The Viceroy's Daughters (27 page)

What seemed much more serious, though known only to those behind the scenes, was that the king's passion for Mrs. Simpson was causing him to neglect his kingly duties. By the beginning of April he was spending most of his time in his private sanctum, Fort Belvedere, with her.

Where Freda Dudley Ward would have gently pushed him toward his work, Mrs. Simpson did not. The red boxes that he had scrutinized so punctiliously at the beginning of his reign now lay unopened, or opened and with their papers scattered carelessly around the house. Since officials could only go there by invitation and often had to wait for hours, their chances of getting the king's initials on all the papers sent were low. Both the negligent approach to business and the lack of security horrified those in his office.

On May 27 the king gave a dinner party at York House, ostensibly in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Baldwin, at which Mrs. Simpson was given precedence over the prime minister's wife. This unheard-of breach of protocol was construed by many as insulting to the dignity of both monarch and prime minister. Queen Mary, sixty-nine the previous day, was deeply upset. From the king's point of view, Mrs. Simpson was to become his future wife and therefore the precedence was indisputably hers. His order that the Simpsons' names be published in the Court Circular (a similarly unprecedented move) was another attempt to make clear publicly the nature of their relationship.

Gossip about the king and Mrs. Simpson had now become rife. When Churchill suggested to the king, at a private dinner party, that such gossip would increase exponentially if Mrs. Simpson were free, the king answered disingenuously that he did not see why Wallis should remain bound in an unhappy marriage merely because of her friendship with him, an answer that he was to repeat again and again. “By the end of June,” wrote Monckton later, “I was seriously worried not about the prospect of the King marrying Mrs. Simpson but about the damage that would be done to the King if he continued to make his friendship with her even more conspicuous.”

Mrs. Simpson's sway over the king may have been responsible for the latest blow, as unexpected as it was dismaying, which the Metcalfes were dealt. The expected household post for Fruity did not materialize; instead, on June 23, 1936, Mountbatten received a letter from the king asking him to be his personal aide-de-camp.

Baba was bitterly resentful at what she saw as a betrayal of Fruity by the king. She knew that if he had been given a job in the royal household their life together would seem less pointless. “I had a most agonising hour with Baba in the Park and oh! How she cried,” wrote Irene as Baba gave way to her despair over the combination of her love for Tom and their rupture, her inability to escape with Jock Whitney to a new life in America and the massive blow to Fruity's hopes and expectations. Irene sent her footman to the Grosvenor Road apartment with a note to Tom about Baba's wretchedness and drove Nick to Denham.

Her letter drew blood: Tom rang up at midnight asking to see her the next day. They met for lunch and Tom agreed to climb down over his insistence that Diana Guinness come out to Porquerolles that summer. Triumphant, Irene went off to Baba's house in Cowley Street to wait for her there and tell her the good news. “In she came at four, exquisite and perfect, and after all I had done for her she merely said it was all too late and she was not going. What a woman!”

The rows between Baba and Fruity, the outpourings of the unhappy Fruity to Irene, the depression over the king's failure to give Fruity a job, the standoffs between Baba and Tom, both equally obdurate, fill pages of Irene's diary. The unhappy Fruity, who had been drinking too much, was dispatched to Freiburg for a cure; he complained bitterly that Baba was not coming with him. “She should be beside me now when I am ill,” he told Irene.

When Tom telephoned to say that he was being operated on for appendicitis at nine-thirty on the morning of July 29, at 31 Queen's Gate, it must have held macabre undertones for them all of Cimmie's last days, and his mother promised to stay in the nursing home and telegraph Irene with the result. Yet again, she was to be dispatched with Nanny and Mick to Newquay while the older children would enjoy a more sophisticated holiday with Tom and his mother at Sorrento. Baba, after a visit to friends, would be in Berlin for the opening of the Olympic Games.

On August 20, Irene received a letter from Lady Mosley to say that as they had all boarded the little local boat at Naples, out of the blue appeared the dreaded Diana Guinness—fetched by Tom's servant Dundas.

Only someone with Tom's powerful personality could have controlled such a diverse household. The children were subliminally aware of their father's relationship with Mrs. Guinness and their grandmother's loathing for her, the two women as different as possible. Lady Mosley, who seldom opened a book and lacked any interest in the arts, seemed hopelessly philistine and uneducated to the cultivated Diana, who took refuge in a politeness made all the more excessive by the Mitford habit of loading drawled sentences with superlatives (“unutterably awful and affected,” reported Lady Mosley later).

In September, Irene was excited to learn that she was to be invited to Berlin for the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg, though when told that she would be the government's guest in Nuremberg, she had reservations: “I am not sure I want to be obligated to the Führer.”

All the same, she went and, along with other visiting dignitaries, was taken in one of a fleet of large red buses to the zeppelin field where the parade and rally were to take place. Her diary comments on the great stands all around the field, the main block hung with red flags along the back wall, the flags on the skyline surmounted by eagles, seeming to float in the light breeze.

“Punctually at 10 the Fuehrer arrived at the head of a string of motor cars, standing erect in a brown uniform,” she wrote. “The car stopped at the foot of the steps and standing erect in it he reviewed 45,000 land troops. Each camp passed him headed by its band and silver emblem. They were all clad in buff uniforms and carried spades over their shoulders. These men have to train in a camp for six months before their two years in the army and they do great land reclaimment and afforestation. Why don't we use our unemployed like that?”

After the review, Hitler mounted the rostrum. “Then for the first time I heard the great man speak,” noted Irene, a fluent German speaker thanks to her year in Dresden before coming out. “He replied with a fine fighting oration stoking up to a great height of emotion that National Socialism must live in the hearts of the people and not in parades and colour shows.” It must have brought back many an echo of her brother-in-law, but when she later described the stirring scene to Baba and Fruity all her sister would talk about by way of response was her autumn wardrobe.

Clothes were a major preoccupation with both Metcalfes. Fruity, tall and handsome in perfectly cut riding clothes or tweeds set off by the upright carriage of the soldier, was a perfect foil for Baba's slender, immaculate elegance. But whereas Baba would spend hours at her dressmaker to ensure that every detail was right, Fruity would often ask her opinion over the daily minutiae of dress. “Which tie shall it be this morning, Babs darling?” he would demand. “D'ye think it should be the blue? Or would you say the red?” The constant flow of questions drove Baba to distraction and, according to Nanny, accounted for much of Baba's bad behavior and rudeness, often to Irene, whose taste she characterized as simultaneously both overflamboyant and dowdy.

Unsurprisingly, when Baba asked if the Metcalfes could use her house as a London base for the middle of every week the following summer, Irene hardly hesitated before writing to tell her sister that she did not think it would work.

Soon these family squabbles were eclipsed by the royal romance. In August the king, instead of going to Balmoral, had taken Wallis Simpson on a cruise along the Dalmatian coast in the yacht
Nahlin
, with a party of friends but without her husband. They were photographed everywhere, their liaison was openly discussed in the American newspapers, and the buzz of gossip in the small world of English society rose to crescendo pitch.

On September 23 an incident occurred that caused widespread anger and disgust. As the king, following the usual royal custom, was staying at Balmoral during September, he had been asked to open the new Aberdeen Infirmary. He had declined to do so on the grounds that he was still in mourning for his father and in his place had sent the duke of York. Although those on Deeside considered themselves to have a special claim to royal favor, this shirking of a royal duty might have been forgiven had the king not driven to Ballater station to meet Mrs. Simpson and back to Balmoral with her sitting openly beside him in the car. “That night, on the dour granite walls ‘Down with the American whore' was chalked up,” recorded
Coronation Commentary
, a book of the period by Geoffrey Dennis. The king had, of course, ignored Churchill's suggestion that Mrs. Simpson should not stay at Balmoral but somewhere nearby.

She seemed to be everywhere, always smothered in jewels. “My eyes were dazed at Mrs. Simpson's emeralds!” reads Irene's diary after a party at the American Embassy on October 2, 1936. Harold Nicolson commented in his diary: “It irritates me that that silly little man should destroy a great monarchy by giggling into a flirtation with a third-rate American.” Or as Ramsay MacDonald had more bluntly put it after seeing Mrs. Simpson swept to Ascot in a royal carriage: “The people of this country do not mind fornication but they loathe adultery.”

 

On October 4, Tom led his fascists in a parade and march in the East End of London, where there was a large Jewish community and a sizable group of communist voters. Although, as usual, he obeyed the commands of the police to the letter, halting the parade and changing the direction of the march at their command, it was a needlessly provocative action and stirred up trouble as effectively as a stone lobbed into a bees' nest. The resultant melee—overturned trucks, the hurling of bricks, stones and glass, the charges with any handy blunt instrument—became known as the Battle of Cable Street. One of its repercussions was the passing of the Public Order Act, which, among other clauses, forbade the wearing of uniforms for such marches.

Irene and Baba viewed the fray entirely from Tom's perspective (“It was the Jews and communists who created the disorder”)—but their reaction might have been different had they known what transpired two days afterward.

On October 6, 1936, Tom Mosley married Diana Guinness, in the Berlin drawing room of Dr. Josef Goebbels and his wife, Magda. Both knew that a register office marriage in England or France would not escape the notice of the press, and Diana used her friendship with Hitler to achieve the secrecy they desired. After the wedding, Hitler simply ordered the registrar to put their marriage certificate away in a drawer.

Tom, who did not inform even his mother of his marriage, had insisted on this secrecy. He told Diana it was to protect her from attack by his political opponents; its hidden agenda was so that he could continue his affair with Baba. Diana told her immediate family: she knew that her parents would view both her and Tom more kindly if they were married and she wanted the freedom to see her youngest sister, Debo, who had been barred from seeing her because she was “living in sin.”

Baba was still torn between desire to break out of what she saw as her stultifying life and loyalty toward Fruity. The guilt she felt about her treatment of her husband and her betrayal of him with, of all people, her sister's husband found its expression in behavior best described as a kind of poisonous gloom. Sometimes the husbandless, childless Irene, watching her, longed to tell her to be thankful for what
she had, otherwise she would “miss everything warm and lovely in life.”

The king's love affair was now the sole topic of conversation at every luncheon or dinner party. “Lunched with Baba and Fruity and Bobby Sweeney and we discussed the outrageous Cavalcade and Time with several awful things about Mrs. Simpson and the gloomy danger of criticism of the King,” wrote Irene that October, before going with the Metcalfes to look at a house, Wilton Place, in Belgravia that they were thinking of buying. What they did not of course know was that a few days earlier, on October 27, the king had had his first interview with the prime minister. Baldwin had asked if it would be possible to halt the Simpson divorce proceedings—about to be heard at Ipswich—as, with Mrs. Simpson free, there would be no stopping any gossip. The king gave Baldwin the same answer as he had given Churchill four months earlier.

The Metcalfes did not spend much time speculating about the king's intentions. Fruity was too miserable and Baba too preoccupied. Her infatuation with Tom Mosley was as strong as ever: in mid-November she tried to persuade Irene to come with her to Italy for a week, purely to act as a smokescreen as she had “some important secret service work to do for T.” Fortunately, the scheme came to nothing; instead, Baba and Fruity settled on Wilton Place, although it was the only thing they did agree on that bitter autumn. Soon, history itself would cause a change in their circumstances.

24

Abdication

At the end of October 1936, Wallis Simpson was granted a decree nisi in the Assize Court at Ipswich. Shortly after this, the king told Walter Monckton that he intended to marry her. Although Monckton had realized the depth of the king's passion, he had not expected this. “I did not before November 1936 think that marriage between the King and Mrs. Simpson was contemplated,” he noted at the time. “The King told me that he had often wished to tell me but refrained for my own sake lest I should be embarrassed. It must have been difficult to him since I had always and honestly assumed in my conversations with him that such an idea (which was suggested in some other quarters) was out of the question.”

Shortly afterward the king's private secretary, Sir Alex Hardinge, wrote the king a forceful letter in which he suggested that to quell some of the lurid speculation Mrs. Simpson should go abroad for a time. The king then decided to inform Baldwin of his intention to marry, adding that he was prepared to leave the throne if necessary (he told his family the same day). To Walter Monckton, the prime minister said that he did not think either the country or the dominions would stand for the marriage.

From then on, things moved swiftly. On Sunday, November 15, Monckton lunched with the press baron Esmond Rothermere, who put forward the proposal of a morganatic marriage (one in which the wife does not take the rank or title of her husband), suggesting the same thing that evening to Baldwin. The king, desperate to gain his objective, preferably with Wallis as queen, sent for the prime minister and asked him to ascertain the feelings of the dominions and the cabinet, thus forcing Baldwin to take up the matter on an official basis.

Telegrams were sent to the dominions, setting out three possible options: that Wallis should become queen; that it should be a morganatic marriage; or that the king should abdicate. The prime minister concluded: “I feel convinced that neither the Parliament nor the great majority of the public here should or would accept such a plan.” To which the cabinet added its own cadenza: “any more than they would accept the proposal that Mrs. Simpson should become Queen.”

A fourth possibility—that he should give up Mrs. Simpson and remain on the throne—had been decisively ruled out by the king, although privately Walter Monckton believed, like the royal family, that “if and when the stark choice faced them between their love and his obligations as King Emperor they would in the end each make the sacrifice, devastating though it would be.”

The dominions plumped for abdication—Canada somewhat halfheartedly, South Africa and Australia categorically. New Zealand was less emphatic: Mrs. Simpson would be impossible as queen but there was something to be said for a morganatic marriage. By now she had left the house in Regent's Park, which the king had rented her, for the safety of Fort Belvedere; soon after she went, a booing, jeering mob congregated outside and stones were thrown through the windows. From the Fort, with her faithful Aunt Bessie in attendance, she wrote a somewhat disingenuous letter to Edwina Mountbatten on November 30:

Edwina dear,
I am lying here making all sorts of wise decisions, schemes, etc for leaving England for a while. I am really worn out with all the talk and all the furore the U.S. press has caused here, and I know how happy my departure would make England. I think I shall have to use the story of Paris for hats, and then be hard to find, and then those charming people, the man in the street and the lunatics, will forget me, and all will be well once more.

Love Wallis

 

Edwina must have received it the day before the event that finally brought the affair into the open. On Sunday, December 2, the bishop of Bradford, concerned at the king's lack of regular churchgoing, preached a sermon on the sovereign's duties as head of the Church of England. With what they saw as an attack by a cleric on the king's morality, the press felt free to unleash the flood of stories hitherto held back by the newspaper proprietors.

The following day, December 3, the king had another audience with Baldwin. He now wished to get Wallis out of the country as quickly as possible. It was decided that she would stay with her old friends Herman and Katharine Rogers at their villa, Lou Viei, near Cannes, escorted thither by Lord Brownlow. The king, Wallis and his old friend Perry Brownlow dined at the Fort that night, after which Wallis set off with a hundred thousand pounds' worth of jewelry, without saying goodbye to any of the staff.

The news of Wallis's departure and of the king's intentions was around London in a flash. Most people felt like Irene, who wrote on December 4: “I feel so hideously angry that the King should have carted his people and England by asking to marry her. Mrs. Simpson has apparently vanished to the South of France. Went to bed raging at this woman and the appalling catastrophe whatever the result she has brought on the King.”

On the same day the king had another interview with Baldwin and asked to see Churchill. As he was not in the cabinet, and Baldwin had no objection, that night Churchill dined at the Fort. His advice was to play for time, largely to see what measure of support the king would gain. Later, Churchill gave an account of that meeting to Robert Bernays, who wrote in his diary on December 9:

Winston told me that the King was in an extraordinary mental state when he visited him and that once or twice he seemed to be seized with a mental anaesthesia.

Where I do sympathise with the King is in his appalling loneliness. Winston found him quite alone. He hasn't one real friend to lean upon in this frightful emergency. His case seems to be arrested development. He has never passed the stage from boyhood to manhood. He is the spoiled child of success with the film star mentality. He sees his job only in terms of cheering crowds. He has never thought the matter out. He imagined that he could quietly retire into private life, leaving his brother to perform the dreary ceremonial functions while he spent a tranquil life gardening at Fort Belvedere and holidaying on the Riviera, occasionally emerging to open a hospital or review the Fleet and receive the cheers that mean so much to him.

For the first time he has been brought up against the fact that abdication means exile and that for the rest of his life he can serve no useful purpose.

 

As the terrible week rolled on, the two men who had spent so many of the early, carefree years with the king sent him supportive notes:

My dear David [wrote Mountbatten to his friend and cousin], I can't bear sitting here doing nothing to help you in your terrible trouble.

Do you realise how many loyal supporters of all classes you have?

If you want me to help you, to do any service for you, or even to feel you have a friend of Wallis's to keep you company, you have only to telephone.

I don't want to be a nuisance but I don't want to feel there is nothing I can do except bite people's heads off who have the temerity to say anything disloyal about their king—though practically none do so—at any rate in my presence.

Your ever loyal devoted dutiful Dickie

 

Fruity, whose devotion had never wavered, wrote a heartfelt letter from Wilton Place.

Your Majesty,
Words cannot express how deeply I feel for you during these terrible days of anxiety. When I was in trouble you stood by me, and I wish to God that I could be of some service to you now.

Please always remember, Sir, that I am ready to do anything for you at any time.

 

Monckton, clever, practical and as a lawyer aware of all the constitutional and legal implications of the various courses of action mooted to the king, put forward the idea that Parliament should pass two bills immediately: one in which the king renounced the throne and the other granting Wallis's decree absolute
*
(without this, Wallis would not gain her divorce and the king would have abdicated in vain), but most of the cabinet rejected this as it smacked of a bargain. Everyone, including the king, felt that the matter should be decided quickly, as the general uncertainty was destabilizing.

The king's own wish was to broadcast his intentions to the nation and then to go abroad for a while to give the people time to come to a measured decision. “I have read the broadcast he wished to make,” wrote Monckton. “In it he asks for the happiness of marriage, etc, and says neither he nor Wallis would insist on her being made Queen but that a title suitable for his wife should be given her.” This broadcast, with its appeal to the emotions of his listeners, was disallowed as being unconstitutional.

By now the king had virtually decided to abdicate, though on December 8 Baldwin went once more to the Fort to plead with him for a reversal of his decision. Again, the king refused, as he did a last-ditch appeal from the cabinet the following day. Though utterly steadfast, he was exhausted, both by the tension of awaiting the outcome and by the constant telephone calls from Cannes in which Wallis alternately threatened to give him up or demanded that he obtain as much as he could get financially from the royal coffers.

“George [the Duke of Kent] came in to see us at six in despair,” wrote Edwina Mountbatten in her diary. “He had just returned from the Fort where the King has definitely made up his mind to abdicate in favour of the Duke of York. Everything these days is too depressing for words.” That night there was the famous last dinner at which were present two of the king's brothers, the dukes of York and Kent, Walter Monckton and several others. “The King exhausted but puts up magnificent show,” wrote Monckton.

By the end of Thursday, December 10, Monckton was equally exhausted. He arrived at Fort Belvedere at 1
a.m
. with the draft Instrument of Abdication (to come into effect on Friday, December 11) and at 2:40
a.m
. was caught by the king for a talk before he could retire to bed. At 9:30
a.m
. the duke of York arrived at the Fort, followed a few minutes later by the duke of Gloucester, with the duke of Kent arriving at ten.

Within minutes, the signing and witnessing of six copies of the Instrument of Abdication and seven of the address for the House of Commons had begun, the sheets of paper spread over a simple mahogany table, with the king alone unaffected by the atmosphere of despondency. “Dickie down at the Fort all day,” runs Edwina Mountbatten's diary. “Chaos reigns. Final preparations for the King's Abdication being made. Everyone completely sunk except the King, who remains fairly calm and cheerful, and completely determined.”

Monckton returned to London with two notes from the king to Baldwin for inclusion in the prime minister's statement to the House of Commons that afternoon. Later that day Baldwin joined the king, the duke of York and their financial advisers at Fort Belvedere to work out a settlement.

Here the king, no doubt under tremendous pressure from Mrs. Simpson, made an uncharacteristic but fatal mistake: he lied to his brother about the size of his fortune, estimated by most authorities at around £1.1 million, inclusive of a settlement on Mrs. Simpson of three hundred thousand pounds. Instead, he told the duke that he only had ninety thousand pounds. He made the same statement to Winston Churchill, with the result that neither trusted him again—to the immense detriment of future relations.

Baldwin's statement to Parliament that afternoon was described by Harold Nicolson as “Sophoclean and almost unbearable.” It affected Robert Bernays equally, who wrote:

I suppose none of us who were present will forget as long as they live the scene in the House of Commons on the day of the Abdication.

Baldwin's speech was an amazing performance. Its material was little pieces of paper with ideas on them contributed obviously by his colleagues. When he came in with the despatch box he found he had lost his key. He desperately searched his pockets for it and then found it under Neville Chamberlain's legs. Then he tried to sort his papers, upset them and had to retrieve them from the floor. Then Hoare had to answer a question and put his papers on top of Baldwin's notes with the result that they were upset again and had to be retrieved from the floor once more.

 

At Denham, Irene went into Micky's nursery at 6
p.m
., where she found him cutting pictures of Mrs. Simpson out of the
Daily Sketch
and saying, “Nasty Mrs. Simpson,” “Horrid Mrs. Simpson,” before chopping them into pieces. “I gather he had overheard Nanny saying something in the nursery,” wrote Irene. “Tears ran down our faces, both Nanny and I, as we listened to the six o'clock news and Mr. Baldwin's statement.”

That night the king worked late on his broadcast, getting up early the following morning to finish it. He had invited Churchill to luncheon, to give a final polish, and it was while they were together that he ceased to be king. As Churchill left, he quoted Marvell's famous lines on the beheading of Charles I: “He nothing common did or mean, upon that memorable scene.” The ex-king's servants did not share that view; none of them would accompany him into his new life.

That evening the ex-king left the Fort at eight-thirty, with his brothers, to dine at Royal Lodge. After dinner Walter Monckton fetched him and drove him to Windsor Castle, from where, at 1
0
p.m
., he was to make his broadcast to the nation under the title of Prince Edward. “You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duty as King as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love” was the sentence that best sums up his attitude—and his failure.