The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication, by Alexander Larman
The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication
By Alexander Larman Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20
‘He was a changeling in that family … no soul, no moral sense, and great personal charm.’
That was the conclusion of Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, then assistant private secretary to Edward VIII, musing on the character of the ex-king after the fuss died down.
It’s 84 years since Edward abdicated to marry the double-divorcée Wallis Simpson, and we can reasonably wonder if subsequent events have proved him wrong about that. Was Edward really so unusual, or is there in fact an ‘Edwardian’ strain that persists in the MountbattenWindsors, conferring on those who inherit it – Princess Margaret, Prince Harry, even Prince Charles – his egregious characteristics of self-pity, high-handedness, vanity and an on-andoff switch for charm?
What can certainly be said is that any such natures were not well served by the aftermath of the abdication crisis, when the royal family took shelter behind a wall of conservatism for them to run their heads against.
You can understand ‘the Firm’s’ alarm. To drive home the danger the monarchy was in during the run-up to the abdication, Larman compares it to the Civil War years; but you could also compare it to the convulsions over Henry VIII’S desire to marry Anne Boleyn, almost exactly 400 years before.
Henry won; Edward lost. He was a mere constitutional monarch, chafing at the bridle of Parliamentary control. Moreover – Larman makes the point – Edward lacked an executive genius like Thomas Cromwell’s to drive a path through the ice fields of resistance.
Instead, he had Walter Monckton. This book began as a biography of Monckton. A friend of Edward’s from university days, he was a clever barrister and a nice man, but as a biographical subject he lacks the sensational element of WE, as Wallis and Edward called themselves. One struggles to imagine Madonna making a film about him.
What the admirable Monckton had was tact, grace and, uniquely, the suppleness to tack between the factions that coalesced while the abdication brewed.
These consisted on the one hand of a group led by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and the ocean-going prig Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, united in their determination to prevent the marriage. On the opposing side, the press baron Lord Beaverbrook, perceiving that every crisis is an opportunity – in this case, ‘to bugger Baldwin’, whom he loathed – set to work.
In concert with Esmond Harmsworth, the Chairman of Associated Newspapers, Beaverbrook devised a scheme whereby Edward, with the popular press behind him, might get to keep both ‘his floozie’ and his crown. They would create an informal ‘King’s Party’ in Parliament, a shadow government without constitutional authority but nevertheless capable of bringing down Baldwin.
Its leader was to be Winston Churchill, who, in one of his many atrocious lapses of judgement, seems to have connived in a scenario that would inevitably politicise the monarchy and which even Edward, notoriously perfunctory in constitutional matters, could see was a terrible idea.
And always in the background there was Ribbentrop, Hitler’s ambassador – convinced, and perhaps rightly, that the King held the keys to AngloGerman entente.
Larman is not of the King’s party. He openly dislikes Edward for his selfishness, slackness, dishonest chicanery and the pitiless way he drove his staff and dismissed anyone who crossed him.
He has such little sympathy for the King, even siding with the courtiers over trivial matters – Edward’s cutting peach blossom at Windsor to send to Wallis, or resetting the clocks at Sandringham, which were kept half an hour fast, to the correct time – that he nearly manages to make us feel sorry for the poor bloke.
Yet the person we must feel most pity for, at the end of this great and well-told story, is Wallis Simpson.
Being a woman, and an American woman at that, Wallis was a magnet for blame. Those around the King held her responsible for a new ‘meanness’ in his manner, a ‘repellent hardness, disloyalty to old friends’. She had bewitched him with un-english sexual gimmicks, they said; she was ‘in the pocket of the German Ambassador’. Here, she comes across as much more sensible and conscientious than Edward.
The top revelation – at least for me – in Larman’s book is in learning that she didn’t love him in the least. She made this repeatedly clear, in letters, quoted here, that would chill the ardour of an oversexed spaniel. The idea of being trapped with him in
exile and disgrace revolted her. For her, Edward and Wallis was not so much WE, then, as ‘ ew!’
Edward ignored her. ‘It’s too late,’ he wrote. ‘Of course, you can do whatever you wish… But wherever you go, I will follow you.’ We know the outcome. And not the least of it was the personal damage it wreaked on subsequent generations of the royal family, terrified of a repeat. No divorcé for Princess Margaret. Prince Charles forced to marry the only virgin in England, with consequences that led to an underpass at the Pont de l’alma.
We haven’t seen the end of it.