The King's Speech - Mark Logue [50]
So when the case came to court on 27 October at Ipswich Assizes (chosen on the grounds that a hearing in London would attract too much attention from the press), it was Wallis who was divorcing her husband for adultery rather than vice versa. The town had never seen the like.63 With the King’s chauffeur at the wheel, Wallis swept into Ipswich in a Canadian Buick at such speed that a news cameraman’s car following at 65 mph was left behind. Security around the courtroom was tight: all newsreel crews had been sent out of town, and two photographers had their cameras smashed with truncheons. Access to the courtroom was also restricted: the mayor, himself an Ipswich magistrate, was admitted only after arguing with his own police officers. All courtroom gallery seats faced by Mrs Simpson as she stood in the witness box were vacant. Tickets were issued only for a few seats to which her back was turned.
Members of staff of the Hotel de Paris then took the stand and described how they had brought morning tea to Mr Simpson and found a woman who was not Mrs Simpson with him in his double bed. After nineteen minutes it was all over and Wallis was granted her decree nisi, with costs against her husband. After she left the court, police locked the doors behind her for five minutes to hold the press at bay. Her Buick flashed out of Ipswich as fast as it had arrived and the police swung one of their cars squarely across the road after her, blocking traffic for ten minutes.
Edward and Wallis were not yet free to marry, however. Under the divorce law of the time, the decree nisi could not be made absolute for six months – which meant that, formally speaking, she would be under the surveillance of an official known as the King’s Proctor until 27 April 1937. If, during that period, she was discovered in compromising circumstances with any man she could be hauled back into court and, if the decision went against her, be forever unable to divorce her husband in an English court. This was only a formality. As Time reported, some thirty-six hours after obtaining her decree, Wallis ‘was supping gaily in the Palace with the King and a very few friends’. Afterwards, Edward ‘squired’ her back to her home on Cumberland Terrace.
The clock was now ticking – and the government faced a dilemma. While the American papers offered salacious blow-by-blow accounts of the affair, the British press continued to exercise extraordinary self-restraint. The Times, the newspaper of record, did report the divorce but only at the foot of a column of provincial news items on an inside page. American and other foreign newspapers brought into Britain that contained stories about the King and Mrs Simpson’s relationship had the relevant columns blacked out or pages removed.
There were limits to how long the cover-up could be maintained, not least because of Britons who travelled abroad and read or heard on the radio about what was happening back home. 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 Britannia and its Dominions were opposed, then he was ‘prepared to go’.
The King did have some prominent supporters, though, among them Winston Churchill, Britain’s future wartime prime minister, who was shouted down by the House of Commons when he spoke out in favour of Edward. ‘What crime has the King committed?’ Churchill demanded later. ‘Have we not sworn allegiance to him? Are we not bound by that oath?’ Initially, at least,