The Daily Telegraph - Features
As the clock ticked down, panic and despair gripped Whitehall
Newly unearthed documents reveal the secret plans that could have changed royal history. By Christopher Wilson
As the abdication crisis reached boiling point in the dying days of 1936, was Wallis Simpson ready and willing to be bought out of her forthcoming marriage to Edward VIII? Newly viewed Cabinet documents indicate that, at the height of the crisis, the question of a cash settlement to get rid of the twice-divorced American was actually proposed by her lawyer.
Had the deal been struck it could have had huge consequences lasting to the present day, resulting in a different monarch occupying the throne – not King Charles III.
The proposal mercifully came to nothing. But for a moment it looked as if, in return for a large sum of money, “the woman I love” would abandon the hapless king to his fate and disappear over the horizon.
The evidence comes in the contemporary account of Sir Horace Wilson, the senior Whitehall mandarin entrusted by prime minister Stanley Baldwin to collate the avalanche of information coming in as the crisis grew. Though it came to the outside world as a seismic shock, the hurried exit of an errant king and installation of a reliable substitute appeared a seamless process administered with professionalism and dignity.
But according to Wilson’s papers, nothing could be further from the truth – the whole thing was a shambles, one that could have ended with the present Duke of Kent, 88, being crowned king.
What I uncovered was a picture of panic and despair as the clock ticked down to December 11, the day King Edward signed the Instrument of Abdication – among people who should have been better prepared. In all, it took just 25 days from the moment Edward told the prime minister he was going to marry Mrs Simpson until his ignominious flight to obscurity.
Despite being told a marriage between the head of the Church of England and a divorcee would spark a constitutional crisis, the king was confident he could have his cake and eat it: “You’ll be Queen, Empress of India, the whole bag of tricks,” he promised Simpson. Meanwhile, in Whitehall there was a misplaced confidence that Edward could easily be deflected by financial sanction from taking what seemed an impossible step.
Edward’s battle for the throne was a stratagem, despite all the king-emperor’s resources at his disposal, that he was ill-equipped to handle. But even though the other side combined the might of the Church, Parliament and courtiers, it struggled to keep on top of the swiftly unravelling narrative. From Wilson’s papers emerges an intriguingly different story to the one historians have repeated.
Those in the know were aware from the moment Edward inherited the throne in January 1936 that there was a problem over his relationship with Mrs Simpson. That he had caved in to her superior will was well known. So too was King George V’s prediction that his son and heir would not last the course as sovereign.
Yet no formal preparations were made – no Plan B formulated. And so in Wilson’s papers we see the first signs of the wheels falling off…
December 5 1936
The secretary of state for air, Lord Swinton, alerts Downing Street that Edward has ordered two planes of the King’s Flight to be prepared for take-off – destination Zurich. Though by this time talks had taken place in Whitehall about the possibility of abdication and the king leaving the country, this news comes as a bolt from the blue.
It is the first the prime minister has heard of any flight plan and it sets alarm bells ringing. In recent days, as part of his power-play, Edward has demanded from Baldwin the right to broadcast an appeal for the public’s support – he would declare his love for Simpson and tell his subjects he wanted to marry her. The nation, he was confident, would rally behind him.
This unexpected manoeuvre rattles everyone from Baldwin to BBC boss Lord Reith, and is quickly stamped on. Now, with Swinton’s report, it looks as though, in revenge, Edward is preparing to
quit the country without bothering to sign the abdication papers which are constitutionally vital to the monarchy’s continuity.
Ironically, though this is the first Downing Street has heard about the planes (one for Edward, one for his luggage), the United Press news agency is already on to it. Harry Flory, its European news manager, had cabled his stringer in Zurich to stand by for Edward’s clandestine arrival. Flory reckons that Simpson will fly from Nice to meet him there.
What they plan to do then – this king on the run and his mistress – nobody has the first clue. But Britain’s position in the world would be compromised, and he has to be stopped.
News of the two planes’ readiness has come from an RAF pilot, clearly concerned that in taking off with his royal passenger aboard he was about to do something illegal. Downing Street officials scurry to hurry up the abdication paperwork so Edward can be forced to sign it before being allowed to set foot on the plane. At the same time, an urgent message is sent to Fort Belvedere in Surrey, where Edward is closeted with Baldwin.
The prime minister confronts the sovereign with his escape plan
– and the planes are cancelled.
December 6 1936
Baldwin receives a letter from Winston Churchill, who has publicly aligned himself with Edward (and will later write HM’s Abdication speech), warning that the king “is very near breakingpoint. He had two marked and prolonged ‘black outs’ in which he completely lost the thread of his conversation. His mental exhaustion was painful to see.”
Already suspected of plotting to create a King’s Party of MPs should Edward refuse to abdicate, thus forcing the government to resign, Churchill adds: “It would be a most cruel and wrong thing to extort a decision from him in his present state.” In other words, do you seriously want a general election?
Others question Edward’s mental state. “He is, I believe, suffering from dementia erotica,” writes the diplomat and author Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart. Virginia Woolf describes in The New Statesman the king’s “sexual difficulty”.
In her excellent history of the Abdication, The People’s King, historian Susan Williams explains: “Edward’s adoration only made sense if it was seen as an obsession – as a pathology, rather than love.” Lord Dawson of Penn, the royal doctor who’d attended King George V on his deathbed, describes Edward’s attraction to Mrs Simpson as a “medical obsession”.
But politicians and mandarins are simply not equipped to absorb the attendant complexities of this diagnosis, and thus play the ball badly from hereon in.
December 7 1936
Wilson receives a visit from Theodore Goddard, Simpson’s solicitor. Wilson notes, incredulously: “After some further talk, I discovered that what Mr Goddard was really saying, in effect, was what price could be paid to Mrs Simpson for clearing out.” The civil servant, veteran of many cabinet crises, finds himself speechless at the thought of providing a massive pay-off to get rid of the problem. Goddard drops the idea like a hot potato when he realises he’s overstepped the mark.
Further evidence emerges of the panic among courtiers and civil servants. Sir Thomas Barnes, the Treasury solicitor, suggests a way of bypassing the perceived problem of the Duke of York as a replacement sovereign. Primogeniturily speaking, Prince Bertie is next up for the throne – but grave doubts are being cast over his suitability. In younger days he’d suffered panic attacks, his stutter is seen as a flaw, and doctors have clandestinely conducted a psychological review as to his mental fitness to rule.
Famously, Bertie is to cry on his mother’s shoulder when he learns he is to be king. It does not bode well for the future of the monarchy.
“Barnes has made a suggestion which seems to me interesting and hopeful,” writes another mandarin, Sir Maurice Gwyer, to Wilson. “It is that Queen Mary should be invited to become Queen Regent until all these troubles are past. The difficulty about an immediate succession is that a substantial part of the country might still favour the present king, and [will] regard his brother as a sort of interloper.”
Skirting around the unspoken doubts as to Bertie’s suitability, Gwyer adds helpfully: “[Queen Mary] would re-establish the reputation of the monarchy.”
Left unsaid – but later to be discovered buried in an early history of Elizabeth II – is who they thought could eventually succeed the Regent Mary. In his 1958 book The Work of The Queen, the royal historian and speechwriter Dermot Morrah, a man better placed than any to know the inside story, wrote: “It was not a legal necessity that the person selected [to sit on the throne] should be the next in hereditary order. Veteran officers of the royal household remember how [the Duke of York] shrank from imposing the burden eventually on his daughter. At that time the only prince in the line of succession who had a son was the Duke of Kent – and the draftsmen preparing the Abdication bill considered what to do [should Kent be named king].”
So in these plans, Bertie would be bypassed – probably to his great relief – and his youngest brother, Georgie, would become King George VI in his place.
In the present day that would make his son, the current Duke of Kent, George VII – rather than the present incumbent. And therefore no Elizabeth II in our history books.
December 8 1936
News of the turmoil in Whitehall has reached America. Edward has been threatened with being cut off from his Civil List cash flow, but, though politicians think this will bring the king to heel, it does little to deter him. Sir Ronald Lindsay, British ambassador in Washington, writes: “The question of the King’s marriage has monopolised [everything] – quite unparalleled in my experience. Nobody thinks of anything else. The effect of this affair is very deplorable. The bonds [between the UK and the US] have been severed, and the loss thereby incurred to Anglo-American relations is very severe.”
This only serves to ramp up the temperature in Whitehall, and various ideas start to be tossed about as to what to do with the king to deflect him from his my-way-orthe-highway stance. One such was to send him on what Wilson delicately describes as “a holiday”.
This was a plan to bundle Edward aboard a warship which would then be dispatched on a nine-month tour of duty. “It might be a good thing if HMS Renown [he means HMS Repulse] were to show herself in Table Bay, Bombay, Singapore and in the charge of a good commander and trusted officers,” Wilson notes.
In other words, put the king under naval house arrest and send him off round the world. Quite how this would be achieved, given the king’s increasing detachment from duty, is not noted – and, in any event, Renown was laid up in dry dock for an extensive refit, while her sister ship, Repulse, was evacuating refugees from the Spanish Civil War.
In any case, it was all too late. Events were now moving at a colossal rate and only three days after Wilson’s suggestion of a holiday, Edward was gone.
None of the crazy ideas spun in those dying days – Queen Mary as Regent, the Duke of Kent as the next King, Edward’s enforced “holiday” – comes to anything.
Both sides come out of it badly. Churchill expected a more resilient king – and maybe an opportunity for himself politically – but in the end is forced to conclude: “Our cock won’t fight.” The king was perceived to have run away and so Churchill’s reputation is dented.
Whitehall, well aware of the hold Simpson had over the king, did little in the early days to form a coherent strategy to deter him from his suicide mission. Nothing quite like this had ever happened before, and they were woefully unprepared.
Baldwin, by every account, played a pretty straight bat. When the king finally realised the game was up, he wept – and Baldwin wept with him. But, in this instance, the premier was the servant of the people, not the crown.
The best they could manage was to deny Simpson a place on the throne beside Edward, but the damage done during those three weeks in 1936 cast a long shadow over the monarchy – a shadow that hovers eerily to this day.
It is the first the prime minister has heard of any flight plan and it sets alarm bells ringing