The King's Speech - Mark Logue [49]
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