The King Who Had to Go

by Adrian Phillips

  The rough treatment handed out to Monckton’s attempts at temporising on the King’s behalf appear to have convinced ministers that the King would have to accept the meeting’s verdict in a docile fashion and the remainder of the day was spent in occasionally farcical anti-climax. Wilson was set to unwinding the plans made the night before to transform Two Bills into a reality. The opposition leaders could be stood down from their appointments with the Prime Minister, although it was too late to reach Sir Archibald Sinclair, so Baldwin took the opportunity to sound him out on Churchill’s attitude; he and Churchill were personal friends of long standing and he had been Churchill’s battalion adjutant on the Western Front. It was rather different with the Archbishop of Canterbury, on whom it was clearly unacceptable to inflict the indignities that political leaders have to bear. In his honour, the Prime Minister maintained the charade that the Two Bills proposal was still a live one and sought his opinion on so grave a moral issue. It was the only time during the crisis that we can be certain that the government asked for his views – even if they did not matter as the question had been settled – and he emerges as anything but the furious scourge of loose behaviour that the Duke of Windsor later depicted. In fact, he had no perceptible influence on Baldwin’s handling of the crisis.19 Moreover, Lang appears as a ditherer, capable of rivalling Simon at his least decisive. The intrusion of the Church of England into the deliberations offered Baldwin rare light relief and allowed Wilson one of the occasional moments of understated irony in his notes, when he described what Baldwin told him of the conversation:

  The Archbishop had begun by thinking that the proposal would not do; but had then seen its possible advantages and had been disposed to favour it; after further consideration he was inclined to come back to his first view. The Prime Minister seemed to think that, on the whole, he had not got very much guidance.20

  After this moment of badinage, Wilson pushed the Prime Minister’s nose firmly back to the grindstone with the hardest of hardline arguments. The House of Commons would expect some statement the following day and it was up to the Cabinet, when it met later that afternoon, to do more in this direction than merely rubber-stamping the decision taken by the morning’s meeting of ministers. ‘It would be a good thing if the discussion could then turn upon what other alternatives were available for the King’s consideration.’21 In simple terms, the Cabinet should decide on a statement to Parliament that made plain that the King could either renounce Mrs Simpson or abdicate. After the Prime Minister had ruled out the morganatic option on the Friday afternoon, he was to go to the next stage and state directly that the King had to choose between Mrs Simpson and the throne.

  When the Cabinet met at 5.30 p.m. the Two Bills proposal was disposed of even more rapidly than at the meeting of ministers. The mass of the Cabinet had no greater appetite than the hardliners. Lord Swinton, the Air Minister, was the only one who spoke in favour of it and then only because he judged it was in the national interest. He was firmly told not to worry about the King’s Proctor and the discussion moved on. It was a meeting of surprising reversals of stance. The most vehement criticism of the proposal came from the only minister who had spoken out in the King’s favour at earlier Cabinet meetings. Duff Cooper had been appalled when he found out about the Two Bills scheme from Walter Elliott after lunch and he identified yet another flaw with the plan; this time one that took a more charitable view of the King’s position:

  I thought this was a disastrous proposal. It would obviously be said that the Government must want to get rid of him [the King], as they had refused to introduce legislation for a morganatic marriage in order to keep him, but were willing to introduce legislation, which according to existing law, would legalise adultery, in order to expedite his departure.22

  Duff Cooper was even more forthright with the Cabinet to whom he described the second bill as ‘a Special Act to allow the King to commit adultery’.23 The other minister to shift tack radically was Neville Chamberlain, who pulled back from being the persistent advocate of bludgeoning the King into giving his decision as soon as possible. Instead – somehow – he had concluded that public opinion on its own would force the King to choose: ‘Moreover if we sat back the public wd. presently realise that the only choice lay between renunciation of marriage & abdication & if the K. persisted in refusing the first all opposition to the 2nd would fade away.’24

  Opposition was so strong that there was no need to debate the specifics of the Two Bills plan, so the meeting switched into a general discussion of what the next steps should be. Enthusiasm for pushing the King for a quick choice had ebbed amongst the other members as well and the Cabinet finally moved to the position that Baldwin had championed all along, of allowing the King to choose in his own time, albeit in the knowledge that he would find it very hard to delay any length of time. Chamberlain had drafted a statement for the Prime Minister to make on the Monday afternoon, which read suspiciously like the kind of thing that Wilson had been pressing on Baldwin before the meeting. It urged a speedy decision and ominously referred to the ‘strictly limited’ alternatives available to the King unless he gave up Mrs Simpson.25 It was decided to redraft it into a considerably more emollient form.

  Ministers had spent the afternoon in the apparent expectation that the King would not create too great a fuss that the Two Bills had been refused, but the risk was still there. When Monckton arrived at Downing Street from Fort Belvedere, Baldwin left the Cabinet meeting to find out how the King had actually reacted to the death of the Two Bills plan. The news was good and it looked as though the moment of greatest danger had passed: ‘The King was, of course, disappointed at the first reaction of Ministers but had not expressed himself strongly on the subject. Mr. Monckton thought that the Cabinet should wait and that the King would not take long to reach his decision.’26 Monckton had found the King in low spirits already and even his anger at Chamberlain’s gratingly materialistic argument for an early decision inspired no more than the acerbic thought that the Chancellor of the Exchequer ‘was being a trifle more mercenary than his office demanded’.27 The King was a beaten man. Everything for which he had asked, save the conversation with Churchill, had been refused by the government. He was left grumbling impotently at the imbalance of force between a constitutional monarch and a democratic government. Even supposing that he actually believed that Baldwin had offered to resign if he could not secure the Two Bills, the King did not challenge Baldwin to deliver on the promise. He was ready to abdicate, taking the chance that Mrs Simpson’s divorce might yet be blocked.

  The sequence of events leading to the demise of the Two Bills plan was another episode that Wilson was at pains to conceal in his notes. This time his personal reputation was at stake. Not only had he played a large part himself in formulating a plan that proved to be severely flawed, but he had also played a major part in killing it off against the wishes of the Prime Minister when these flaws became too apparent.

  Wilson’s account of the episode begins with a straightforward description of how he and Monckton devised the plan together with Dugdale and Allen, which is amply borne out by other testimony. It is when he moves on to the events at Downing Street on the Saturday night when the action becomes more confused and the number of disinterested witnesses dwindles, that it becomes hard to disentangle what actually happened from what Wilson wants to hide. The key moment in the proceedings is the arrival of Simon at Downing Street. In Wilson’s draft version, it is possible to make out that he had been called in to sign the warrant for the phone trap, albeit only by identifying the connection between two passages in widely separated parts of the text. In the passage that says when Simon arrived at Downing Street, Wilson attempted to kill two birds with one stone of elegant false suggestion: ‘At about 9.30 p.m. the Home Secretary came to see me. I … told him of the proposition that was under examination…’ It reads as though Simon was called in specifically to be told of the Two Bills, rather than having come on the quite different and unre
lated errand of signing off the wiretap. Wilson does not explain at all why Chamberlain returned to Downing Street.

  When he came to prepare the final version he probably spotted that too much was revealed in the draft or that it did not hang together. He opted for a more radical solution. In the final version, all references to the aeroplanes at Hendon and the upshot of this episode are omitted, and all we are told is that ‘later in the day it [the Two Bills plan] was discussed with the Home Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer’. He does, though, still slip in a significant obfuscation of the record. To mask the fact that the two hardliners and Wilson himself were worrying the question of the Two Bills to death whilst Baldwin slept upstairs, Wilson introduces his favourite device of jumbling chronology. In the midst of his account of the agonised discussion at Downing Street, he inserts a paragraph saying that ‘The Prime Minister had in meantime gone to Fort Belvedere’. Read closely it is not an untruth in the strictest sense, but it creates the entirely misleading impression that Baldwin’s visit to Fort Belvedere was taking place at the same time as the three-way discussion.

  Wilson erased his own part in the decision to summon the hardline ministers on the Sunday morning, but this may be no more than a civil servant’s self-effacement. When he revised the draft he struck out not only the statement that he had suggested the meeting and replaced it with a bland ‘it was thought’, but also the reference to his note to Baldwin giving the names of ministers summoned. He also tries lamely to trivialise the importance of the morning meeting. He practically contradicts himself on the role he set out on the Sunday night for the meeting of ministers when he refers to the possibility that the full Cabinet might ‘endorse – if they did endorse – the conclusions tentatively arrived at by Ministers in the morning’. It is harder to think of a less tentative conclusion from a meeting than the rejection of the Two Bills in the morning. Wilson trapped himself further in self-contradiction by stating that the full Cabinet was genuinely taking the decision even though he had just written that the morning meeting meant that ‘it was found no useful purpose would be served by seeing the Opposition Leaders’.

  Somebody, most probably Wilson himself, was also feeding a far more blatant fiction into the record. Both Monckton and, through him, the Duke of Windsor himself, were led to believe that the meeting of ministers had been fixed before Baldwin came to Fort Belvedere on the Saturday afternoon and that it had been designed to tackle in advance potential resistance from hardliners.28 Nothing else supports this timing. Both Chamberlain’s diary and Wilson’s own notes are quite unambiguous that the meeting was called by the threesome late on the Saturday night. The similarities between this distortion and what happened over Hardinge’s letter are too strong to ignore. In the same way that Monckton was told with literal accuracy, but quite misleadingly, that the Cabinet had not discussed the issue before the letter was written, someone had told Monckton that the Sunday meeting had been summoned by the Prime Minister himself. Jumbling the sequence of events leading to the meeting of ministers had a further, unintended consequence by contributing to the Duke of Windsor’s belief that Baldwin had staked his premiership on the outcome of the meeting rather than merely issuing an almost certainly insincere offer of resignation afterwards.

  NOTES

  1. Chamberlain diary, 5 December

  2. NA PREM 1/466 draft

  3. Chamberlain diary, 5 December

  4. Chamberlain to Ida, 8 December

  5. NA PREM 1/466

  6. Chamberlain diary, 5 December

  7. Chamberlain diary, 5 December

  8. NA PREM 1/466

  9. NA PREM 1/466

  10. NA PREM 1/466

  11. Windham Baldwin papers, 3/3/8(iii), notes on lunch with Monckton, 27 August 1950

  12. CAB 23/68

  13. CAB 23/68

  14. Monckton narrative

  15. Monckton narrative

  16. NA CAB 23/68

  17. Windham Baldwin 3/3/8(iii), notes on lunch with Monckton, 27 August 1950

  18. Windham Baldwin 3/3/8(iii), notes on lunch with Monckton, 27 August 1950

  19. Windham Baldwin 3/3/8(iii), notes on lunch with Monckton, 27 August 1950

  20. NA PREM 1/466

  21. NA PREM 1/466

  22. Duff Cooper diaries

  23. NA CAB 23/68

  24. Chamberlain diary, 6 December

  25. NA CAB 23/68

  26. CAB 23/68

  27. BBK G/6/19, A King’s Story, p. 391

  28. A King’s Story pp 389–90, Monckton narrative

  OVER THE EDGE

  CHAPTER 17

  RATHER A FACER

  * * *

  After some further talk, I discovered that what Mr. Goddard was really saying to me was, in effect, what price could be paid to Mrs. Simpson for clearing out? This was rather a facer for me as the point had not occurred to me before and nowhere in my experience could I find any help. We discussed this point for a little while and agreed that Mr. Goddard’s proper course … was to remind himself that he would be talking to Mrs. Simpson as her solicitor and therefore that … his best line would be to try to find out what was in her own mind.

  SIR HORACE WILSON, ABDICATION NOTES1

  BY THE SUNDAY night it seemed that the crisis was close to being settled. The King had decided to abdicate and to take the risk of intervention in Mrs Simpson’s divorce. But hopes of an easy conclusion were overtaken by a series of events that brought fresh complications and added new twists to old ones. New uncertainties and doubts arose during the course of Monday, which was crowded with developments both private and public. The episode that stands out in this day of confusion is the decision to send Theodore Goddard, Mrs Simpson’s solicitor, to see her in Cannes by plane. It bore on almost all the day’s other occurrences in a bewildering and tangled pattern of motivations that added time and complexity to the crisis.

  The day’s biggest change was that the government started to pay some attention to Mrs Simpson as an individual. With hindsight it is only surprising that this had not happened sooner. One of the curiosities of the abdication crisis is how little interest the government had paid to Mrs Simpson herself up to that point. Perhaps it reflected the prevailing attitude of society in those days that women were strictly an accessory element in life, that vast amounts of effort were devoted to trying to change the King’s behaviour, but very little to trying to influence Mrs Simpson’s. Mrs Simpson was not just a woman, but a woman with a deeply tarnished reputation, especially to the handful of men who knew of the Special Branch dossier on her and her husband. It is a moot point whether the government would have tried anything but for the fact that she had fled for Cannes and could thus now be approached separately from the King.

  The ball was set rolling on the Sunday evening as the politicians weighed the outcome of the afternoon’s Cabinet meeting. The guests at a large dinner party given by the Channons included Duff Cooper, the Chief Whip Margesson and Leslie Hore-Belisha, who talked the question over once the meal was over. Honor Channon, more mindful of the King’s interest than her husband was, begged Margesson to try to work on Mrs Simpson.2 In what might be considered something of an understatement, they agreed that ‘not sufficient effort had been made hitherto’ to prevent abdication. They also admitted amongst themselves the frightening truth that ‘the only person who could change the King’s mind was Wallis’.3 They concluded that ‘somebody having authority’ should persuade her to give up the marriage by telling her directly that she was doing harm and her future was hopeless. Duff Cooper had spoken to Brownlow at the Villa Lou Viei that afternoon and learned that Mrs Simpson’s morale had fallen to the point that she was near despair. An appeal to her might thus find fertile ground. Margesson was willing to undertake the mission to Cannes and promised the others that he would try to get approval the following morning. He was as good as his word and saw Chamberlain just after breakfast the next day with a report of what Brownlow had told Duff Cooper from Cannes: ‘She rea
lised the game was up and was ready to agree to renunciation.’4

  Margesson found himself pushing at an open door. After having changed his mind the previous afternoon on the need to push the King into a quick decision – in practice to commit himself to abdication – Chamberlain now began to wobble seriously on how to end the crisis and started to see the attractions of Mrs Simpson solving the problem by giving up the King. Having spent the best part of a month arguing and intriguing for the government to make moves that would almost certainly have driven the King towards abdication, Chamberlain had finally recognised just how extreme this was as an outcome. In addition to whatever Margesson told him, Chamberlain had seen that most newspapers were taking the line that renunciation would be the best solution. It was anything but a wholehearted volte-face. Chamberlain was positively grudging and grumbled that ‘although I have felt all through that we should never be safe with this K.[ing] I did not feel we ought to discourage any chance of this solution’.5 Moreover, he had his own preferred candidate for the job and one quite different to the political heavyweight whom the group at the Channons’ dinner party had wanted. In fact, it was someone with a proven track record in failing to make Mrs Simpson do what he or the government wanted. It was Theodore Goddard, her solicitor for the divorce cases and the hardliners’ intermediary in Fisher’s unavailing attempt to remove her from the scene after the Ipswich hearing. The choice of Goddard as a go-between reflected the fact that another, quite different set of considerations were at work, and it severely compromised the attempt to make Mrs Simpson abandon the King. There is no sign that anyone gave serious thought to sending anyone other than Goddard to Cannes. Goddard was the hardliners’ man and they were firmly in the driving seat.