The royals - Kitty Kelley [13]
At the end of his life, King George V cursed the laws of primogeniture that barred his solidly married second son from succeeding him. Although Bertie’s stutter and stammer irritated him beyond bearing, he would have done anything to save the Crown from the Prince of Wales and his wenching ways.
“After I am dead,” he said, “the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.” In that the King proved prescient.
He wanted the throne to pass to his second son and then to his beloved granddaughter Elizabeth, who called him “Grandpapa England” because he referred to the National Anthem (“God Save the King”) as his song. She sat on his lap, tousled his hair, pulled his beard, and plucked food from his plate for her Welsh corgi dogs. She also made him get down on his hands and knees to play “horsey” with her. The old King doted on his first granddaughter and held her in his arms on the balcony of Buckingham Palace so she could hear the crowd roar. “They’re cheering for you, you know,” he told her. Later he confided to an equerry: “I pray to God that my eldest son [Edward] will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne.”
Critically ill for days, George V died on Monday, January 20, 1936, at 11:55 P.M. His end was hastened by Lord Dawson, who gave him a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine. The courtier wanted the King to die before midnight so that his death could be announced in the morning Times rather than in the less prestigious evening newspapers. The King, who had renamed the royal family, now lost his life to meet a newspaper deadline. Such was the legacy of the House of Windsor, which would eventually rise and fall as a puppet show for the media.
THREE
Winston Churchill puffed on his cigar and pondered the problem that was threatening a constitutional crisis: The new king, Edward VIII, wanted to announce his engagement to the American Wallis Warfield Simpson.
“Why shouldn’t the King be allowed to marry his cutie?” Churchill asked.
“Because,” retorted playwright Noel Coward, “England doesn’t wish for a Queen Cutie.”
The new King, who was forty-one years old and had never been married, intended to make his mistress his wife as soon as she got her second divorce. Upon his coronation he wanted her crowned as his consort. But he was up against the British establishment, which would not accept Wallis as Regina. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said it was outrageous to think that an American woman with two failed marriages could marry the King and become Queen of the British empire. The King insisted he would be supported by public opinion. The Prime Minister polled the prime ministers of the Commonwealth and reported back the results: Either abandon Mrs. Simpson or abdicate.
“The throne,” said the King, “means nothing to me without Wallis beside me.”
Within ten months of his accession, the new monarch renounced the crown. He made public his abdication over the radio on December 11, 1936, in a speech that Churchill had helped him write. The evening broadcast from Windsor Castle was relayed around the world wherever the English language was spoken. In New York City cabdrivers pulled over to the curb to listen to the King say he could not continue to reign without the help and support of the woman he loved. The British public, which had learned of the crisis only weeks before, had sent telegrams and cables to Fort Belvedere, pleading with the King: “Stay with us!” and “Please don’t desert us!” Now they wept as they listened to him give up his throne. “He Wuz Robbed!” said the Beaverbrook press. Journalist H. L. Mencken wrote, “It was the greatest news story since the Resurrection.”
When the King married Mrs. Simpson six months later, Queen Mary wrote in her diary,