Power and Glory, page 16
It is probably the most affecting thing he ever wrote. It was the speech he was unwilling, or simply unable, to make publicly, and is hard to read without being moved by his mingled feelings of pride and loss. It was sent to Broadlands shortly after the honeymoon began, and it is not hard to imagine his daughter’s response at receiving the poignant and heartfelt letter. It bears reproduction in full.
I was so proud of you and thrilled at having you so close to me on our long walk in Westminster Abbey, but when I handed your hand to the Archbishop I felt that I had lost something very precious. You were very calm and composed during the Service and said your words with such conviction that I knew everything was all right.
I am so glad you wrote and told Mummy that you think the long wait before your engagement and the long time before the wedding was for the best. I was rather afraid that you had thought I was being rather hard-hearted about it. I was so anxious for you to come to South Africa, as you knew. Our family, us four, the Royal Family must remain together, with additions of course at suitable moments!
I have watched you grow up all these years, with pride under the skilful direction of Mummy, who as you know is the most marvellous person in the world in my eyes, and I can, I know, always count on you, and now Philip, to help in our work.
You leaving us has left a great blank in our lives, but do remember that your old home is still yours and do come back to it as much and as often as possible. I can see that you are sublimely happy with Philip which is right, but don’t forget us is the wish of your ever loving and devoted,
Papa36
Chapter Ten
‘The Future Is a Gloomy One’
‘I think the answer to the question “were you invited to the wedding” should be the plain truth “no” and then refuse to comment, don’t you?’1 So the Duchess of Windsor complained to her aunt on 11 September 1947. The royal family’s refusal to invite the duke and duchess to Princess Elizabeth’s wedding was not an unpredictable snub, given the events of the previous years, but it was still a salutary reminder that the couple were seen as infra dig and that their presence at such high-profile – and supposedly joyful – public events was neither required nor welcome. The duke had offered the king his congratulations on the ‘interesting announcement’ on 8 July, and suggested to his mother that ‘I certainly hope they will be very happy’,2 but it did not translate into him and his wife being welcomed back into the fold.
Wallis was not happy. Informing her aunt that the duke was being asked for comment as to his presence at, or absence from, the forthcoming wedding, she said, ‘Naturally the English do not want this so definite and the Duke has been told he should avoid answering! Why should we go on protecting their rude attitude after ten and a half years? I can’t see how any sane person should think I would be asked after all this time and I don’t think it hurts to answer the truth, do you?’3
The lack of an invitation to the wedding was the first substantial proof they had that despite their indifferently received return visits to Britain, they would never be accepted back into the royal family, or treated with anything other than contempt. They were in New York for the ceremony, in their rented home at Waldorf Towers, and watched it disconsolately on television. Irrelevance bit hard. Edward wrote angrily to the Earl of Dudley on 16 October to say, ‘I shall be very interested to know if you are able to get the low-down on the marked indifference of the Press in general to my presence in Great Britain’, and was sure that he knew the reasons why. ‘It is difficult to believe that it was not acting on a directive from Buckingham Palace.’4
There were those who agreed that the couple’s treatment had been shoddy. The duke’s younger sister, Princess Mary of York, who had remained close to him since the abdication, did not attend the wedding, citing ill health as a factor, as well as her continued mourning of the recent death of her husband, Henry Lascelles, Earl of Harewood. That she was seen out in public two days later at another event indicated either that she had a more robust constitution than many of her family, or that she had deliberately boycotted the event in tacit protest as to how her elder brother continued to be treated.*
And the duke found some unexpected support, perhaps unbeknown to him, from ‘three American women’. They wrote to the king on 4 October angered at the lack of an invitation for both Edward and Wallis. The anonymous correspondents stated that ‘For ten years the treatment accorded Her Highness, the Duchess of Windsor, by the English Government and the Queen Mother, particularly, has been an insult to every American. Surely, no really great person stoops to be discourteous to anyone regardless of their station in life.’ The letter struck an egalitarian note: ‘The Duchess is not of Royal Blood, but is there such a thing as Royal Blood? Isn’t it fast becoming just a Fairy Tale? Are we, today, not striving for a United World devoid of trivial snobbery and such?’
The women were undoubtedly angry – ‘How can the Queen Mother do justice to her people when she has so little concern for her own son’s happiness, and for ten years has hurt him so deeply?’ – and concluded by asking, ‘Don’t you think it about time to do something about all this? It has no place in our distressed world of today.’5 The king’s reaction to the declaration of solidarity with his brother and sister-in-law was unrecorded.
Others remained partisan too. Edward’s great supporter Kenneth de Courcy was quick to reassure him of his undying loyalty. He wrote on 17 November from London that ‘the nuptial celebrations have started here but I must confess to a feeling of coldness on my part as I deplore the absence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor … I also think it perfectly preposterous that the three sisters of the bridegroom have been invited just because they are married to Germans.’
Nonetheless, de Courcy remained optimistic about the duke’s future, even if few others were. ‘We are on the verge of very great political changes here, not only affecting the parties but large philosophical changes, and I think it may well be that presently other views may prevail.’ He also suggested that a return to prominence was not just likely, but inevitable. ‘I need hardly tell you, sir, that so soon as it is possible some of us who feel strongly will I hope be in a position to insist that those who advise the Crown advise that you should govern one of the great dominions, if indeed Your Royal Highness felt so inclined … One day an arrangement of that kind must be offered and if I have anything whatsoever to do with it, as one day I may have, such an offer will be made.’6
De Courcy was amusingly certain about the extent of his own influence, but no doubt his continuing confidence in the duke acted as a pick-me-up in otherwise difficult times. As Edward and Wallis continued to drift between America and Europe, the former king might have been mordantly amused to know that even if he was not wanted by his family, there were still those who were keen to be associated with him. One enterprising individual, D. M. McCausland, formed the ‘Duke of Windsor pipe band’ and asked for formal permission for the duke to be associated with the organisation. Although Edward’s great love of the bagpipes was a consistent, if sometimes regrettable, feature of his life,* his secretary, F. J. Dadd, replied, straight-faced, that ‘I am to say that the Secretary of State regrets that this is not a case in which, in accordance with established practice, he can make a favourable recommendation to the King, whose consent is required to the use of Royal names and titles.’7
Bagpiping aside, America proved to be a mixed experience for the duke and duchess. Many of their belongings had been sent there at the outbreak of war in a panic, and were still in storage in New York, reinforcing the sense that their existence was a transitory, uncertain one. A permanent life there seemed undesirable because of the taxes they would be expected to pay as residents, and the duchess felt personally aggrieved at the attention – usually unflattering – the American papers paid her.
Edward expressed his discontent with the country’s ‘leftist thinking’, and was particularly upset that Truman won re-election in the autumn of 1948. He complained to Beaverbrook that ‘the departments in Washington and even the White House will escape the thorough house-cleaning of liberals and fellow-travellers, if not Communists, which is long overdue’.8 Yet he felt no more fondly towards Britain, which he decried to Queen Mary as ruined by ‘decades of Liberal and Socialist legislation’; he commented wistfully that ‘so much of the traditional elegance we used to know has already vanished or is vanishing … until one hardly has the heart to revisit the haunts of one’s youth’.9 As he aged, he became increasingly conservative and reactionary in his views. The previous year, he had written sorrowfully to the king to say, ‘I can well imagine how you must be considerably harassed by the turn economic and political events are taking in Great Britain, which are so deplorable and discouraging as to be beyond comment from this distance.’10
It was not long until the Windsors left the United States – on board the Queen Mary, in the company of none other than their long-standing friend Lord Beaverbrook – and after a brief sojourn in Britain, they returned to France and La Croë in August 1948. Wallis wrote miserably to her aunt shortly after their arrival about their current circumstances. ‘We have had a disturbed time – you remember I was not looking forward to this journey to Europe … the Duke has had colitis and when he is sick as you know he becomes the real invalid. Also the Russians have him down and he wants to get everything out of this country at once … The Duke is in a strange mood – upset over the world and plans which are hard to adjust for us around taxes.’11
Edward’s strange mood was not helped by his correspondence and association with de Courcy, who skilfully – or foolishly – fanned the flames of his paranoia. Even as he wrote on 22 July that ‘I do not for the moment think that there is going to be a war this summer as some sensational people have forecast’, de Courcy repeated his usual belief in Britain’s decline. ‘I cannot help but feel that we shall be reduced to a mere Military Mission, despite all our protests and strong speeches … What is the good of saying that we are going to make a strong stand at any cost and then Cabinet Ministers going around saying that we are going to avoid war at any costs?’ His attitude, as expressed to the duke, was reassuringly, even naïvely, straightforward. ‘By the use of a few atom bombs on the [Soviets’] main concentration points, the thing could be finished within a month and the world could settle down to at least a century of peace, if not more.’
He was warmer about the king and queen than he had been before – ‘they make a very good impression … she is absolutely magnificent’12 – but the duke’s response of 28 August made no reference to his family. Edward did, however, return to his favourite theme: how dreadful the world had become, and how little could be done about it. After referring to his recent illness (‘I was quite sick … firstly from an overdose of penicillin given me as an antidote to a bite sustained in separating the two Cairns in one of their monthly scraps, and secondly from an attack of colitis’), he concurred with de Courcy’s worldview. He suggested that although the experts he had consulted agreed that it would be better to stand up to Stalin now, ‘it is a big chance to take for time is on the side of the Western Powers and Russia knows it and another World War will anyway destroy the last remnants of what is left of free enterprise in Great Britain and the economic structure of America’.
He blamed the late President Roosevelt for this situation; he considered that Roosevelt had been excessively servile towards Stalin and Russia. ‘There is no escape from the fact that the future is a gloomy one and that inevitably the East and West must eventually shoot it out. I would not be surprised if you bypassed Grosvenor Square nowadays to spare yourself the disgust of having to look at the statue of the man most responsible for the jam in which the Western Powers now find themselves.’ He concluded with inadvertent bleakness. ‘If there’s no shooting before October, I expect to go to Great Britain the latter part of that month.’13
* * *
There were other distractions. By the time he and the duchess had established themselves in France once again, Life magazine wished to resume business with him. The magazine’s editor, Dan Longwell, wrote to him on 10 September to agree to the duke’s two provisos: no time limit in finishing, and the understanding that, in collaboration once again with Murphy, the duke would be primarily writing a book, and that Life would excerpt appropriate sections upon its completion in order to have another successful run of articles. Longwell struck a breezy note – ‘I do believe that both of you will do your best while enthusiasm is running high’ – but despite his assurances that there was no hurry to finish writing, he hinted that they might yet be scooped, or as he put it, ‘someone else might jumble much of the story in some popular way and create a legend that would be hard to catch up with in reality’.14
If this was intended to galvanise the duke into action, it did not work. He and Wallis had recently hosted Monckton and his wife at La Croë, and the time had been spent drinking cocktails – ‘I must confess to finding [it] very hard to take [them] at our advanced age’, the duke good-naturedly complained in a letter to Monckton – and having what Edward called ‘the opportunity of undisturbed reminiscing’. They had discussed the abdication at length, which the duke had enjoyed: ‘it was fascinating to recall the stirring events of 1936 and to test our memories in connection with those momentous days’.15 Churchill was presently a guest of the couple,* enjoying the opportunity to be away from politics and to paint, and Beaverbrook was expected imminently; a reminder that the duke continued to have connections in high places, even if he railed against his home country and its dwindling relevance.
Monckton, however, was less delighted at the prospect of the book being massaged into existence.† After his reappointment to the position of attorney general to the Duchy of Cornwall by the king, he wished to look to the future, rather than obsessively dwell on the past. Not only was he uncomfortable at the idea of his own recollections of the abdication crisis ever making it into public view -he described his memoir to Lascelles, who hoped to be able to have a copy for the Royal Archives, as ‘too full and too intimate for publication, even after the lapse of years‡16 – but he was also fearful as to what the duke’s memoir would contain. He complained to Edward’s former equerry, Major Gray Phillips, that ‘[I] fear that he really is getting down to writing the long threatened book … I always hoped a) that it would be postponed to the Greek kalends* and b) that I should be able to operate an effective blue pencil.’
As the book was inevitable, Monckton’s best hope was to prevent its worst excesses. He commented to Phillips, caustically, ‘one cannot help seeing how much more interesting it is for him to occupy himself in recapturing those exciting days than in any other pursuit now open to him’. He was not blind to ‘the final attractions’ of the book – ‘presumably largely in hard currency’ – but he also attempted to enlist Phillips’ help in curbing the duke’s worst excesses. ‘You and I and all his friends must try to dissuade them from publishing matter … where we feel that the very fact of their publishing it will injure them in the eyes of the public.’ He noted that the ‘pleasant and understanding’ Murphy was ‘mainly interested in the sales of the book, and this will, of course, drive him to want to publish just those things I want to stop’.17
Murphy, however, was finding the task of collaborating with the duke increasingly irksome and unpleasant. As time went on, numerous difficulties arose. Edward was concerned that his cowriter wanted the book to be sensationalist, gossipy and liable to cause more offence than he wished it to; Murphy, meanwhile, found the duke insufferable. He blamed the duchess in large part for this, later writing that ‘a dozen times a day she would telephone to the Duke in his workroom … the Duke’s reluctance – or inability – to concentrate being abetted by his fear of crossing the Duchess, [made me] helpless, with no ally and no appeal’.
As he caustically suggested, ‘the flow of the Duke’s narrative could never, even at best, invite comparison with a cataract; his span of attention … was two and a half minutes maximum, and when the story of the preceding night was plainly written in his trembling hands and bloodshot eyes,† [I] knew that another workday would have to be scrubbed’. Murphy cited an adage of Rubens to explain how difficult his working life had become: ‘Long experience has taught me how slowly princes act when someone else’s interest is involved.’ Anyone with any previous experience of the duke could only have confirmed the veracity, as well as the timelessness, of the statement.
There was a point in the middle of 1948 when Edward considered abandoning the memoir altogether. It was Beaverbrook who counselled him against so doing, and indeed stressed the importance of celerity. The magnate wrote to the duke in July, ‘It is clearly of high importance that such a work [as yours] should be prepared without delay. If there is any postponement, the facts will inevitably become blurred and distorted. Such a book must be a historical document of the first importance. It must shape the work of all the historians of that era for all time. It is imperative that you should write the record yourself. No-one else can do it with such authority … the British people have never really understood the story of the Abdication. If your account is given to them, you may be sure you will get an overwhelming response.’18
Beaverbrook had informally advised Edward many times when he was king, often with some success. The duke’s biographer Philip Ziegler commented to me that Beaverbrook was the only man he would ever listen to, and so it proved. The duke professed himself ‘both interested and gratified’ and replied that ‘The telling of the events of 1936 will be difficult and will require all the tact and skill at my command … The unsettled state of the world and the war clouds which hang so heavily over us hardly create an atmosphere conducive to quiet thought and reminiscing.’19 Although the unkind, or battle-weary, might have questioned whether the duke possessed either tact or skill, he now agreed a formal deal with Life: in addition to the continued services of Murphy, he would receive a $25,000 advance, any research or secretarial assistance he needed and carte blanche to deliver the finished series of articles when he wanted. It was a deal that any other author would have sold their grandmother for, but Edward, after all, had been king. This unprecedented degree of noblesse oblige seemed only justified when it came to telling this particular monarch’s story.
