That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (22 page)

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Authors: Anne Sebba

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Royalty, #Rich & Famous

BOOK: That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
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Wallis on the Run
 
‘Concentrate on the legal side now’
 
 
 
O
n a cold and foggy afternoon in early December 1936 the King told Wallis that it was no longer safe for her to stay at the Fort. She must leave the country as soon as could be arranged. He had telephoned Perry Brownlow, a personal friend and lord in waiting, that morning and asked him if he would be prepared to escort her abroad. Brownlow offered Wallis his own home, Belton House in Lincolnshire, as a safe refuge, but she declined, so he made preparations for the journey to France. He drove to Windsor where he found the King ‘rather pathetic, tired, overwrought, and evidently dreading Wallis’s departure, almost like a small boy being left behind at school for the first time’.
The dramatic change in the situation resulted from an outspoken speech delivered by the inadvertently historic figure Dr A. W. F. Blunt, Bishop of Bradford, to his Diocesan Conference on Tuesday 1 December. Bishop Blunt preached on the King’s need for divine grace in the months before the Coronation service, adding that ‘it could be wished that he showed more awareness of this need’. The Bishop claimed he had written his speech six weeks earlier following a discussion with a businessman about the commercial versus religious aspects of the Coronation and had no intention of referring to current rumours about Mrs Simpson, only to the King’s negligence in churchgoing.
The British press could restrain themselves no longer. All the newspapers now reported this attack on the Sovereign, which opened the floodgates of publicity. Suddenly pictures of Mrs Simpson appeared in British newspapers. For most readers these were the first images of the American woman who was said to be the King’s ‘close friend’. The Bishop’s speech came to Mr Baldwin ‘as did the ravens feeding Elijah in a predicament in the wilderness’, in Nancy Dugdale’s phrase, while her husband believed that Bishop Blunt’s address ‘could not have been brought about in a more desirable and less scandalous way … purely religious, non political, non sectarian – just SB’s luck!’
In spite of widespread assumptions that either the Archbishop of Canterbury or Baldwin had written the speech, it came as a shock to both men to see the report in the press the following day. But while Baldwin might have been relieved, the Archbishop was aghast; if any clerics was to give the King advice, it should be him. Yet he was only too aware of how he had failed V>
Baldwin and Dugdale already had a secret appointment to meet the King set for 9 p.m. on 2 December – the secrecy at the King’s behest – to report back on the morganatic marriage proposal. But, in the wake of the Blunt speech, this had taken on a desperate urgency. While Dugdale paced up and down the garden with detectives, Baldwin informed the King of the answer obtained from the Dominion prime ministers, from the British Cabinet, from the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Attlee, and from the leader of Liberals: they all said a morgan
atic marriage was impossible and were strongly opposed to it. ‘The King was ill tempered and petulant at this meeting, ’ Nancy Dugdale recorded, ‘and very angry about Bishop Blunt. Mr Baldwin had to calm him and generally treat this wrong headed little man like a doctor treats a case, never putting his back up, never giving in. The King suggested broadcasting, placing himself at the mercy of his people.’ The audience lasted one hour and the King’s attitude to the Dominions was ‘there are only very few people in Canada, Australia and the colonies … meaning that the question of colonial responsibility did not count for a great deal’.
According to Nancy Dugdale, at the end of the meeting Baldwin said to the King – ‘and it won over his complete confidence – “well, sir, whatever happens I hope you will be happy.”’
13
Subsequently the King alluded many times to this phrase saying: ‘Not even my so called friends who are on my side have ever wished me happiness.’
The two men left the Palace feeling ‘sad at heart for the little man, despising him, loving him, and pitying him all at the same time and hating the woman who goaded him on to fight until the struggle became one between the Prime Minister and Mrs Simpson through the person of the King’. Dugdale, quoting Flaubert, believed that the King was that day ‘Vaincu enfin par la terrible force de la douleur’.
The King drove down to the Fort and immediately reported the latest events to Wallis, telling her she must now leave. He had heard that
The Times
, the newspaper he feared most, was preparing to run a fierce attack on her the next day and, although he had asked Baldwin to stop it, his request had been refused. This was not within the Prime Minister’s power, even had he wished to stop such an article. In any case, the
Times
editor, Geoffrey Dawson, was a staunch supporter of the government, unlike Beaverbrook or Harmsworth.
The final evening for Wallis at the Fort was painful. Brownlow asked the King if he intended to abdicate. ‘“Oh no,” he replied. He had just told me the first and last important lie of our friendship.’ Brownlow believed that Wallis ‘had taught him to lie’. In fact there was an element of truth in the King’s reply as he had it in mind to go to Switzerland and then see if he was called back with Mrs Simpson at his side. As they departed the King ‘leant across to her to ge [ tond t one last touch of her hand – there were tears in his eyes and on his cheeks, and his voice was shaking – wherever you reach tonight, no matter what time, telephone me. Bless you, my darling.’
Others remember the departure more prosaically. Mrs Simpson left by walking through the King’s bedroom on to the lawn without saying goodbye to any of the staff, with whom her relationship had never been easy.
‘Well, that’s the end of that,’ said one of the footmen to the butler, Osborne, who had always believed Wallis ‘had got her knife into them’.
‘Don’t be too sure,’ Osborne replied.
‘We’ll keep our fingers crossed.’
Since Wallis would not fly, driving to the Herman Rogers villa, Lou Viei, near Cannes, was seized on as the only option. Wallis talked almost incessantly on the journey but it was only as they crossed to Dieppe that Brownlow discovered to his horror that he was also responsible for Wallis’s jewels, which she had brought with her, ‘presents from the King worth at least £100,000 – to carry them savoured a little of the deportee or exile’, he felt. Though they were travelling under the pseudonyms of Mr and Mrs Harris, the King’s Buick was quickly recognized and they were followed for much of the journey, forcing the King’s chauffeur to take sudden side-turnings in towns he did not know in the hope of throwing off their pursuers. They arrived at the Grand Hôtel de la Poste in Rouen at 5.15 a.m., spoke to the King for fifteen minutes and finally got to bed around six o’clock for a few hours’ sleep. After two days on the road, they arrived at Lou Viei – a twelfth-century converted monastery, which Brownlow rather uncharitably described as ‘small and dark … unsuited to winter conditions’ – with Wallis humiliatingly crouched in the back of the car, covered by a blanket. She felt every inch the hunted animal. The journey was an agonizing experience and ‘the feeling of desperation that was my invisible and relentless companion during the entire trip is not difficult to recapture’. Still manipulating the agency wires where he could, Bernard Rickatson-Hatt loyally delayed announcing Mrs Simpson’s destination until she had reached Cannes.
‘Tell the country,’ she had scribbled in one final note to the King, referring to the very modern idea they had discussed before she left, that he should broadcast an appeal directly to the country to be allowed to marry and remain king. Television broadcasts were completely new and untried and even Christmas radio broadcasts by the monarch had been used only since 1932. But Wallis, admitting that a radio broadcast was her idea, said she had in mind the ‘extraordinary impact on public opinion of President Roosevelt’s “fireside chats”’. Back at the Fort, without Wallis, the King’s confidence quickly drained. He no longer believed he could have both Wallis and the throne, in spite of Churchill urging that he should not be rushed and that, with time, something could be done short of abdication – an unpopular line which even his wife Clementine disagreed with. Churchill in 1936 was viewed as a man of flawed political judgement, yet his opinions were coloured not just by romance. His own mother was American and had been vilified for her love life. However, by the time he rose to speak in the House of Commons on Monday 7 December the mood had changed and he was shouted down on all sides. Baldwin gave thanks for the power of a weekend.
The King now abandoned the idea of using a broadcast as an appeal remain as King and marry Wallis. Nonetheless, [Nonem"emboldened by what he perceived as the successful South Wales tour, he still wanted to speak directly to the nation before departing. This was a misreading of the situation, however, as there were many Nonconformists in South Wales who were extremely critical of Edward’s behaviour. Likewise in England, as Mrs Hannah Summerscales asserted when she wrote to the King’s Proctor: ‘Even though the King thinks that working people are with him, I know that they are not. I was born a working woman and I know that working people want the moral cleanliness of their homes and moral cleanliness of the crown and throne …’ But it was also deeply unconstitutional for the King to go above the heads of his government and the notion had a whiff of dictatorship about it at a time when any threat to democracy was a very serious matter. Baldwin pragmatically explained to the King that if he made such a broadcast ‘he would be telling millions of people throughout the world, including a vast number of women, that he wanted to marry a married woman’, and had his Home Secretary, Sir John Simon – not known as Sir John Snake for nothing – swiftly draft a paper to show that constitutionally a king can broadcast only on the advice of his ministers. Aware of the stark choice, the King now prepared himself for abdication.
Sir Edward Peacock, the King’s Canadian-born principal financial adviser who was very close to him at this time, stated that the wavering in the final days was ‘as I know, upon the insistence over the phone of the lady that he should fight for his rights. She kept up that line until near the end, maintaining that he was the King, and his popularity would carry everything. With him this lasted only a very short time then he recognized the falsity of the position and put it definitely aside … the lady persisted in her advice until she saw that that tack was hopeless.’
The long-distance telephone calls between the pair, on a crackly and faint line, which punctuated the next few days were something none of the participants ever forgot. The King was always distraught waiting for Wallis to call but wrung dry after she had. They were in daily contact – not easy in 1936, even for a king – and the lines had to be kept free for at least two hours for her exclusive use. William Bateman, the King’s private telephone operator at the Palace, had been instructed to give priority to all calls and messages from her. But it was difficult to hear clearly, so Wallis shouted, and the King found these conversations emotionally draining as all his negotiating power was evaporating in the face of his one remaining desire: to marry Wallis. He often had Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse, or his solicitor, George Allen, by his side to prompt him while speaking to Wallis and at a critical moment in one conversation he covered the phone with one hand and asked Allen what he should say to summarize the situation to her. Allen wrote, and the King relayed, ‘The only conditions on which I can stay here are if I renounce you for all time.’ She knew he was never going to do that.
He had hoped to secure the right to a substantial pension, the right to return to the Fort as his home in due course, the right of his future wife to share his royal title and, most urgently, an Act of Parliament making Wallis’s divorce absolute immediately to ensure that they could be married. Monckton, managing astutely to remain the King’s adviser while retaining the trust of the politicians, took up the latter issue urgently on the King’s behalf. He was genuinely alarmed by the cruel possibility awaiting the King if he abdicated and then found that Wallis was not free after all. He suggested the idea of a special Bill to free her immediately at the same time as the abdication, an obvious way of tidying things, pointing out that divorces [thal t by Bill were once the only way of getting a divorce. But, although in those fraught final days Baldwin was prepared to consider this, ultimately he had to remind the King that ‘even his wishes were not above the inexorable fulfilment of the law and he was afraid he could not interfere’. However, it was more complicated than that because any such action might have been misinterpreted as a government ploy to persuade the King to abdicate, which it could not be seen to do. In the event, the King in his all-consuming desire to have Wallis, played into the government’s hands and failed to secure any of these rights before he too left.
Within hours of her arrival in Cannes, a confused and exhausted Wallis tried to persuade the King to stay on the throne. She issued a statement claiming that she was anxious to avoid damaging His Majesty or the Throne and stating her readiness ‘if such action would solve the problem to withdraw forthwith from a situation that has been rendered both unhappy and untenable’. Hardinge, not surprisingly, insisted that she was not sincere in this and was merely posturing, knowing what the King’s response would be. Nancy Dugdale described the statement as ‘undisguised humbug. After having done her utmost to split the country from Land’s End to John O’Groats she now played the part of the gilded angel who, having failed to accomplish this, only wanted to act for the best.’

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