Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (88 page)

This unprecedented crisis affected Queen Mary on a deeply personal level. Years later, she still found it hard to discuss the incident in detail, though she described Edward’s actions as a “shock” that “grieve me beyond words.”
¹³⁵⁰
Not only did the king’s actions offend her sense of reverence for the institution of the monarchy, but the fact that the epicenter was her own son was at times too much to bear. Unwilling to do nothing while Edward undermined the credibility of the royal family, Queen Mary made sure to be seen out in public presenting an image of calm strength. As often as possible, she was out visiting exhibitions, museums, and the many Christmas festivities that were under way.

In early December, she was at Marlborough House with Bertie when Edward arrived to inform them of his decision to abdicate. Upon being announced, the king walked across the room, kissed his mother’s hand, and apologized for calling at so late an hour. He had something important to say, he told them. They were curious about what he might say, his mother replied. Taking a sip of whiskey, Edward, standing with his back to a roaring fire, blurted it out.

“Mama, I find I cannot live alone as King, and I must marry Mrs Simpson.” Still calm and collected, Mary asked him what he was going to do.

“I shall abdicate,” he told them. “Mrs Simpson is everything in my life, and all that matters is our happiness.” Queen Mary stood silent for a moment.

“No, you are mistaken, David,” she replied in one of the rare angry moments of her life. “All that matters is our duty. Consider the millions of young men who sacrificed their
lives
for their country in the Great War. And you will not even give up for your country a twice-married woman who is not even yet free to marry you!”

“No, Mama, all that matters is our happiness. That is all,” the king shot back again.
¹³⁵¹

No longer able to be silent, Bertie chimed in, his voice stuttering with emotion. And what of Elizabeth? he asked. What of his family? What about the sacrifices Edward was expecting everyone else to make for the sake of his happiness? The king merely shrugged off his brother’s remarks, flippantly telling him he would make a good king. Then, as quickly as he entered, Edward kissed his mother’s hand and darted out of the room, leaving the pair stunned.

“He is wrong in almost everything he is doing,” Mary told Bertie, “and only right in one thing.”

“What is that, Mama?” Bertie asked.

Turning to her son, she replied, “In his belief that you’ll make a very good king. And as Papa always said, Elizabeth will make a wonderful Queen.”
¹³⁵²

The next day, Mary sent Edward a letter which he appears to have mistaken for acceptance of his decision: “As your mother I must send you a letter of true sympathy on the difficult position in which you are placed. I have been thinking so much of you all day, hoping you are making a wise decision for your future.”
¹³⁵³
The king sent his mother a warm reply: “I feel so happy and relieved to have at last been able to tell you my wonderful secret, a dream which I have for so long been praying might one day come true. Now that Wallis will be free to marry me in April it only remains for me to decide the best action I take for your future happiness for the good of all concerned.”
¹³⁵⁴
In a letter to her daughter-in-law Elizabeth, Queen Mary was more candid about her feelings. “I am more worried than I can say at what is going on.” Throughout the crisis, she felt very lonely and isolated. “There is no one I can talk to about it, except you two [Elizabeth and Bertie] as Mary is away & one can’t discuss that subject with friends,” she wrote to Elizabeth. “What a mess to have got into & for such an unworthy person too!!!”
¹³⁵⁵

At 10:00 a.m. on December 10, 1936, the official announcement was made. Queen Mary wrote how “the paper” was “drawn up for David’s abdication of the Throne of this Empire because he wishes to marry Mrs Simpson!!!!! The whole affair has … been very painful—It is a terrible blow to us all.”
¹³⁵⁶
King Edward VIII became the first English monarch in history to voluntarily give up the throne. Later that day, Prime Minister Baldwin finally revealed the intimate details of the abdication crisis to the House of Commons. In her diary that night, Queen Mary recorded that this “was received in silence & with real regret. The more one thinks of this affair the more regrettable it becomes.”
¹³⁵⁷
The next day, Edward formally abdicated in the presence of his three brothers. He was forty days shy of having reigned for just one year. This gave him the dubious distinction of being the shortest-reigning monarch in British history and the fifth shortest in English history. That day, he made a radio broadcast informing the people of his choice: “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 duties as king as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love.”
¹³⁵⁸
He also said that to avoid further scandal, he would be leaving the country immediately.

That night, the now ex-king met with his family to say their farewells at Royal Lodge, in Windsor Great Park. Queen Mary and the Princess Royal were the first to drive back to London after saying a “dreadful goodbye.” The queen confided that “[t]he whole thing was too pathetic for words.”
¹³⁵⁹
At the stroke of midnight, Edward and Bertie said an emotional good-bye. Edward bowed to his brother, hailing him as his new king, and the pair parted company. As part of Edward’s abdication, it was agreed that he and Wallis would never again reside in England, though in the future they would fight to have this decision reversed. When someone asked Queen Mary when her son might return to his homeland, she replied, “Not until he comes to my funeral.”
¹³⁶⁰
The relationship between the queen and her eldest son would remain estranged for the rest of their lives, despite the fact that they would continue to write to each other on a regular basis. After his mother’s death, Edward’s attitude toward her would grow decidedly more hostile. “My sadness was mixed with incredulity that any mother could have been so hard and cruel towards her eldest son for so many years and yet so demanding at the end without relenting a scrap,” he wrote in a private letter to his wife. “I’m afraid the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they are now in death.”
¹³⁶¹
In an interview with the
Daily Express
years later, Edward admitted his true feelings about the abdication: “But make no mistake, it is the circumstances, not the decision itself, that I regret. If twenty years were to be erased and I were to be presented with the same choice again under the same circumstances, I would act precisely as I did then.”
¹³⁶²

Edward VIII’s abdication and subsequent marriage to Wallis Simpson in June 1937 had far-reaching consequences and set a dangerous precedent. In the years that followed, kings and rulers around the world found themselves under fire from commoner mistresses who demanded they follow Edward VIII’s example and renounce their thrones for love. In Britain, the abdication crisis threatened the Windsor dynasty, already weakened by King George V’s death and the monarchy’s connection to Germany during the war. But in spite of everything, Queen Mary continued to enjoy unbridled popularity. Whenever she appeared in public, she was met with thunderous applause. One afternoon, the sight of her on the street prompted all the witnesses to cry out, “Thank God we’ve still got Queen Mary.”
¹³⁶³
In October 1936, Elizabeth wrote to Mary, “In these anxious & depressing days you are indeed ‘a rock of defence’ darling Mama, & I feel sure that the whole country agrees.”
¹³⁶⁴
Regardless of his mother’s unimpeachable character, Edward’s actions had repercussions.

On December 12, the day after the abdication became official, Bertie became King George VI, making his wife Elizabeth the queen consort. Bertie chose to take his father’s name to create a sense of continuity and traditional values from George V’s reign. Their ten-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was now heir apparent. George VI and his Privy Council sprung into action to limit the damage done to the monarchy by his brother. Edward was given the title Duke of Windsor and the style of Royal Highness. “Furthermore, my first act on succeeding my brother will be to confer on him a Dukedom and he will henceforth be known as H.R.H. The Duke of Windsor,” George VI announced.
¹³⁶⁵
This honor, however, was deemed inappropriate for Wallis and was therefore denied to her or any children they might have. “Is she a fit and proper person to become a Royal Highness after what she had done in this country, and would the country understand it if she became one automatically on marriage?” George VI asked. “I and my family and Queen Mary all feel that it would be a great mistake to acknowledge Mrs. Simpson as a suitable person to become Royal. The Monarchy has been degraded quite enough already.”
¹³⁶⁶
Queen Mary unequivocally agreed with the king: “It is unfortunate that he [Edward] does not understand our point of view with regard to the HRH and that this rankles still, but there is no doubt you must stick to this decision as it wld make great difficulties for us to acknowledge her [Wallis] as being in the same category with Alice & Marina.”
¹³⁶⁷

There was a particular lack of sympathy from foreign courts for Edward or his American bride. Queen Maud of Norway was particularly scathing in her opinion of the whole affair. “Where is She?
Do
wish something
could
happen to prevent them from marrying,” she wrote to Queen Mary. “
How
sad it all is, that he has ruined his life, fear later he will be sorry what he has done and given up.” Queen Marie of Romania was just as dumbfounded over the news, since she had attached the highest hopes to Edward VIII’s accession. “Personally, I am too royal not to look upon David as a deserter,” the flamboyant queen admitted. “There is too much poetry in my heart and soul to be touched by this love story. She [Wallis] is an uninteresting heroine.… I could weep over him.”
¹³⁶⁸

To secure Wallis’s divorce from her second husband, Edward secretly paid Ernest Simpson an estimated £100,000 “partly to compensate him for the theft of his wife, and partly to get him to appear to be the adulterer in the subsequent divorce proceedings.”
¹³⁶⁹
Once it was official, Wallis and Edward rushed off to get married at the Château de Candé, a Renaissance manor house in France. Huddled outside the château’s fences were anxious paparazzi hoping to capture photographs of the ceremony. As expected, the highly controversial wedding was small—only sixteen guests were in attendance. The Church of England refused to sanction it, and no members of the royal family attended. “I suppose you get endless letters as I do,” Mary wrote to George VI, “imploring us not to go out for the wedding as it wld do great harm, especially after the terrible shaking the Monarchy received last Dec[embe]r.”
¹³⁷⁰
The only mention of the wedding that Mary made was a brief note in her diary: “Alas! the wedding day in France of David & Mrs Warfield … We all telegraphed to him.”
¹³⁷¹
Edward took the absence of his family as an “unforgivable snub.” Shortly after the ceremony, he wrote to his mother, “I was bitterly hurt and disappointed that you virtually ignored the most important event of my life. You must realize by this time, that there is a limit to what one’s feelings can endure, this most unjust and uncalled for treatment can have had but one important result; my complete estrangement from you all.”
¹³⁷²

The abdication of Edward VIII was soon followed by the coronation of the new king and queen on May 12, 1937—the date planned for Edward VIII’s coronation. It was expected to be even larger in scale than the 1935 celebrations for King George V’s Silver Jubilee. In one of the rare moments of her life, Queen Mary broke with tradition by attending the coronation. Even the etiquette-insensitive Queen Alexandra had retired to Sandringham for George V’s crowning. This tradition dictating that a queen dowager was forbidden from attending the coronation of her husband’s successor predates the Plantagenet dynasty in the fifteenth century. But in light of the events surrounding George’s accession, everyone felt Mary’s presence was a necessity.