The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (206 page)

Baldwin declared the matter must be swiftly resolved. The cabinet agreed. That evening the King once more told the prime minister that his decision to marry Wallis was irreversible; Baldwin again replied that the government’s position was unalterable. The need for a solution being urgent, there was no point in continuing the deadlock. But Churchill did not know that. As Baldwin and Edward conferred, Winston rose in the House to ask that “no irrevocable step” be taken until Parliament could be consulted. His appeal was greeted by angry murmurs. He and Beaverbrook then met with the King’s solicitor and endorsed Edward’s wish to address the nation. Within the hour Baldwin vetoed any royal broadcast as “thoroughly unconstitutional.”

The Times
leader the following morning—the day of the Albert Hall meeting—was the opening gun in Dawson’s campaign against the marriage. He wrote of “a grave constitutional issue” arising from “a conflict between the
KING’S
intentions and the advice of his Ministers,” and observed that “the high office which
HIS MAJESTY
holds is no man’s personal possession. It is a sacred trust, handed down from generation to generation.” The path of a sovereign was not easy, particularly one “who has reached middle age without the blessing of a happy marriage,” but His Majesty must understand that the monarchy itself would be “weakened if ever private inclinations were to come into open conflict with public duty and be allowed to prevail.” Edward was stung. In his memoirs he would write bitterly: “The press creates; the press destroys. All my life I had been the passive clay that it had enthusiastically worked into the hackneyed image of a Prince Charming. Now it had whirled around and was bent upon demolishing the natural man who had been there all the time.”
¹⁶⁰

Emotionally, Churchill was becoming a loose cannon, making contradictory statements as he tried to reconcile the unsuitable marriage with his devotion to the Crown. Lunching with Sir Walter Citrine, he said very quietly, “I shall defend him. I think it is my duty.” It was also a violation of his assurance to Salisbury, and Citrine, startled, said, “What? Irrespective of what he has done?” Winston, according to his companion, “looked grave, and, putting his hands on his breast, he said with emotion, ‘He feels it here.’ ”
¹⁶¹

Those closest to Churchill were appalled. His daughter Mary recalls that Clementine “disagreed profoundly. She saw something else very clearly, too,” Mary remembers. “She realized that Winston’s championship of the King’s cause would do him great harm, and that he would be accused of making political capital out of this crisis.” Harold Nicolson wrote that Churchill’s “line” was “let the King choose his girl.” But there was more to it than that. Later Winston’s physician observed: “King and country, in that order, that’s about all the religion Winston has.” Yet he, too, missed the point. Part of it was Churchill’s deep, unquestioning loyalty to those he had befriended. One of his secretaries recalls that even if a man had publicly disgraced himself, he would say, “I don’t want to hear it. This man is my friend.”
¹⁶²

Lady Violet Bonham Carter, after trying to reason with him about the issue and being “met by black hostility,” concluded, as Clementine had, that he was “quite oblivious” to the public’s distaste for “a hole-and-corner morganatic marriage.” Violet wrote that “his championing of Edward VIII was inspired by a romantic loyalty. He would have been prepared to stand alone beside his King against a world of arms.” Winston himself said much the same thing later: “I should have been ashamed if, in my independent and unofficial position, I had not cast about for any lawful means, even the most forlorn, to keep him on the Throne of his fathers.” This was intuitive, not reasonable; it was as though the King had called: “Now who will stand on either hand / And keep the bridge with me?” Two had sprung forward: Beaverbrook and Churchill. But their incentives were very different. Later Beaverbrook said he had been trying to “get” Baldwin. Winston, aroused, hotly replied: “
I
wasn’t trying to ‘get’ anyone. I wanted to save the King.”
¹⁶³

It couldn’t be done, and when, the day after
The Times
editorial and the Albert Hall rally, Edward asked the prime minister if he might see Churchill, as “an old friend” with whom he might “talk freely,” Baldwin agreed. He knew he had won. He had just told His Majesty that the cabinet wanted a decision during the weekend—it was now Friday—or, if possible, this evening. Edward had replied: “You will not have to wait much longer.” He hadn’t wanted the crown; he wouldn’t fight for it. Conservative MP Henry Channon wrote in his diary: “The King told [the Duke of Kent] that over two years ago while he knew he was an excellent Prince of Wales and liked the job, he nevertheless felt that he could never ‘stick’ being King as he put it, he was afraid of being a bad one. He could never tolerate the restrictions, the etiquette, the loneliness; so perhaps if the issue had not arisen something else would have.”
¹⁶⁴

Yet His Majesty did not reveal this submissiveness to Churchill, who went to Fort Belvedere on the evening of December 4 under the impression that he could save him, nor did he mention Baldwin’s time limit and his tacit acceptance of it. Churchill’s impression was that Edward “wanted a fortnight to think the matter over.” Winston had assumed that the prime minister would give him no less than a month. He said: “Your Majesty need not have the slightest fear about time. If you require time there is no force in this country which would or could deny it to you. Mr. Baldwin would certainly not resist you.” He added a piece of advice. The King should not “on any account leave the country.” That would “produce the worst possible impression”; everyone would say he had “gone to meet Mrs. Simpson.” Edward demurred; he had no intention of seeing her, but thought “a complete change in the Alps” was what he needed. Nevertheless, he dropped the idea. Winston was his friend and champion; he couldn’t quarrel with him. In his memoirs he would write: “When Mr Baldwin had talked to me about the Monarchy, it had seemed a dry and lifeless thing. But when Mr Churchill spoke it lived, it grew, it became suffused with light.”
¹⁶⁵

Saturday morning Winston sent the prime minister a complete account of his audience with the King and prepared a statement for publication in the Sunday papers. It opened: “I plead for time and patience.” There was no conflict between King and Parliament, he argued, because Parliament had not been consulted, nor allowed to express an opinion, and for a monarch to abdicate “upon the advice of the Ministry of the day” would be without precedent. Because Mrs. Simpson’s decree would not be absolute until April 1937, the marriage could not be celebrated until spring, and “for various reasons” it might “never be accomplished at all.” Surely “the utmost chivalry and compassion” should be shown “toward a gifted and beloved King torn between private and public obligations and duty.”
¹⁶⁶

Churchill’s assurance that the King “need not have the slightest fear about time” had been ill-advised. Actually, Baldwin told his senior ministers that same Sunday, “This matter must be finished before Christmas.” According to Monckton, who was there, Chamberlain insisted even that was too much time; the uncertainty, he said, was “hurting the Christmas trade.” And word of the King’s fatalistic acceptance of dethronement was spreading. Beaverbrook had phoned Churchill with the bad news: “Our cock won’t fight.” Winston, refusing to give in, drafted a compromise statement for His Majesty. In it the King would give the cabinet veto power over his marital plans, should the question arise in April. Sinclair cosigned the proposal, but when it reached Fort Belvedere the King rejected it “on the grounds,” as Winston later wrote Boothby, “that it would not be honourable to play for time when his fundamental resolve was unchanged, and he declared it unchangeable.” After that, Churchill added, “No human effort could have altered the course of events.”
¹⁶⁷

Unfortunately, before word of the King’s response reached him, Winston had blundered into the worst political mauling of his life. Bob Boothby, one of a handful of MPs who had remained loyal to him, had been his weekend houseguest at Chartwell; there he had noted that Churchill was “silent and restless and glancing into corners,” like “a dog… about to be sick on the carpet.” Later Boothby told a friend his premonition, on Sunday, that “Winston was going to do something dreadful,” but that he never dreamed he would come into the House of Commons and be “sick right across the floor.”
¹⁶⁸

Monday, December 11, Churchill attended a meeting of the Anglo-French Luncheon Club, and, according to Boothby, arrived in Parliament “drunk, for the first and only time in his life.” It was Question Time. The prime minister was at his best, patiently answering queries about the crisis. The House was friendly; MPs had spent the weekend taking the pulse of their constituencies and had found little support for Edward. “What is so tragic,” Harold Nicolson wrote Vita, “is that now that people have got over the first sentimental shock, they
want
the King to abdicate. I mean opinion in the House is now almost wholly anti-King.” MPs, he wrote, were saying that “ ‘If he can first betray his duty… there is no good in the man.’ ”
¹⁶⁹

As Winston took his seat Baldwin was explaining, rather disingenuously, that His Majesty was still weighing his decision and that until he reached it the government would make no move. Winston later acknowledged in his letter to Boothby that he “did not sufficiently realise how far the Prime Minister had gone to meet the views I had expressed. I ought of course to have welcomed what he said….” Instead, oblivious to the proceedings he was interrupting, he rose to defend his press statement of the day before. He began: “May I ask my right hon. Friend whether he could give us an assurance that no irrevocable step will be taken before the House has received a full statement—” That was as far as he got. The House rose as one man in a spectacular display of collective fury. Macmillan recalled “the universal hostility shown to him from every quarter—Conservatives, Socialists, and Liberals.” Winterton, who served in the House of Commons for forty-seven years, called the demonstration “one of the angriest manifestations I have ever heard directed against any man in the House of Commons.” Individual cries were audible—“Drop it!” “Order!” “Twister!”—but most voices joined in a wordless, derisive, ear-splitting roar.
¹⁷⁰

In his diary Leo Amery wrote that Churchill was “completely staggered by the unanimous hostility of the House,” and Nicolson noted: “Winston collapsed utterly in the House…. He has undone in five minutes the patient reconstruction work of two years.” Winston himself felt “entirely alone in a wrathful House of Commons. I am not, when in action, unduly affected by hostile currents of feeling,” but now it was “almost physically impossible to make myself heard.” Nevertheless, he stood defiantly, in his familiar fighting stance, his jaw thrust forward and his expression grim, until, to his astonishment, the Speaker ruled him out of order for attempting to deliver a speech during Question Time. Flushed, he turned to Baldwin, and, according to Beaverbrook, shouted: “You won’t be satisfied until you’ve broken him, will you?” Then he stalked out, followed only by Brendan Bracken. It was,
The Times
declared the next morning, “the most striking rebuff in modern parliamentary history.”
¹⁷¹

So extraordinary a spectacle suggests motivation which lay deeper than the immediate issue, in which Churchill, after all, had played a minor role, and an ineffectual one at that. Indeed, the entire response to the Simpson affair, public and private, seems to have been an overreaction. It had “completely absorbed the public interest,” in Boothby’s opinion, because “here, at last, was something that was moving and exciting without being dangerous.” One could safely commit oneself; whichever way it went, the solution would not be a matter of life or death. Therefore, Britons could release the tension arising from frustration over rearmament and the growing likelihood of another European war. They had brooded over Churchill’s recitation of alarming facts, resenting his insistence that they face the growing danger. As events vindicated him, that exasperation grew. Now, when he was clearly wrong, they made him the target of their chagrin. In raging at him they were raging at the prospect of another great conflict, one they did not deserve and for which, as they saw it, they bore no responsibility.
¹⁷²

After the Churchill shoutdown, events moved swiftly toward a denouement. On Thursday, December 10, the King signed the Deed of Abdication, stipulating that his reign would end at noon the following day. Baldwin brought it to the House of Commons that same afternoon, had it read by the clerk, and then delivered an excellent speech tracing the course of the crisis from its origins. Holding up the signed document, he declared: “No more grave deed has ever been received by Parliament, and no more difficult, I may say repugnant, task has ever been imposed upon a Minister.”
¹⁷³

That last part was not entirely true. Encountering Harold Nicolson afterward, Baldwin said, “I had a success, my dear Nicolson, at the moment I most needed it.” Coming after a year crowded with disappointments, the acclaim over his masterstroke can hardly have been repugnant. But no one begrudged him it. In the
Evening Standard
Churchill wrote that the prime minister had “never spoken with more force or more parliamentary skill.” His own brief account to the House of his action during the crisis—pointing out that he had been acting based on the limited information then available to him, was heard next—heard first in distrustful silence, then with sympathy, and finally with what Hansard’s record described as “loud cheers.” In his diary Amery wrote: “Winston rose in face of a hostile House and in an admirably phrased little speech executed a strategical retreat.”
¹⁷⁴

On Friday Churchill lunched at Fort Belvedere, working with the King on the text of his abdication broadcast. As Edward wrote in his memoirs, it was an address which any “practiced student of Churchilliana could spot at a glance,” with such phrases as “bred in the constitutional tradition by my father” and “one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me—a happy home with his wife and children.” Afterward Winston wrote of his host, “His mettle was marvellous.” So it should have been. Edward was free of duties he detested; soon he would be reunited with his love, and he could devote the rest of his life to pleasure as His Royal Highness, the Duke of Windsor, the title his brother was about to bestow upon him—although, at the insistence of the Royal Family and to Edward’s anger, Wallis would be denied the honorific Her Royal Highness. But she would be a duchess, which was a lot more than anyone in Baltimore would have predicted. At the end of his luncheon with Winston, Edward glanced at his watch and realized that “I ceased to be King.” As he saw Churchill off, he wrote, “there were tears in his eyes. I can still see him standing at the door; hat in one hand, stick in the other. Something must have stirred in his mind; tapping out the solemn measure with his walking stick, he began to recite, as if to himself.” The something was from Andrew Marvell’s ode on the beheading of King Charles I: