Baldwin (22 page)

This changed when Baldwin came back to London in October. What had previously been gossip only within a small circle had become widely known throughout the world, excepting however that substantial part of the British public which did not have international contacts. The British press continued to display a discretion which was a remarkable tribute to the influence of the Palace as an institution with the ‘respectable’ proprietors, and of the King himself with Rothermere and Beaverbrook. Neither the American nor most of the European press was subject to such restraints, and their readers had been regaled throughout the summer with photographs and titillating reports of a royal cruise down the Dalmatian coast. This produced a flood of letters to Downing Street, which were kept from Baldwin during his long holiday, but which hit him with the force of a tidal wave on his return. At the same time there was the dread news that a Simpson divorce case had been set down for hearing at Ipswich, chosen because it could there be more easily hurried on, for 27 October. King Edward VIII was clearly moving outside the waters which had been well charted by King Edward VII. The last thing that Mrs Keppel would have been encouraged to do was to get a divorce.

The prospect was intimidating. Today, over fifty years after the beginning of the testing but successful reign of King George VI, the Abdication looks merely an unusual transition from one sovereign to another. Before it took place, it seemed almost equally likely that the premature end of King Edward’s reign might result, not in the succession of his brother, but in the collapse of the monarchy. Nevertheless, Baldwin’s reaction to the new developments was not wholly one of dismay.

He had had his rest, his metabolism responded well to an occasional crisis, he had long known there was one looming here, and he may have sensed that there were advantages, both public and private, in bringing it to a head before the end of his premiership. Furthermore, it gave him an excellent excuse not to apply his mind to the dismal subjects–rearmament, the war in Spain, relations with Hitler, the distressed areas–the weight
of which had built up during his absence. The Abdication was an issue where British public opinion, not intransigent foreigners or intractable facts, was likely to be decisive, and one on which, therefore, his old gifts of timing, mood creation, and putting an adversary in the wrong, should be of pre-eminent value. The first minister he saw after taking in the new facts was Eden, in many ways his favourite at the time. With suppressed excitement and relief at the possibility of preoccupation, he told the Foreign Secretary that the crisis of the monarchy was upon them, that he (Eden) must go and read his own overseas correspondence on the subject (which he had not apparently hitherto done), and that he must not trouble him (Baldwin) too much with foreign affairs just now. Eden wrote: ‘After three months without a comment from the Prime Minister’ (he had not seen him during this period, which included the ‘internationalization’ of the Spanish Civil War), ‘I found this an astonishing doctrine.’
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At the end of his first week back, Baldwin went to stay at Cumberland Lodge, in Windsor Great Park, only a few miles from Fort Belvedere, a
bijou
residence which justified its martial name only by looking like a toy castle, but which was nonetheless the King’s main base throughout his brief reign. The proximity did not however imply that the Prime Minister was moving amongst the King’s friends. The host was Lord FitzAlan,• a Roman Catholic and a former Chief Whip. The guests he had assembled to meet the Prime Minister included Lord Salisbury, Anglican and hereditary bearer of the conscience of the Conservative peers, Lord Kemsley, Welsh and nonconformist by origin, portentous press lord by achievement, and the Duke of Norfolk, leading Catholic layman, nephew of FitzAlan, and responsible as Earl Marshal for the organization of the Coronation–if it took place. In addition, Alexander Hardinge,• who had replaced Wigram as private secretary to the King and who constantly saw his loyalty as lying with the institution and not with the person, was available to come over at short notice and did so. The King hardly
needed to have a net laid for him, but had he done so it would have been difficult to assemble, almost in his own backyard, a more obvious team of trappers.

Those assembled were unanimous that the King could not be allowed to proceed as he was doing. But the main practical outcome of the weekend was to brace Baldwin, in favourable surroundings, for a first confrontation. This took place at Fort Belvedere at 10.30 on the morning of the following Tuesday, 20 October. The King was brought back from Sandringham. Baldwin drove across from Chequers. It was hardly a convenient location for either. But at least it was a most beautiful morning and St Luke’s Day, the heart of the Indian summer, as Baldwin noted. He complimented the King upon his herbaceous borders, but otherwise was uneasy. After a short time he asked if he could have a whisky and soda, and when the ingredients were brought tried to pour a drink for the King. ‘Sir, when?’ he oddly and unwisely said. It was too easy a trick to miss. The King assured Baldwin that he never drank before seven in the evening and settled down to listen to the lecture that he knew was coming. Baldwin started in a circumlocutory way, but he appears eventually to have been fairly blunt. ‘I don’t believe you can go on like this and get away with it,’ was his core phrase, prepared with care because he believed that it was in the King’s idiom. He asked for the divorce to be put off, which the King said was Mrs Simpson’s business, and he urged that she should go away for six months. He omitted to ask whether the King intended to marry her after the divorce, but this apart he discharged his difficult duty faithfully.

He did not at this stage bring the matter before the whole Cabinet, but confined himself to informing four or five senior ministers of what had occurred. Nor did he do much else about it. He consulted a few people whom he thought were good tests of opinion. He tried (unsuccessfully) to get Mackenzie King, who was visiting, to speak as bluntly to the King as he had done himself, but the Canadian Prime Minister, although agreeing with Baldwin, preferred to use his audience for flattery rather
than warning. From mid-October to mid-November Baldwin behaved as though he still hoped that the King might retreat and the affair blow over. Probably he did not think this likely to happen. Possibly he did not want it to happen. But he thought there was advantage in giving it an opportunity to do so.

Neville Chamberlain thought otherwise. He encouraged Sir Warren Fisher, the permanent secretary of the Treasury, and other senior civil servants to busy themselves with the drawing up of constitutional memoranda which came near to being ultimata. Their tone is indicated by Chamberlain’s draft of a ‘friendly’ precursor of a formal submission for Baldwin to send to the King:

I have before me an official communication in which the advice of Your Majesty’s Government is formally tendered, to the effect that in view of the grave danger to which, in their opinion, this country is being exposed, your association with Mrs Simpson should be terminated forthwith. It is hardly necessary for me to point out that should this advice be tendered and refused by Your Majesty, only one result could follow in accordance with the requirements of constitutional monarchy, that is, the resignation of myself and the National Government. If Mrs Simpson left the country forthwith, this distasteful matter could be settled in a less formal manner.
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Chamberlain obviously thought the King should be dealt with more like the Poplar Board of Guardians than like Hitler. Baldwin was horrified by these draft documents. They offended his sense of emollience and he also realized that, if submitted and published, their clamant discourtesy would almost certainly have the effect of swinging opinion towards the King. He took the documents away and metaphorically buried them, but not before they had made him realize that he could not allow the matter to drift for much longer.

The same realization came to the King, pushed towards his
precipice by Hardinge harshly telling him that he could not go on without a decision. A second meeting between Sovereign and Prime Minister (on the King’s initiative) took place on 16 November.
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At this meeting the question of marriage was raised (there is a conflict of evidence as to by whom). The King asked whether it would be approved, and Baldwin skilfully replied that it would not be acceptable to the country, thereby keeping any question of the Government’s own veto in the background. The King then said he would abdicate in order to marry. According to his account to the House of Commons, Baldwin replied: ‘Sir, that is most grievous news, and it is impossible for me to make any comment on it today.’ According to Mrs Baldwin, whose account was more immediate, the words were: ‘Sir, this is a very grave decision and I am deeply grieved’; but the significant difference is that she adds: ‘and he went on to tell him that according to some legal opinion the divorce ought not to have been granted, that there were certain aspects of it that in any ordinary case would not have gone through.’ This was perhaps the one element of veiled blackmail in Baldwin’s dealing with the King, the faint suggestion that if he was too awkward with the Government he might end up without either the Throne or the freedom to marry Mrs Simpson.
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Between then and the next meeting on 25 November the idea of a morganatic marriage was put into the minds of both the King and Baldwin. The King was attracted, Baldwin was not. The King pressed for formal consideration, to which Baldwin agreed, although pointing out that this would involve both the Cabinet and the Dominion Prime Ministers. On 27
November the Cabinet was accordingly officially informed of the whole matter for the first time. Except perhaps for Duff Cooper, who was the closest to the King, they were all against the morganatic proposal. So, too, were those of the Dominion Prime Ministers who had a view. Lyons of Australia was particularly strong, Mackenzie King and Hertzog of South Africa a shade less so. De Valera was only interested in using the crisis to loosen the links of the Irish Free State with the Crown, and Savage of New Zealand, somewhat surprisingly, veered between unconcern and bewilderment.

Baldwin’s object was then to resolve the crisis with reasonable speed without appearing to force the hand of the King. He had audiences on 2 and 4 December. On the first occasion he gave the King the result of the consultations with the Cabinet and the Dominions. That killed the morganatic marriage plan. He then vetoed the King’s request to be allowed to make his own appeal to the British people. A King, he said, could only do so in terms approved by his ministers. The King then said: ‘You want me to go, don’t you?’ Baldwin answered with commendable frankness: what he wanted, what he thought the King himself wanted, was for him to go, if he had to, as quietly as possible, and thereby to make things easier for his successor.
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On the following evening the King, detecting a hint of impatience in the Prime Minister, said with some bitterness: ‘You will not have to wait much longer, Mr Baldwin.’

Both King and Prime Minister were becoming a little strained. Baldwin was being buffeted from several sides. An arrow shot almost accidentally by the Bishop of Bradford had given the press an excuse to break their self-imposed conspiracy of silence and bring the whole matter into the public domain. A substantial part of the Cabinet was pressing for a quick outcome. The Chancellor of the Exchequer showed that the traditions of ‘Brummagen’ radical commercialism had not died with his father by being most worried about the effect of
continued uncertainty upon the Christmas trade. The opposition were loyally supporting the Government, but were also pressing for a definitive statement. Churchill, on the other hand, with the support of the
Daily Mail,
the
Daily Express
and, more surprisingly, the
News Chronicle,
was feeling his way towards a King’s Party. In the House of Commons on the afternoon of Thursday, 3 December, he got a sizeable cheer when he spoke against any ‘irrevocable step’.

Baldwin rightly thought that this particular bubble would be pricked over the weekend. MPs would be steadied against the King by their constituents.
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By the Monday they were to shout down with peculiar virulence a similar although more long-winded question by Churchill. Nevertheless, Baldwin felt his time was running short. This led him to make his one dangerous error of the whole affair. A possible intervention of the King’s Proctor to upset the divorce had for some time been lurking in the Government’s mind. It was of course the point of Baldwin’s remark to the King on 16 November. The Attorney-General had, under instructions, done a good deal of work on the issue. The Government had played with it as a possible weapon against the King. Now it was suddenly turned against them. The advice was that the Proctor could not act against his nominal royal master. But once the King had abdicated he would cease to have this protection. Walter Monckton,
his legal adviser, seized the point, and on Saturday, 5 December, asked almost as a condition of Abdication, that a special bill should be introduced to make the decree immediately absolute, and thus remove the danger.