30 November – 9 December 1936:

End of the Exhibition, but the Royal Show goes public:

London’s one-and-a-half million pound amusement centre and landmark, the Crystal Palace, was destroyed by fire on November 30th. Within half an hour of the first alarm, the building, covering twenty-five acres, was wholly ablaze, and the blood-orange glow from the fifty foot flames could be seen from another great landmark of pleasure, the Grand Pier in Brighton, eighty miles away. The Investigation failed to find the cause of the fire, which started around 6.30 p.m., during an orchestral rehearsal in the lobby. At first it was dismissed as a minor fire, and the band played on, but the flames were fanned by a strong wind so that the musicians had to be evacuated. The central transept collapsed only minutes after they got outside. The whole structure was now ablaze and melting, made as it was of wood, iron and glass. The noise of the crashing glass roof could be heard five miles away. Thousands of Londoners came out to see the spectacle of streams of molten iron and glass, looking like a volcano, so many that they had to be held back by a cordon of police to allow the ninety fire-tenders to tackle the blaze through the intense heat, which could be felt on faces half a mile away. The Duke of Kent arrived on the scene, boosting the morale of the firefighters by donning a helmet and staying until 2.30 a.m. The next morning all that was left of the structure were the two 300 ft, stone-built water towers.

The destruction of the immense glass palace, built to Joseph Paxton’s design to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, symbolised a breach in continuity with the Victorian Age and the commencement of a new, frightening age in which fires, whether started accidentally or by bombing, were becoming commonplace. The only relics of this bygone era were plaster of Paris effigies of the kings of England on their tombs and the concrete sculptures of dinosaurs, which can still be seen in the gardens to this day. The glass exhibition hall had first stood in Hyde Park, before being moved, at great cost, to Sydenham in 1854, where it was reconstructed, enlarged and made the centre of a large pleasure park. By the thirties it had gone into decline as an exhibition centre, being used mainly for choral singing and orchestral competitions. It still housed waxworks, which had, of course, all melted away. John Logie Baird’s new television laboratory was also destroyed, but this did not affect the BBC’s new TV broadcasts.

Some saw the fire almost as a divine judgement on the King’s rejection of traditional values. Queen Mary was deeply affected by the sudden fall of the People’s Palace she had re-opened with George V as the first home of the Imperial War Museum in 1924, before it moved to Lambeth. She watched the smoke rising in the distance from the windows of Marlborough House, visiting the burnt-out site three days later, still dressed in black, surveying the mass of bent and twisted metal. The sense of melancholy which the scene conveyed must have matched her mood at the end of an annus horribilis, with the monarchy on the verge of collapse, just as her late husband had predicted at its beginning. Abroad the warlike turn of events had destroyed Chamberlain’s hopes of economic recovery and social reform on the home front. Resources were needed for Rearmament, the fire-fighting appliances needed priming, and the prospects for peace had been shattered. The public mood, like that of Queen Mary herself, was deeply pessimistic, symbolised in the tangle of steel and glass she stood before. It looked like a bomb site and reminded some journalists of the bombing of Madrid. In recent weeks, the newspapers and newsreels had been full of images from Spain of huddled men and terrified women and children taking shelter from the German bombers.

On 2nd December Baldwin went again to the Palace and informed the King that he thought that the lady he married should automatically become the Queen, and that, although inquiries in the Commonwealth were not yet complete, neither Britain nor its Dominions would tolerate a morganatic marriage. In fact, this was not true. We now know that only the Australian Prime Minister’s response was entirely against the morganatic marriage. Both the New Zealand and Canadian responses were far more sympathetic to the idea, but they were either changed or not put formally to the Cabinet, and were withheld from the King.

However unbelievable it may seem from the perspective of the multi-media society of the twenty-first century, most of the country had still not heard of Wallis Simpson until December 2nd, when the Yorkshire Post  reported a fairly innocent comment made by the Bishop of Bradford, the aptly named Dr Blunt, who also had never heard of Mrs Simpson, at a Diocesan Conference the previous day:

The King’s personal views are his own but it is still an essential part of the idea of kingship…that the King needs the grace of God for his office.

Above: Alfred Blunt, Bishop of Bradford.

The Bishop said that he wished, therefore, that the King would show more positive evidence of the need for Divine Guidance.  All he meant was that the King ought to go to Church more often, but a local journalist in the audience wrongly took the Bishop’s remark as a none-too veiled reference to the King’s affair. When his report was carried by the Press Association, the national news agency, the newspapers interpreted Blunt’s words as the signal they had all been waiting for: an official breaking of the silence by the Church, and therefore the Establishment, over the Simpson affair. The national press soon circulated the story, breaking their self-imposed silence about the monarch’s love-life. The whole story of the King’s affair was now filling the pages of the newspapers. Over the previous few months, only a relatively small number of Britons had known what was going on. Now the newspapers quickly made up for lost time, filling their pages with stories of crisis meetings at the Palace, pictures of Mrs Simpson and interviews with men and women in the street, asking their opinions. Feature articles included biographies of Wallis Simpson, photographs of her previous husbands, reports of the Nahlin cruise, pictures of the couple together and columns of comment. While Dawson of The Times attacked the King, with Baldwin’s collusion, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and The Daily Mirror backed him, reflecting their owners’ views. They have much in common, began a profile of the royal couple in the Daily Mirror on 4 December. They both love the sea. They both love swimming. They both love golf and gardening. And soon they discovered that each loved the other. The Liberal-nonconformist Daily Chronicle also came out in favour of a morganatic marriage. While only eighty thousand read the broadsheets, the combined circulation of those supporting the marriage was nine million.

The same day, 3rd December, Baldwin addressed the House, simply reporting that no constitutional crisis had yet arisen. Harold Nicolson MP went to Islington, where he gave a public lecture, a long-standing engagement. Out of an audience of four hundred only ten joined in the singing of ‘God Save the King’ at the beginning of the meeting. He wrote that evening that he didn’t find people to be angry with Mrs Simpson, but that there was a deep and enraged fury at the King himself. In eight months, Edward had destroyed the great structure of popularity which he himself had raised. Apparently, for Nicolson, not even his popularity with the armed forces, the ex-servicemen and the unemployed miners, so recently demonstrated, would be enough to break this fall from grace.

The King retreated to Fort Belvedere, clinging to his morganatic dream, which Baldwin demolished it in a public statement:

There is no such thing as what is called a morganatic marriage known to our law…the lady whom he marries, by the fact of her marriage to the King, necessarily becomes Queen…The only way in which this result could be avoided would be by legislation dealing with a particular case. His Majesty’s Government are not prepared to introduce such legislation.

The Duke of York, Albert, and his family, had been in Scotland during the previous days. Alighting from the night train at Euston on the morning of 3 December, they were confronted with newspaper placards with the words, The King’s Marriage. Albert and Elizabeth were both deeply shocked by what it might mean for them. When the Duke spoke to his younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, he found him in a great state of excitement. The King himself had not yet decided what to do, saying he would ask the people what they wanted him to do and then go abroad for a while. In the meantime, he sent Wallis away to Cannes for her own protection. She was already receiving poison pen letters and bricks had been thrown through the window of the house she was renting in Regent’s Park. The couple feared that worse was to come. The same day the Duke of York telephoned the King, who was at his retreat at Windsor Great Park, Fort Belvedere. ‘Bertie’ wanted to make an appointment to see his brother ‘David’ in person, but this was declined. He kept trying over the next few days, without success, the King refusing to see him on the grounds that he had still not made up his mind as to his course of action. Despite the huge impact that his decision would have on his brother’s life, Edward refused to confide in him. He must have known that Bertie had no desire to become King. The Duke’s sense of foreboding was growing and, according to Princess Olga (sister of the Duchess of Kent), he became mute and broken… in an awful state of worry as David won’t see him or telephone. 

Wallis Simpson had not been not entirely as disinterested as she later made out, even if she was more capable than Edward of being dispassionate in public. She had encouraged him to take up Churchill’s morganatic marriage idea and now urged him to appeal to his people over the heads of the politicians by means of a radio broadcast. Her plan for him was that he should then fly to Switzerland and wait to see what the impact of public opinion on the government would be. Edward went along with this and again summoned Baldwin to the Palace on the evening of 3rd December. The PM told the Cabinet that he had driven to the Palace and had been taken in by a back entrance to avoid the photographers camped out at the front. The King had read a proposed draft of his radio broadcast to Baldwin, who had responded by saying that, although he was willing to put the idea to the Cabinet, he thought they would regard it as thoroughly unconstitutional. At this, the King had lost his temper with Baldwin, demanding to know what more the PM would have him do. Baldwin had replied, so he said, that what he wanted was what the King had told him he had wanted: to go with dignity, not dividing the country, and making things as smooth as possible for your successor. Trying to calm the situation and step back from the abyss that he must have sensed opening between them as they sat together on the sofa, Baldwin is then said to have raised his whisky-and-soda and said: Well, Sir, whatever happens, my Mrs and I wish you happiness from the depths of our souls, at which the King burst into tears, and Baldwin followed suit. What a strange conversation piece, observed Harold Nicolson when he heard of this from Liberal MP Robert Bernays, those two blubbering together on a sofa!

As Baldwin predicted, the entire Cabinet was once more united behind him the next morning and against the whole idea of a royal broadcast. Chamberlain again urged the PM to bring the King sharply up to the point and get him to abdicate the same day. The politicians now began to panic because they feared that if he were to broadcast, public opinion would move irrevocably in his favour, especially as Chamberlain confirmed, from the whips, that Churchill and Beaverbrook were working on the King’s speech together. The terrible consequences of Churchill being asked to form a government, then demanding a General Election were too dreadful to contemplate, apparently. Baldwin calmed the situation, agreeing to make a statement in the House ruling out any possibility of the King making his broadcast.

Wallis told Edward, ‘You must speak!’, perhaps confusing his powers with those of an American President. As she was now nearing a nervous breakdown herself, she had agreed to go to France, to stay at the villa of friends in Cannes. When Churchill went to meet the King the next morning, 4 December, he found him ill and isolated. He persuaded Baldwin to delay the Cabinet’s ultimatum, and the following day accused the King’s ministers of acting unconstitutionally in demanding his abdication and in reaching secret deals with His Majesty’s ‘Loyal Opposition’ to confront him with the ultimatum. In his press release, he also made an implicit appeal to the Dominions, perhaps sensing that Baldwin had not been entirely truthful in his representation of their views. Forty Conservative MPs were ready back Churchill, who had already selected much of his Cabinet, and was planning his first actions on replacing Baldwin as PM. Crowds formed outside Buckingham Palace and Downing Street cheering for the King, holding placards which read Cheer Your King at the Palace: After South Wales, You Can’t Let Him Down.

Liberal opinion was also behind the King: John Maynard Keynes wanted to know, on simple utilitarian grounds, why the King could not have his morganatic marriage. However, many liberals were nervous about joining forces with the reactionary Beaverbrook and Rothermere press to support the monarchy. There were demonstrations against Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, but as the MPs toured their constituencies that weekend, they also found a widespread sense of betrayal felt by many who, like the Jarrow marchers, had seen the royal family as a model of family life, symbolising the most important values of their subjects. Perhaps this helps to explain why there was no great spontaneous uprising in support of a previously immensely popular member of that family. Apart from the welcome support from Churchill and Duff Cooper in parliament and government, most of the vocal and visible support was unwelcome, coming from the pro-fascist Right and, more sinisterly, Mosley’s blackshirts who, not yet proscribed from wearing their uniforms, marched up and down Whitehall with a picture of the King, shouting: One, two, three, four, five, we want Baldwin dead or alive! But, in any case, it was largely uncoordinated, useless and simply too late.

By the end of the following weekend of 5th-6th December, if not at its beginning, Edward had decided to give up his fight and hand the Crown to his brother. Yet Albert had none of his brother’s charisma and was ill-prepared for the role he was being handed by him. He also had come close to a nervous breakdown during the four days since his return from Scotland, during which his brother had declined to see him. On Sunday 6th, the Duke again rang the Fort to be told that the King was in a conference and would call him back later. The call never came. Edward had summoned his lawyer, Sir Walter Monckton, to his room at Fort Belvedere and told him of his decision. The next day, Churchill, unaware that the decision had been made, was shouted down when he tried to argue that no pistol should be held at the King’s head. Edward finally made contact with his brother, inviting him to the Fort after dinner. The Duke wrote his own account of this meeting:

The awful and ghastly suspense of waiting was over… I found him pacing up and down the room, and he told me his decision that he would go. 

When he got home that evening, he found his wife had been struck down with flu. She took to her bed, where she remained for the next few days as the dramatic events unfolded around her.  She wrote to her sister:

Bertie & I are feeling very despairing, and the strain is terrific. Every day last a week & the only hope we have is in the affection & support of our family & friends.

Meanwhile, events moved swiftly. At a dinner at Fort Belvedere on Tuesday 8th, attended by several men, including the Duke and the prime minister, Edward made it clear he had already made up his mind. Baldwin had arrived with a suitcase, ready for lengthy negotiations. For a moment, the King was horrified at the prospect of his PM staying the night. The King’s brothers, Princes Albert and George were also at the dinner. According to Baldwin’s account, before they sat down the King merely walked up and down the room saying, “This is the most wonderful woman in the world.”   The Duke of York’s account reported his astonishment as his brother, the life and soul of the party, told Baldwin things I am sure he had never heard before about unemployment in south Wales. Edward may have felt that this was, at least, some small way in which he could honour his Dowlais declaration before departing. Apparently, the Duke turned to Walter Monckton and whispered, and this is the man we are going to lose. Monckton later wrote that it was his lawyer’s acumen that probably prevented  him from retorting, and this is exactly why we are going to lose him, because he makes the politicians feel uncomfortable.  The Duke was in sombre mood and wrote that it was a dinner that I am never likely to forget. On each of the following days, crowds gathered in Whitehall, waiting for news (see below).

The contemporary journalist and commentator René Cutforth, wrote forty years later that his remark, Something must be done (as it was wrongly reported) to an unemployed miner in Dowlais had indeed been made to the umbrage of the politicians, who wanted none of that sort of talk. To that one sentence he owed most of his reputation among them as ‘irresponsible’. But while the remark may have sealed his fate as far as Chamberlain and others in the cabinet were concerned, the King had left Baldwin in no doubt about his determination to marry Wallis Simpson. Cutforth made an interesting comment on this:

Millions of words have been written in explanation of this world shaking affair, and American friends of mine cling to this day to the theory that only some shared sexual deviation could explain Edward’s insistence on a world well lost for love. In the Thirties we thought Freud could explain everything… It was, in fact, a simple case of delayed adolescent romantic love… Ernest Simpson… knew this well enough: he used to refer to the Prince of Wales as ‘Peter Pan’. Years later Wallis wrote of Edward: “Over and above the charm of his personality and the warmth of his manner, he was the open sesame to a new and glittering world that excited me as nothing in my life had done before… All I can say that it was like being Wallis in Wonderland.”

16-27 November, 1936: The Crown in Crisis;

Something will be done

Although Wallis Simpson had been granted her decree nisi at Ipswich Assizes following a twenty-minute appearance in court on the 27 October, she and the King were not yet free to marry. Under the divorce law of the time, the decree could not be made absolute for six months, which meant that Wallis would be under the ‘surveillance’ of an official known as the King’s Proctor until 27 April 1937. If, during that period, she was found in compromising circumstances with any man she could be hauled back into court and, the decision went against her, she would be forever unable to divorce her husband in an English court. Although there had seemed little doubt that it was Wallis’ adultery with Edward that precipitated the breakup of her second marriage, her husband Ernest had agreed to save her ‘blushes’ by being caught in flagrante by staff at the Hotel de Paris near Maidenhead in July, with a Miss ‘Buttercup’ Kennedy. In reality, obtaining the decree absolute was a mere formality, and the couple showed no reserve in the conduct of their relationship over the next six months.

On 16 November Edward invited Baldwin to Buckingham Palace and told him he intended to marry Mrs Simpson. If he could do so and remain King, then ‘well and good’ he said, but if the governments of Britain and the Dominions were opposed, then he was ‘prepared to go’. He did have some prominent supporters in taking this stance, among them Winston Churchill, who was shouted down by the House of Commons when he spoke out in favour of Edward. What crime has the King committed? Churchill later demanded, Have we not sworn allegiance to him? Are we not bound by that oath? At the time of the King’s meeting with Baldwin, however, Churchill may have thought, with some justification, that Edward’s relationship with Mrs Simpson would fizzle out, just as his earlier liaisons had done, and before either the coronation or the wedding could take place in the spring.

Travelling overnight, the King’s train pulled into Llantwit Major before dawn on 18^th November. After breakfast, the King set off by car on his tour of the Vale of Glamorgan and the valleys. On the first day, he visited training centres in the Vale where young men and women from the valleys were being trained before being transferred into domestic service and other trades in England. Then he toured some of the valleys and pit villages where the collieries stood idle and so did their miners, in front of him. Almost every conversation ended with the polite request for him to tell Whitehall to do something to bring jobs back to the valleys. His black bowler hat made him look like a mines’ inspector, a point picked up by The South Wales Echo in one of its cartoons lampooning the inaction of Baldwin, Chamberlain and Brown, the Minister for Labour, hated for his role in the introduction of the Means Test and Transitional Benefits.

It was in Dowlais, during a tour of the derelict steelworks, shut down six years earlier, that he made his remark, terrible, terrible, something will be done about this! This was also how the newsreels reported it at the time,  showing the marvellous reception of his long-suffering subjects in the depressed area. The King had brought hope to replace despair. Nine thousand men had worked making steel; now there was nothing but the wreckage of the old works, and no other industry to take them on. In 1936, 75% of the Dowlais men were unemployed. The demonstration that met him was largely spontaneous and supportive and, as he looked over the derelict site, some of the men began singing Crugybar, the Welsh Hymn. It was then that he made his impromptu speech, often misquoted, as ‘something must be done’. As in the Jarrow Crusade, these four words were frequently on the lips of advocates of the distressed areas, and had been used elsewhere on this visit by the King, responding to pleas from the people. However, this time what he said was different markedly different in tense and tone, context and subtext.

It may well have been an attempt to head off the kind of criticism that Ellis had suggested might accompany his visit, rather than an attempt to embarrass the government. His use of will rather than must, the manner in which he directed the remarks to the politicians alongside him, and his insistence that the steelworkers must stay here, working reflected his determination to see to it that his government would change its policy from one of sole reliance on transferring the unemployed to other areas to that of attracting new industries, as advocated by Malcolm Stewart and many others. This was a direct challenge not only to Brown, but also, through him, to Chamberlain and Baldwin.It was fighting talk, not the resigned remark of a monarch who was about to give up the throne. Whatever the case, the King’s visit did indeed acquire a political significance, though opposite in nature to that which Ellis was expecting. It certainly did not endear him to a Cabinet that was now beginning to discuss the constitutional crisis and the distinct possibility that he would be forced to abdicate. The coalfield communities turned the whole event into another mass demonstration. The publicity given to it and to Edward VIII’s remarks also, certainly, had an important impact in quickening the process of industrial redevelopment. Something was, eventually, done, but not at the dicta of the King and only after his abdication. For the time being, though, his visit re-energised him, and he began to think that he might put up a fight for the throne, the woman he loved, and his people, against the politicians who seemed to wish that all of them would simply go away, rather than trying to find unorthodox solutions for unusual circumstances. Even those who knew that he didn’t have the power to change the hard hearts of politicians were nonetheless grateful that he had taken the trouble to survey the depressed valleys with his own eyes.

Playing the Good King

On his return from South Wales on November 20th, the King felt buoyed up by his popularity and his ability to demonstrate empathy with the sufferings of his people. Ramsay MacDonald, Lord President, who knew South Wales well as Labour MP for Aberavon from 1922 to 1929, commented that these escapades should be limited… They are an invasion into the field of politics and should be watched constitutionally. Geoffrey Dawson called his comments at Dowlais monstrous…a constitutionally dangerous proceeding that would threaten, if continued, to entangle the Throne in politics.

The Beaverbrook press, by contrast, allying itself with Churchill, was keen to make political capital out of the visit, contrasting his care for the plight of the unemployed with the indifference of the government under the headline, “The King Edward Touch”. It continued to trumpet its praise:

Never has the magic of personal leadership been better shown than by the King’s visit to south Wales. As few ministers have done, the Sovereign examined their plight and drew from them the tale of their trouble.

He himself later called his words the minimum humanitarian response that he could have made to the suffering he had seen, though he also added that the monarch should be able to play the role of the Good King, free to move unhindered among his subjects, and speak what is in his mind.

On the evening of his return from South Wales, Edward telephoned his brother, the Duke of Kent, and told him of his intention to marry Wallis, and make her Queen, Empress of India, “the whole bag of tricks!” This renewed self-confidence also sprang from his finding a new ally behind the scenes in the ample shape of Winston Churchill, whose motives for supporting the King were a mixture of personal ambition and political acumen. Churchill felt that Baldwin was slow to rearm because he was putting the interests of his party before those of the country. This was also why the PM would rather have the King abdicate than risk losing his popular mandate in an early election. On the other hand, Churchill realised that he needed a more popular cause than rearmament to revive his flagging fortunes. Backing the King would add to Baldwin’s discomfort and might lead to a new Conservative administration with Churchill at the heart of it. He was also a romantic, half-American himself, and held the monarchy in great reverence. In addition, he respected the King for his twenty-five years of service as Prince of Wales, before becoming monarch, almost as long as the time since Winston himself had first become a minister. The civil law allowed re-marriage. Why should the King, never married himself, not be able to marry the woman he loved, even if she had been married twice before? The answer to this, of course, lay in the attitude of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was not keen on anointing an adulterer in any case. He would far rather crown his far more virtuous brother. Churchill had little time for such stuffiness.

Above: Archbishop Lange

While Edward was in South Wales, Churchill put the case for a morganatic marriage. This would deny Wallis the title of Queen and preclude Edward’s heirs from taking the throne, the crown eventually passing to the Princess Elizabeth.  Rather than putting the proposal directly to the King, he used Lord Rothermere’s son, Esmond Harmsworth. Lord Harmsworth took Wallis to lunch at Claridge’s and told her that if, on marriage, she became the King’s consort, but not his Queen, she might become ‘the Duchess of Cornwall’. She liked the idea, and telephoned the King on his special train in South Wales. On the following day, November 20th, Edward briefly discussed by telephone with Baldwin the possibility of Parliament passing a special Bill that would allow him to marry Mrs. Simpson without her becoming Queen. He told the PM that this was Wallis’ own idea, following Winston Churchill’s advice not to credit him with it. He also told Baldwin to submit the proposal, as his Prime Minister, to the British Cabinet as well as to all the Cabinets in the Dominions. Up until this point, the matter of the King’s relationship with Mrs Simpson had not been discussed even in the British Cabinet, though the politicians in the Dominions were already far more aware of the details of the ‘affair’ through their press, which was not fettered in its reporting. Baldwin had kept everything he could from most of his Cabinet colleagues, but had already used the freedom of North American press to his advantage in the Hardinge letter, which the King had received just a week beforehand, and which contained the confected reference to the negative reaction of Canadians. In fact, North American reaction was, by all the accounts of the time, quite positive towards the marriage, with many people looking forward to an American becoming Queen. Wallis must have been aware of this, even if she accepted that there was also some adverse reaction among a minority of fellow (North) Americans. The Hardinge letter should at least have alerted the King to the danger of trusting Baldwin to consider the morganatic proposal fairly and honestly, but apparently it did not. For his part, Edward had discussed the plan over the course of his weekend with Wallis at the Fort. On the Monday, he sent Harmsworth to Downing Street to discuss the details of the plan with Baldwin. This was a major tactical error.

Baldwin was ready for the proposal, having had the weekend to find a legitimate reason to oppose it and force the abdication. Baldwin had discussed it with Chamberlain over the weekend and both men knew of (and were suspicious of) Churchill’s motives in proposing the scheme. Perhaps most significantly, both men were from strong, middle-class Victorian church-going traditions in a country where church attendance had declined dramatically since the Great War. Baldwin rejected the plan at once and told Harmsworth that MPs would never pass the required act of Parliament. The young Lord, the epitome of aristocratic decadence to Baldwin, impetuously retorted that he thought they would, apparently failing to challenge Baldwin’s  basic assumption that a special Bill was necessary.

Seventy years on, no such act of Parliament was deemed necessary for the current heir to the throne to marry the divorced Mrs Parker-Bowles with the proviso that she would become and remain the Duchess of Cornwall. In his brief discussion with Harmsworth, Baldwin also added what he believed to be ‘the truth’, for good measure; that the British  people would never accept Wallis Simpson as the King’s wife, whatever her constitutional position. Drawing another lesson from more recent royal relationships, we now know that despite the strength of public feeling at the time of the Prince of Wales’ separation from Princess Diana, the outpouring of sympathy at her death, and the suffering of her two children as a result of these two events, the public seem to have accepted Charles’ marriage to his former mistress on the basis that she will not be made ‘Queen Camilla’. A morganatic marriage is now deemed both permissible and acceptable to the establishment, including the monarchy itself, as well as to the people: could it have been in 1936, especially given Edward’s popularity? Of course, the so-called sixties sexual revolution and  the change in moral values over those seventy years needs to be accounted for, but the constitutional position of the monarch as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith has remained unchanged. So has that of the Church itself in respect of Divorce in general, although re-married couples can now receive a blessing in church, as Charles and Camilla did in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, following the registration of the marriage.

Above: Fort Belvedere, Edward VIII’s private quarters at Windsor Castle.

The truth was, as Edward himself said in his final broadcast, there was never any constitutional difference between himself and Parliament. Perhaps referring to his exchange with Baldwin on the 13th, he added that he should never have allowed any such issue to arise by accepting that he might have to confront the Hobson’s choice which Baldwin was offering him. Churchill himself never proposed that either Parliament or the Cabinet needed to be involved in agreeing to the morganatic marriage. On the contrary, he repeatedly argued that the King should be accorded the same basic human right to marry as any of his subjects.

It was the prospect of Churchill forming a ‘King’s Party’ to push for ‘the Cornwall Plan’ which forced Baldwin’s arm. He himself would rather be forced to resign in favour of Chamberlain than allow Churchill to become PM with an entirely new cabinet. He therefore decided to confront ‘the big beast’ in person, at the same time securing broader support in Parliament with which to scotch the morganatic plan. On 24 November, he summoned Churchill, together with Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, and Sinclair, the Liberal leader, telling them the government would resign if Edward pressed on with his plans to marry.  He demanded a pledge that they would not try to form an alternative government. Both Attlee and Sinclair agreed, but Churchill reserved his position. In reality, Baldwin and Chamberlain had already decided upon the smooth transition from one monarch to another which the King had reluctantly, and conditionally, agreed upon, in his audience with Baldwin on 16 November. The King’s ‘remarks’ in south Wales, coupled with Churchill’s intervention, had made Baldwin and Chamberlain even more determined that Edward should abdicate in favour of his brother, Prince Albert, Duke of York. There was, for them, no going back. ‘Chips’ Channon, however, wrote of the Conservative Party divided, the country divided and schism in the Royal Family. If Churchill had been trumped by Baldwin, he still had cards to play.

On 25 November, Baldwin was commanded by the King to attend an audience at Buckingham Palace. Edward put the proposal of a morganatic marriage to him directly and in person. Baldwin told him that he didn’t think Parliament would support this, but that he would consult the Cabinet and the Prime Ministers of the Dominions. The King’s only other options were to invite Churchill to form a new government or to rule alone by royal prerogative (in effect, as a dictator). Both were unrealistic: the only realistic option was to abdicate in favour of the Duke of York. Baldwin at last called a Cabinet meeting to discuss the issue, and dispatched telegrams to the Prime Ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland. On 27th, the King’s proposed marriage was discussed in full, open Cabinet for the first time. There was no support for the morganatic proposal, with Duff Cooper the only minister suggesting a delay in a decision about the marriage until after the coronation, a view which Churchill also put forward in Parliament.

When Lord Beaverbrook’s ship Bremen docked in Southampton the next day, the King’s biggest supporter drove straight to the Fort. On hearing first-hand the account of his second, fateful meeting with Baldwin, the newspaper magnate realised that the game was already up because the King had already placed his head on the block. All that remained was for the PM to swing the axe. He concluded that while Edward had friends among the miners, he did not have them where it now mattered, in the Cabinet. The King was well out of his depth as far as politics were concerned and in danger of drowning.