The King Who Had to Go

by Adrian Phillips

  The culmination of Mrs Simpson’s move north was to be reunited with Slipper, who arrived in the charge of a Scotland Yard detective. Presumably the intelligence dividends of the mission were felt to be worth deploying a member of Special Branch on a servant’s errand. The idyll was doomed to be short and it came to an end when Rickatson-Hatt visited in early April, presumably invited to discuss press coverage. If the surmise that he was MI5’s informant is correct, it is almost certain that he would also have gathered intelligence on behalf of the government. On the afternoon of his visit, he played a round of golf on Candé’s private course, accompanied by Mrs Simpson and Slipper. They had barely begun when Slipper was found comatose in the bushes. Mrs Simpson thought that he had been bitten by a viper. A vet worked on him through the evening unavailingly and he died that night, the only recorded fatality of the crisis. The Duke and Mrs Simpson were left to mourn the death of the intended ‘principal guest at the Wedding’.21

  Mrs Simpson blamed Baldwin for what she saw as her ill-treatment, even going so far as to label George VI as ‘the puppet they [the politicians] have placed on the throne’.22 It was all part of a seamless conspiracy to force Edward off the throne and then to destroy his memory:

  They had for months an organised campaign to remove you – and how cleverly they worked – so have they one to prove they were right in what they did and the first step is to eliminate you from the minds of the people. I was the convenient tool in their hands to use to get rid of you and how they used it!23

  In reality, the politicians were just glad to have washed their hands of the couple. As Edward’s authorised biographer has shown, George VI used ministerial advice as a pretext to follow his own judgement on the questions of whether members of the royal family should attend the wedding and whether the Duchess of Windsor should be allowed the title of Her Royal Highness.24 The King was especially insistent on the question of the title because he believed that it could only be granted irrevocably.25 He doubted the marriage would last, creating the horrible vision of the ex-Duchess of Windsor taking the title as alimony into a doubtless unsuitable fourth and subsequent marriages.26 George VI appears to have been heavily influenced in his efforts to withhold the title by his wife, who was also one of the chief doubters that the marriage would last.27 The politicians and even the hardline civil servants feared that it would be seen as a spiteful move against the ex-King to withhold the title. Perhaps curiously, they would have found that Churchill agreed with them on this point as he firmly advised against Mrs Simpson becoming a Royal Highness after marrying the Duke of Windsor.28 Amidst all Churchill’s contradictory statements of his view of her, this is perhaps the best clue that he actually held her in low esteem.

  Ultimately, the politicians fell in line with George VI’s wishes. Simon overcame his initial instinct to apply the ordinary rule that a wife automatically shares her husband’s titles and confected an argument that the title of Royal Highness could only be applied within the line of succession. It seems that the matter was only finally settled when George VI wrote directly to Baldwin to break the logjam.29 The government issued Letters Patent granting the title to the Duke as an exception, after the fact of his abdication, but not to his wife. As with all significant government acts in Britain it was done in the sovereign’s name, but for once it was an initiative of the sovereign imposed on reluctant politicians. It is a telling register of the low esteem in which the Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson were held that the government accepted not merely the inequity of the move, but, more important, the risk that it would provoke the Duke into some form of misbehaviour. Oceans of ink have been drained criticising the specious injustice, if not downright illegality of this move, but it should be remembered that it arose from the unreflected and informal promise to let the Duke of Windsor keep royal status, which was made in the haste, stress and confusion of the final days of Edward’s reign. Unlike the similarly compromised financial arrangements, it could not be revised in private and it might have looked better in the eyes of posterity to live with the full consequences. Once the future George VI had swallowed the precedential camel of allowing Edward to retain royal status, it was perverse to strain at the gnat of allowing his wife to acquire it too. The same legalistic ingenuity that was deployed to allow royal status to only the husband could equally have been used to ensure that the wife would only retain it for the lifetime of the marriage. Sixty years later, Letters Patent were issued stripping the title of Royal Highness from the divorced wives of born royalty and this was applied to both of Elizabeth II’s ex-daughters-in-law. The unshakeable resolve of Queens Elizabeth and Mary never to receive the Duchess of Windsor meant that the Duchess of Windsor never became part of the royal family in any meaningful sense.

  Even though he had bowed to royal wish, Baldwin was unhappy with this arrangement and shuffled the job of getting it approved by the Dominions onto Chamberlain, who was very soon to succeed him as Prime Minister.30 Chamberlain grumbled at another example of Baldwin ‘shirking’ an unpleasant job, but obliged. Perhaps he was less troubled at the thought of delivering so public a snub to the Duchess of Windsor. Unwittingly, the Dominions fell in with royal wishes, notably New Zealand’s Prime Minister, who told Baldwin that she could be called ‘Her Grace the Duchess of Windsor … And quite enough too!’31 Yet again Monckton was used to spread a misleading version of the story that even further exonerated the British government. He was told that the Cabinet left to itself would not have withheld the title, but the Dominions insisted.32 The King was suitably relieved that Chamberlain’s efforts had borne fruit.33 The Duke of Windsor was predictably furious, railing against what he believed was the breach of a firm promise not to ‘make trouble about the title’.34

  The question of financial provision for the Duke of Windsor had also been left unsettled in the last frantic days before the abdication. The agreement with his brothers only came into play if he did not receive a Civil List pension, so it was inevitable that the question would arise for the government. On this issue, it looked as though Baldwin might face a sterner open political challenge than he had done during the crisis itself. His old and irreconcilable foe David Lloyd George came out publicly in support of the Duke of Windsor’s interests. Like Churchill, he had only a tiny parliamentary following, but a great name and immense powers of rhetoric. Unlike Churchill, he had practically no hope of office and thus nothing to lose. He and Churchill had the great tactical strength of sitting on the Parliamentary Civil List Committee, which was the first forum in which the issue would be raised. Lloyd George had avoided the opprobrium garnered by Churchill by supporting Edward before his abdication, partly through the chance of being in the West Indies when the crisis broke. He had scented an opportunity to embarrass the government, rapidly blotting out the bad impression that Edward had made during the visit to Wales the previous year, and had hovered on the verge of intervening, but his children, Megan and Gwilym, who each had political careers of their own, acted as forces for caution. Once Edward had abdicated, Lloyd George had seen the coast clear to cause mischief. He sent the Duke of Windsor a telegram on Christmas Eve, which he copied to the news agencies:

  Best Christmas greetings from an old Minister of the Crown who holds you in as high esteem as ever and regards you with deep and loyal affection, deplores the shabby and stupid treatment accorded to you, resents the mean and unchivalrous attacks upon you and regrets the loss sustained by the British Empire of a monarch who sympathised with the lowliest of his subjects.35

  Thus, Lloyd George launched the legend that Edward had been driven from his throne because of his social views. Three months later, he followed this up by lobbying George VI directly in favour of generous financial treatment for his brother.36

  Churchill saw an opportunity to needle the government over the Duke of Windsor’s finances, and his personal loyalty dictated that he try to make sure that his former King was well provided for. He knew from the start, though, that he was on the back foot and that r
aising the Duke of Windsor’s finances at the Civil List Committee would be unwise. Baldwin had taken the precaution of briefing Churchill on the financial affairs of the Duke, including his private fortune of nearly £1 million and the temporary transfer of the bulk of his wealth into Mrs Simpson’s name, and the agreement with his brothers over Sandringham and Balmoral.37 Lloyd George knew none of this when he had spoken to George VI but it is more than likely that Churchill told him afterwards. This was Churchill’s first intimation that the story the ex-King had told him of impending poverty at Fort Belvedere was a lie. He also knew how unwise it would be to wash the Duke of Windsor’s financial linen in public. Under the pretext of making sure that Baldwin’s description of the Duke of Windsor’s finances was accurate, he prodded Chamberlain and recruited Lloyd George to the cause.38 The prospect that his old foes might unite to embarrass the government was enough to throw Chamberlain into a fit of near apoplexy, and he fell to ranting against ‘these two pirates’ who were ‘hunting together’ and trying to ‘blackmail [George VI] into a regular swindling arrangement by threats of making trouble in Committee’.39 Fisher and Wilson seem to have backed him with direct pressure applied at court.40 Their campaign received unexpected fillips at the Civil List Committee meeting on 7 April 1937, when Attlee raised the question of the royal family’s private finances and Leo Amery spontaneously spoke in favour of generous financial provision for the Duke of Windsor. This was enough to prompt Chamberlain into going to see the King. He learned that the Fort Belvedere agreement between the Duke of Windsor and his brothers had been very hastily done, and wanted it to be replaced by a more business-like contract.41 It took the combined efforts of the Duke of Windsor himself, whom Churchill only told afterwards that he was launching his campaign, and Clive Wigram, Edward VIII’s first private secretary who had reappeared in active royal service under George VI, to persuade Churchill to ‘cease firing’.42 Wigram finally resorted to telling Churchill that the Duke of Windsor had lied to his brother about his wealth and backed this by a threat to reveal to Parliament the amount of money the Duke of Windsor had taken abroad with him. The Duke of Windsor was not mentioned at the Civil List Committee and he never received a Civil List pension. Though it was to take many months of agonised and bitter haggling to reach a formal agreement with his brother, the immediate political threat had been defused.

  Baldwin’s reluctance to take responsibility for withholding royal status from Mrs Simpson did not mean that his view of her had softened at all from his savage judgement at the height of the crisis. He did not hide his low opinion of her and began to speculate that she might not go unpunished. Shortly before he left office, he gave Sir John Reith a long account of the affair over a cosy dinner at Chequers.

  He said Mrs. S, a thorough bad’un all through; he used very strong language about her [the word ‘whore’ presumably figured]. She had had a tremendous amount of money out of the King. He wondered if Edward would ever find out what a blackguard she was & whether he would shoot her if he did.43

  Baldwin’s comment went well beyond semi-jocular speculation in poor taste. He had already been struck by the contrast between Edward’s shining vision of Mrs Simpson and the ugly picture that Downing Street’s intelligence sources had fed to him. He knew the ex-King’s uncompromising character and, along with many others, doubted his mental stability. When it had seemed as though the intervention of the King’s Proctor might prevent him marrying Mrs Simpson, Baldwin had feared these violent traits would lead to suicide. He was now concerned that they would translate into homicidal violence. It was not just Baldwin who entertained fears of what would happen if the Duke of Windsor discovered Mrs Simpson’s true nature. Some months later Baldwin told his niece that these were shared by the Duke’s family: ‘His family are all wondering what will become of him when at last he opens his eyes and sees the sort she really is, Or – will he remain besotted to the end?’44

  George VI had not merely stepped into his brother’s shoes but he had picked up his appointments diary as well. The most significant date had been there for almost a year: 12 May 1937, the day that had originally been fixed for the coronation of Edward VIII, which had seamlessly become the day that George VI was to be crowned. The Duke of Windsor now found himself operating in a timetable he had planned a year before under radically different circumstances. Mrs Simpson’s divorce proceedings had been timed to allow time for the decree absolute to be issued before the coronation date and hence to allow him to marry Mrs Simpson before. The timing had been dangerously tight then and was worse after the abdication, above all because the King’s Proctor’s investigation had pushed up the risk that the marriage might be impossible. In early March, Mrs Simpson had bowed to the inevitable and set a date for the marriage after the coronation.45 The risk that it might overshadow George VI’s ceremony dwindled sharply.

  The divorce court finally delivered the decree absolute on 3 May and the Duke of Windsor joined Mrs Simpson at Candé as rapidly as possible. There was no pretence that she was being chaperoned there. It was a slightly more decent interval between divorce and wedding than Edward had originally had in mind. In most other respects, it was a curious ceremony to mark the marriage of a former King of England and Emperor of India. In keeping with French practice, the civil ceremony was performed by the local mayor, but the bottom of the barrel was scraped to find an Anglican clergyman to perform the religious ceremony. Douglas Jardine was a mere provincial curate with no connection to royal circles or personal ties with the couple, who defied his bishop’s explicit instructions to officiate. He later tried to capitalise on his notoriety by opening the ‘Cathedral of Windsor’ as a wedding venue in Hollywood.46 He prefigured Squadron-Leader, the Rev. Dennis Barlow, hero of Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One, who blackmailed the respectable British expatriate community of the Hollywood cricket club into funding his return to Britain by threatening to open for business performing ‘non-sectarian’ religious services. Candé had a Roman Catholic chapel, but there does not seem to have been any attempt to consecrate the premises for an Anglican service. A reproduction Renaissance chest was adorned to serve as an altar.

  Courtiers followed the example of the Duke’s brothers and his cousin Louis Mountbatten, who had originally offered to act as best man, and stayed away, and British public servants obeyed rather more direct instructions to do so. The congregation totalled eleven and included the Bedaux, who had been at pains to have the word spread that they were not charging money for the use of the château, as Charles Bedaux feared that this might be taken as a sign that his business was not doing well. No expense was spared on the other aspects of the wedding. The Paris couturier Mainbocher made a wedding gown for the bride in what was to become famous as ‘Wallis blue’. Cecil Beaton and Constance Spry, the leaders of London fashion in photography and flower arrangement, were hired to attend to these parts of the day’s proceedings. The celebrated organist Marcel Dupré was brought in from Paris, although it is unlikely that anyone involved was aware that the keys of the Skinner organ act merely as on/off switches, so there is no scope for variation or subtlety in fingering them. Any competent organist can achieve the same quality of music. The Duke had some compensation for the expense in the shape of a piece, ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo’, that Dupré had written specially, enriching an otherwise mundane programme that concluded with the couple walking out to Vidor’s toccata.

  Even more curious than the ceremony itself was the message that one of the guests delivered. Walter Monckton was almost the only individual to emerge from the crisis without alienating one side or the other. He had remained a trusted friend to the Duke, but George VI had kept him on as Attorney General to the Duchy of Cornwall – indeed, conferred on him the first knighthood of the new reign – and he acted as intermediary between the Duke and both Buckingham Palace and Downing Street in what was becoming an increasingly fraught relationship. It is a tribute to Monckton’s qualities that his relationship with the Duke had not been damaged by
two things that he had had to tell him in the first months of his exile: that George VI would no longer speak to him by telephone and, later, that his wife-to-be would not have royal status. The message Monckton brought to the wedding was a private one for the Duchess alone. He asked whether he might have five minutes alone with her. The Duke did not want this, but she insisted on granting Monckton’s wish. Even in the decorous, written narrative that Monckton produced, his message was a blunt one: ‘…most people in England disliked her very much because the Duke had married her and given up his throne, but if she made him and kept him happy, all that would change, but that if he were unhappy nothing would be too bad for her.’47 This is the version that is usually quoted, but in the course of a far less discreet conversation with Baldwin’s son in 1950, he gave another version, in which the menace was quite direct: ‘…plenty of people would be ready to knock her on the head if after all this she failed to make her husband happy, and he (M.) would be glad to do so also.’48 In both versions, the Duchess told Monckton that she had already thought about the matter deeply. Over the years, she succeeded in making her husband happy and Monckton never felt the need to carry out his threat. When Maugham had overbid at bridge on Christmas Day at the Villa Mauresque, she had only suffered the consequences for a few minutes, but when Edward had overbid his hand, thinking that his popularity was great enough for him to make Wallis his Queen, she had to cope with the consequences for a lifetime.

  NOTES

  1. Monckton narrative

  2. Windham Baldwin papers, 11/3/13, note of conversation with Monckton

  3. Channon diaries, 27 November

  4. Boothby, Recollections of a Rebel, p. 197

  5. NA MEPO 35/10, Channing (?) to Game, 19 December

  6. Mrs Simpson to Duke of Windsor, 12 December