The King Who Had to Go

by Adrian Phillips

  Unnoticed at the time, Downing Street’s reading of the King’s intentions was wrong on one point. It was insignificant on the Saturday night, but by the Wednesday morning it had acquired an unexpected importance. As Churchill had warned the King, Downing Street jumped to the conclusion that the King intended to use the aeroplanes to join Mrs Simpson at Cannes. If the King’s yearning for a quiet break in the mountains had registered at all in Downing Street, it had not been believed. A flight to Cannes would have been a bit more scandalous than a flight to Zurich, but either would have been intolerable. Dugdale did not know exactly what he was stopping, but he knew that it had to be stopped.

  In their subsequent accounts of the Zurich episode, both Wilson and the Duke of Windsor were notably dishonest. It could have had horrible consequences and so was best buried, but each side wanted something on record to give their preferred version of the story if the facts should leak out. Almost in passing, the Duke implied that arrangements had got no further than identifying somewhere to stay at Zurich.11 His claim that ‘if nothing came of Walter Monckton’s Two Bills, I would repair there to wait’ is self-evidently false as the process of realising the scheme would not even have begun at 9.30 on the Sunday morning. Wilson too links the flight to Zurich to the Two Bills scheme, albeit in the shape that it was originally conceived, as something that would follow the King’s proposed broadcast.12 He appears to have been motivated by a desire to present things in the kindest light possible by asserting that it was all due to mere oversight. He claims that Alexander told Dugdale that it had simply been omitted to cancel the arrangements for the planes once the King had been told that the broadcast had been blocked. This is not remotely supported by Dugdale’s own account.

  NOTES

  1. Ziegler, Edward VIII, p. 315

  2. Fielden papers, Fielden to Duke of Windsor, 10 August 1937

  3. CHAR 2/264, Memorandum, The Abdication of Edward VIII

  4. NA PREM 1/466

  5. NA PREM 1/466, Flory cablegrams

  6. Dugdale diary

  7. NA PREM 1/466, draft

  8. Dugdale diary

  9. NA PREM 1/466

  10. NA CAB 301/101, Hutchinson to Gardiner, 5 December

  11. A King’s Story, p. 386

  12. NA PREM 1/466

  CHAPTER 16

  A MICROCOSM OF THE CABINET

  * * *

  We settled to postpone the P.M.’s visit to the Queen and to summon Halifax, Inskip, S. Hoare, M. Macdonald [sic] Runciman K. Wood & O. Stanley as a sort of microcosm of the Cabinet to give further consideration to this proposal tomorrow at 10.

  NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, DIARY,

  5 DECEMBER 1936

  HAVING THRASHED OUT an agreement in principle on the idea of the Two Bills with Monckton as the King’s representative, Wilson moved onto the next stage in the process. Time was short and there was no harm in working on the assumption that the principals – the King and the Prime Minister – would endorse the terms that they had concluded. The government would need two separate pieces of legislation that would need to be prepared in far less time than was normally available. Whilst Baldwin and Dugdale were at Fort Belvedere, Sir Horace Wilson had begun to transform the idea of Two Bills into a practical proposition. He called the government’s two top lawyers, Sir Maurice Gwyer and Granville Ram, to Downing Street to begin the process of drawing up the necessary legislation. They faced an epic task to prepare the legislation for Parliament possibly as soon as the Monday.

  That Saturday night in Downing Street was the most crowded few hours of the crisis. Wilson had been toiling through the day, but his efforts were interrupted at about 7 p.m. when Chamberlain came to see him with the news of the aeroplanes waiting at Hendon. This led to the lawyers briefly being taken off their work on the Two Bills to prepare an instrument of abdication for immediate use. Dugdale’s resolute action at Fort Belvedere meant that this was not needed and Chamberlain was able to set off for a dinner party still in ignorance of the Two Bills plan.1 On his way out he told Wilson to put into action his plan for tapping the King’s phones.2

  At around 8.30 p.m. Baldwin returned from Fort Belvedere with the news that the King had made up his mind to abdicate. Baldwin was sure that the Two Bills solution would be implemented, and things were put in hand to smooth the way for an announcement on the Monday. The full Cabinet would need to approve the scheme and a meeting was summoned for 5.30 p.m. on the Sunday, which would give the lawyers time to prepare legislation for the ministers to rule on. An audience with Queen Mary was fixed for 10.30 a.m., at which the Prime Minister could tell her of her son’s decision to abdicate.3 Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was bidden to Downing Street; the Two Bills construction involved a ticklish question of ethics and, whilst it was not essential, his approval would be another important part of the drive to implement the deal. The Bills would have to be passed by Parliament, so meetings were fixed with Clement Attlee and Archibald Sinclair. They had backed the government at every step so far, but their approval was still needed. With all this under his belt, Baldwin seems to have gone straight to bed; there is no record that he played any part in the remainder of the night’s events. This was doubtless one of the occasions about which Chamberlain complained boastingly to his sister that he had ‘been up night after night till one o’clock or after long after S.B. has gone to bed’.4

  But for the Hendon aeroplanes episode, that is where things would have rested until the Sunday. As was discussed in the previous chapter, it was not enough for Chamberlain to agree to the phone taps; Sir John Simon had to give them some formal approval in his capacity as Home Secretary and Wilson called him into Downing Street to do this where he arrived at about 9.30 p.m. At this point Wilson put Simon fully into the picture about the Two Bills. Simon had already been told enough to assure Beaverbrook on the Saturday morning that the threat of intervention by the King’s Proctor was being removed by legislation, but when he was presented with the Two Bills scheme in detail, he was appalled. His fellow hardliner Chamberlain was called back to Downing Street to provide assistance and, in his turn, briefed on the Two Bills scheme and on the conversation between the King and Baldwin at Fort Belvedere. It was thus the hard core of the hardliners, Chamberlain, Simon and Wilson, who sat down to deal with what they saw as the flaws in the Two Bills deal; problems that Baldwin had not considered in the press of events. Right from the start none of them showed much enthusiasm for the concept itself; all had ‘misgivings’.5 It is tempting to suppose that Wilson had first worked on the plan when the Prime Minister told him to, but when he came to discuss it with the man for whom he would probably be working in a few months, he could let his instinctive concern rip. At the start, it was Simon who was the most hostile to the idea, but Chamberlain endorsed his stance.

  Simon thought this a shocking precedent. He realised that in the surge of sympathy with the K. which the abdication would evoke the bill might be carried but afterwards it would be a terrible argument against the monarchy that this special favour had been given to an ex King because he had been K.. What would the non conformists say? I felt the same scruples. It wd. be considered as an unholy bargain to get the K. to abdicate. I doubted if the Labour Party wd. support it.6

  The three men around the table disliked the Two Bills both from a moral perspective and one of practical politics, but they knew that an accommodation would remove the one remaining obstacle to a swift end to the crisis. There was also an element of fairness. Chamberlain saw that the King was making ‘an unparalleled sacrifice … all the more poignant because in making it he had no security that the purpose for which it was made could be achieved’ and admitted the ‘cruelty’ of his position.7 Simon had already spotted the more pragmatic argument for the deal: that keeping the ex-King in limbo would leave him ‘“knocking about Europe for four months” with all the consequential possibilities of mischief-making on the Continent and here’.8 There was no need to go further into the potential for trouble tha
t Edward might cause. The lawyers were called from upstairs in case they might be able to offer some guidance on how the divorce proceedings might be expedited. They had already looked at this possibility themselves and poured cold water on the idea. Somervell was firmly against the idea that the government might approach the President of the Divorce Court directly and, even less helpfully, was no more enthusiastic about the Two Bills than the hardliners. Other possible solutions were floated, but every time the discussion returned to the ugly fact that almost any construction would be a deal or look like a deal. Accelerating the passage of A. P. Herbert’s Private Member’s divorce law reform Bill briefly offered an elegant solution, but the government would have had to sponsor at least part of such a move, which brought things back to a dubious bargain.

  The best that they could come up with was a suggestion from Chamberlain that the matter be fudged, with the government making a vague commitment to help on the point of Mrs Simpson’s divorce bundled into a package of measures designed to smooth the transition between two Kings. This was enough to wear down Simon’s initial visceral dislike of the plan and he came to accept that ‘bearing in mind the need to give the new King the best possible start off … the scheme had more advantages than he had at first been inclined to think it had’.9 It was hardly a ringing endorsement for a proposal that arose from near desperation.

  The quartet talked around the subject for more than two hours, but sometime after midnight they abandoned the effort to come up with a hard and fast plan. Chamberlain’s fudge was not enough on its own and they knew that more would have to be done. It was Wilson who called time on the proceedings with the suggestion that the question be referred to a larger group of ministers the following morning, and this was accepted without demur. Knowingly or unknowingly, this step was the death knell for the Two Bills plan. The Sunday morning meeting would make the real decision, which the full Cabinet would rubber-stamp in the afternoon. In Wilson’s silky prose:

  It would be unwise to confront the whole Cabinet with this very difficult problem unless it had been carefully examined beforehand by some Ministers so that the Cabinet would have the advantage of some lead, or at least a clear exposition of the proposal, its advantages and its disadvantages.10

  The key choice would be which ministers to have at the morning meeting. Inevitably, seniority within the government was a major factor, but they were also picked on the basis of their sympathy for the hardliners’ stance. Halifax was senior in the government, a High Churchman and thus reliably conservative, as had been demonstrated by his membership of the cabal Chamberlain had organised three weeks before to attempt to railroad Baldwin into sending the King a peremptory ultimatum. Hoare was also senior and had proven faithful to the government line despite his foot in the enemy camp. Walter Runciman was another of the cabal, albeit freighted with nonconformist morality rather than the Anglican flavour of Christianity. The others were chosen on the basis of their likely opposition to a deal: the ‘noted Churchm[e]n’ Thomas Inskip and Kingsley Wood, another noncomformist, and a younger more secular hawk Oliver Stanley.11 Quite who chose the ministers is a mystery, but their names were on a note that Wilson wrote for Baldwin, which served as a list of men to summon.

  When the ministers gathered at 10 a.m. the following day, it was soon clear that the Two Bills proposal was in deep trouble. Baldwin’s description of the King’s dilemma attracted as good as no sympathy. Simon endorsed the idea of the Two Bills ineffectively, deploying his uniquely personal combination of legalism, tepidity and ambiguity. His argument in favour of making an exception for the King because he supposedly did not have the option of lying low until he was free unlike ‘a prominent Civil servant, who would have to give up his job in the event of a divorce’ has the flavour of an advocate pleading a truly hopeless case.12 It opened a wide flank for Sir Thomas Inskip, Scottish lawyer and Anglican evangelical, to slip in a damning comment on the King’s moral fitness for the job. Inskip was one of the most junior and unimportant members of the Cabinet, but the accident of fate gave him a key albeit walk-on part in the crisis. His appointment to the Cabinet in March had excited widespread derision and predictable comparisons with Caligula elevating his horse Incitatus to the consulate. To ease political pressure to accelerate rearmament (notably from Churchill) Baldwin had decided to appoint a minister for the Coordination of Defence but had exposed the move as a piece of empty tokenism by choosing Inskip, an ineffectual safe pair of hands. Inskip had made his name in Parliament with magnificent speeches against the modernisation of the Church of England’s prayer book and was firmly in his element on a question of morality. He took up Simon’s comparison of the King and another public servant with the equally dubious but infinitely more telling assertion that ‘if a prominent Civil Servant was publicly known to be engaged in an affair of this kind (like Mr. Parnell, for example), he would have to go’.13 Charles Stewart Parnell MP had led the Irish Home Rule movement until 1889, when his mistress’s husband sued her for divorce, creating a scandal which drove Parnell out of politics. Inskip’s allusion was historical, but it was also thoroughly topical. Elsie Schauffler’s play on the subject had just premiered in London after a prolonged battle to force it past the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain.

  Inskip’s intervention was the turning point in the discussion. Chamberlain began by distancing himself from the proposal by announcing that it had been sprung on him only the previous evening, but his most telling argument against the Two Bills proposal and ultimately its fatal flaw was that it constituted an unholy bargain. No one disagreed and it became rather the leitmotif of the meeting to castigate any such bargain as unacceptable. No one attached any moral or practical importance to the six-month gap between the two stages of divorce; it was shortening it for one individual that stuck in the ministers’ craw. Ever alert to wider consequences, Inskip warned that manipulating one divorce would corrupt any change to divorce law and deliver ‘a blow to the sanctity of marriage’. One minister came up with the ugly, but compelling argument that accelerating Mrs Simpson’s divorce by legislation would create the impression that the divorce was flawed – either because the couple had colluded or because Mrs Simpson herself had also committed adultery – so could and should not be legally finalised. The government would thus appear to be colluding in an abuse of the judicial process. The nearest that the discussion got to pragmatism was an argument that such a bargain would weaken the government’s moral authority, internationally above all. None of the ministers, not even Baldwin, raised the danger that the King might back away from his half-commitment to abdicate if he could not be certain of marrying Mrs Simpson. The Two Bills were dead.

  Monckton had spent the two hours whilst the ministers deliberated, awkwardly sitting in Wilson’s office whilst the civil servant waded through his paperwork. He was summoned into the Cabinet room by the Prime Minister in person, but it was Chamberlain who explained to him why the Two Bills had been turned down: because the appearance of ‘a bargain where there ought to be none’ could not be condoned.14 It was only at this point that ministers developed an interest in how the King would react to the verdict and the question was put to Monckton. With some courage Monckton told the hostile figures around that table that in his own opinion the King would want more time to consider the question of abdication and also ‘advice from other quarters’ including Churchill.15 Monckton pointedly explained the King’s likely need for advice by the ‘divergence of view’ amongst ministers that he would detect, in other words because the government had gone back on what the Prime Minister had offered the King. He thought the refusal of the Two Bills plan ‘would materially alter the position’. Monckton received a decidedly hostile reception beginning with a diatribe by Chamberlain on the urgency of the question and how the uncertainty was damaging the pre-Christmas trade. When Ramsay MacDonald asked Monckton how much more time the King would want, he asked for a fortnight. It was a forlorn hope.

  Baldwin began by attacking Monckton’s ide
as of where the King might find alternative advice. He was firmly warned off seeking advice solely from the men who had advised him so far; Baldwin suggested he might also wish to try the far more respectable press baron, Lord Camrose of the Daily Telegraph. In Baldwin’s view, anything that smacked of a ‘King’s Party’ ought to be anathema to the King. As to timing, Baldwin in practice set the King one deadline. He should be told of the decision by the meeting of ministers before the full Cabinet meeting at 5.30 p.m. and, by clear implication, make some response. In practice, the King was being left with only a couple of hours to ask for the extra breathing space that Monckton had tried to keep open and, if need be, to fight on. Pressure was piled on the King. The presence of Monckton provided ministers for the first time with a channel through which they could send their message directly to the King without having to go through the Prime Minister. To speed the King towards a decision, one of the ministers pointed to the ‘dangers of delay’, in particular the threat of intervention ‘from those who wanted him to remain King’ and, more menacingly, ‘the risks to the lady herself’.16

  Baldwin was so abashed at his failure to convince the hardline ministers to accept the Two Bills that he told Monckton after the meeting that he would have to resign.17 As the Prime Minister doubtless intended him to, Monckton talked him out of this thought with the claim that the King would not accept the resignation. When Monckton told the King about this conversation immediately afterwards he confirmed that he would not have accepted Baldwin’s resignation.18 This little piece of theatre did, though, help feed the legend later promoted by the Duke of Windsor and Beaverbrook that Baldwin had placed his premiership on the line in advance of the meeting of ministers. In their accounts of the crisis, both the Duke and Beaverbrook asserted that Baldwin had promised in advance to resign if the Two Bills plan was rejected, and the Duke simply did not mention that he had approved of Monckton turning down Baldwin’s idea of resignation on his behalf.