* * *
I. William Bateman was the king’s private telephone operator at Buckingham Palace, who had been instructed to give priority to all calls and messages from Mrs. Simpson.
II. Patricia, Viscountess Hambleden, became the Duchess of York’s Lady of the Bedchamber in 1937. She held this position until 1994.
8
* * *
The Fury
Throughout the previous week, the royal family had been tensely awaiting the decision of the king. The Duke and Duchess of York waited for news at Royal Lodge. Finally, on Monday, December 7, it came. After he had spoken to Wallis, and ignored her pleas, Edward rang Bertie and at ten minutes to seven asked him to come and see him after dinner. The Duke of York recorded: “I said, ‘No, I will come and see you at once.’ I was with him at seven p.m. The awful and ghastly suspense and waiting was over. I found him pacing up and down the room, and he told me his decision that he would go.”1
The moment that George, the Duke of Kent, heard that Bertie had been summoned to the Fort, he too arrived, uninvited and unannounced. The three brothers had dinner that night, along with another unexpected guest, Stanley Baldwin, who arrived with a suitcase, intending to spend the night to help the king “wrestle with himself”—an idea that appalled Edward. Nevertheless, out of politeness, he invited the prime minister to join them. “The dinner party was, I think, his tour de force,” wrote Sir Walter Monckton, present that evening with George Allen, Ulick Alexander and Major T. L. Dugdale, Baldwin’s parliamentary private secretary. “In that quiet panelled room he sat at the head of the table with his boyish face and smile, with a good fresh colour while the rest of us were pale as sheets, rippling over with bright conversation, and with a careful eye to see that his guests were being looked after. . . . As the dinner went on the Duke [of York] turned to me and said: ‘Look at him. We simply cannot let him go.’ But we both knew that there was nothing we could do or say to stop him.”2
When Wallis’s statement was published on Tuesday, December 8, many believed it heralded the end of the crisis. Chips Channon wrote: “The press received Wallis’s statement with mixed comments. Rothermere and Beaverbrook hail it with great jubilation but the Times and the Telegraph barely disguise their disappointment for they are both determined to get the king to abdicate.”3
The process of abdication was already in motion, and the royal family, particularly Mrs. Simpson’s two fiercest detractors—Queen Mary and the Duchess of York—regarded Wallis’s offer to withdraw as a face-saving sham. The royal family, blind to Wallis’s untenable and wholly unfair situation, rigidly adhered to the view that she had brainwashed Edward, and he had become temporarily unhinged by obsession. In their view, she had schemed to be queen and, when that looked out of her grasp, decided to settle for a morganatic marriage. When this too eluded her, she had pushed for marriage above all else, even though this would mean depriving Edward of the throne. They would never care to believe the truth: that when the king told Wallis on the telephone that he was abdicating, she ended the call, devastated and weeping. Many observers believed the royal family was wrong about Wallis. “She certainly never saw herself as queen,” said Lady Diana Cooper. “I didn’t sense any sheer ambition in her.”4
Shortly after arriving at Lou Viei, Wallis wrote to her friend Sibyl Colefax of her struggle to try to prevent the abdication: “I knew him so well, I wanted them to take my advice. But no, driving on they went headed for this Tragedy. If only they had said, let’s drop the idea now and in the autumn we’ll discuss it again. And Sibyl darling in the autumn I would have been so very far away. I had already escaped.”5
On December 9, as Sir Walter Monckton drove from Fort Belvedere to London with the king’s royal assent to his own act of abdication, Queen Mary was driven out of the capital to Royal Lodge. Despite thick fog, she made the journey to see Edward. In the drawing room, at around four o’clock, as twilight gathered, Queen Mary heard of her son’s irrevocable decision to leave the throne. “I gave her a full account of all that had passed between Mr. Baldwin and myself during the six days since our last meeting on the Thursday before,” Edward said. “She still disapproved of and was bewildered by my action, but now that it was all over her heart went out to her hard-pressed son, prompting her to say with tenderness: ‘And to me, the worst thing is that you won’t be able to see her for so long.’ ”6
Queen Mary headed back for London, where she dined with the Duke and Duchess of Kent. After dinner, the Duke of York arrived at Marlborough House, and they looked over the draft instrument of abdication, a document the Duke of York regarded with terror and his mother read with incredulity. “I went to see Queen Mary,” the duke later wrote, “& when I told her what had happened I broke down & sobbed like a child.”7
At breakfast the following morning, the king received the official copies of the instrument of abdication via his red dispatch box. His three brothers arrived at Belvedere by ten o’clock and assembled in the octagonal drawing room, together with Sir Edward Peacock, the king’s financial advisor, Monckton, George Allen and Ulick Alexander. “As if in harmony with the lifting of the almost intolerable pressure of the last few weeks, the fog that had for some days added to the gloom had also lifted,” the king later wrote. “Sitting at the desk, with my three brothers watching, I began to sign the documents.”8 After signing seven copies of one document and eight of another, formally relinquishing monarchical authority, he yielded his chair to his brothers, who signed their names as witnesses in their order of precedence.
This was the first time in British history that the Crown had been surrendered entirely voluntarily. Because the title to the Crown depends upon statute, a royal abdication can be effected only by an act of Parliament. On December 11, His Majesty’s Declaration of Abdication Act 1936 was passed, giving succession to his brother George and excluding any progeny of Edward from the line of succession.
“The occasion moved me,” Edward recalled. “Like a swimmer surfacing from a great depth, I left the room and stepped outside, inhaling the fresh morning air.”9 Sir Walter Monckton followed the king to the terrace to ask if there was anything the king wished the prime minister to mention in his report to Parliament. Edward had two points he wanted Baldwin to make to the house. He wrote them down on separate pieces of paper. The first was to stress his support of his brother Bertie. This the prime minister did include in his speech. (“The Duke of York. He and the king have always been on the best of terms as brothers, and the king is confident that the duke deserves and will receive the support of the whole Empire.”) The other point concerned Wallis. Edward wanted the British people to know that “the other person most intimately concerned” had steadily tried “to the last” to dissuade the king from the decision he had taken. Stanley Baldwin elected to leave this second, critical point out of his speech.
Around the same time that the king’s brothers arrived to sign the instrument of abdication, Edward received a generous letter from Ernest Simpson. It is a quite astonishing missive from a cuckolded husband to his usurper. “My heart is too full for utterance tonight,” he wrote. “What the ordeal of the past weeks has meant to you I well know, and I want you to know that my deepest and most loyal feelings have been with you throughout! That you may find an abundance of happiness in the days that lie before you is my earnest hope and prayer. For the last time, Sir, let me subscribe myself your devoted subject, but always your loving friend and obedient servant.”10
While the fateful documents were locked up in the official red box and taken to London by Sir Walter Monckton, Edward worked on the farewell broadcast that he proposed to make to the country. As he would no longer be king, the government would have no authority to seal his lips. Some in Westminster looked coldly on the king supplying an epilogue to the drama. Queen Mary also tried to dissuade her son, but he was determined to speak.
Edward chose to spend his last day at the Fort, and last hour as king, dining with his old friend and ally Winston Churchil
l. Churchill “generously supplied the final brush strokes” to the speech and made admirable suggestions including the peerless “And he [George/Bertie] has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me—a happy home with his wife and children.”
“While we were thus at the table, I ceased to be King,” Edward later wrote. “As I saw Mr. Churchill off, there were tears in his eyes. I can still see him standing at the door, hat in one hand, cane in the other.” Tapping with his walking stick on the flagstones, Churchill began to recite the famous ode by Andrew Marvell on the beheading of King Charles I: “He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene.”11
Two weeks later, on Christmas Day, Churchill wrote to Lloyd George: “I am profoundly grieved at what has happened. I believe the Abdication to have been altogether premature and quite unnecessary.”12
* * *
On the evening of the abdication, the mood at Lambeth Palace was one of quiet jubilation. “Thus it came about that a King with an Empire at his feet nine months ago has gone into the wilderness as an exile from his native land for the sake of a woman who has already made a failure of two marriages!” wrote the Reverend Alan Don, Cosmo Lang’s private secretary. “Here is a theme for a dozen tragedies. Here too is a demonstration for all the world to see that the British Democracy demands from those in high places an exacting standard of life and character. It is that and that alone which counts in the long run. Tonight there is a sense almost everywhere, at any rate among responsible people, a sense of relief.”13
This “sense of relief” was not shared by all at Buckingham Palace. Of the dramatic events of December 10, Queen Mary recorded: “I saw Ld Salisbury & the PM—at 3 to Piccadilly to see ElizabethI who was in bed with a cold, too unlucky. The PM made his announcement in the house about David’s final decision—which was received in silence & with real regret—The more one thinks about this affair the more regrettable it becomes.”14
As the former king packed up his “most personal possessions” at the Fort, the new king came into his room, alone, to talk. Edward closed the door and pushed aside his things on the sofa to make room for his brother to sit down. “This situation seemed to cry mutely for a symbolical laying on of hands, a passing of the torch,” Edward recalled. “But there is not much a former monarch can tell his successor.”15 Edward simply reassured his younger brother that he would not find the job too difficult, for he was already intimately familiar with court life. Words were not easy for Bertie in times of great emotion, but Edward “knew that he felt my going keenly.”16 They then discussed what Edward’s title would be. On surrendering the Crown, King Edward VIII automatically reverted to the status of a prince of the blood royal and became His Royal Highness Prince Edward of Windsor. Bertie announced that he would create Edward a duke, and suggested the Duke of Windsor as a title. As Edward liked this idea, Bertie said that he would make it the first act of his reign, to be announced at his Accession Council meeting at St. James’s Palace the following morning.17
As well as the former king’s future status, there were many questions relating to finance which Bertie, Edward and their advisors had discussed that day. Sir Godfrey Thomas, Edward’s assistant private secretary, wrote in his diary: “Will Mrs. S be prepared to face life as Mrs. Edward Windsor, or even the Duchess of Sussex, on an income of £12,000 a year, which Ulick Alexander says is all he will have if he packed up and departed as a private individual?”18 It was of immense importance to Edward that he secure a favorable abdication settlement. Sir Walter Monckton expertly negotiated the terms on his behalf. He asked for a pension of £25,000 a year, for which the new king would ultimately be responsible, in return for surrendering his life interest in Sandringham and Balmoral. Bertie paid his brother for the two properties which had been left to Edward by his father. Edward claimed to Bertie that his fortune amounted to only £90,000, which was less than a tenth of the true figure. This pointless lie seems to have been told in blind panic; Edward was in a despairing state, suddenly fretful for his financial future and terrified he would let Wallis down by not providing adequately for her. When this lie soon became exposed, it served to indelibly poison relations between the two brothers for the rest of their lives.19
That last night, however, still in no small measure of shock, the brothers dined amicably together. Edward had arranged a last supper with his family at Royal Lodge before making his final farewell broadcast from Windsor Castle at 10 p.m. Before leaving the Fort, Edward telephoned Wallis to say he would not be able to speak to her for a day or two. When she asked where he was going, he replied: to a hotel outside Zurich. She was appalled. “You can’t go to a hotel. You will have no privacy. You will be hounded to death,”20 she told him.
Edward realized that, in his overwrought state, he had not given much thought to where he would go. It was a perverse irony that it was impossible for him to be with Wallis, the drive behind his sacrifice, until after her divorce was settled in April. As Edward had made public his desire to marry her, it was essential, under the archaic laws that then existed, that they did not meet in case it jeopardized her decree absolute.
“It filled me with fury that the British Government could be so indifferent to his new vulnerability,” Wallis wrote. “So ungrateful for his splendid service, as to fail to provide him with the privacy and protection he would desperately need in the first few months of readjustment. Here, at least, I could help him.”21 She telephoned their friends Baron and Baroness Eugene de Rothschild, who had a castle, Schloss Enzesfeld, near Vienna, to ask if they would invite the former king to visit them. Like the Rogerses, the Rothschilds instantly agreed.22
As Edward packed up the last of his belongings, the poignant moment arrived when he was due to leave the Fort. He graciously bade farewell to the staff gathered in the hall, asked Sir Walter Monckton to take Slipper to the car and stepped out onto the flagstones. Leaving the Fort—where he “had passed the happiest days” of his life—proved the greatest wrench: “in that moment I realised how heavy was the price I had paid,” he said.23
A few minutes later, he joined his family at Royal Lodge. Here the former king dined with the new king; Queen Mary; the Duke of Gloucester; the Duke of Kent; his sister, the Princess Royal; his uncle, the Earl of Athlone; and Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone. According to Edward, “Dinner passed pleasantly enough in the circumstances. I hope I was a good guest, but I rather doubt it.”24 According to Monckton, Queen Mary “had thoughtfully left off her mourning black for the evening so as not to cast more gloom.”25
“That last family dinner party was too awful,” Elizabeth told a friend years later. “Thank goodness I had flu and couldn’t go.”26 She did, however, write to her brother-in-law from her sickbed the following day—the day on which she became Queen Consort and Empress of India. “Darling David, I am so miserable that I can not come down to Royal Lodge owing to being ill in bed,” she wrote, “as I wanted so much to see you before you go, and say ‘God bless you’ from my heart. We are all overcome with misery, and can only pray you will find happiness in your new life. I shall always mention you in my prayers, and bless you, Elizabeth.”27
Foreshortening the dinner, Monckton arrived to take Edward to Windsor Castle to broadcast to the nation. Inside the car, on the back seat, an eager Slipper greeted his master. As they drove up the Long Walk, towards Windsor Castle, Monckton informed the former king that the Rothschilds were preparing to welcome him at Schloss Enzesfeld.
Edward was met by Lord Wigram at the castle doors. He walked up the Gothic staircase to his old rooms in the Augusta Tower, where he was received by the director of the BBC, Sir John Reith. Around his old desk, sound technicians and cameramen had set up equipment. When the moment for the broadcast came, the time signal sounded. In a deep voice, Sir John announced into the microphone: “This is Windsor Castle. His Royal Highness, Prince Edward.”28 Sir John then slipped out of the door, leaving only Edward and Monckton in the room. As Edward shifted his pos
ition in his chair, preparing to speak, he knocked his foot against the table leg, which avid listeners interpreted as a door slamming. In his inimitable voice he said: “At long last I am able to say a few words of my own . . .”29
In the South of France, Wallis listened intently as Edward’s voice came out of the loud speaker, “calmly, movingly.”30 Everyone at Lou Viei, including the staff, had gathered around the radio in the sitting room. Wallis lay on the sofa, her hands over her eyes, trying to hide her tears. The former sovereign addressed his former subjects:
I have never wanted to withhold anything, but until now it has been not constitutionally possible for me to speak.
A few hours ago I discharged my last duty as King and Emperor, and now that I have been succeeded by my brother, the Duke of York, my first words must be to declare my allegiance to him. This I do with all my heart.
You all know the reasons which have impelled me to renounce the throne. But I want you to understand that in making up my mind I did not forget the country or the Empire which as Prince of Wales, and lately as King, I have for twenty-five years tried to serve. But 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 duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.
And I want you to know that the decision I have made has been mine and mine alone. This was a thing I had to judge entirely for myself. The other person most nearly concerned has tried up to the last to persuade me to take a different course. I have made this, the most serious decision of my life, upon a single thought of what would in the end be the best for all.31
The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcée Who Became the Duchess of Windsor Page 20
