Alone, 1932-1940

  Yet His Majesty did not reveal this submissiveness to Churchill, who went to Fort Belvedere on the evening of December 4 under the impression that he could save him, nor did he mention Baldwin’s time limit and his tacit acceptance of it. Churchill’s impression was that Edward “wanted a fortnight to think the matter over.” Winston had assumed that the prime minister would give him no less than a month. He said: “Your Majesty need not have the slightest fear about time. If you require time there is no force in this country which would or could deny it to you. Mr. Baldwin would certainly not resist you.” He added a piece of advice. The King should not “on any account leave the country.” That would “produce the worst possible impression”; everyone would say he had “gone to meet Mrs. Simpson.” Edward demurred; he had no intention of seeing her, but thought “a complete change in the Alps” was what he needed. Nevertheless, he dropped the idea. Winston was his friend and champion; he couldn’t quarrel with him. In his memoirs he would write: “When Mr Baldwin had talked to me about the Monarchy, it had seemed a dry and lifeless thing. But when Mr Churchill spoke it lived, it grew, it became suffused with light.”165

  Saturday morning Winston sent the prime minister a complete account of his audience with the King and prepared a statement for publication in the Sunday papers. It opened: “I plead for time and patience.” There was no conflict between King and Parliament, he argued, because Parliament had not been consulted, nor allowed to express an opinion, and for a monarch to abdicate “upon the advice of the Ministry of the day” would be without precedent. Because Mrs. Simpson’s decree would not be absolute until April 1937, the marriage could not be celebrated until spring, and “for various reasons” it might “never be accomplished at all.” Surely “the utmost chivalry and compassion” should be shown “toward a gifted and beloved King torn between private and public obligations and duty.”166

  Churchill’s assurance that the King “need not have the slightest fear about time” had been ill-advised. Actually, Baldwin told his senior ministers that same Sunday, “This matter must be finished before Christmas.” According to Monckton, who was there, Chamberlain insisted even that was too much time; the uncertainty, he said, was “hurting the Christmas trade.” And word of the King’s fatalistic acceptance of dethronement was spreading. Beaverbrook had phoned Churchill with the bad news: “Our cock won’t fight.” Winston, refusing to give in, drafted a compromise statement for His Majesty. In it the King would give the cabinet veto power over his marital plans, should the question arise in April. Sinclair cosigned the proposal, but when it reached Fort Belvedere the King rejected it “on the grounds,” as Winston later wrote Boothby, “that it would not be honourable to play for time when his fundamental resolve was unchanged, and he declared it unchangeable.” After that, Churchill added, “No human effort could have altered the course of events.”167

  Unfortunately, before word of the King’s response reached him, Winston had blundered into the worst political mauling of his life. Bob Boothby, one of a handful of MPs who had remained loyal to him, had been his weekend houseguest at Chartwell; there he had noted that Churchill was “silent and restless and glancing into corners,” like “a dog… about to be sick on the carpet.” Later Boothby told a friend his premonition, on Sunday, that “Winston was going to do something dreadful,” but that he never dreamed he would come into the House of Commons and be “sick right across the floor.”168

  Monday, December 11, Churchill attended a meeting of the Anglo-French Luncheon Club, and, according to Boothby, arrived in Parliament “drunk, for the first and only time in his life.” It was Question Time. The prime minister was at his best, patiently answering queries about the crisis. The House was friendly; MPs had spent the weekend taking the pulse of their constituencies and had found little support for Edward. “What is so tragic,” Harold Nicolson wrote Vita, “is that now that people have got over the first sentimental shock, they want the King to abdicate. I mean opinion in the House is now almost wholly anti-King.” MPs, he wrote, were saying that “ ‘If he can first betray his duty… there is no good in the man.’ ”169

  As Winston took his seat Baldwin was explaining, rather disingenuously, that His Majesty was still weighing his decision and that until he reached it the government would make no move. Winston later acknowledged in his letter to Boothby that he “did not sufficiently realise how far the Prime Minister had gone to meet the views I had expressed. I ought of course to have welcomed what he said….” Instead, oblivious to the proceedings he was interrupting, he rose to defend his press statement of the day before. He began: “May I ask my right hon. Friend whether he could give us an assurance that no irrevocable step will be taken before the House has received a full statement—” That was as far as he got. The House rose as one man in a spectacular display of collective fury. Macmillan recalled “the universal hostility shown to him from every quarter—Conservatives, Socialists, and Liberals.” Winterton, who served in the House of Commons for forty-seven years, called the demonstration “one of the angriest manifestations I have ever heard directed against any man in the House of Commons.” Individual cries were audible—“Drop it!” “Order!” “Twister!”—but most voices joined in a wordless, derisive, ear-splitting roar.170

  In his diary Leo Amery wrote that Churchill was “completely staggered by the unanimous hostility of the House,” and Nicolson noted: “Winston collapsed utterly in the House…. He has undone in five minutes the patient reconstruction work of two years.” Winston himself felt “entirely alone in a wrathful House of Commons. I am not, when in action, unduly affected by hostile currents of feeling,” but now it was “almost physically impossible to make myself heard.” Nevertheless, he stood defiantly, in his familiar fighting stance, his jaw thrust forward and his expression grim, until, to his astonishment, the Speaker ruled him out of order for attempting to deliver a speech during Question Time. Flushed, he turned to Baldwin, and, according to Beaverbrook, shouted: “You won’t be satisfied until you’ve broken him, will you?” Then he stalked out, followed only by Brendan Bracken. It was, The Times declared the next morning, “the most striking rebuff in modern parliamentary history.”171

  So extraordinary a spectacle suggests motivation which lay deeper than the immediate issue, in which Churchill, after all, had played a minor role, and an ineffectual one at that. Indeed, the entire response to the Simpson affair, public and private, seems to have been an overreaction. It had “completely absorbed the public interest,” in Boothby’s opinion, because “here, at last, was something that was moving and exciting without being dangerous.” One could safely commit oneself; whichever way it went, the solution would not be a matter of life or death. Therefore, Britons could release the tension arising from frustration over rearmament and the growing likelihood of another European war. They had brooded over Churchill’s recitation of alarming facts, resenting his insistence that they face the growing danger. As events vindicated him, that exasperation grew. Now, when he was clearly wrong, they made him the target of their chagrin. In raging at him they were raging at the prospect of another great conflict, one they did not deserve and for which, as they saw it, they bore no responsibility.172

  After the Churchill shoutdown, events moved swiftly toward a denouement. On Thursday, December 10, the King signed the Deed of Abdication, stipulating that his reign would end at noon the following day. Baldwin brought it to the House of Commons that same afternoon, had it read by the clerk, and then delivered an excellent speech tracing the course of the crisis from its origins. Holding up the signed document, he declared: “No more grave deed has ever been received by Parliament, and no more difficult, I may say repugnant, task has ever been imposed upon a Minister.”173

  That last part was not entirely true. Encountering Harold Nicolson afterward, Baldwin said, “I had a success, my dear Nicolson, at the moment I most needed it.” Coming after a year crowded with disappointments, the acclaim over his masterstroke can hardly have been repugnant.
But no one begrudged him it. In the Evening Standard Churchill wrote that the prime minister had “never spoken with more force or more parliamentary skill.” His own brief account to the House of his action during the crisis—pointing out that he had been acting based on the limited information then available to him, was heard next—heard first in distrustful silence, then with sympathy, and finally with what Hansard’s record described as “loud cheers.” In his diary Amery wrote: “Winston rose in face of a hostile House and in an admirably phrased little speech executed a strategical retreat.”174

  On Friday Churchill lunched at Fort Belvedere, working with the King on the text of his abdication broadcast. As Edward wrote in his memoirs, it was an address which any “practiced student of Churchilliana could spot at a glance,” with such phrases as “bred in the constitutional tradition by my father” and “one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed on me—a happy home with his wife and children.” Afterward Winston wrote of his host, “His mettle was marvellous.” So it should have been. Edward was free of duties he detested; soon he would be reunited with his love, and he could devote the rest of his life to pleasure as His Royal Highness, the Duke of Windsor, the title his brother was about to bestow upon him—although, at the insistence of the Royal Family and to Edward’s anger, Wallis would be denied the honorific Her Royal Highness. But she would be a duchess, which was a lot more than anyone in Baltimore would have predicted. At the end of his luncheon with Winston, Edward glanced at his watch and realized that “I ceased to be King.” As he saw Churchill off, he wrote, “there were tears in his eyes. I can still see him standing at the door; hat in one hand, stick in the other. Something must have stirred in his mind; tapping out the solemn measure with his walking stick, he began to recite, as if to himself.” The something was from Andrew Marvell’s ode on the beheading of King Charles I:

  He nothing common did or mean

  Upon that memorable scene.175

  But in the streets of London children were chanting a different couplet:

  Hark! The herald angels sing,

  Mrs. Simpson pinched our King.

  That was not all she had pinched. Listening to the former king’s broadcast at Chartwell with Bill Deakin, Churchill was moved to tears, not by his own prose but by its implications. For him, and for those working to strengthen the defense of England, the crisis had been disastrous. Afterward he wrote: “All the forces I had gathered together on ‘Arms and the Covenant,’ of which I conceived myself to be the mainspring, were estranged or dissolved, and I was myself so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended.”176

  Certainly his campaign for preparedness was a casualty. Violet Bonham Carter wrote that many of his loyal followers “expressed to me (and no doubt to others) the view that if he continued to lead us our cause would be hopelessly compromised.” Had it not been for the Simpson crisis, Macmillan believed, Arms and the Covenant “might have succeeded in shaking the already weakened position of the Prime Minister. We might have been able to force a change of policy or of Government or both. Alas!… All the effect of the Albert Hall meeting was destroyed—first by the Abdication and secondly by the catastrophic fall in Churchill’s prestige.”177

  In an angry letter written immediately after the shoutdown in the House, Boothby had reminded Winston of their agreement that “you were going to use all your powers,” which could have been “decisive” in a successful resolution of the royal marriage issue. “But this afternoon you have delivered a blow to the King, both in the House and in the country, far harder than any that Baldwin ever conceived of. You have reduced the number of potential supporters to the minimum possible—I shd think now about seven in all. And you have done it without any consultation with your best friends and supporters.” Boothby wanted “to follow you blindly” because, as he wrote in a second letter, “I believe, passionately, that you are the only man who can save this country, and the world, during the next two critical years.” But now the Churchillians were under attack by men who had been on the verge of conversion to Winston’s cause. One of them had been prepared “to send a series of cables to friends of his in the Australian Government… under the aegis of your authority,” but now refused to do so. Boothby pointed out that it was “only when you rely on the power of clear disinterested argument, based on your unrivalled intellect and experience, with the solid central mass of the House of Commons, that you rise to the position of commanding authority which you should always occupy.”178

  At the new king’s coronation in Westminster Abbey in May, Winston leaned toward Clementine and whispered: “You were right. I see now the other one wouldn’t have done.” But a public apology was impossible for him, and an acknowledgment of error nearly so. On Christmas Day he wrote Lloyd George, vacationing in the West Indies: “It has been a terrible time here…. You have done well to be out of it”—as though the Welsh radical, with his humble origin and scorn for aristocracy, would have risked his career to save a man who had abandoned a kingdom for a woman. To the Duke of Westminster, Churchill wrote: “It is extraordinary how Baldwin gets stronger every time he knocks out someone or something important to our country.” But had Edward been important to England, and to the cause Churchill championed, he would not have appeared in Germany, on his honeymoon, striding down the middle of a street lined with Nazis extending their arms in a Hitlergruss—and returning the greeting with a stiff-armed heil of his own.*179

  Churchill, the strategist and statesman, could not recognize the achievement of Baldwin, the political technician. Macmillan grudgingly admired the feat which left “Baldwin’s authority… immensely strengthened and Churchill’s fallen almost to nothing.” Nicolson, singling out “the supremacy of Baldwin” as the chief consequence of the Simpson affair, quoted “a leading Labour man” as saying to him: “Thank God we have S.B. at the top. No other man could have coped with this.” Nicolson was proud of “how unanimous the House really is in times of crisis. There has been no hysteria and no party politics.” Actually, of course, there had been both: hysteria in the outburst against Churchill, and, in Baldwin’s triumph, Tory gains equivalent to a victory at the polls.180

  In the end Winston grasped the extent of his debacle and was plunged into gloom. In Paris after the abdication he told Beaverbrook, “My political career is over.” The Beaver replied, “Nonsense,” but later he wrote: “It was only by chance that he was a Member of Parliament when the war broke out.” After the war Bernard Baruch reminded Churchill how, in 1936, “your political career seemed ended, and you wondered whether you should enter some business.” The Albert Hall rally had turned to ashes. When Lord Davies urged Winston to rouse the nation by embarking on a public speaking campaign, Churchill replied that he thought there was a tendency to “overrate the value of public meetings,” that at “the present time nonofficial personages count for very little,” and that “one poor wretch may easily exhaust himself without his even making a ripple upon the current of opinion. If we could get access to the broadcast [sic] some progress could be made. All that is very carefully sewn up.”181

  Indeed it was; the appeasers, secure once more, and still convinced that Churchill was a dangerous provocateur, took every opportunity to muzzle him. The cabinet reviewed a BBC plan for a new series of broadcasts on European affairs. Duff Cooper, again a minority of one, thought all knowledgeable Englishmen should be invited to speak; the rest of the cabinet voted to exclude “independent expression of views.” Secretary to the Cabinet Hankey suggested that Winston’s privilege, as a privy councillor, to see copies of Air Ministry replies to his criticisms of the RAF be discontinued. “So far as I can see,” he said, “there is no advantage in continuing this controversy with Mr Churchill.” Baldwin approved, then quickly reversed himself when Winston phoned threatening to circulate his own memoranda “to any of my friends I might think fit.” The government knew how accurate Winston’s information was, though as yet
none of them had made it a major issue.182

  He knew—and told Inskip—that Britain’s rearmament was falling “ever more into arrears,” and that the country’s weakness in the air was “marked and deplorable.” Lord Rothermere, who had been staying at Berchtesgaden as the Führer’s first overnight foreign guest, wrote Churchill that the Führer “professes great friendship for England but it will be friendship on his terms and not ours.” Rothermere predicted that “even without a great war Britain and France will be practically vassal states before the end of the present decade. The idea that we cannot fight is spreading all over England.” In the Evening Standard on February 5, 1937, Winston wrote that fifteen million Czechs now lived “under the fear of violent invasion, with iron conquest in its wake.” There the Goebbels “hate-culture continues, fostered by printing press and broadcast,” and at any time Berlin’s propaganda might be directed against Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, even Britain.183

  All this deepened his melancholy. Clementine and fourteen-year-old Mary were staying at the Flexen Hotel in Zürs am Arlberg, skiing in the Austrian Alps. Winston was alone at Chartwell with Deakin, working on Marlborough, and, as he wrote his wife, turning out “articles to boil the pot.” Yet they weren’t enough; unpaid bills lay in a heightening pile on his desk. Even the weather was cheerless—bleak and gray, with a heavy, pounding rain which confined him and his easel to one end of the drawing room, where he erected dust sheets to protect the furniture and peered out, painting what he could see. At last it cleared. Cecil Roberts, a journalist and an old acquaintance, called and found him seated by Chartwell’s lake, hunched over, staring at his swans. Winston spoke mournfully of the imminent changing of the guard at No. 10, with Baldwin moving out and Chamberlain in. He said, “There’s no plan of any kind for anything. It is no good. They walk in a fog. Everything is very black, very black.”184