The King Who Had to Go

by Adrian Phillips

  24. NA CAB 23/68

  25. BBK G/6/41, Duff Cooper review of Baldwin biography in Daily Mail, 14 November 1952 (quoted)

  26. NA CAB 23/68, Duff Cooper diaries

  27. Churchill papers 2/264, Churchill to Baldwin, 5 December

  28. BBK G/6/23, BBK G/6/24

  29. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 78 fn. 1

  30. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, pp 81–2

  31. BBK G/6/19

  32. BBK G/6/19

  33. Beaverbrook (ed. A. J. P. Taylor), The Abdication of King Edward VIII, p. 105

  34. BBK G/6/23, Beaverbrook to Murphy, 3 August 1949

  35. Jenkins, Churchill, p. 500

  36. BBK G/6/16, Churchill to King, evening 5 December

  37. Churchill papers, 2/264, Churchill to Edward VIII, 7 December

  * Amended by hand to ‘“I have made my first blunder”, he said next day. But if the Prime Minister…’

  CHAPTER 14

  THE LONG AND SINISTER SHADOW

  * * *

  The King’s Proctor … throws a long and sinister shadow. In the lonely months that lay across the abyss of abdication she and I would both be vulnerable to possible intervention in the courts, which might cost W her freedom and I the marriage for which I had given up my throne.

  DUKE OF WINDSOR, DRAFT MEMOIRS1

  IT IS OFTEN said that that Mrs Simpson was unacceptable as a wife for the King because she was ‘twice divorced’. This is a convenient shorthand but it is inaccurate. Even the alternative euphemistic circumlocutions ‘with two husbands living’ or ‘had twice been in the divorce courts’ miss a very fundamental point. Because her decree absolute was not granted until May 1937, she was still married in the eyes of the law and of many ordinary people during the crisis. This made the King’s desire to marry her doubly scandalous as well as being downright preposterous. He wanted to marry a woman who was someone else’s wife. It also threw up a series of practical questions, which deeply influenced the course of the crisis. The most important of these was that, as in any divorce case under English law of the time, there had been a possibility that the King’s Proctor might intervene in Mrs Simpson’s divorce from the day that the decree nisi was granted at Ipswich. Interventions by the King’s Proctor were almost invariably successful and this had the effect of cancelling the decree nisi and leaving the couple still married to each other.2 This danger hung over the entire period of the crisis. It remained a significant factor until well after the King had abdicated. The risk never went away, but there were constant changes in how the risk was analysed by the various individuals in the government, in part because it would have brought such huge additional uncertainty to an already complex series of problems. With bewildering rapidity, intervention switched between being a threat and being an opportunity.

  At the start the hardliners had been happy to deploy intervention as one of the weapons in their arsenal. It had served as a panic factor to stampede Hardinge into writing his letter, when the publicity it would have caused was anathema to court and government. It had also offered the illusion of a quick and brutal solution to the whole affair as a way of keeping Mrs Simpson married to Ernest for good and thus unable to marry the King. This idea had a sufficient head of steam for Baldwin to mention it to Stanley Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner and one of the most influential voices in the Prime Minister’s ear, in the course of a long discussion of the tactics of handling the affair at Chequers on 15 November: just before his crucial audience with the King after the Hardinge letter, ‘The Prime Minister also indicated that certain people are distinctly active with regard to the divorce and are determined to oppose the granting of the decree absolute’.3 Frustratingly, it is not spelled out who these ‘certain people’ are, but the fact that the Attorney General Sir Donald Somervell was required to advise on the possibility as a potential ‘solution of the problem’ suggests that it was being touted as an option at the highest level of government.4 Bruce himself believed that the decree absolute would have to be blocked if the King claimed to the Prime Minister that he did not intend to marry Mrs Simpson as this was the only sure way of preventing a marriage; clearly the King’s word counted for little. Ramsay MacDonald, who had immediately been suspicious of Mrs Simpson’s divorce, appears to have lobbied for the King’s Proctor to be consulted, if nothing more, two days before.5 If it had been simply a question of handling the two stray members of the public who had written to the King’s Proctor at that stage it would not have had to be dealt with at this level. Whoever the ‘certain people’ might have been, they were not deterred by a risk that was instantly obvious to Bruce: ‘It is almost impossible to visualise the scandal that this would involve as the King’s name would inevitably be dragged in.’6

  At this stage Wilson certainly looked on the possibility of intervention as a significant factor. It was a point on which the King appeared vulnerable and Wilson probably felt he should be reminded of it. When Baldwin had the fateful audience with the King in the wake of the Hardinge letter, Wilson reported that the Prime Minister had used the subtle constitutional question of whether the King could appear in his own courts as a way of questioning the validity of the divorce.7 Here Baldwin was probably telling Wilson a white lie. The constitutional point was a complex and hypothetical argument, which also implied that the King was open to being accused of adultery with Mrs Simpson. On neither count would it have been a wise question to raise. Like most people, he would have struggled to grasp the relevance of the fact that he was ‘not justiciable in his own courts’ (or what this meant) and would have been infuriated by the insinuation of guilty conduct with Mrs Simpson. Neither of the participants in the conversation ever mentioned anything like it. It is far more likely that Baldwin mentioned doubts over the divorce only in vague and general terms after Wilson had fed him the constitutional idea.

  Somervell’s advice had been enough to kill the thought of promoting intervention in the days before the confrontation triggered by Hardinge’s letter, but it had not gone away. It resurfaced a little less than three weeks later, just after the story had broken in the newspapers, lending an aspect of emergency and time pressure to the crisis. Yet again intervention shifted shape into something that suited the hardliners’ agenda at that particular moment. By a piece of convoluted logic it had become a reason for the King to abdicate quickly. When the inner group of ministers were called to Downing Street at 9 p.m. on Wednesday 2 December for Baldwin to brief them on his fraught audience with the King, Chamberlain argued:

  Here I put in that one effect [of a broadcast] might well be to stir up persons who would take particularly violent views as to the impropriety of the marriage to intervene with affidavits in the divorce proceedings and thus bring about the very result against which the K. had asked for a guarantee.8

  The next day Simon followed up what Chamberlain had said with a letter to Baldwin. Ostensibly, it set out Simon’s analysis of the legal situation but, in reality, it presented intervention as a tool to push the King toward abdication.

  One of the foremost preoccupations in the King’s mind in reaching his decision is whether anything might occur which would prevent the divorce decree from being made absolute … I would first point out that any risk there may be of an attempt by a member of the public to intervene in the proceedings for the purpose of preventing the decree being made absolute would be greatly reduced if the interest of the King in this matter was that of a private person. It is always possible that some zealous citizen may try to block the divorce on ‘patriotic’ grounds in order to prevent the King’s marriage. But if the King became a private citizen this motive would disappear and I should regard the risk as quite negligible.9

  Put simply, if the King behaved himself and abdicated, Mrs Simpson was practically certain of her divorce, otherwise someone would probably interfere. Simon ruled out the possibility that the King’s Proctor might intervene in her divor
ce on the basis of the evidence then available. Weirdly he then undermined his argument of the threat from a ‘zealous’ citizen when he admitted that such things were almost unheard of: ‘This method is exceedingly rare – in my own professional experience I have never come across such a case.’ And yet he had just made something that could be read as a definite prediction on behalf of all the cranks of Britain. One is left with the suspicion that what Simon was really writing about, but at which he could only hint, was the possibility that a suitable crank might be found to perform the King’s Proctor’s task for him.

  It is a moot point whether Chamberlain and Simon were trying to send a disguised threat to the King or merely trying to push a weak argument for his leaving the throne. Whichever it was, it was important enough for Chamberlain to ask Baldwin at the start of the discussion at the following morning’s Cabinet meeting whether he had, in fact, put the point to the King. Baldwin did claim that he had, although this cannot have been in a sufficiently direct or emphatic form to get the full message over.10 Chamberlain was probably right to suspect Baldwin of shirking the task. Most likely the Prime Minister simply did not think the argument would be effective. It seems to have been a rerun of Wilson’s ambitious attempt to get Baldwin to persuade the King that Mrs Simpson’s divorce was flawed because he was immune to a legal accusation of adultery with her.

  Simon treated the entire Cabinet to an even more menacing version of the argument just after Churchill’s letter had been read out. Even in Sir Maurice Hankey’s restrained prose the snarl is almost audible as Simon came wafer-close to a direct threat to torpedo Mrs Simpson’s divorce if the King played for time:

  The Home Secretary pointed out that if the King were to adopt a ‘stonewalling’ attitude the result would probably be to render the grant of a Decree Absolute to Mrs. Simpson’s divorce more doubtful. He thought His Majesty ought to be warned of this risk by whoever was the proper authority … But now, after the Prime Minister had announced that if the King married Mrs. Simpson she must be Queen, strong efforts were likely to be made to challenge the divorce in the Courts … the King ought to be told, and warned that if his aim was to be able to marry Mrs. Simpson ‘stone-walling’ would not be a good way of attaining that object.11

  Nowhere in any of the analysis of whether the King’s Proctor might intervene did Mrs Simpson’s interests get a mention. Intervention was treated solely as a possible move on the politico-legal chessboard. The only hint that human emotions might be involved was speculation as to what patriotically motivated cranks might do. It was taken for granted that the press and other politicians would meekly accept what the courts might do as an unalterable fact of life. Mrs Simpson had blundered into high politics through her affair with the King. As far as the politicians and bureaucrats were concerned, neither she nor anyone else could expect any consideration to be given to the human aspect of her divorce. This reflects not merely contemporary attitudes to such matters but shows again the same blind-spot in the government’s analysis of the situation that had vitiated Fisher’s scheme to get Mrs Simpson out of the country. It showed not only callousness, but the lack of a pragmatic ability to investigate all the possible avenues to a solution. The government never reflected on the detail of the relationship between the King and Mrs Simpson, entirely missing the fact that she was far less committed to the relationship than he was. Her divorce was assumed to be a project that both were bent on. The government was looking at destroying it from the outside and ignored the fact that it was vulnerable from the inside as well.

  The King found himself facing two unpleasant interrelated facts as the tempo of the crisis accelerated. Struggle as he might to avoid recognising it, it was impossible to marry Mrs Simpson and remain on the throne. He would have to make a choice, but the risk of intervention further complicated what would never have been an easy or simple decision. It meant that even if he left the throne it was still far from certain that he would be able to marry Mrs Simpson under any circumstances. It had already been on his mind at the traumatic audience on Wednesday 2nd when he made the impossible request of the Prime Minister simply to guarantee that Mrs Simpson would get her decree absolute. Baldwin gave these fears a very large boost the following day when, almost at the end of the audience, he slipped in a vastly softened version of the warning from Chamberlain and Simon. The ‘zealous’ citizen motivated by ‘patriotism’ was diluted to some ‘muddle-headed busybody’ who might try to delay proceedings by mounting an intervention falsely alleging collusion.12

  From then on the King was increasingly preoccupied. His concern was fuelled from within his own camp by Monckton, who had long understood the danger: ‘I was always desperate lest you should fall between two stools – i.e. abdicate and then find that [Mrs Simpson] was not free.’13 In part, Monckton was motivated by the lawyer’s natural instinct to nail possible legal problems, but it must have been clear to him that his principal was vulnerable to hostile action. Monckton presents the decision to begin to investigate coping with the danger of the King’s Proctor as though it were an abstract legal one, but, as he was almost constantly in Downing Street, it is hard to believe that some of the government’s thinking on the possibility of intervention did not feed through to him.

  From an early stage the King had spotted that the government was alert to the possibility of intervention and sensed that it was being exploited against him. In typical style, he contrived to ignore the fact that the risk was an elementary legal aspect that he himself should have had in mind when making his plans. He also presented Mrs Simpson as the immediate victim of the government’s machinations:

  Always in the background there was pressure of another kind, and of this Mr. Baldwin made full use. It is a commonplace of the human character that a man who is quite indifferent to threats against himself may feel very differently if the threats are directed against those he holds dear. In the Government’s war of nerves, this peculiarly demoralising weapon was not neglected. Always in the background, I was aware of an ugly threat to Wallis. At first, this threat took the form of vague hints and obscure allusions. There were frequent references, more or less direct, to the possibility of intervention in Wallis’s divorce case.14

  The King felt that he, as well as Mrs Simpson, was being coerced. This rankled with him long afterwards, particularly in the light of the claim from the government side that no pressure had been applied to him, and he complained in one draft of his memoirs:

  Several days later, as the crisis ebbed, the Times rejected with outraged sanctimoniousness the ‘abominable and malignant insinuations that pressure had been brought to bear upon the King by his Ministers’. And to the extent that no active pressure was ever applied the statement is technically true. But pressure of a sort was certainly there – the passive yet implacable grip of a vize which, having fastened upon its victim, never relaxes.15

  Isolated and constricted in the oppressive atmosphere of Fort Belvedere, the King was increasingly vulnerable to his own sense of pressure. By the time that talks began on the Saturday morning, the threat of intervention was beginning to tell on the King. Monckton told Downing Street that the King was increasingly agitated to the extent of ‘threatening to do some violence to himself’.16 He had threatened suicide when Mrs Simpson briefly tried to leave him at the end of the Nahlin trip and the danger that the King’s Proctor might wreck Mrs Simpson’s divorce and prevent him from marrying her had pushed his thoughts in the same direction.

  When the King finally faced reality sufficiently for him to allow Monckton to begin discussing with the government the ways and means of abdication, the question of intervention took centre stage. Wilson performs one of the many reversals of straight-line chronology in his notes when he comes to the episode and tries to disguise the fact that the King’s decision to open negotiations had not come through official channels. It was, however, clear from the start that the King’s willingness to abdicate was closely linked to – in practice depended on – removing the threat o
f the King’s Proctor. ‘It appeared that at that time the plan in the King’s mind was that he should abdicate, but that, through the acceleration of the divorce proceedings, he would be assured that it would be possible for him, after abdication, to marry Mrs. Simpson.’17

  The negotiations on the details of abdication began almost as soon as the King had made his decision on the Saturday morning. Monckton and Allen travelled up from Fort Belvedere with a formal remit to tell the Prime Minister that the King had decided to go, and an informal one to lay the risk of intervention. The King’s fragile state added another layer of urgency to the discussions that began with a long session at Downing Street and continued over lunch in a private room in Windham’s Club in St James’s Square, which Monckton had established as his London base. At that stage it was a highly confidential affair involving just four individuals: Monckton and George Allen, the King’s lawyers, and two of Baldwin’s closest confidants, his parliamentary private secretary Tommy Dugdale, and Sir Horace Wilson. The only senior minister who appears to have been given an inkling of what was afoot was Sir John Simon, who knew enough to assure Beaverbrook that the question of the divorce was being settled by legislation. Even Chamberlain, who had been closely involved in all the major steps up till then, does not appear to have known, and the Cabinet as a whole was given only the sketchiest indication that something was in hand to neutralise the threat of intervention.

  The possibility that the government might somehow instruct the divorce court to speed up the process of Mrs Simpson’s divorce was rapidly discarded. Monckton then proposed a radical but straightforward method of dealing with the linked questions of abdication and Mrs Simpson’s divorce. He suggested that two bills should be introduced simultaneously to Parliament: one was the legislation that would have been needed in any case to effect the abdication and the other one would grant Mrs Simpson an immediate decree absolute. This was not quite as outlandish as it might seem today. Up to 1857 the only way to obtain a divorce had been through a private Act of Parliament for the individuals concerned. Monckton was proposing no more than a once-off revival of the practice. Moreover, no vital principle of British law was at stake either; Scotland and certain Dominion territories also got along perfectly well without the long interval between the two steps in the divorce process. By coincidence, a Private Member’s Bill was working its way through Parliament that would have disposed of the difficulty. Elected to Parliament in 1935 as an independent MP, the author and barrister A. P. Herbert had been leading a high-profile campaign against the absurdities of the then current divorce law, first in a humorous novel Holy Deadlock and then in Parliament. His Bill would bring the gap between decree nisi and decree absolute down to six weeks from the six months that were causing so much uncertainty. It was passed the following year with tacit government support.