The King Who Had to Go

by Adrian Phillips

  Goddard’s qualifications to act as an intermediary with Mrs Simpson had not improved since his first failure. He had not seen her since the divorce case and there is little sign of any other communication. It was only by a ludicrous coincidence he had found himself briefing the government again just after the press silence broke. He also acted as solicitor to a former national Labour minister, Jim Thomas, who had been forced to resign in May 1936 over the leakage of Budget secrets. In December, Thomas was contemplating an attempt to make a return and Ramsay MacDonald, notionally his party leader, took Goddard to lunch at the House of Commons to try to head him off, entirely unaware of the connection between Mrs Simpson and Goddard, still less the dubious purposes to which it had been put.

  ‘You know, surely, that I should like to talk with you about the position of our friend.’

  ‘Yes, I know you are interested in her.’

  ‘Her? What do you mean?’

  ‘Mrs. Simpson. She is a friend of yours.’

  ‘No! … And why did you think I wanted to talk about Mrs. Simpson?’6

  After MacDonald recovered from the shock of being labelled a friend of Mrs Simpson, the two discussed the case. Once again Goddard showed the ambiguity of his loyalty towards his client. He admitted that he thought the proceedings had not been ‘usual’ and that he expected the King’s Proctor would be called on to act. By the Monday his predictions were looking increasingly accurate. Whether Goddard actually believed MacDonald’s claim of ignorance hardly matters; wheels were turning that would soon bring him back into action on behalf of the government.

  Having spent months in trying to get Mrs Simpson out of the country and finally succeeding, Wilson wanted to keep her there and had already started fretting at the possibility that she might want to return to the UK. As the wiretaps on Fort Belvedere that he had successfully lobbied for on the Saturday revealed, Mrs Simpson was insisting stridently to the King that he should not abdicate, in the course of fraught telephone conversations between Cannes and Sunningdale. The poor quality of the international phone lines of the era gave them an agonising edge of technical imperfections. The King sometimes had to shout so loud to make himself heard that almost everyone in Fort Belvedere could hear his end of the dialogue; the wiretaps were hardly necessary.7 It was bad enough that Mrs Simpson was trying to persuade the King to stay on the throne by phone, but it would be even worse if she were in a position to do so face-to-face. According to Wilson’s account, Monckton and Allen had already considered how to deal with the threat of Mrs Simpson returning to the UK over the weekend.8 Monckton had already put Goddard on standby for a journey to Cannes, ‘in the hope that, as her solicitor, he might be able to put before her considerations which would induce her to stay away’.

  There was another message that Wilson wanted to be sent to Mrs Simpson – one that showed that he was taking a different view of the crisis to the politicians’. Unlike Chamberlain, there is no sign that Wilson himself had developed any doubts that it would be a good thing if the King abdicated. As far as he was concerned, the consensus was that the King should go. As well as warding off any threat that Mrs Simpson might come back to Britain, Goddard could also head Mrs Simpson off from further efforts to persuade the King to stay: ‘[I]t appeared evident that she was out of touch with opinion here and that on that, and on other points, there might be occasions when it would be a good thing if a man of Mr. Goddard’s experience was at her side.’9 Wilson was clearly aware that Mrs Simpson was trying to persuade the King that his popularity was great enough to keep him on the throne and was insisting that he did not abdicate. The combination of the wiretaps and the audibility of the King’s side of telephone conversations at Fort Belvedere meant that their conversations were almost an open book.10 In Wilson’s eyes, what mattered was to stop Mrs Simpson’s efforts to talk the King out of abdication – or, worse, to fight the government – and not to make her renounce him.

  As if this were not enough, the question of intervention in Mrs Simpson’s divorce reared its ugly head again. Chamberlain had hardly gone in to see the Prime Minister with the plan to send Goddard to Cannes, when the lawyers arrived with word that the King was still hoping that the government might give him some certainty that Mrs Simpson’s divorce would go through. This was enough to bring Chamberlain back to his old mantra that the best way for Mrs Simpson to get her divorce was for the King to abdicate, thus removing the temptation for muddle-headed or excessively patriotic individuals to lodge an intervention. This was the last hurrah for this piece of wishful thinking, which had once been so potent amongst the hardliners, and within minutes it was overtaken by a new and far more pressing iteration of the intervention danger. Chamberlain was called out of the room by Wilson, who told him that after weeks of being no more than a hypothetical possibility, intervention was now imminent. Worse, it was coming from two directions and would attack the divorce on both the grounds available. The King’s Proctor had heard from

  a reputable firm of solicitors that they were going to put in an affidavit on collusion and from a less reputable individual who said he had in his employ a servant of Mrs. S. who was prepared to give evidence of her misconduct at her flat, in Cornwall & elsewhere.11

  It was looking as though Monckton’s worst fears were being realised and that Mrs Simpson would find herself permanently imprisoned in her marriage to Ernest.

  Here Baldwin saw a silver lining to the cloud as intervention offered an opportunity to save the King from marrying ‘a woman who could only make him miserable’.12 Chamberlain performed his third volte-face in little more than an hour and, in an unaccustomed concession to humanity, endorsed this view. As before, Goddard was to be the messenger and an uncompromising message was agreed upon. Goddard would

  tell her plainly that all chance of her marriage to the K. as K. was at an end as the country & the Dominions would not have her at any price. Moreover that she would not get her divorce & her best chance was now to withdraw her petition & get what kudos she could from a renunciation.13

  Baldwin and Chamberlain were behaving as though successful intervention was a practical certainty, but once again there must be some suspicion that the risks of intervention were being manipulated. Chamberlain’s belief that a private intervention was about to be launched might simply have been a misunderstanding, but there is some similarity here with the way in which Fisher had claimed inaccurately to Hardinge that two affidavits had been filed when the civil servants were trying to panic him into action almost a month before. In fact, Sir Thomas Barnes, the King’s Proctor, had told Wilson that the ‘reputable’ solicitors had formally requested his intervention rather than launching intervention on their own or anyone else’s behalf.14 None of the growing number of letters that the King’s Proctor had received since the press broke its silence questioning the circumstances of Mrs Simpson’s divorce had even mentioned the possibility that the writer would intervene as a member of the public. None of the letters to the King’s Proctor, including the ‘reputable’ firm’s, offered substantial new evidence or accusations.

  None of the outside solicitors who were interesting themselves in the case had new evidence, but the government had just been confronted by what looked like potentially new important testimony. This provided a far stronger reason for the civil servants to anticipate that intervention might succeed and this, rather than what was coming into Barnes’s office, might explain what they had done. On that same Monday morning, as the idea of Goddard going to Cannes had taken shape, Ernest Simpson, who had been practically absent from the story since Sir Maurice Jenks had told the government in January that he was willing to give his wife up to the King, had now begun to harry Downing Street with telephone calls, offering whatever help he could. As the government’s harassed law officers concluded instantly, the most likely form that this proffered assistance would take was testimony that he had colluded with his wife in the divorce case. The law officers knew that this would be fatal to her chances of a decree ab
solute, throwing the situation irredeemably out of control. Unlike adultery, where the courts had the option of granting a ‘discretion’ to the petitioner, ‘collusion is an absolute bar to a divorce’.15 The evidence of one of the spouses that the couple had colluded would have been enough to destroy the case, but the fact that Mrs Simpson was paying her husband’s costs (unknown, of course, to the government’s lawyers) would have made the accusation of collusion almost impossible to refute. Worse, Ernest Simpson again wanted to speak to the Prime Minister personally – presumably to negotiate some adequate reward for his assistance. It was hard to imagine any more squalid and compromising conversation and the law officers were at pains that Ernest should be held at the greatest distance possible. A successful intervention might leave the King on the throne, but the scandal of an apparent deal between the Prime Minister and a near pimp was beyond any price that could be contemplated. Sir Maurice Gwyer’s assessment of what Ernest Simpson was up to was correct. That day Ernest had also sent a message to Clive Wigram, Hardinge’s predecessor as private secretary to the King, offering to wreck the divorce by giving evidence that the divorce was a collusion between the couple and the King.16 Wigram was just as horrified as the government law officers, but for a rather different reason. He knew his former master well enough to predict that if the divorce collapsed, the King or ex-King would simply cohabit with Mrs Simpson.

  Once the decision had been taken to send Goddard to Cannes as an informal agent of the government, he was taken to lunch at Windham’s Club by Monckton in order to meet Wilson. This seems to have been the first time that Wilson and Goddard met in person; Fisher, who had handled the earlier contact directly, was ill. Wilson was suitably impressed by the strength of Goddard’s dislike of his client. Wilson shared Fisher’s resentment that she had failed to ‘fade away’ after the decree nisi. He was a man whom Wilson was prepared to trust, but he was also enough of a negotiator to have spotted a way in which his client’s material interests and the government’s aims might coincide. At this stage in the proceedings it was common ground between Goddard and Wilson that he was going to Cannes to find an opportunity to ‘induce her to give up the King’.17 Wilson was unused to the workings of the rougher end of such negotiations and it took him some time to understand that Goddard was asking him ‘what price could be paid to Mrs. Simpson for clearing out?’18 It was certainly not the kind of question with which senior civil servants often find themselves dealing: ‘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.’ After a brief reflection, Wilson recovered his poise with the decision that the gravity of the crisis merited all-out pragmatism, that this was not the moment for extreme civil service fastidiousness. He told Goddard that he could open negotiations by asking her price. Wilson left Goddard with discretion to tell her if she was opening her mouth too wide, ‘to say anything that he thought proper as to the reasonableness or otherwise of what she thought might be done’. If the terms were not too stiff Goddard should identify and approach the ‘proper part[y]’ with whom to discuss any demands that she might come up with. Wilson had gone far enough by accepting the idea that Mrs Simpson might be bribed and did not want to get involved in actually paying the bribe. Whether Mrs Simpson could be paid off was not a question of ethics but one of practicalities, notably finding a suitably indirect and totally deniable conduit.

  Had Goddard simply set off for Cannes after lunch with Wilson, the job would have been complicated enough, but for reasons that remain obscure he went on to Fort Belvedere with Monckton to see the King. According to Wilson’s notes, this had already been planned before the lunch, but according to the Duke of Windsor’s published memoirs, Goddard arrived unheralded with ‘a vague plan for going to Cannes to talk to her’.19 In one draft of the memoir, though, the Duke of Windsor claimed to have found out about the plan somehow and had summoned Goddard to Fort Belvedere to forbid him from going.20 Goddard did not mention that he had been talking to the government. The most likely reason that Goddard saw the King was to find out what he was thinking, both in his capacity as Mrs Simpson’s solicitor and information-gatherer for the government. All that has survived of their conversation is that he told the King of his plan and that the King told him directly that he would not allow it. The King, of course, had no legal authority whatsoever for this, but Goddard felt, or claimed to have felt, that this placed him in a quandary. As well as whatever task that he was to perform on the government’s behalf, he was beginning to feel that he ought to advise his client on the comparatively mundane question of her divorce proceedings. He had already picked up rumours of imminent intervention and Wilson had hinted to him that these were accurate. As her solicitor, it would unarguably be his professional duty to advise her on what to do if intervention were made or a very strong probability, although it is debatable whether this would have required a face-to-face conversation.

  Goddard and Monckton were still at Fort Belvedere when a phone call from Cannes added yet another and entirely unexpected ball for everyone to juggle with. Mrs Simpson told the King that she was just about to release a statement to the press and wanted the King’s approval. It was carefully phrased and ambiguous, but most readers would have taken it to mean that she was willing to give up the King:

  Mrs. Simpson throughout the last few weeks, has invariably wished to avoid any action or proposal which would hurt or damage His Majesty or the Throne.

  To-day her attitude is unchanged and she is willing, if such action would solve the problem, to withdraw forthwith from a situation that has been rendered both unhappy and untenable.

  The statement came as a surprise to almost everyone, but it was the outcome of two separate and potent forces. Brownlow had been trying to persuade Mrs Simpson to renounce the King from the start of their journey and he had continued to do so as their friendship deepened over the course of their adventures in France. By the Saturday night he had made enough progress to send the telegram to Beaverbrook that briefly spurred his optimism. In Brownlow’s eyes, the statement was a step in the right direction, albeit far from decisive.21 He was motivated by genuine loyalty to the King, by what he had promised Beaverbrook and, possibly, because he believed that Mrs Simpson did not want to marry the King. On her side, Mrs Simpson was trapped between conflicting forces and under such stress that she was barely thinking. She repeatedly tried to prevent the King from abdicating. She feared that she would be blamed publicly if the King actually abdicated.22 She had already recoiled from press coverage of her relationship with him and she knew that this would intensify massively if he gave up the throne to marry her. Everything suggests that Mrs Simpson would in fact have been willing to forsake the King. Her dominant motive was self-interest. She was alert to the material and prestige advantages of being a King’s mistress, but it was far from clear how many of these would be available to an ex-King’s wife. Marriage to an unstable, possessive obsessive – whom she did not love – might also have been an unappealing proposition, and there is no evidence that she would have been emotionally distressed if he had abandoned her. She may also have predicted, however dimly, something that was to nag her through their marriage, ‘that by marrying her he had become a less important person’.23 Getting him to focus on the advantages of remaining King would have offered an elegant solution to this conundrum, but to a far greater extent than anyone else she knew how reluctant the King would be to give her up.

  Mrs Simpson read the statement to the King, who recognised its true purpose: publicly to place responsibility for events onto the King’s shoulders.24 He entirely approved of this. It was true and it would be a relief to Mrs Simpson. However, he was naive in thinking that anyone else would believe this and blind not to understand that Mrs Simpson might actually be happy to withdraw. His approval of the statement was evident to everyone at the Fort, although it is not clear whether this was because he was having to shout so loud that it was practically impossible not to overhear him. T
he combination of Mrs Simpson’s statement with the King’s attempt to block Goddard’s journey to Cannes offered ample material to be discussed at the highest level, and the three lawyers – Allen had joined the group – set off for Downing Street.

  The crisis was still in full swing in Downing Street, Fort Belvedere, Villa Lou Viei, the lawyers’ offices and in the inmost thoughts of the King and Mrs Simpson, but whilst Goddard had been at Fort Belvedere, the threat of an imminent constitutional crisis had practically vanished. Baldwin’s statement to the House of Commons at 4 p.m. had been received with vigorous cheers. The Prime Minister had read the situation correctly and Parliament was very happy to endorse the conclusions he had drawn. The public mood had swung against the King. MPs, especially those who had returned to rural constituencies for the weekend, would have been exposed to the conservative instincts of people outside London. By contrast, Churchill had totally misread the mood of the House. He had not been talking to country station-masters or tenant farmers but to a Tory ‘die-hard’. The die-hards had fought bitterly against Dominion status for India, with Churchill as their ally. More out of dislike of Baldwin than love of Edward VIII, they had decided to fight to keep him on the throne. They had lobbied Churchill for his support and Boothby suspected that one of them had egged Churchill on to a disastrous intervention in the House of Commons.25 Churchill figuratively tore up the vaguely statesmanlike scheme decided at Chartwell the previous day, and once Baldwin had resumed his seat, he rose to repeat his demand of the previous week that no ‘irrevocable action’ should be taken. Neither the King nor Beaverbrook had seen fit to tell him the truth and he was still wrapped up in some romantic vision of defending his sovereign to the last. And it proved to be almost the last for Churchill. Yet again he fell victim to his own headstrong and unreflecting approach. He persisted in the face of a hostile House and was shouted down when he tried to follow up his initial question. MPs from both sides of the House yelled ‘twister’ at him, a legacy of the distrust he had earned by crossing the floor twice. He was called to order by the Speaker for attempting to make a speech at Question Time, a poignant blow for a politician who respected Parliament and its traditions deeply. Bitterness and frustration overwhelmed him and he shouted at Baldwin, ‘You won’t be satisfied until you’ve broken him.’26