The Metcalfes did not spend much time speculating about the king’s intentions. Fruity was too miserable and Baba too preoccupied. Her infatuation with Tom Mosley was as strong as ever: in mid-November she tried to persuade Irene to come with her to Italy for a week, purely to act as a smokescreen as she had “some important secret service work to do for T.” Fortunately, the scheme came to nothing; instead, Baba and Fruity settled on Wilton Place, although it was the only thing they did agree on that bitter autumn. Soon, history itself would cause a change in their circumstances.
24
Abdication
At the end of October 1936, Wallis Simpson was granted a decree nisi in the Assize Court at Ipswich. Shortly after this, the king told Walter Monckton that he intended to marry her. Although Monckton had realized the depth of the king’s passion, he had not expected this. “I did not before November 1936 think that marriage between the King and Mrs. Simpson was contemplated,” he noted at the time. “The King told me that he had often wished to tell me but refrained for my own sake lest I should be embarrassed. It must have been difficult to him since I had always and honestly assumed in my conversations with him that such an idea (which was suggested in some other quarters) was out of the question.”
Shortly afterward the king’s private secretary, Sir Alex Hardinge, wrote the king a forceful letter in which he suggested that to quell some of the lurid speculation Mrs. Simpson should go abroad for a time. The king then decided to inform Baldwin of his intention to marry, adding that he was prepared to leave the throne if necessary (he told his family the same day). To Walter Monckton, the prime minister said that he did not think either the country or the dominions would stand for the marriage.
From then on, things moved swiftly. On Sunday, November 15, Monckton lunched with the press baron Esmond Rothermere, who put forward the proposal of a morganatic marriage (one in which the wife does not take the rank or title of her husband), suggesting the same thing that evening to Baldwin. The king, desperate to gain his objective, preferably with Wallis as queen, sent for the prime minister and asked him to ascertain the feelings of the dominions and the cabinet, thus forcing Baldwin to take up the matter on an official basis.
Telegrams were sent to the dominions, setting out three possible options: that Wallis should become queen; that it should be a morganatic marriage; or that the king should abdicate. The prime minister concluded: “I feel convinced that neither the Parliament nor the great majority of the public here should or would accept such a plan.” To which the cabinet added its own cadenza: “any more than they would accept the proposal that Mrs. Simpson should become Queen.”
A fourth possibility—that he should give up Mrs. Simpson and remain on the throne—had been decisively ruled out by the king, although privately Walter Monckton believed, like the royal family, that “if and when the stark choice faced them between their love and his obligations as King Emperor they would in the end each make the sacrifice, devastating though it would be.”
The dominions plumped for abdication—Canada somewhat halfheartedly, South Africa and Australia categorically. New Zealand was less emphatic: Mrs. Simpson would be impossible as queen but there was something to be said for a morganatic marriage. By now she had left the house in Regent’s Park, which the king had rented her, for the safety of Fort Belvedere; soon after she went, a booing, jeering mob congregated outside and stones were thrown through the windows. From the Fort, with her faithful Aunt Bessie in attendance, she wrote a somewhat disingenuous letter to Edwina Mountbatten on November 30:
Edwina dear,
I am lying here making all sorts of wise decisions, schemes, etc for leaving England for a while. I am really worn out with all the talk and all the furore the U.S. press has caused here, and I know how happy my departure would make England. I think I shall have to use the story of Paris for hats, and then be hard to find, and then those charming people, the man in the street and the lunatics, will forget me, and all will be well once more.
Love Wallis
Edwina must have received it the day before the event that finally brought the affair into the open. On Sunday, December 2, the bishop of Bradford, concerned at the king’s lack of regular churchgoing, preached a sermon on the sovereign’s duties as head of the Church of England. With what they saw as an attack by a cleric on the king’s morality, the press felt free to unleash the flood of stories hitherto held back by the newspaper proprietors.
The following day, December 3, the king had another audience with Baldwin. He now wished to get Wallis out of the country as quickly as possible. It was decided that she would stay with her old friends Herman and Katharine Rogers at their villa, Lou Viei, near Cannes, escorted thither by Lord Brownlow. The king, Wallis and his old friend Perry Brownlow dined at the Fort that night, after which Wallis set off with a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of jewelry, without saying goodbye to any of the staff.
The news of Wallis’s departure and of the king’s intentions was around London in a flash. Most people felt like Irene, who wrote on December 4: “I feel so hideously angry that the King should have carted his people and England by asking to marry her. Mrs. Simpson has apparently vanished to the South of France. Went to bed raging at this woman and the appalling catastrophe whatever the result she has brought on the King.”
On the same day the king had another interview with Baldwin and asked to see Churchill. As he was not in the cabinet, and Baldwin had no objection, that night Churchill dined at the Fort. His advice was to play for time, largely to see what measure of support the king would gain. Later, Churchill gave an account of that meeting to Robert Bernays, who wrote in his diary on December 9:
Winston told me that the King was in an extraordinary mental state when he visited him and that once or twice he seemed to be seized with a mental anaesthesia.
Where I do sympathise with the King is in his appalling loneliness. Winston found him quite alone. He hasn’t one real friend to lean upon in this frightful emergency. His case seems to be arrested development. He has never passed the stage from boyhood to manhood. He is the spoiled child of success with the film star mentality. He sees his job only in terms of cheering crowds. He has never thought the matter out. He imagined that he could quietly retire into private life, leaving his brother to perform the dreary ceremonial functions while he spent a tranquil life gardening at Fort Belvedere and holidaying on the Riviera, occasionally emerging to open a hospital or review the Fleet and receive the cheers that mean so much to him.
For the first time he has been brought up against the fact that abdication means exile and that for the rest of his life he can serve no useful purpose.
As the terrible week rolled on, the two men who had spent so many of the early, carefree years with the king sent him supportive notes:
My dear David [wrote Mountbatten to his friend and cousin], I can’t bear sitting here doing nothing to help you in your terrible trouble.
Do you realise how many loyal supporters of all classes you have?
If you want me to help you, to do any service for you, or even to feel you have a friend of Wallis’s to keep you company, you have only to telephone.
I don’t want to be a nuisance but I don’t want to feel there is nothing I can do except bite people’s heads off who have the temerity to say anything disloyal about their king—though practically none do so—at any rate in my presence.
Your ever loyal devoted dutiful Dickie
Fruity, whose devotion had never wavered, wrote a heartfelt letter from Wilton Place.
Your Majesty,
Words cannot express how deeply I feel for you during these terrible days of anxiety. When I was in trouble you stood by me, and I wish to God that I could be of some service to you now.
Please always remember, Sir, that I am ready to do anything for you at any time.
Monckton, clever, practical and as a lawyer aware of all the constitutional and legal implications of the various courses of action mooted to the kin
g, put forward the idea that Parliament should pass two bills immediately: one in which the king renounced the throne and the other granting Wallis’s decree absolute* (without this, Wallis would not gain her divorce and the king would have abdicated in vain), but most of the cabinet rejected this as it smacked of a bargain. Everyone, including the king, felt that the matter should be decided quickly, as the general uncertainty was destabilizing.
The king’s own wish was to broadcast his intentions to the nation and then to go abroad for a while to give the people time to come to a measured decision. “I have read the broadcast he wished to make,” wrote Monckton. “In it he asks for the happiness of marriage, etc, and says neither he nor Wallis would insist on her being made Queen but that a title suitable for his wife should be given her.” This broadcast, with its appeal to the emotions of his listeners, was disallowed as being unconstitutional.
By now the king had virtually decided to abdicate, though on December 8 Baldwin went once more to the Fort to plead with him for a reversal of his decision. Again, the king refused, as he did a last-ditch appeal from the cabinet the following day. Though utterly steadfast, he was exhausted, both by the tension of awaiting the outcome and by the constant telephone calls from Cannes in which Wallis alternately threatened to give him up or demanded that he obtain as much as he could get financially from the royal coffers.
“George [the Duke of Kent] came in to see us at six in despair,” wrote Edwina Mountbatten in her diary. “He had just returned from the Fort where the King has definitely made up his mind to abdicate in favour of the Duke of York. Everything these days is too depressing for words.” That night there was the famous last dinner at which were present two of the king’s brothers, the dukes of York and Kent, Walter Monckton and several others. “The King exhausted but puts up magnificent show,” wrote Monckton.
By the end of Thursday, December 10, Monckton was equally exhausted. He arrived at Fort Belvedere at 1 a.m. with the draft Instrument of Abdication (to come into effect on Friday, December 11) and at 2:40 a.m. was caught by the king for a talk before he could retire to bed. At 9:30 a.m. the duke of York arrived at the Fort, followed a few minutes later by the duke of Gloucester, with the duke of Kent arriving at ten.
Within minutes, the signing and witnessing of six copies of the Instrument of Abdication and seven of the address for the House of Commons had begun, the sheets of paper spread over a simple mahogany table, with the king alone unaffected by the atmosphere of despondency. “Dickie down at the Fort all day,” runs Edwina Mountbatten’s diary. “Chaos reigns. Final preparations for the King’s Abdication being made. Everyone completely sunk except the King, who remains fairly calm and cheerful, and completely determined.”
Monckton returned to London with two notes from the king to Baldwin for inclusion in the prime minister’s statement to the House of Commons that afternoon. Later that day Baldwin joined the king, the duke of York and their financial advisers at Fort Belvedere to work out a settlement.
Here the king, no doubt under tremendous pressure from Mrs. Simpson, made an uncharacteristic but fatal mistake: he lied to his brother about the size of his fortune, estimated by most authorities at around £1.1 million, inclusive of a settlement on Mrs. Simpson of three hundred thousand pounds. Instead, he told the duke that he only had ninety thousand pounds. He made the same statement to Winston Churchill, with the result that neither trusted him again—to the immense detriment of future relations.
Baldwin’s statement to Parliament that afternoon was described by Harold Nicolson as “Sophoclean and almost unbearable.” It affected Robert Bernays equally, who wrote:
I suppose none of us who were present will forget as long as they live the scene in the House of Commons on the day of the Abdication.
Baldwin’s speech was an amazing performance. Its material was little pieces of paper with ideas on them contributed obviously by his colleagues. When he came in with the despatch box he found he had lost his key. He desperately searched his pockets for it and then found it under Neville Chamberlain’s legs. Then he tried to sort his papers, upset them and had to retrieve them from the floor. Then Hoare had to answer a question and put his papers on top of Baldwin’s notes with the result that they were upset again and had to be retrieved from the floor once more.
At Denham, Irene went into Micky’s nursery at 6 p.m., where she found him cutting pictures of Mrs. Simpson out of the Daily Sketch and saying, “Nasty Mrs. Simpson,” “Horrid Mrs. Simpson,” before chopping them into pieces. “I gather he had overheard Nanny saying something in the nursery,” wrote Irene. “Tears ran down our faces, both Nanny and I, as we listened to the six o’clock news and Mr. Baldwin’s statement.”
That night the king worked late on his broadcast, getting up early the following morning to finish it. He had invited Churchill to luncheon, to give a final polish, and it was while they were together that he ceased to be king. As Churchill left, he quoted Marvell’s famous lines on the beheading of Charles I: “He nothing common did or mean, upon that memorable scene.” The ex-king’s servants did not share that view; none of them would accompany him into his new life.
That evening the ex-king left the Fort at eight-thirty, with his brothers, to dine at Royal Lodge. After dinner Walter Monckton fetched him and drove him to Windsor Castle, from where, at 10 p.m., he was to make his broadcast to the nation under the title of Prince Edward. “You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duty as King as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love” was the sentence that best sums up his attitude—and his failure.
All over London, audiences trickled out of theaters, where the duke’s speech was broadcast, as they could not bear to stay for the rest of the play. In Wilton Place Irene listened to it with the Metcalfes:
Louis Greig* had told me not to cry as the King had wanted this through and through and I was not to dramatise his agony of heart. I could wish he had left Mr. Baldwin’s fine eulogy of himself as the last picture as his little melodramatic epilogue of seven minutes had no greatness and was rather “hot”-making and mingy. But it made me howl all the same. His voice sounded thick and muddled too. I said it was emotion. Baba said the King was a tortured demented soul, quite different from Louis’s view.
Monckton then drove the duke of Windsor back to Royal Lodge to say goodbye to his family. As it was midnight by then, Queen Mary and his sister Princess Mary soon left for London; the duke and his three brothers “chatted about everything except that which was in their minds,” according to Monckton. “We kissed, parted as freemasons, and he bowed to me as King,” wrote the new king, George VI. Then the duke and Monckton left for Portsmouth, the duke talking easily and cheerfully all the way: it had been arranged that he would leave for France that night on the destroyer HMS Fury, accompanied by courtiers Ulick Alexander and Piers (“Joey”) Legh.
So last-minute were the orders to the destroyer’s captain, Cecil Howe, that he was obliged to borrow bed linen, crockery, glasses and an experienced steward from the royal yacht. The Fury left Portsmouth at 2 a.m. and because the weather was poor lay off the Isle of Wight for some hours so that the ex-king could get some sleep. But his nervous tension was such that he sat up in the wardroom until 4 a.m., drinking brandy and talking of recent events. The Fury reached Boulogne at 3:40 the following afternoon, December 12, tying up at a berth sealed from public view, and the party set off by special Pullman for Austria, where the Baron Eugene de Rothschild had put one of his houses, Schloss Enzesfeld, near Vienna, at the duke’s disposal.
A few days later, the diarist Chips Channon made a perceptive comment. “I heard that garrulous gossip, Malcolm Bullock, with an expertise of felinity, remark for me to overhear: ‘I don’t know what the Archbishop meant, as the late King had no friends.’ It is terribly true; only Fruity Metcalfe with his checks and his brogue. No other man friend did the King ever have.”
&nbs
p; A young man called Dudley Forwood, an attaché at the British legation in Vienna, was staying with the Rothschilds for a visit planned to include Christmas when his ambassador, Sir Wolford Selby, called him from the embassy to tell him that the abdication had taken place and that he must return at once. Forwood drove through the night and when he arrived learned that the duke of Windsor was already on his way and that he, Forwood, was to be seconded as his equerry.
With the ambassador, he met the duke on his arrival in Vienna and they drove to Schloss Enzesfeld, set among low wooded hills and with golf and skiing nearby to provide the energetic diversions which the duke loved. Kitty Rothschild, who regarded the duke’s visit as a great social coup, was waiting to welcome him, but her hopes of gaining a foothold in the duke’s circle were to be disappointed, thanks to Wallis’s paranoid jealousy.
There were misunderstandings from the start. The duke, depressed and frustrated at his separation from Wallis, was not an easy guest. It was not so much his habit of consoling himself by playing his drums loudly to a gramophone record until late at night while drinking too much brandy that worried the exhausted Legh as his attitude to his hostess.
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 28
