The King's Speech - Mark Logue [51]
Logue will have watched the unfolding of the dramatic events of December 1936 with as much surprise and shock as King Edward’s other subjects. His relations with the Duke of York had also been put on the back burner, although he did receive an invitation to attend a garden party on 22 July at Buckingham Palace.
There were important developments, too, on the Logue domestic front: that September his eldest son Laurie, who was second in command of the ice cream department at Lyons, married Josephine Metcalf from Nottingham. His doctor son Valentine, five years Laurie’s junior, was now on the staff at St George’s Hospital, where he was awarded the prestigious Brackenbury Prize for surgery. ‘I wanted him to follow in my job – but he is set on being a surgeon,’ Logue wrote to the Duke.
In the meantime, he had not given up on reviving his royal connection. On 28 October– the day after Wallace Simpson obtained her decree nisi – Logue wrote yet again to the Duke suggesting a meeting. ‘It was in July 1934 that I last had the honour of speaking with your Royal Highness’, he wrote, ‘and although I follow all you do and say with the greatest of interest, it is not the same as seeing you personally, and I was wondering if you could spare the time out of your very busy life to come to Harley St – just to see that all the “machinery” is working properly.’65
The Duke could be excused for not responding to Logue’s proposal: the crisis surrounding his brother’s relationship with Mrs Simpson was moving towards a climax and, for the time being at least, he had more pressing matters than his speech impediment.
On 3 December the British press broke their self-imposed silence about the affair. The catalyst was a bizarre one: in a speech to a church conference, Alfred Blunt, the appropriately named Bishop of Bradford, had talked about the King’s need for divine grace – which was interpreted, wrongly as it turned out, by a local journalist in the audience as a none-too-veiled reference to the King’s affair. When his report was carried by the Press Association, the national news agency, the newspapers saw this as the signal they had all been waiting for: they could report about the monarch’s love-life.
Over the previous few months, only a relatively small number of Britons had known what was going on. Now the newspapers quickly made up for lost time, filling their pages with stories of crisis meetings at the Palace, pictures of Mrs Simpson and interviews with men and women in the street asking them their opinion. ‘They have much in common,’ began a gushing profile of the royal couple in the Daily Mirror on 4 December. ‘They both love the sea. They both love swimming. They both love golf and gardening. And soon they discovered that each loved the other.’
The Yorks had been in Scotland for the previous days. Alighting from the night train at Euston on the morning of 3 December, they were confronted with newspaper placards with the words ‘The King’s Marriage’. They were both deeply shocked by what it might mean for them. When the Duke spoke to his brother, he found him ‘in a great state of excitement’. The King had apparently not yet decided what to do, saying he would ask the people what they wanted him to do and then go abroad for a while.66 In the meantime, he sent Wallis away for her own protection. She was receiving poison pen letters and bricks had been thrown through the window of the house she was renting in Regent’s Park. There were fears that worse was to come.
The same day the Duke telephoned his brother, who was holed up in Fort Belvedere, his retreat in Windsor Great Park, to make an appointment, but without success. He kept trying over the next few days but the King refused to see him, claiming he had still not made up his mind about his course of action. Despite the huge impact that the decision he made would have on his younger brother’s life, Edward did not seek his advice.
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