The King's Speech - Mark Logue [52]
Finally, the next day, he made contact: the King invited him to come to the Fort after dinner. ‘The awful and ghastly suspense of waiting was over,’ the Duke wrote in his account. ‘I found him [the King] pacing up & down the room, & he told me his decision that he would go.’68 When the Duke got home that evening, he found his wife had been struck down with flu. She took to her bed, where she remained for the next few days as the dramatic events unfolded around her. ‘Bertie & I are feeling very despairing, and the strain is terrific,’ she wrote to her sister May. ‘Every day lasts a week & the only hope we have is in the affection & support of our family & friends.’69
Events moved swiftly. At a dinner on the eighth attended by several men, including the Duke and the prime minister, the King made it clear he had already made up his mind. According to Baldwin’s account, he ‘merely walked up and down the room saying, “This is the most wonderful woman in the world.”’
The Duke, meanwhile, was in sombre mood. It was a dinner, he wrote, ‘that I am never likely to forget’.
At 10 a.m. on 10 December, in the octagonal drawing room of Fort Belvedere, the King signed a brief instrument of abdication in which he pledged to ‘renounce the throne for myself and for my descendants’. The document was witnessed by the Duke, who now succeeded him as George VI, as well as their two young brothers, the Dukes of Gloucester and of Kent.
The next evening, after a farewell dinner with his family at the Royal Lodge, the man who was no longer king made a broadcast to the nation from Windsor Castle. He was introduced by Sir John Reith, the director-general of the BBC, as ‘His Royal Highness the Prince Edward’. ‘I have found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge the duties of king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love,’ he declared. Edward’s reign had lasted just 327 days, the shortest of any British monarch since the disputed reign of Jane Grey nearly four centuries earlier.
After returning to the Royal Lodge to say his familial goodbyes, he left just after midnight and was driven to Portsmouth, where the destroyer HMS Fury was waiting to take him across the Channel to exile. As the enormity of what he had done began to dawn on him, he spent the night drinking heavily and pacing up and down the officers’ mess in a state of high agitation. The Duke of Windsor, as he would henceforth be known, travelled on from France to Austria where he was to wait until Wallis’s divorce was made absolute the following April.
On 12 December, at his Accession Council, the Duke of York, now King George VI, declared his ‘adherence to the strict principles of constitutional government and . . . resolve to work before all else for the welfare of the British Commonwealth of Nations’. His voice was low and clear but, inevitably, his words were punctuated by hesitations.
Logue was among those to write his congratulations when he sent his usual birthday greetings two days later. ‘May I be permitted to offer my very humble but most heartfelt good wishes on your accession to the throne,’ he wrote. ‘It is another of my dreams come true and a very pleasant one.’ Seeing a chance of reactivating their old ties, he added: ‘May I be permitted to write to your Majesty in the New Year and offer my services.’70
The newspapers greeted the resolution of the crisis and arrival of the new king with enthusiasm. Bertie may not have had the charm or charisma of his elder brother, but he was solid and reliable. He also had the benefit of a popular