Edward VIII by Piers Brendon

Author:Piers Brendon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

Edward’s broadcast, heard with breathless attention throughout his realm on the evening of 11 December, also contained a poignant valediction: ‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.’50

5

The Duke of Windsor at Bay

‘In the darkness he left these shores.’ Thus spoke Archbishop Lang in his own wireless oration, remarking on the coincidence that Edward quit the throne on the very day that King James II had fled the country in 1688. Lang further observed that Edward had surrendered his sacred trust because of a ‘craving for private happiness’ inconsistent with Christian principles of marriage and amid ‘a social circle whose standards and ways of life are alien to all the best instincts and traditions of his people’.1 Lang’s sanctimonious homily was widely condemned, for the Duke of Windsor retained a prehensile hold on the imagination of many of his former subjects. Walter Monckton was not alone in saying, in a letter to Queen Mary, that ‘there always will be a greatness and a glory about him’.2 Mass Observation, a pioneering public opinion survey, found that at the time of George VI’s coronation people ‘really liked’ the duke ‘whatever his shortcomings’,3 and even during the war he remained a more attractive figure than the king. On the other hand, Lang was not just the voice of Victorian prudery, as intoned in church or, still more, in chapel. He spoke for many who felt that Edward had inflicted a grave wound in the heart of the British polity. Their outrage was well expressed by the Liberal social reformer Violet Markham: ‘What will history say of a man who held an American harlot of more importance than the welfare of the nation or the Empire?’4 Conservative courtiers were determined that the duke should do no more harm. None was more uncompromising than Tommy Lascelles, who maintained that Edward lacked moral and mental faculties to set against his ‘exceptionally strong primitive passions’.5 Moreover he had no aesthetic or spiritual capacities. Like the child in the fairy story, he was ‘given everything in the world, but they forgot the soul’.6

Certainly the god in the constitutional machine had been shown to have feet of clay. The abdication crisis had administered, as the right-wing bishop Hensley Henson said, ‘a serious shock to monarchical sentiment’.7 For the first time in sixty years, wrote the left-wing academic Harold Laski, ‘the validity of the monarchical principle itself is being widely discussed’.8 The spectre of republicanism even raised its head in the House of Commons. Yet only five MPs were willing to vote to have an elected head of state. And Edward’s blow against the hereditary principle never produced, as Churchill had feared, ‘a profound lesion in the unity of this country’.9 Nevertheless, George VI told his older brother that he had succeeded to a tottering throne and he doubted his ability to sustain it, let alone to restore the mystique of monarchy.

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