The Peoples King (41 page)

There was a growing realization, however, that the King might actually abdicate. One 'poor working woman' said that 'if it was left to me I say marry her and be happy', but that it was not for the poor to decide. She therefore pleaded with the King to give Wallis up: 'I know it's a lot to ask you to do, but we all love you so and how could you or Mrs Simpson live happy when you know what it will do for England for many Poor will be thrown out of work.'
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A Londoner offered a solution. Edward should accede to the throne, he suggested, and a few months afterwards Mrs Simpson should become Lady-in- Waiting to Queen Mary or the Duchess of York. Then, 'following the desire of we The People she be later created a Duchess.' The letter- writer was sure that 'so good, clever and kind a woman would soon by her work endear her self even to those who feel she is somewhat a stranger at present.'
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'Only time I was frightened. I thought [the King] might change his mind,' said Baldwin on 8 December, the day after Wallis's press statement was released.
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Like many others in government and court circles, he had assumed her to be a cunning schemer who would have no interest in keeping the King on the throne if she were not herself going to be Queen. In his mind, her status as a divorcee, and an American one at that, put her into a category of women who were 'loose'- 'fast' and untrustworthy. Many of his circle shared this view. 'More anxiety &t more news about Mrs S', wrote Lucy Baldwin in her diary on 8 December - 'a thoroughly bad lot.'
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She was 'believed to be the kind of person', claimed Ramsay MacDonald in his diary earlier that year, 'who would sell secrets'.
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Sir Horace Wilson sneeringly concluded that Wallis was 'selfish, self-seeking, hard, calculating, ambitious, scheming, dangerous."
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The royal crisis was regarded as smutty and unsavoury, even though it was actually all about love. 'I felt I must work off the dirt of this horrible crisis', wrote Lady Milner. 'So I went to a Turkish Bath this morning.'
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None of these people could bring themselves to see Mrs Simpson as an individual who genuinely loved Edward and wanted the best possible outcome for him - even if it meant giving him up. But, as Lord Brownlow wrote on 9 December, 'Mrs Simpson tells me she was and is perfectly willing to instruct me to withdraw her petition for divorce and indeed willing to do anything to prevent the King from abdicating. I am satisfied beyond any doubt that is Mrs Simpson's genuine and honest desire.'
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Wallis's generous and unselfish offer of renunciation made her seem less predictable. Baldwin was not sure how to deal with it - or, indeed, with her. He knew, though, that her press statement might influence the opinion of the wavering Dominions and he promptly sent a tele­gram to the leader of each one, stating that he had 'every reason for doubting bona fides of Mrs Simpson's statement. Believe it to be no more than attempt to swing public opinion in her favour and thereby give her less reason to be uneasy as to her personal safety.'
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Baldwin also summoned Wallis's solicitor, Theodore Goddard, to Downing Street, where he showed him a copy of Mrs Simpson's press statement and asked him to go to the South of France to ascertain the real nature of her intentions.
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Goddard agreed. He had been planning to visit Mrs Simpson in any case. There was some worry - felt keenly by Sir Horace Wilson in particular - that Wallis might be planning to return to London, and Walter Monckton had suggested that Goddard, as her solicitor, should visit her and persuade her to stay away. At about the same time, Goddard had learned of a very real threat to her divorce, because of an impending intervention in the suit. It convinced him that he had an obligation to see his client and discuss the options with her. However, he went against the wishes of the King, who had first approved the visit but then changed his mind.
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No doubt the news of an intervention in Wallis's divorce, which he was told about, had made Edward uneasy.

Goddard left on Tuesday morning, 8 December, in a small govern­ment plane; he was forced to land at Marseilles and went on to Cannes by car. He went to see Wallis the next morning, and found her in a state of distress. She had spoken on the telephone the day before with the King and with George Allen, who had told her about the threat to the divorce. He asked her whether it was wise to continue with the divorce proceedings. If she were to abandon the divorce, he said, 'all possibility of the King's marriage would fall to the ground and the crisis would thus be resolved.' He added, however, that the process would take several weeks, and any reinstatement of her petition in the future would be complicated and 'possibly somewhat untidy'. Not knowing what to do, Wallis turned to Lord Brownlow, who was highly doubtful that such an action could be achieved in time to affect any decision by the King. If the King
did
abdicate, he pointed out, such a step might be disastrous. Edward's motivation all along had been marriage - so that 'for you to scrap your divorce will produce a hopeless anticlimax and an all-round tragedy.'
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Lord Brownlow was in any case livid with rage that Goddard had brought with him a personal physician - because of his weak heart - who was being described by British reporters as a gynaecologist. He had also brought with him a law clerk, who was reported to be an anaesthetist. Given the powerfully negative views on pregnancy outside marriage in the 1930s, these reports would be very damaging to the good names of Wallis and the King. Brownlow squashed the rumours as quickly as he could.

Wallis was not sure how best to react to Goddard's suggestion. She told him that she was quite prepared to give the King up, but that she believed he would follow her, wherever she went. They made a telephone call together to Edward, who pointed out that any further discussions with Goddard were now irrelevant. He explained that he had already told the Cabinet of his decision to abdicate - 'For me,' wrote Edward later in his memoirs, 'it was all over.'
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Goddard returned to England that night. There was no plane, so he took a train to Paris, where he was met the next morning, Thursday 10 December, by a secretary from the British Embassy who had been sent by Downing Street to discover the outcome of the interview with Mrs Simpson. He was under instructions to phone back with his findings, as the Prime Minister was going to address the House of Commons that afternoon and wanted the information before he spoke. When Goddard finally arrived at Downing Street, he was met by Sir Horace Wilson, who had already received the report sent from Paris. 'I could not help but gather from my conversation with him', wrote Goddard years later, 'that he already knew all about it and seemed to know something of our conversations with the King.'
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In other words, he suspected that the telephone line between Wallis and Edward had been bugged.

After Goddard's departure, Wallis and Brownlow decided that she should leave Europe immediately in a final effort to keep Edward on the throne. She would send a statement to the press telling them of her complete withdrawal from the situation and her imminent departure for a distant country. On Wednesday 9 December she telephoned Edward with this news, expecting to bury her love for him 'for ever'. But for once, he cut her short, I can't seem to make you understand my position', he said. 'It's all over. The Instrument of Abdication is already prepared . . . The Cabinet has met twice today, and I have given them my final word. I will be gone from England within forty-eight hours.'
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Wallis was stunned by the finality of Edward's statement. But his mind was irrevocably made up, as he told the Cabinet, when it sent a message asking him to reconsider his decision. 'They would have been in a nasty position if he had changed his mind!', wrote Nancy Dugdale in her diary.
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On the evening of 9 December, there was a pall of fog over London. Bertie went to see Queen Mary, and when he had told her of Edward's final decision, he recorded in his chronicle of events, he 'broke down and sobbed like a child'. The Queen described this interview in her own diary. 'The whole affair has lasted since 16 November,' she wrote sadly, referring to the day when Edward first told her of his plan to abdicate, 'and is very painful. It is a terrible blow to us all and particularly to poor Bertie.'49

At ten o'clock on the morning of 10 December 1936, just one week after the general public had first read in the papers about the royal love affair, the King executed the Instrument of Abdication. It was the end of a reign of 326 days:

I Edward VIII, of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions bey­ond the Seas, King, Emperor of India do hereby declare My irrevocable determination to renounce the Throne for Myself and for My descendants, and My desire that effect should be given to the Instrument of Abdication immediately.
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The signing of the Instrument was witnessed by Edward's three living brothers - their Royal Highnesses the Duke of York, the Duke of Gloucester and the Duke of Kent - and made Albert, the eldest of these three, the new King. Queen Mary drove out to Royal Lodge, in Windsor Great Park, where Edward met her and gave a full account of what had happened since they had last met, nearly a week ago. Now that it was all over, recalled Edward, 'her heart went out to her hard-pressed son, prompting her to say with tenderness: "And to me, the worst thing is that you won't be able to see her for so long."

Baldwin's wife, Lucy, also felt sorry for Edward. 'The King had decided to go', she wrote in her diary. 'Poor dear man but it is for the best.'
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There was a general feeling of relief among the social elite - 'I don't fancy there will be any King's party or any old revival of the red rose v. the white rose', wrote Francis Meynell to his wife.
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' 'There will be no more of the orgies there used to be when Mrs Simpson did the
"danse du ventre
[belly dancing]",' observed Nancy Dugdale, 'and other un-English performances of unsavoury nature.'
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Meanwhile, the general public waited anxiously for news. 'Every­body had been strained all day as it was known that King must come to a decision', reads a London solicitor's diary entry for 10 December.
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'All the morning papers prepared us for the news that Mr Baldwin was to give the House this afternoon,' noted a schoolmaster who had been closely following events. 'When I went to spend my free afternoon in T[unbridge] Wells,' he added, 'I knew I should probably come back with Edward VIII no longer King of England. And so it was.'
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Vera Brittain, changing trains at Edinburgh, saw news-vendors running up and down Princes Street in the centre of the city selling special editions, and on large placards she saw the words 'Abdication fears growing'.
^[2]
The news was officially broken by Baldwin in the House of Com­mons at 3.3 5 on the afternoon of 10 December - 'the most momentous statement of the crisis', observed
The King Abdicates
, a Pathe Gazette newsreel. Earlier, Edward had sent Baldwin a pencilled note asking
him to refer in his speech to Wallis's efforts to avoid abdication - 'Mrs Simpson - Has consistantly [sic] attempted to withdraw and even yesterday made a final attempt to dissuade the King from the course he has resolved to take.' Horace Wilson added a sneering comment to this note: 'I asked the PM whether he had any intention of mentioning Mrs Simpson. (If he had, I was quite willing to draft appropriate passages!) The PM said he would make no reference. To make a favourable one would clearly be to go counter to public opinion.'
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There was an excited atmosphere in the House during the wait for Baldwin's speech.
The Times
observed that:

Every seat was filled. Members squatted on the steps of the gangways, stood in a serried crowd behind the Bar, and thronged the side galleries three deep. There was even a small overflow upon the steps of the Speaker's Chair. The Peers' Gallery was filled to overflowing, though all the more prominent peers preferred to attend the proceedings in their own House, hi the Distinguished Strangers' Gallery was a representative assembly of diplomats, including the French and Belgian Ambassadors; and no member of the public fortunate enough to obtain a ticket had failed to use it.
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First, the Prime Minister read to the House a message from the King, declaring his intention to abdicate. 'I shall always remember the . . . wild stampede at the first sentence of the King's statement that he had renounced the throne irrevocably', said Robert Bernays in his diary. He observed 'a tremendous sense in everyone that we were on a great stage and the world was taking account of how we were comporting ourselves.'
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Then Baldwin gave a speech. 'He spoke for just under an hour, quietly, slowly, simply,' recorded Nancy Dugdale, who was watching from the Gallery, 'with an acute sense of the world listening to every word he said.'
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It was an 'amazing performance', according to Bernays.
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The Prime Minister gave an account of the events that had led up to the final moment of abdication. He paid tribute to the King's determination to 'go with dignity', his abhorrence of the idea of a King's Party and his decision to stay in Windsor, away from the cheering crowds of London. However, the account was very much from his own and the Government's point of view. He did not mention the King's wish to broadcast to the nation, which had been forbidden by the Cabinet. Nor did he respond to the King's request that he explain how hard 'the other person most intimately concerned' had tried to dissuade him from his decision to abdicate.
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