The King's Speech (16 page)

With the Duke making such progress Logue, now aged fifty-five, may have been reconciled to the fact that their work together was largely over. He would have been wrong. The Duke’s life was about to change for ever – and with it Logue’s.

Ever since George V’s illness in 1928, there had been concerns about his health; a renewal of his bronchial trouble in February 1935 necessitated a period of recuperation at Eastbourne. The King recovered sufficiently to take full part in celebrations of his Silver Jubilee that May, when he appears to have been genuinely surprised at the enthusiastic welcome he was given by the crowds. ‘I’d no idea they felt like that about me,’ he said, on returning from a drive through the East End of London. ‘I am beginning to think they must like me for myself.’
⁵⁷
When he appeared at Spithead that July to review the Fleet, many onlookers were convinced that he would go on to reign for several more years.

Any improvement was relative, however. The King, who had just celebrated his seventieth birthday, was ailing, and after he returned from Balmoral that autumn, those closest to him noticed a serious deterioration in his health. The death of his younger sister, Princess Victoria, early in the morning of 3 December, came as a tremendous blow and for once his overwhelming sense of public duty faltered – he cancelled the State Opening of Parliament. He went to Sandringham that Christmas for the usual celebrations and made his broadcast to the Empire, but listeners could detect the deterioration in his health.

On the evening of 15 January 1936 the King took to his bedroom at Sandringham, complaining of a cold; he would never again leave the room alive. He became gradually weaker, drifting in and out of consciousness. ‘I feel rotten,’ he wrote in the last recorded entry in his diary. On the evening of the 20th his doctors, led by Lord Dawson of Penn, issued a bulletin with the words that were to become famous: ‘The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.’

That close came at 11.55 p.m., scarcely an hour and a half later – hastened along by Dawson, who admitted in medical notes (which were made public only half a century later) to have administered a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine. This, it seems, was in part to prevent further suffering for the patient and strain on the family, but also to ensure the death could be announced in the morning edition of
The Times
rather than ‘the less appropriate evening journals’. The newspaper, apparently advised to hold its edition by Dawson’s wife in London, whom the doctor had tipped off by telephone, duly obliged. ‘A Peaceful Ending at Midnight’ was its headline the next morning.

The Duke was grief stricken. The consequences for his own life were also dramatic. Although he was carrying out his fair share of royal duties, he had hitherto remained largely in the background. With his elder brother’s accession to the throne as Edward VIII, Bertie was elevated to become heir presumptive, which meant he had to take over many of the activities Edward had hitherto carried out. ‘All we at 145, Piccadilly knew in the schoolroom was that all of a sudden we saw much less of handsome golden-headed Uncle David,’ wrote Marion ‘Crawfie’ Crawford, the children’s nanny. ‘There were fewer occasions when he dropped in for a romp with his nieces.’

CHAPTER EIGHT
Edward VIII’s 327 Days

Edward VIII at the beginning of his short reign

N
o British sovereign ascended the throne with more accumulated goodwill than Edward, the eldest son of George V. Whether because of his courage, his radiant good looks or his avowed concern for the ordinary man (and woman), the new King seemed to embody all that was best about the twentieth century. ‘He is gifted with a genuine interest . . . in all sorts and conditions of people, and he is rich in a study that is admirable and endearing in any man and inestimable in a sovereign – the study of mankind,’ enthused
The Times
on 22 January 1936. His reign was to last less than year, however, ending in one of the greatest crises the British monarchy has ever endured – obliging his younger brother to take a throne he had not wanted and for which he had not been prepared.

Although noted from an early age for his charm and good looks, Edward had been a shy youth. Then in 1916, at the age of twenty-two, he was introduced by two of his equerries to an experienced prostitute in Amiens who, according to one account, ‘brushed aside his extraordinary shyness’.
⁵⁸
From then on, he seemed to be making up for lost time.

Like his grandfather Edward VII before him, Edward adored London night life. Diana Vreeland, a well-connected fashion columnist, appears to have coined the term the ‘The Golden Prince’ and declared that all women of her generation were in love with him.
⁵⁹
Edward showed little interest in the attempts of his strait-laced parents to find him a suitable bride, and instead indulged in a series of affairs, most scandalously one that lasted sixteen years with Freda Dudley Ward, the wife of a Liberal Member of Parliament. After ending the relationship simply by refusing her telephone calls, the Prince moved on to Thelma, Lady Furness, the American-born wife of Viscount Furness, the shipping magnate, and twin sister of Gloria Vanderbilt. The couple had a brief affair.

It was at her husband’s house, Burrough Court, near Melton Mowbray, either in 1930 or 1931 (depending on whose account you believe) that Thelma introduced the Prince to her close friend, Mrs Wallis Simpson. A fairly attractive, stylishly dressed woman in her mid-thirties, she had been born Bessie Wallis Warfield in 1896 into an old Pennsylvania family that had fallen on hard times – an experience that appeared to have left her with an acquisitive streak. In 1916, aged just twenty, she married Earl Winfield Spencer, an American airman, but he was a drunk and they divorced in 1927. A year later she moved up in the world, marrying Ernest Simpson, an American businessman based in London with connections in smart society.

As the Duke of Windsor was later to recall in his memoirs, their relationship got off to a curious start. Casting around for a bland topic with which to start a conversation, he asked whether, as an American, she suffered from the lack of central heating while visiting Britain. Her reply surprised him. ‘I am sorry, Sir,’ she said, a mocking look in her eyes, ‘but you have disappointed me.’

‘In what way?’ replied the Prince.

‘Every American woman who comes to your country is always asked that same question. I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.’
⁶⁰

The directness of her approach endeared her to Edward, who spent much of his time surrounded by sycophants. Initially they appeared to have been just friends, but this turned to an affair after Thelma went back to America in January 1934 to visit her sister. Then, that summer, the Prince invited Wallis and her husband on a cruise aboard the
Rosaura
, a 700-ton ferry that had just been converted into a luxurious pleasure cruiser by Lord Moyne, a businessman and politician whose family founded the Guinness brewing firm. Ernest had to decline because he had to go on a business trip to America, but Wallis went on her own. It was at this point, she subsequently claimed, that she and the Prince ‘crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love’.
⁶¹

The fact that the Prince of Wales should have a mistress – even a married American one – was not especially problematic, even if the mood of the age was rather different from the time when a previous holder of the title, the future Edward VII, had been pursuing women across London. Provided that she remained a mistress, that is. But the Prince of Wales appeared unwilling to follow his predecessor’s acceptance of a distinction between those women who could serve as mistresses and those who had the appropriate background to make them a potential queen. This meant trouble – although it was to take a few months.

After he became King, Edward’s popularity grew with his love of all things fashionable and modern. During a visit to the coal mining villages of South Wales, especially hard hit by the Depression, he delighted the crowd by declaring that ‘something must be done’. Those around him were less impressed: he dismissed many Palace officials whom he saw as symbols and perpetuators of an old order and alienated many of those who remained by cutting their salaries in the interest of balancing the royal books – yet at the same time spending lavishly on jewels for Wallis from Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels.

To the exasperation of ministers, Edward was often late for appointments or cancelled them at the last moment. His Red Boxes containing the state papers on which monarchs were meant to work so diligently, were returned late, often apparently unread or stained by the bases of whisky glasses. The Foreign Office took the unprecedented step of screening all the documents they sent to him. Edward was quickly growing tired of what he described as ‘the relentless grind of the King’s daily life’; George V’s warning that, as monarch, his eldest son would ‘ruin himself within a year’ was beginning to look prescient.

The King was distracted – and the source of his distraction was not difficult to find. Yet he faced a serious impasse: Wallis Simpson was not going to go away; nor would he have allowed her to. In an attempt to square the circle, there was talk of making her Duchess of Edinburgh or of a morganatic marriage – that is one in which none of the husband’s titles and privileges pass to the wife or to any children, even though there was no precedent for such a union in Britain. To the alarm of all political parties, there was even a suggestion that Edward might take his fate to the country.
⁶²

Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative prime minister, and other members of the political establishment considered Mrs Simpson totally unsuitable to be Queen – and feared the heads of the Dominion governments felt the same way. As head of the Church of England, Edward could not be married to a twice-divorced woman with two living husbands. Rumours circulated that she exerted some kind of sexual control over him; there were suggestions she had not just one but two other lovers beside him. Some even said she was a Nazi agent.

As long as Wallis remained married to Ernest, their affair was a potential scandal rather than a political and constitutional crisis. Yet matters were progressing on that front, too. Although there seemed little doubt that it was Wallis’s adultery with the King that precipitated her marital break-up, it was customary among gentlemen keen to spare their wives’ blushes that they should pose as the guilty party. Ernest had chosen 21 July, the eighth anniversary of his marriage, to be caught
in flagrante
by staff at the swanky Hotel de Paris at Bray on the Thames near Maidenhead with a Miss ‘Buttercup’ Kennedy. The following month, the King and Mrs Simpson set off on another cruise – this time through the Eastern Mediterranean on board the steam yacht
Nahlin
. Their journey was covered widely in the American and European press, but their British counterparts maintained a self-imposed silence.

So when the case came to court on 27 October at Ipswich Assizes (chosen on the grounds that a hearing in London would attract too much attention from the press), it was Wallis who was divorcing her husband for adultery rather than vice versa. The town had never seen the like.
⁶³
With the King’s chauffeur at the wheel, Wallis swept into Ipswich in a Canadian Buick at such speed that a news cameraman’s car following at 65 mph was left behind. Security around the courtroom was tight: all newsreel crews had been sent out of town, and two photographers had their cameras smashed with truncheons. Access to the courtroom was also restricted: the mayor, himself an Ipswich magistrate, was admitted only after arguing with his own police officers. All courtroom gallery seats faced by Mrs Simpson as she stood in the witness box were vacant. Tickets were issued only for a few seats to which her back was turned.

Members of staff of the Hotel de Paris then took the stand and described how they had brought morning tea to Mr Simpson and found a woman who was not Mrs Simpson with him in his double bed. After nineteen minutes it was all over and Wallis was granted her
decree nisi
, with costs against her husband. After she left the court, police locked the doors behind her for five minutes to hold the press at bay. Her Buick flashed out of Ipswich as fast as it had arrived and the police swung one of their cars squarely across the road after her, blocking traffic for ten minutes.

Edward and Wallis were not yet free to marry, however. Under the divorce law of the time, the
decree nisi
could not be made absolute for six months – which meant that, formally speaking, she would be under the surveillance of an official known as the King’s Proctor until 27 April 1937. If, during that period, she was discovered in compromising circumstances with any man she could be hauled back into court and, if the decision went against her, be forever unable to divorce her husband in an English court. This was only a formality. As
Time
reported, some thirty-six hours after obtaining her decree, Wallis ‘was supping gaily in the Palace with the King and a very few friends’. Afterwards, Edward ‘squired’ her back to her home on Cumberland Terrace.