The Duchess Of Windsor (33 page)

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Authors: Greg King

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David told his brother that he had discussed the situation with Baldwin the previous evening. “It looks to me now, the way things are shaping up, that I shall probably have to go,” he said.
“Oh, that’s a dreadful thing to hear,” the Duke replied. “None of us wants that, I least of all.”
“I’m afraid,” David said, “there’s no other way. My mind is made up.”
22
The King had indeed made up his mind: he would win the fight in his own way, or he would go.
Wallis, meanwhile, had only managed to see David briefly. He told her that the prime minister had approved his plan to seek the advice of certain members of the cabinet. But when she tried to question him, he told her, “I must work things out in my own way.”
23
While David was speaking with his brother, Wallis attended a dinner party given by Emerald Cunard. Prince and Princess Paul of Yugoslavia were also present. Chips Channon noted that Wallis “looked very well tonight, like a Vermeer, in a Dutch way. The conversation got on to tiaras, and Princess Olga said hers gave her a headache. Wallis Simpson laughingly added, ‘Well, anyway, a tiara is one of the things I shall never have . . . .’ There was an embarrassed pause. . . .”
24
In the midst of these developments, the King made a scheduled journey to Wales to inspect impoverished mining towns. Increased oil consumption had resulted in mining layoffs and shutdowns, leaving the area economically depressed. David was startled at the poverty he saw. When he met one young man who said that he had never been able to find work, all David could say was a muttered “Terrible, terrible....” A group of unemployed miners handed the King a letter: “This is a stricken valley. Slighted by the dead hand of poverty.... Our women grow prematurely old.... Our children are stunted.... Will an impoverished people be able to joyfully celebrate Your Majesty’s Coronation?”
25
Touring the stricken households, seeing the grim faces and sad eyes, David was deeply moved. Spontaneously, he declared, “Something must be done to find them work.”
26
The King’s offhand remarks made headlines the following day, spurring the government into action. The chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, ordered a new study on mining conditions and proposals to grant additional government funding to relieve the hardships of unemployment. Labour MPs in the House of Commons asked for quick legislation to attract new industrial development to South Wales. The
News Chronicle
declared: “The King is above and outside politics. What he has done is in the sole interest of truth and public service.... The man in the street feels that Whitehall stands condemned. . . .”
27
But Baldwin feared political consequences. There was talk that the King had overstepped his bounds. Many Conservative politicians felt that the King had simply been trying to score popularity at the expense of the ruling government, and resentment against him continued to grow.
The visit to South Wales, however, had once again demonstrated in the most visible way possible the King’s popularity with the working classes. This enthusiastic reception and support convinced him, it seems, that his case was not completely lost where Wallis was concerned. Whereas he had previously discussed abdication as being a necessary adjunct to a marriage with Wallis, after the Wales visit he seemed determined to marry her and retain the throne.
On November 19, the day he returned from Wales, David met with his brother. The change in his course of action soon became evident when he told George that he planned to marry Wallis.
The Duke was startled at this piece of news and stammered. “What will she call herself?”
“Call herself?” David asked. “What do you think—Queen of England of course.”
“She is going to be Queen?” George asked incredulously.
“Yes, and Empress of India, the whole bag of tricks.”
28
19
 
The Morganatic Marriage Proposal
 
W
HILE THE KING WAS AWAY
on his tour of South Wales, Esmond Harmsworth asked Wallis to join him at Claridge’s for lunch.
1
During the course of the afternoon, Harmsworth suggested that Wallis ask the King about the possibility of a morganatic marriage. Such a union, he explained, would allow the King to marry her, but she would not become queen. This, he believed, might end the rumblings in the government. “I realize, Wallis, that all this is not very flattering to you,” he acknowledged. “But I am sure that you are one with us in desiring to keep the King on the Throne.” He even suggested a possible title should she marry the King: Duchess of Lancaster, from one of the King’s lesser titles.
2
At first, Wallis had her doubts about a morganatic marriage. She felt that such a marriage would leave her in a peculiarly ambiguous position: not quite queen and yet undeniably the wife of the king. As she began to carefully consider the proposal, however, it seemed to offer a way out of a situation which was growing more impossible by the day.
Her feelings for David were deep and genuine. She had made her decision to remain at his side, no matter the consequences, trusting his assurances that he would somehow manage to work things out. At the same time, Wallis was increasingly aware of the obstacles facing any union. She remained utterly ignorant of the strength of feelings against the marriage, believing that the decision rested solely with certain members of the court and society. Nevertheless, she thought that such prejudice as existed was directed only at her assumption of the position of queen. As a twice-divorced American, even Wallis had to admit that her credentials for the post were doubtful. A morganatic marriage seemed to offer a hopeful solution to such opposition.
The idea of such a marriage also offered its own benefits. As the King’s wife, she would become chatelaine of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham House, Holyrood House, and Balmoral Castle; she would be responsible for acting as official hostess; she would holiday with David, enjoy the luxuries of the life he lived as monarch, and be treated with the greatest of respect. Moreover, she knew that a morganatic marriage also offered a degree of freedom which would have been impossible for the Queen. As a morganatic wife, her role would be largely private. She would not have to undertake public duties or even appear at the side of the King during official functions. To Wallis, never having been raised to live her life in the public eye and unaccustomed to the idea of royal duties, this aspect appealed greatly. She would have the King, the power and position of his wife, and the benefits of life as a royal, all without the encumbering obligations of service which went with the rank of Queen.
A day after her lunch at Claridge’s, Wallis joined David at Fort Belvedere. She thought he looked tired and “harassed.”
3
She told him of her talk with Harmsworth and suggested the idea of a morganatic marriage. At first, he greeted this proposal with skepticism, believing it would be an unacceptable and dishonorable position for Wallis. However, he listened to Wallis’s arguments and duly agreed to examine the idea with care.
Wallis knew almost nothing of the history of morganatic marriages. The only recent association fresh in many people’s minds was the case of King Carol II of Romania, whose morganatic marriage was annulled to allow him to marry a Greek princess; he had then left her for his mistress, Madame Lupescu. Such convoluted affairs were held to be highly dishonorable and intensely suspect. Most of Europe’s royal houses had their own dynastic laws regulating marriages, and morganatic unions were often the refuge of those caught in scandal and illicit love affairs.
Morganatic marriages had been most prevalent among the German Kingdoms, principalities, and grand duchies. Most royal marriages were controlled by the principal of
Ebenbürtigkeit,
or equality of birth between partners. Should one partner contract a marriage with a spouse of unequal rank, such a union was considered to be morganatic.
Ironically, Queen Mary—that great upholder of tradition and unwavering opponent of her son’s proposed union with Wallis—was herself descended from a morganatic marriage.
4
In 1835, His Royal Highness Prince Alexander of Württemberg attended a ball at the Imperial Palace of the Hofburg in Vienna. Here he met the beautiful and gifted Countess Claudine Rhedey, daughter of an ancient Hungarian noble family. In May 1835 the pair married morganatically. A few days later, the Emperor of Austria named her Countess Hohenstein. The pair had three children, the second of whom, His Serene Highness Franz, Duke of Teck, married Queen Victoria’s first cousin, Her Royal Highness Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, in 1866. Their daughter became Queen Mary. Because she took her rank from her father, she was born a mere Serene Highness. Only when she married the future King George V did she become Her Royal Highness.
5
There were other members of the British Royal Family with equally close ties to morganatic marriages. In 1851, Prince Alexander of Hesse, brother of Grand Duke Ludwig III of Hesse and by Rhine, broke dynastic protocol by marrying a commoner, Countess Julia Hauke, the daughter of a Polish general. “It is hard to conceive the enormity of the offense of a prince of royal blood marrying a commoner—and poor Julie was little better than that,” writes Richard Hough. “It was regarded by the closely linked royal families of Europe as an act not just of disloyalty but of sedition. It threatened the whole delicately balanced and mutually inter-dependent dynastic structure built up over the centuries with the family-tree-like complexity of tall scaffolding.”
6
She was created first Countess, then Princess, of Battenberg, named after the village close to the Rhine where the Hesse family owned a castle. Her husband, who was eventually forgiven by his elder brother and granted the title of His Serene Highness Prince Alexander of Battenberg, was grandfather of Edward VIII’s great friend Lord Louis Mountbatten.
In Russia, where the Romanovs were bound by multiple marital laws requiring equal unions, morganatic marriages, ironically, were almost commonplace within the Imperial Family. In 1880, after the death of his wife, Emperor Alexander II had contracted a morganatic marriage with his longtime mistress Princess Catherine Dolgoruky, with whom he already had three children. The emperor was assassinated by terrorists before he had a chance to raise his wife, upon whom he had bestowed the courtesy title Princess Yourievskaia, to the rank of empress. One of Alexander’s sons, Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, contracted a morganatic marriage with his mistress and was forced to live in exile until the outbreak of the First World War. Other grand Dukes, including Nicholas II’s brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and his cousin Grand Duke Michael Michailovich, had likewise married morganatically.
Perhaps the most famous morganatic marriage was that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, to Countess Sophie Chotek in 1900. Although she received the courtesy title of Duchess of Hohenberg from Emperor Franz Joseph, this was his only concession. In order to marry Sophie, Franz Ferdinand had been required to renounce the rights to the succession of any children born of the marriage. On public occasions, Sophie was forced to walk not with her husband but behind the least important female members of the imperial household. She could not attend official dinners given by her husband because her rank was not considered sufficient enough to be included. Even when she and Franz attended a private performance together at the theater, they were not allowed to sit in the same box.
7
Their assassination in Sarajevo in July 1914 precipitated the First World War.
In England, however, there were no recent precedents. Nearly a hundred years earlier, the Dukes of Sussex and Cambridge had contracted unequal marriages. Both, however, had married without seeking permission of the sovereign, as required by the Royal Marriages Act, so their unions were illegal and therefore not considered morganatic.
Nevertheless, only one potential legal impediment to a morganatic marriage stood in the King’s way. In 1931, Parliament had passed the Statute of Westminster, which formally severed the sovereign authority of Great Britain over its dominions. While British political control over the dominions was thus weakened, the statute sought to strengthen their ties with the British Crown itself. Specifically, it allotted to the dominion heads and parliaments the right of consultation and assent where any alterations of the succession to the throne were made, as well as any changes in royal titles or styles. A morganatic wife of the king would indeed mean consultation with the dominions, a fact of which David was apparently unaware.
On Monday, November 23, David returned to London and sent for Esmond Harmsworth. After some discussion concerning the morganatic-marriage idea, he asked Harmsworth to raise the question with the prime minister. “From the moment the King proposed this,” writes historian A. J. P. Taylor, “he put himself at the Government’s mercy. He was now asking them for something, whereas previously they had been asking him.”
8
Harmsworth duly saw Baldwin that same evening. John Davidson, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, later noted: “We discussed the matter, and tried to picture the scene in the House of Commons when SB [Baldwin] had to explain why Mrs. Simpson was good enough to be the King’s wife but not good enough to be Queen. . . .”
9
Baldwin himself recalled: “I told him that he and his filthy paper did not really
know
the mind of the English people: whereas I
did
. And I explained to him that a morganatic marriage would mean a special Bill being passed in Parliament; and that Parliament would
never
pass it. Harmsworth said: ‘Oh, I’m sure they would. The whole standard of morals is so much more broadminded since the War.’ I replied: ‘Yes, you are right: the ideal of morality . . . certainly has gone down since the War: but the ideal of Kingship has gone
up . . .’
“
10
The entire meeting left Baldwin greatly upset. He believed the morganatic marriage was being promoted by Lord Rothermere and Winston Churchill, two men he regarded as his bitterest enemies. As soon as Harmsworth left, Davidson reappeared. The prime minister said with disgust: “He wants Mrs. Simpson to be a Duchess—not to be royal, but less than royal, but rather better than an ordinary Duchess.”
11
During this week, David continued to meet with Walter Monckton at Buckingham Palace. Although he had followed Monckton’s advice and left Hardinge in his post, David believed—quite rightly—that his private secretary was secretly reporting to Baldwin. He took particular pains to disguise Monckton’s visits, asking that the lawyer arrive at the visitor’s entrance, in the southeast corner of the palace, rather than by the usual privy purse entrance, which would lead him past the household offices. Once inside, Monckton followed a circuitous path through the palace corridors to the Belgian Suite, where the King kept his private apartments. This exercise in avoiding Hardinge, however, was all for nothing: the private secretary managed to learn of each visit, and once he even dispatched a footman with a note asking if Monckton would like to join him for a drink before leaving.
12
Monckton advised the King that “even in the unlikely event of the Cabinet approving a morganatic marriage, special legislation would be required, and the prospect of such a bill’s ever passing Parliament was dubious.”
13
Beyond this, he told the King, the approval of all eleven dominion cabinets would be required. David believed that his personal popularity in the dominions would help win opinion over to his side. However, he failed to understand that it was not the general population that would decide his future but politicians and individual cabinet members less well disposed to him.
On the morning of November 25, Baldwin met with Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill, and the leader of the Liberal Party, Archibald Sinclair, at No. 10 Downing Street. He discussed Harmsworth’s visit and the idea of a morganatic marriage for the King. Although David had not yet asked Baldwin to consult any officials in the British cabinet, the prime minister wanted to assure himself that no surprises lay in store. Accordingly, he asked an important hypothetical question: If the King were to push for a morganatic marriage against the advice of his government and Baldwin resigned as a result, would any of these men be willing to form a replacement coalition government whose sole reason for existence was to push through legislation to allow the King to marry? Although Churchill declared that he would support the King, both Attlee and Sinclair assured Baldwin that they would not support a morganatic marriage and would refuse to participate in any new government if the King tried to form one under these conditions. Attlee declared that while most of his party members had no objection to an American becoming queen, “I was certain that they would not approve of Mrs. Simpson for that position.”
14
These answers largely satisfied the prime minister. Baldwin could now play from a position of strength. The King could marry whom he liked, but if it was Mrs. Simpson, the ruling government would resign, and no other party leader was willing to step into the breach and form a new government.

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