The Peoples King (15 page)

Lord Wigram, who initially served the new King as Private Secre­tary, soon resigned, to be replaced by Major Hardinge. 'Before very
long,' wrote Sir Horace Wilson, Chief Industrial Advisor to the Prime
Minister, 'we knew from Lord Wigram and others that there was
grave doubt' that any hopes for the King's reign would be fulfilled.
Before Wigram went, said Sir Horace, he told Baldwin of his fears and
made it clear that, in his view, this was a case where it was almost
impossible to appeal to reason and judgement.
⁶
There were regularly
used channels of communication between the top levels of the civil
service, the royal household and government. These were augmented
by the multiple connections knitting Society together - Wigram's wife
was Neville Chamberlain's daughter, for example.

Edward had begun to replace some of his father's courtiers, a process
that was customary for any new monarch. This did not please the old
guard. When Lord Cromer agreed to stay on as Lord Chamberlain,
he did so, he said, out of a sense of duty rather than desire - because
he knew 'that war was in effect declared against the old gang'.
⁷
Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been
a long-standing intimate of George V and a key figure in his court,
took the same view. 'There is not only a new reign, but a new
regime,'
he lamented. 'I can only be most thankful for what has been, and for
what is to be, hope for the best.'
⁸

Charles Lambe was aware of a 'great deal of whispering and secrecy',
with 'one courtier always bleating, a centre of discontent. Another -
ancien regime
- outraged, pompous and ineffectual.'
⁹
Edward was
evidently not able or not willing to take control and manage his royal
staff. Lambe observed that from the start of Edward's reign, the
organization seemed wrong:

The nominal Executive Head was the Lord Chamberlain but inside the Palace
there was no Chief of Staff. Consequently the good old atmosphere of com­petition for the King's Ear prevailed, as it must always have done in history.
A really big understanding man could have made the system work by earning
not only the loyalty of his own department but of all the many others who,
while trying to co-operate, owed him no direct allegiance in a disciplinary
sense.
¹⁰

If Edward had managed to take charge, he might have secured the
court's backing and support. Even Wigram could not help liking him.
He 'confessed' to Hilda Runciman, the wife of the President of the Board
of Trade, that the King

was quite irresistible in spite of being very trying and annoying to a secretary]:
. . . Wigram said he took care to avoid a quarrel. .. just changed the subject,
but of course he has to tell him his duty and he only wishes he had had him
younger!"

But in any case, Edward - as Prince of Wales, and then as King -
found many aspects of court life absurd. One of these was the 'coming
out' of girls during the London season, when Society girls were pre­sented to the monarch personally. Contemporary newsreels show how
bored he was by these occasions: at a Palace garden party in July 19 3 6
he was seen to give each girl a hurried nod and then, when it began to
rain, he abruptly brought the ceremony to a close.
¹²
At the State
Opening of Parliament on 3 November 1936, he arrived in a Daimler
and wore a cocked hat, as Admiral of the Fleet. This angered many
members of the court, who expected him to travel in a gilded coach
drawn by a team of eight horses and to wear a golden crown.
¹³
Edward's dress was a further source of annoyance - he preferred
comfortable clothes, rejecting the starched shirts and rigid dress con­ventions favoured by his father. At a formal meeting at the Jockey
Club he caused a minor sensation by appearing in a lounge suit and
straw hat, when his official hosts had donned morning coats and top
hats in his honour.
¹⁴
His brother Albert did not approve of these
sartorial innovations. In a letter to Lord Londonderry about what
decorations to wear at small dances, he said,

I will have a talk about it with my brother this coming week ... I know you
will not repeat this, but he is rather difficult on these matters & has different
ideas about them from anyone else. We ought to conform to what he does,
really, but this is often difficult knowing that he is in the wrong, or at least
out of order with what has been done on a similar occasion previously.
¹⁵

Edward was equally 'out of order' in his attitude to the routine of
the royal circuit established by his father, which he largely dropped.
He also introduced a new air of informality. The Deputy Comptroller
of Supply at Buckingham Palace was surprised to find that from time
to time

we had visits from the King. He would suddenly appear in the kitchens, the
cellars, and the store rooms, or other 'behind the scenes' parts of the Palace,
walking round, alone, or with one equerry, on tours of inspection. It was all
very informal, and quite unlike anything we had seen King George V do at
the Palace.
¹⁶

In a way, he added, 'it was quite a refreshing change after the rigidly
fixed time-table of King George V's day, when you could predict with
absolute certainty the movements of the King and Queen several
months, indeed, a year ahead.'

Nor did Edward enjoy the standard leisure pursuits of upper-class
men, such as hunting and shooting, which had been the favourite
pastimes of his father. While out stalking at Balmoral, Edward dis­appointed everyone by taking nothing more lethal than a cine-camera
with which to 'shoot' the stags.
¹⁸
'The fact is,' wrote the
South Wales
Argus
approvingly on 19 November 1936,

that His Majesty does not like shooting either stags or birds. In this he is a
great contrast to his late father. With George V all shooting was a passion and
he had shot not only stags, pheasants and partridges in Great Britain, but all
kinds of wild animals all over the world."

Indeed, shooting had occupied George's leisure time for six months
of the year (at one pheasant shoot he shot a thousand out of the total
bag of four thousand birds).
²⁰
Alexander Hardinge also loved to
shoot: his letters to Helen Cecil, when they were engaged, reported on
numerous grouse shoots at Balmoral. On one day in the summer of
1922, he reported a 'fine shoot' of 1,335 grouse.
²¹
In order to procure
more daylight for shooting, George V had kept the clocks at Sandringham half an hour fast. Edward and some others, including the Duke
of York and Queen Mary,
²²
had disliked this eccentric way of doing
things, and just hours after his father's death, Edward put the clocks
back from 'Sandringham Time' to Greenwich Mean Time. Senior
courtiers were dismayed,
²³
and Archbishop Lang lamented, 'I wonder
what other customs will be put back also!'
²⁴

But many others approved. It was one of the ways, observed the
American journalist John Gunther, in which Edward began his reign
on a note 'of sensible modernity' - at once, it was apparent that 'a
new freshness, a note of informality and daring, was blowing through
royal affairs.'
²⁵
'The trouble is,' claimed one of his subjects sympathet­ically, 'that you are a hundred years ahead of your time. All advanced
thinkers are with you.'
²⁶

Edward was a man who 'Prefers a Simple Life', reported the
South
Wales Argus
with satisfaction.
²⁷
He liked 'gardening and golf and
jigsaw puzzles and dancing to the gramophone and even darts.'
²⁸
In
the evening, he did his embroidery — he had learnt from Queen Mary
how to do gros point.
²⁹
He frequented nightclubs such as the Kit Kat,
the Cafe de Paris, and especially his favourite, the Embassy Club on
Bond Street, where he and Wallis relaxed by dancing and listening to
jazz and other modern music. Here they spent evenings with Prince
George and his wife Marina, and mixed with musicians, artists and
writers, including the novelist Michael Arlen, author of the best-selling
The Green Hat
(the Embassy reserved special tables for both Edward
and Arlen). Edward regularly played polo with Sir Philip Sassoon,
who shared his interest in social welfare and had built a model
working-class housing estate in Folkestone, with a free dental clinic.
³⁰
Despite these relatively simple pleasures, Edward gained the reputation
of a playboy. But he was most unlike a typical playboy of the time,
such as Aly Khan, the heir to the immense fortune of his father, the
Aga Khan. Aly Khan's interests were strictly limited to polo ponies,
fast cars and beautiful women.

In the atmosphere of resentment and mistrust that dominated the
royal court, it was inevitable that gossip about King Edward VIII
would thrive - especially the rumour that he planned to marry Wallis.
On 10 October 1936, Alexander Hardinge visited the Duke of York
at his house on Piccadilly to warn him that the situation was so grave
that it 'might end with the abdication of his elder brother'.
³¹
This was
an odd warning to give, since - as Hardinge himself observed in his
diary - there was 'nothing concrete on which any representation could
be based.'
³²
Hardinge was a man of absolute rectitude - so absolute,
indeed, as to be inflexible. For him, there was a correct way and an
incorrect way of doing things, and his conception of 'correct' was
closely bound up with tradition and with the values and customs of
the narrow social circle to which he and his family belonged. Edward
and Hardinge were the same age and had been in the same Guards
regiment during the war, but Hardinge's loyalties lay elsewhere: he
had been King George V's Assistant Private Secretary for sixteen years,
and his attitudes reflected those of the previous court. Sir Horace
Wilson had his doubts about the decision to appoint Hardinge as
Edward's Private Secretary: 'his feelings seem to have led him to make
remarks that were to say the least of it tactless and some of them were
said to have been retailed to the King.'
³³
Hardinge was not at all a
suitable Private Secretary for Edward VIII, who would have benefited
from the firm support of a more gentle and humorous man, particularly
one who was in tune with modern ideas.