The Peoples King (46 page)

the pressure which the Government put upon the King and the Press campaign directed against him with so much brutality by the Times, together with the personal strain to which he was inevitably subject, might well have led to his abdication any day last week. In fact the Deeds were all drawn up and in my view the Government expected to announce the abdication on Monday [7 December].

He added, 'What has impressed me most during this crisis has been the King's virtues of courage, manliness and honour; and of his loyalty to his Ministers and respect for the Constitution.'
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Churchill felt immensely sympathetic towards the King. 'Poor little lamb,' he said to a friend, 'he was treated worse than any air mechanic, and he took it lying down.'
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Many were grateful to Churchill for his willingness to speak out on behalf of the King. 'As one of the dumb masses who have not been permitted to express their views on the momentous decision which has been taken & decided by the High Noises over our heads,' wrote a correspondent, 'perhaps you will permit myself & my family to express our gratitude to you that one man was found who was willing to speak a word on behalf of His Majesty King Edward VIII. We do so gratefully & sincerely.' When the 'so-called representatives of the working classes combine with their opponents to dethrone the People's King,' added the letter, 'one can better understand the sentiments of the man who said, "The more I see of dogs the less I care for men." Right or Wrong, he was our King.'
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'I have been horror-struck,' wrote Lord Hamilton of Dalzell to Churchill, 'as I am sure you have been - by the readiness with which the word "Abdication" has come to men's lips in the recent crisis. It is a word that can only be spoken, without treason, by one man.'
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Duff Cooper regretted the loss to the nation of King Edward. 'I was sad at his going', he recorded in his memoirs. 'I felt that we were losing a personality of value to the State ... He had many qualities that fitted him for his great position'.
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Prince George, the Duke of Kent, who was devoted to Edward, was devastated. Some of the younger generation in the royal household wondered at the depth of animosity towards the former King. The Earl of Harewood, Edward's nephew, commented that 'it was hard for the younger amongst us not to stand in amazement at the moral contradiction between the elevation of a code of duty on the one hand, and on the other the denial of central Christian virtues - forgiveness, understanding, family tenderness.'
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'All through Mrs Simpson', judged a Sussex farmer.
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But was it? Some people believed that Edward's love for Wallis was not the reason, but an excuse for the abdication - that she was a godsend to those who wanted to see him go. 'I am sorry that Edward VIII has been bounced into abdicating', wrote Alan Turing to his mother. 'I believe the government wanted to get rid of him', he wrote,

and found Mrs Simpson a good opportunity. Whether they were wise to try to get rid of him is another matter. I respect Edward for his courage ... I don't see how you can say that Edward was guilty of wasting his ministers' time and wits at a critical moment. It was Baldwin who opened the subject.
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Geoffrey Wells noted in his diary that a close friend, with whom he agreed, was 'quite sure that the Govt was anxious to get rid of the King because of his determination to be, as King, an individual. Mrs S the excuse.' Wells added that it was 'a kind of ultimate disillusion - the final proof of the utter rottenness of all present political parties.'
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In particular, argued some, it was Edward's visit to South Wales that had set the abdication wheels in motion. 'As an Englishman, a Manchester man, turned fifty years of age,' observed a letter to Edward,

I see in this no Constitutional Crisis - and I view the matter as a political red herring, drawn by the present hotch-potch-two-years-behind-the-times government, a herring intended to distract public attention from their inability or desire to implement the assurances you recently made to the South Wales Black Areas that 'Something must be done' to better the lot of their workless

'Baldwin and his satellites have no plans and apparently no interest for this problem,' he added, 'and their present move is to camouflage their gross and flagrant inactivity.'
^[3]
" The Australian newspaper the
Labor Daily,
which was based in Sydney and represented a key strand of Labour opinion, had maintained right from the start that 'the present crisis has been very carefully arranged in an effort to secure a showdown prior to the Coronation.' This, it claimed, was because of Edward's democratic tendencies and his sympathy for the poor.
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Vera Brittain was equally cynical about the role of the Government:

The essence of the whole drama, as I saw it in common with many other British citizens sickened by sanctimonious hypocrisy, lay less in the King's attitude to his ministers, which was strictly correct, than in the attitude of the ministers to the problem. Mrs Simpson, we believed, had merely been made a convenient excuse for removing a monarch whose informality, dislike of ancient tradition, and determination to see things for himself had affronted the 'old gang' from the beginning.
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Lloyd George agreed with this view. Thoroughly disgusted by the news of the abdication, he had written from Jamaica to his son Gwilym, telling him how angry he was:

The Tories seem to have once more triumphed; they have got rid of a King who was making himself obnoxious by calling attention to conditions which it was to their interest to cover up. Baldwin has succeeded by methods which time and again take in the gullible British public. He has taken the high line in order to achieve the lowest of aims. I have never seen such a blend of hypocrisy and humbug. But once again it has triumphed, and a really democratic King has been driven from his Throne by the Tories with the help of the Labour Party.
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'And when the truth of these days is allowed to be known,' wrote the novelist Hugh Ross Williamson in
Time and Tide
on 19 December 1936, 'it will be found that Edward VIII's promise to the derelict areas and the forgotten men: "I will see that something is done" is the essential clue to the events of the last three weeks.' From that moment, he added, 'the King's doom [was] sealed.'
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'

There was resentment among many ordinary people that they had never had a chance to say what they wanted. 'There is a vast body of the English Public inarticulate', wrote one correspondent to the King, 'who are utterly opposed to any talk of Your Majesty's abdication' - but who were unable to have any influence on the outcome of the crisis.
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'The People', said another, 'never had a chance' to prevent the abdication.
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'At every dinner & social occasion I go to I will always use and ask for a toast to our beloved Duke of Windsor', wrote an Edinburgh man to Churchill. 'I wish Sir you and all our ministers', he added, 'had been amongst the working class, during the Crisis & had heard what they had to say. 1 might say ... 99 per cent were & still are for the Ex King.'
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"
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'The British people and the London Parliament', observed George Bernard Shaw, 'were not consulted, and are wholly blameless in the matter.'
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Tom Harrisson, a young man who had recently returned from an anthropological expedition to the New Hebrides and settled in the Lancashire cotton town of Bolton, was appalled by the way ordinary people had been sidelined and by how little information had been made available. As a direct response, the following month he and some colleagues set up an organization called Mass-Observation to collect and publish information about the public. Only in this way, maintained the new organization, could democracy mean what it says: to allow rule by the people, appraised of the facts. In other words, they aimed to bridge the gap between the rulers and the ruled.
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The first full-scale book produced by Mass-Observation was
May the Twelfth,
an account of the coronation of George VI in 1937, which revealed that numbers of people resented the new King and longed for Edward. In one village in Somerset, for example, most of the inhabi­tants thought Edward ought to be King and refused to have the cost of coronation celebrations put on the rates.
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In Nottingham, a hairdresser reported that she listened to the wireless from half past ten to half past four: 'And you should have seen my mother - she sat in front of it all day - and all through the service while he was being crowned and that, the tears were pouring down her face and she kept moaning, "Oh, it ought to be Edward - it - it - it ought to be Edward."
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There were suspicions in America that the British Government had been motivated by hostility to Edward's sympathy for the poor. 'I hear . . . that in [the] USA rumour has distorted the significance of the visit to South Wales', noted Baldwin's friend Thomas Jones, with some anxiety. 'It is being said that SB sacrificed the King to the demands of the Die-Hards who were enraged at the publicly expressed sympathies of our democratic King.
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John Gunther told Margot Asquith that Americans 'completely fail to understand one thing, why Baldwin has not come in for more criticism for what was certainly his extremely undemocratic behaviour, I.e. he decided that a morganatic marriage was impossible and got the whole thing fixed up, fait accompli, before letting the country know a word. Should there have been all that censorship?
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The
Milwaukee journal
accused Baldwin of sabotaging Edward's 'promise to see that something would be done about a decaying region in a rich empire'.
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The
Voice,
a newspaper in Hobart, Tasmania, bitterly regretted the loss of 'undoubtedly the most democratic King the world has ever known, "The Poor Man's King".' The editor, Mr Dwyer-Gray, who was Treasurer of the Tasmanian Government, argued that Edward had been forcibly removed - 'The
Voice
will not be silenced. This was as foul a plot as ever disgraced mankind. "Finance" did not want a radical King . . .' The 'Poor Man's King', it added, was given an ultimatum, precipitating a crisis where there was no need for hurry at all. 'Misrepresentations of Dominion opinion were used in London and misrepresentations of London opinion were used in the Dominions.
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The knuckles of Mr Dwyer-Gray were severely rapped. When he attended an official dinner to honour Lord Hartington, who was visiting Tasmania, Hartington 'spoke very plainly to him, and said that he was shocked to see such articles from the pen of a Minister of the Crown, and a Roman Catholic one at that.' Lord Hartington sent a copy of the offending article to Sir Harry Batterbee,
¹⁰⁹
who forwarded it to Sir Horace Wilson with the comment, 'You may be interested to see the enclosed - pretty disgusting!'"
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'This is sedition - putting a monarch off his Throne without consulting Parliament', accused Jack Beasley, the Labour MP for New South Wales."' H. V. Evatt, a distinguished lawyer and a Justice of the Federal Supreme Court of Australia, who later became leader of the parliamentary Labour Party, wrote to Churchill to express his gratitude that there was 'at least one man in the Parliament at West­minster who in a time of unexampled crisis, served his late Monarch so loyally and so well.' He regretted that no means had existed 'for ascertaining the guidance and extent of the "public opinion" (in the Dominions or England)': 'What a Whip triumph! That a Parliament with no Shadow of relevant popular mandate should effectuate such a charge! And what a triumph for Dictatorship! That a Government should carry through such an affair before any reference to Parlia­ment was made!' All this, he observed, had passed into history. But would not history, he wondered, contrast the two men - 'the politician who by innuendo, by the over emphasis on personal friendship, and by downright misrepresentation, gave the Iago touch to the crisis and the man, the monarch, who was too great for the Parliament and too noble for the individuals who purported to speak for the Dominions.'"
²

Sir Horace Wilson felt some anxieties, too. He wondered whether 'the historian of the future' might not criticize the Government for not starting soon enough to induce the King to change his mind. Baldwin told him not to worry, because the King had been determined to marry Mrs Simpson anyway."
³

While the act of abdication continued to resonate in the lives of millions of people all over the world, Edward's own life underwent a swift and dramatic change. In just a few hours after his farewell broadcast, he would be sailing away from Britain. He did what he could for his staff. Bruce Lockhart heard a story that the King, on eve of departure for France, sent for Crisp, his valet. 'We're going abroad, Crisp. What about the luggage?' Crisp hesitated. He was married, didn't want to go. King saw at once. 'Never mind, I'll get you a job here.' Rings up his brother. 'Bertie, what about my valet - he's best authority on medals and decorations in the world.' King went without valet. Crisp now with King George VI.
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The Windsor family shared a final meal with Edward at Royal Lodge, in Windsor Great Park, after listening to the broadcast. The diners were Edward himself, Queen Mary, Albert, Harry, George, and his uncle and aunt, the Earl and Alice, Countess of Athlone, of whom Edward was very fond. The new Queen Elizabeth was not there. 'That last family dinner was too awful', she said years later to a friend. 'Thank goodness I had flu and couldn't go.
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Perry Brownlow, who had been summoned to Windsor from Cannes, witnessed the farewells. He told Diana Vreeland that Edward went up to his mother, Queen Mary, 'and kissed her on both hands and then on both cheeks. She was as cold as ice. She just looked at him.
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Lady Iris Mountbatten observed in her unpublished memoirs that Queen Mary 'actually seemed unchanged by the great loss of her eldest son. I could see no outward sign that she had been tormented by heartbreak.' This brought home, she added, 'a sense that I have always had, that my family was not motivated by love or human emotions.
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Queen Mary's life, observed Janet Flanner, 'has been one of inhuman self- control.
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