The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (205 page)

His difficult son, now Edward VIII, became, among other things, Defender of the Faith—the faith of the Church of England, which did not recognize divorce. Britain’s first bachelor king since the mad George III, 176 years earlier, Edward was now forty-two, and both his subjects and the Royal Family thought it time he acquired a queen. So did he; in his autobiography he wrote, with a careless air which would have dismayed Bagehot, that his “rolling stone was beginning to seek a resting place.” He had enjoyed relationships with many women, but there was a curious pattern to them. He stared right through lovely girls and headed for their mothers. He not only sought out women whose childbearing years were over or ending; he was especially attracted to those already married.
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His search had ended late in his tenure as Prince of Wales, when he discovered, or was discovered by, Mrs. Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson, a charming Baltimore adventuress of genteel if threadbare origins who had learned, like Becky Sharp, to live by her wits. Beginning her womanhood “in greatly reduced circumstances,” Baltimoreans said, she supported herself “in greatly seduced circumstances.” Wallis lacked beauty but possessed something rarer. She was
smart
. Violet eyes, dark hair, a magnolia complexion, and a stunning figure, combined with the great gift of being a good listener, made her popular everywhere. In 1916 she had married a naval officer. Divorcing him, she eloped with her best friend’s husband, Ernest Simpson, a wealthy shipping man. Simpson’s work often brought him to London; he was always accompanied by his wife, and upon being introduced to her at a garden party, the Prince of Wales found he could not take his eyes off her. How often they saw one another, or in what circumstances, is unknown, but after Edward became monarch she began divorce proceedings against her second husband. The divorce case was a seamy one of middle-aged adultery, and as it began toiling its way through His Majesty’s courts of law that year, there were those who trembled at the possibility that His Majesty himself might be named in the proceedings.
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Early in February 1936, less than a month into the new reign, Stanley Baldwin was told that his new sovereign intended to marry Mrs. Simpson as soon as her decree was final. The bearer of the news was a third party, however, and the prime minister dismissed it as incredible. Sir Walter Monckton, Edward’s chief confidant, later wrote: “I thought throughout, long before as well as after there was talk of marriage, that if and when the stark choice faced them between their love and his obligations as King-Emperor, they would in the end make the sacrifice, devastating though it may be.”
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Nevertheless, Monckton was troubled, and on July 7 he called on Churchill to seek advice. Clementine once called Winston “the last believer in the divine right of kings.” It was almost impossible for him to think unkind thoughts about any occupant of England’s throne. But he was aware of Wallis. At the time of George V’s death, he later wrote in an unpublished memorandum of events, “it was known through wide circles of politics and society” that Edward “had formed a deep attachment for Mrs. Simpson.” However, he continued, “although branded with the stigma of a guilty love, no companionship could have appeared more natural, more free from impropriety or grossness.” If the man existed with whom Wallis had enjoyed a platonic friendship, his name is lost to history. Yet Churchill wrote that first as prince, and now as king, Edward simply “delighted in her company, and found in her qualities as necessary to his happiness as the air he breathed.” Winston drew the peculiar inference that her presence was “a safeguard.”
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At No. 11 Morpeth Mansions that Tuesday evening Monckton told him all he knew, which was less than the whole truth. Mr. Simpson was now living with another woman, he said, and on the strength of that Wallis was seeking her freedom. Monckton added that while the King had no thought of marrying her, his strong “possessive sense” would be gratified were she a free woman. Indeed, even now he contemplated inviting her to Balmoral Castle, the royal residence in Scotland.
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Churchill frowned. His view of what happened when two worldly figures of opposite sex were alone together may have been distorted, but he knew what was and was not done in public. The divorce itself, he said, would be “most dangerous.” Gossip was one thing; court proceedings were “in another sphere.” If the woman gained her freedom under Wallis’s circumstances, “it would be open to any Minister of Religion to say from the pulpit that an innocent man had allowed himself to be divorced on account of the King’s intimacies with his wife.” He urged “most strongly” that “every effort should be made to prevent such a suit.” He also opposed, with all his vigor, any appearance by Mrs. Simpson at Balmoral. Edward must be reminded “that his friendship [with Mrs. Simpson] should not be flaunted in the eyes of the public.” Later, he wrote, he learned that this advice “was not at all pleasing to Mrs Simpson,” who had “expressed surprise that I should have been ‘against her.’ ” Thursday evening Churchill dined with the King at York House. Edward had not yet received Monckton’s report; he asked Churchill whether they had met. Winston nodded. What, asked Edward, had they discussed? Churchill answered in one word: “Gossip.” Later he wrote: “His Majesty looked at me hard, but did not pursue the subject.” And when Monckton did relay Winston’s advice, the King ignored it.
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On October 4 Wallis took a house in Regents Park, and three weeks later at Ipswich she was awarded a decree nisi. It could not become absolute, and she could not remarry, until six months had passed. Nevertheless, the story was on the front page of every American newspaper. Not so in England. The British press, responding to a personal appeal from their sovereign, suppressed the story. In fact, when Churchill wrote that the affair was common knowledge among “wide circles of politics and society,” he was referring to the people
he
knew, the highest reaches of the upper class. The rest of Britain was ignorant of the marriage crisis. Even Anthony Eden was unaware of it until Baldwin, returning from vacation on October 12, astonished him by asking: “Have you had any letters about the King?” The young foreign minister replied: “No, not so far as I know; why should I have?” The answer awaited Eden, he later wrote, when he returned to the Foreign Office and “found there had been letters from overseas, where there was no press restraint…. They wrote of the King and Mrs. Simpson and her impending divorce suit and they were critical.” Throughout the summer and early autumn, the Dominions and the Americans had been following with keen interest what H. L. Mencken called “the greatest story since the resurrection.”
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Afterward Philip Guedalla said of Baldwin that he had handled the King “with a firmer touch than [he had] the King’s enemies.” Weary and fragile though he was, baffled by the glowering events on the Continent, the Dear Vicar nevertheless retained his sensitive domestic antennae. “Here, indeed,” Macmillan recalled, “was a matter upon which his special talents and his lovable personality had their full play. The King’s problem was, at it were, a supreme ‘family’ problem. Nobody could handle this kind of thing more skilfully or more sympathetically than Baldwin, or with a surer touch.” He had been praying for the chance to score one last triumph. He could have hoped for none greater than this.
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But monarchs, even constitutional monarchs, are intimidating to those who have been brought up to revere the Crown, and this sovereign was displaying a cunning, evasive side no one in Parliament had noticed in him before. He had lied to Monckton, to his solicitor, and to his own family. Despite his solemn assurances, the terrible truth was that his intentions toward Wallis were honorable. He
did
intend to marry her. Finally, he laid the awful truth before his mother. Queen Mary, seething with rage and grief, told him that it was his constitutional duty to inform the prime minister at once.
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On Monday, November 16, he did so. Baldwin was convinced that Britons would not have Mrs. Simpson on any terms—as queen, as titled consort, or as morganatic wife. Had he been discreet, His Majesty might have kept her as his mistress, but since she was already a household word in the United States and the Dominions, sooner or later Fleet Street would make her a British celebrity. Moreover, any surreptitious arrangement was unacceptable to the King. She must become his wife, he insisted, and must share his throne. Baldwin told him that was unthinkable. The King remained adamant. Obviously, there was only one solution. Edward VIII must abdicate and be succeeded by his brother the Duke of York, “Bertie,” as King George VI. Apparently both His Majesty and the prime minister recognized the inevitability of this from the outset, but neither could mention it to the other, let alone outsiders. In Cannes, whence she had gone, “the Baltimore woman,” as the press now called her, was unaware that her next name was likely to be, not Wallis Regina, but Mrs. Windsor.

Baldwin’s next move was obligatory; he had to report this conversation to the cabinet, leaders of the opposition parties, elder statesmen, and key figures in the House of Lords. Thus informed, Lord Salisbury led a small group of outraged senior parliamentarians to No. 10 the next day. It was their position, Salisbury said, that though they would not be shocked by a commoner who wanted “to marry his mistress,” the situation was very different when “a man born to sublime responsibilities” was “ready to jeopardize them, as it seems, in order to gratify his passion for a woman of any sort.” Salisbury had invited Churchill to join this delegation, but Winston had declined. He agreed with the delegates, he explained, but were he to commit himself now, he “would lose all influence over the King.” Instead, he planned a personal appeal to His Majesty, arguing that just as millions of other Englishmen in his generation had “made every sacrifice in the War, so he must now be willing to make this sacrifice for his Country.” Here Winston encountered a problem. He had a good case, but to state it he must see His Majesty, and Baldwin wouldn’t permit that; he was keeping Edward secluded in the royal lodge at Ford Belvedere. Anyone wanting to call on him must be screened by the prime minister, who had approved only a handful of applicants, notably the Archbishop of Canterbury and Geoffrey Dawson of
The Times
.
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At this point a certain illogic began to creep into Winston’s thinking. On Wednesday of the following week, Baldwin, seeking nonpartisan support in Parliament, told Churchill, Attlee, and Sinclair that should the King refuse to abandon his marriage plans, he and his cabinet would resign; he asked what their response would be. Attlee and Sinclair quickly replied that neither would accept the seals of prime minister. Churchill said his attitude was “a little difficult,” but he would “certainly support the Government.” He was convinced that the King would abandon his marriage plans. At the same time, he saw no reason why, after Wallis was again free, they should not “continue to see one another outside marriage.” Even if one accepts his view of their relationship as a sexless friendship, this would constitute an invitation to scandal which, as he himself had told Monckton, could only tarnish the Crown. Furthermore—and here he raised an issue which would loom ever larger as the crisis grew—Churchill deplored talk of a swift decision. He saw no reason to be “hasty.” This was merely a royal “infatuation.” In time, he predicted, two or three months at most, it would pass and His Majesty would come to his senses. Baldwin, who had studied the expression on the King’s face when he spoke of Wallis, knew better.
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Churchill did see that the essential “difficulty,” as he wrote Salisbury, had risen since Wallis’s decree nisi. It was a “point of honour that a man should marry the woman who divorces herself or is divorced on his account.” This problem was “insuperable, unless the lady in question herself spontaneously gives the release.” He therefore approved the dispatch of a mission to Cannes with that objective. One was formed. Lord Beaverbrook led it; he was perhaps the only man in Edward’s kingdom audacious enough to ask his monarch’s intended “to renounce all idea of marriage, morganatic or otherwise, with the King.” All she had to do, he explained, was withdraw her petition for an absolute divorce. Winston believed that would end the crisis. His hopes were high. In a letter praising Beaverbrook he wrote: “He is a tiger in a fight… a
devoted
tiger! Very scarce breed.” But if Beaverbrook was a tiger, Wallis was a man-eater. She coldly informed him and all the other King’s men that should their sovereign decide to marry, she would place no obstacles in his path.
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Until now the public had been unaware of the impasse. Their ignorance ended on December 2, when the Right Reverend Alfred Blunt, bishop of Bradford, inadvertently touched off a furor by criticizing the King’s poor churchgoing record. The press seized upon the occasion to comment on Wallis in Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Darlington, and Birmingham newspapers. No power on earth would keep the crisis out of
The Times
the next day. The cabinet met in emergency session. Duff Cooper proposed that the coronation move forward as planned and the marriage issue be raised after the King had been crowned in May. But he was a minority of one. Were his course followed, the others told him, the monarchy, the very symbol of unity, would become the eye of a storm tearing Britain and the Empire apart, with the possibility that a King’s party might be formed—a throwback to the days when the royal court vied with the House of Commons in governing the nation. Duff Cooper was also reminded that the prime minister had other duties, among them rearmament and foreign policy in Spain, Geneva, and Ethiopia. This was incontestable. Macmillan sympathized with the King, but he later emphasized that “apart from the personal problems involved, grave injury was done to the public interest from a wider point of view. During many weeks—the whole of the late summer and autumn—the Prime Minister and his leading colleagues… were occupied with the complications and distractions of this affair at a vital period.”
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