Piers Brendon EDWARD VIII The Uncrowned King Contents Genealogical Table EDWARD VIII 1. Royal Destiny 2. Prince Imperial 3. Public Figure, Private Life 4. King Edward’s Reign 5. The Duke of Windsor at Bay 6. Governor of the Bahamas 7. Last Years Illustrations Further Reading Notes Picture Credits Acknowledgements Follow Penguin Penguin Monarchs THE HOUSES OF WESSEX AND DENMARK Athelstan Tom Holland Aethelred the Unready Richard Abels Cnut Ryan Lavelle Edward the Confessor James Campbell THE HOUSES OF NORMANDY, BLOIS AND ANJOU William I Marc Morris William II John Gillingham Henry I Edmund King Stephen Carl Watkins Henry II Richard Barber Richard I Thomas Asbridge John Nicholas Vincent THE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET Henry III Stephen Church Edward I Andy King Edward II Christopher Given-Wilson Edward III Jonathan Sumption Richard II Laura Ashe THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK Henry IV Catherine Nall Henry V Anne Curry Henry VI James Ross Edward IV A. J. Pollard Edward V Thomas Penn Richard III Rosemary Horrox THE HOUSE OF TUDOR Henry VII Sean Cunningham Henry VIII John Guy Edward VI Stephen Alford Mary I John Edwards Elizabeth I Helen Castor THE HOUSE OF STUART James I Thomas Cogswell Charles I Mark Kishlansky [Cromwell David Horspool] Charles II Clare Jackson James II David Womersley William III & Mary II Jonathan Keates Anne Richard Hewlings THE HOUSE OF HANOVER George I Tim Blanning George II Norman Davies George III Amanda Foreman George IV Stella Tillyard William IV Roger Knight Victoria Jane Ridley THE HOUSES OF SAXE-COBURG & GOTHA AND WINDSOR Edward VII Richard Davenport-Hines George V David Cannadine Edward VIII Piers Brendon George VI Philip Ziegler Elizabeth II Douglas Hurd 1 Royal Destiny Edward VIII reigned for less than a year and was never crowned king. Far from fulfilling the splendid destiny proclaimed as his birthright, he shook the Windsor dynasty, newly established in 1917, by abdicating to marry the divorced woman he loved. The event had been foretold in two memorable prophecies. The first was by the pioneer socialist Keir Hardie. It was provoked by Parliament’s refusal to add to its congratulatory address on the birth of Prince Edward, which took place on 23 June 1894, an expression of sympathy for more than 250 Welsh miners killed in a colliery explosion on the same day. Hardie declared, amid cries of ‘Oh! Oh!’ and ‘Order!’, that from childhood this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation … In due course … he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and the end of it all will be the country will be called upon to pay the bill.1 Edward’s father, plagued in his final years by worries about his son’s infatuation, was equally prescient. Where others saw a star, George V saw a meteor, and he predicted that after he was dead ‘the boy will ruin himself within twelve months’.2 Certainly Edward’s renunciation of the throne damaged the monarchy. It led to a schism between the Duke of Windsor, as Edward then became, and the new sovereign, his brother George VI. It made divorce such a royal taboo that Princess Margaret was unable to wed the man of her choice in 1955 and a generation later it cast a long shadow over Prince Charles’s marital affairs. It also put a premium on sovereign responsibility and propriety, as embodied by Queen Elizabeth II. Her reign, like that of her father, can be seen as an attempt to exorcize the ghost of the abdication. Only a lifetime dedicated to duty could efface memories of Edward VIII’s short, unhappy kingship. It was the louring meridian in a career whose morning was golden and whose afternoon was leaden. The pit disaster aside, the auguries could hardly have been more favourable at Edward’s nativity. He was the great-grandson of Queen Victoria and, as the eldest son of the Duke of York, the heir to Edward (VII) Prince of Wales, he stood in direct line of succession to the throne. The queen herself was not only the ‘grandmother of Europe’, her descendants dominating the courts of the continent, but the Empress of India, presiding over a Greater Britain on which the sun never set. As the first industrial nation and a commercial colossus with a pre-eminent navy, her tiny offshore island was the greatest power on earth. At home she basked in the quasi-religious loyalty of her people. And when the queen’s might and majesty were celebrated at her Golden and Diamond Jubilees, she was said to have become ‘visibly transfigured before the eyes of her subjects’.3 Between these two patriotic festivals Edward was born at White Lodge, Richmond Park, the home of his mother’s parents, the Duke and Duchess of Teck. A month later, in the presence of the queen and many notabilities, he was baptized by the Archbishop of Canterbury from a golden bowl of Jordan water, and christened Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. The first three names identified him with royal relations while the last four were those of the patron saints of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The prince’s arrival was greeted with expressions of joy and devotion in all corners of the United Kingdom, echoed throughout the empire. Clergymen attributed the glorious summer to the advent of this son of York. The Times intoned that he was the beneficiary of a noble inheritance and, plainly confident that its voice would be heard in regions above, prayed that he would be worthy of so great a trust. In royal matters appearances are especially liable to deceive, and the expectations of this newspaper, which became Edward VIII’s most voluble critic during the abdication crisis, were to be dashed on the rocks of reality. For nurture and nature would so conspire to make the most popular, glamorous and widely travelled Prince of Wales in history unfit to wear the crown – in his own estimation as well as that of others. David, as his family always called him, received an upbringing that, for all its fairy-tale facade, was narrow and loveless even by Victorian standards. His mother, then the Duchess of York and later Queen Mary, was shy, stiff and bloodless, a jewelled automaton. To be sure, she sometimes displayed affection towards her children – David, her buttercup-blond favourite, was joined by Bertie (later King George VI) in 1895, Mary (later the Princess Royal) in 1897, Henry (later Duke of Gloucester) in 1900, George (later Duke of Kent) in 1902, and Prince John (who was epileptic and possibly autistic) in 1905. But hugs and kisses were in short supply at home. There was no ‘passionate tenderness’4 and in public a glacial formality prevailed. When the queen died in 1953 her eldest son unforgettably told his wife, ‘I’m afraid the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they now are in death.’5 By contrast David’s father, who seemed like a genial squire devoted to shooting and stamp-collecting, was a splenetic martinet. An old seadog himself, he growled and barked at his children. He imposed a stern domestic discipline and enjoined strict adherence to old-fashioned standards, particularly in dress and protocol. Errant offspring were chivvied, snubbed, baited, bullied and beaten. David would later tell his cousin Lord Mountbatten that he envied him a father whom he could love: ‘If my father had died, we should have felt nothing but relief.’6 David spent much of his childhood immured in his father’s cherished home York Cottage, which Edward VII had built on the Sandringham estate to accommodate additional guests at his shooting parties. With its small rooms and thin walls York Cottage was compared to a suburban villa or a seaside boarding house, but it was actually quite commodious. Moreover David and his siblings were often invited to Sandringham House itself, whose ugliness was only surpassed by its luxury. Here they were spoilt by their grandparents, learning crocheting from Queen Alexandra and sliding bits of buttered toast down the seams of King Edward’s trousers. Still, York Cottage was a place of confinement. Life in the nursery was restrictive, painfully so in David’s case, since a vicious nanny pinched him to make him howl before presenting him to his parents at teatime, doubtless to demonstrate her capacity to calm him afterwards – eventually she was discovered and dismissed. Life in the schoolroom was equally constrained. Under the auspices of a games-playing prep-schoolmaster, Henry Hansell, the royal children underwent the grind of instruction without acquiring the benefit of education. David had a quick brain (especially in comparison with his stammering brother Bertie), an enquiring mind and an exceptionally retentive memory for facts and faces. But he took little interest in the standard subjects he was taught – languages, literature, history, geography, maths – and he seemed positively allergic to print. In later years he seldom read books, repeating the sad mantra of the unlettered that he preferred to learn from life. The stifling philistinism of York Cottage was partly to blame for all this. Despite the availability of an Aladdin’s Cave of royal treasures, many of them looted from the empire, its rooms were furnished by Maples and its walls decorated with hoary maxims such as ‘A Stitch in Time Saves Nine’. Queen Mary, it is true, did value objets d’art, particularly those that augmented regal prestige, and she was not above purloining them; but when George V heard the word ‘culture’ he reached, metaphorically at least, for his gun. He thought authors should be shut up, shook his stick at a Cézanne and confused highbrow with eyebrow. Despite the privileges of his exalted station, David grew up in a tight social circle and straitened intellectual circumstances. His youth, though, was not all harsh discipline. It was enlivened by impromptu outdoor sports and games of ludo and canasta. It was palliated by servants (whom the royal children in some ways came to resemble, especially in modes of speech) and David was long sustained by the loyalty of his personal retainer Frederick Finch. He attended dancing classes, a rare chance to meet contemporaries. On the golf course he caddied for his father. He and his siblings sang folk songs and played soldiers. They also indulged in high jinks and practical jokes, once inducing their French tutor to eat an exotic savoury which actually consisted of tadpoles on toast. However David’s father was determined that he and Bertie should undergo the rigours of naval training. This was an odd decision, since he recognized how poorly his own apprenticeship afloat had equipped him for sovereignty. Yet it was based on faith in the Senior Service’s capacity to form the character of future leaders and it reflected the hope that encountering other boys on equal terms (the first time this royal experiment had been tried) would prepare the young princes to take their place in an increasingly democratic realm.