themselves at every vulnerable point.
The King Who Had to Go Page 24
