Churchill and the King Page 5

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  Bertie endured the entire episode with “unrelieved gloom.” His brother had barely spoken to him, or confided in him, and rarely sought his opinion. This was probably for the best, since Bertie would have had to support his brother even more aggressively than he had done. Nonetheless, he, as well as Elizabeth, especially, had deplored the prospect of the “shop-soiled American, with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw” being anywhere near their family, let alone a member of it.

  His brother’s neglect must have been agonizing. Despite their differences, the two had been close their entire lives. How often he must have thought, as his wife once said to an acquaintance, “You are a lucky man to be able to do what you like.” But she stiffened the spine, as she so often did: “I have great faith in Bertie,” she wrote to Queen Mary. “He sees very straight, & if this terrible responsibility comes to him he will face it bravely.” For now he did, even while being ignored. He and Wallis were the two most strident, unwavering opponents of abdication. Then at last, on December 7, he heard from the king.

  “Come & see me after dinner.”

  “No, I will come & see you at once.” The awful & ghastly suspense of waiting was over. I found him pacing up & down the room, & he told me his decision that he would go. I went back to the Royal Lodge for dinner & returned to the Fort [Belvedere] later. I felt having once got there I was not going to leave. As he is my eldest brother I had to be there to try & help him in his hour of need.

  When recounting this to his mother, he “sobbed like a child.” The short signing ceremony took place on the tenth. “Perfectly calm D signed 5 or 6 copies of the instrument & then 5 copies of his message to Parliament, one for each Dominion Parliament. It was a dreadful moment & one never to be forgotten by those present.”

  The family gathered for dinner the following day. “When D & I said good-bye we kissed, parted as freemasons & he bowed to me as his King.” The performance was as unfamiliar as it was uncomfortable. “All my ancestors succeeded to the throne after their predecessors had died. Mine is not only alive, but very much so.”

  Edward had abdicated and a new King George—the Sixth—took his place. To his brother’s onetime partisan, he wrote:

  My dear Mr. Churchill,

  I am writing to thank you for your very nice letter to me. I know how devoted you have been, and still are, to my dear brother, and I feel touched beyond words by your sympathy and understanding in the very difficult problems that have arisen since he left us in December. I fully realise the great responsibilities and cares that I have taken on as King, and I feel most encouraged to receive your good wishes, as one of our great statesmen, and from one who has served his country so faithfully. I can only hope and trust that the good feeling and hope that exists in the Country and Empire now will prove a good example to other Nations in the world.

  “This gesture of magnanimity,” Churchill later recalled, “towards one whose influence at that time had fallen to zero will ever be a cherished experience in my life.”

  The king had a difficult time of it at first. “Dickie,” he said to his cousin, “this is absolutely terrible. I never wanted this to happen; I’m quite unprepared for it.” Mountbatten tried to reassure him by quoting something his own father had said to Bertie’s: “George, you’re wrong. There is no more fitting preparation for a King than to have been trained in the Navy.” Baldwin also assured him that he had the country’s full support.

  The coronation took place on May 12, 1937. “I could eat no breakfast, and had a sinking feeling inside,” Bertie wrote. He later told someone “that for long periods . . . he was unaware of what was happening.” Yet, as Channon has described,

  [t]he panorama was splendid, and we felt we were sitting in a frame, for the built-up stands suggested Ascot, or perhaps—more romantically—the tournaments of mediaeval days; the chairs were covered with blue velvet . . . on all sides were MPs I knew and their be-plumed, be-veiled, be-jewelled wives. . . . The North Transept was a vitrine of bosoms and jewels and bobbing tiaras. . . . There was an excited pause, then a hush as the regalia was carried in and then out again. . . . And I looked about again, dazzled by the red, the gilt, the gold, the grandeur. After a little the real Royalties arrived, the Princess Royal looking cross, the tiny Princesses excited by their coronets and trains, and the two Royal Duchesses looking staggering. . . . Another pause, till the gaunt Queen of Norway appeared, followed by Queen Mary, ablaze, regal and over-powering. Then the Queen’s procession, and she appeared, dignified but smiling and much more bosomy. Then, so surrounded by dignitaries carrying wands, sceptres, orbs and staffs, as to be overshadowed, George VI himself. He carried himself well.

  Churchill came out of the abdication less well. Having broken with his fellow Conservatives, especially Baldwin, a half decade before, he found himself at the nadir of his party, and with no cabinet role.

  Out of Office! And what a variety of Office he had seen. The crowded career is too familiar to need rehearsal in any detail. . . . Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Chancellor of the Exchequer—all these lay behind him by 1930, interspersed and accompanied, outside the field of politics, by one or two Lord Rectorships, active service and prolific authorship.

  Again, the pliable Churchill recovered. His position vis-à-vis the reconstituted royals would improve when he stood by the new king in the decision to deny a royal title to Mrs. Simpson. It probably did not dispel the Baldwin-related suspicions—which Baldwin himself may have fueled when he met secretly with Bertie on the eve of the abdication. This also is unknowable. What is known is that a much different man now wore the crown. Buckingham Palace was occupied by a charming and attractive young family. The wholesome Georgian monarchy was restored. The country could relax. The people could feel confident and hopeful.

  There was still the matter of the king himself: he had not sought this enormous new job, however much the prospect of having it may have sat in the back of his mind. He must have been frightened, yet part of him seemed well armored. As was now his custom, he began to swim harder and faster once he survived the initial shock of being thrown into deep water. He would not be a figurehead. Yet he was not, at least not then, at all temperamentally suited to rule.

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  How far they had come in a mere two decades. Churchill lurked in the political wilderness, not entirely in disgrace but close to it, “an Ishmael in public life.” The king—who was not yet king and had few premonitions of becoming one—was a shy young man who dreaded speaking in public and found the first few episodes when forced to do so to be excruciating. Having become king, he was said to have “discovered that he was for the first time in his life able to make up his own mind.” By 1940 the two would lead the nation together in war.

  If their upbringing and youth had set the foundation for the men they would become, the interwar years thrust them together in a way that would allow each one to master the forward elements of his character. For Churchill these were his tenacity and his power of rejuvenation; for the king it was his decency, integrity, and duty. In time some elements of each merged with those of the other. Whereas these qualities in both men were praiseworthy but perhaps ill suited to the 1920s, by the mid-1930s events and circumstances would create an entirely different need for them.

  The interwar crises had a silver lining. That is to say, neither man emerged unscathed or undamaged from setbacks, but both acted to master them. Some part of their character drove them on, even against, particularly in the king’s case, his evident desires. He was not ambitious, at least not in public. At first he would be a reluctant monarch. He was the good, loyal second son, pleased with his place in the immediate background. And why should he not have been?

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bsp; Churchill, on the other hand, could not have been happy with subordination. He meant to be the leading man or no man. He was no mere careerist; the role he sought was historic; it was meant to transcend, to last well beyond, his professional career. And so his tactical pursuits went, at least in these years, somewhat against the grain of the man on the make and would seem, on first examination, to be rather self-destructive. Whereas the soon-to-be king would spend the remainder of the decade gaining further in confidence, Churchill would spend it tempering his ambition with what he may have considered to be self-willed judiciousness, or as near to that as he could come.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Appeasement

  The 1930s “was the Devil’s decade. It came in like a ravening wolf, and went out like a roaring lion. It began with a world in economic chaos, and ended with the world at war.” Like Churchill’s description of the German drive to rearm, it was “invested with a ruthless, lurid tinge. It glittered and it glared.”

  Churchill was at one of the lowest points in his public career. He became entangled on the wrong side of the abdication question. He would be on the right side of “appeasement,” though here he went against the popular grain. He remained a member of Parliament but had not held cabinet office since 1929; the leaders of his party, including both prime ministers, Baldwin and Chamberlain, held him in contempt. His close supporters in the high reaches of his party, it was said, could fit into a small smoking room. The remainder of the Conservatives, by contrast, were, as the saying went, merely Tories who were ashamed of themselves. According to many of them, Churchill had been a brilliant comet whose trajectory had long since fallen below the horizon. He resumed painting and writing; he brooded; he simmered. But “like the chamomile, the more he is trodden on, the more he flourishes.” Only just not yet. For now the savior of British honor and strength was the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain.

  During his years in the wilderness, Churchill wrote his four-volume biography of Marlborough and studied his ancestor’s military imagination. He must have thought many times what it would take to lead a similar Grand Alliance. He also worried about the need arising for it. Churchill was the only man, according to his doomed friend from the Foreign Office, Ralph Wigram, who “has always, always understood.” Wigram was the informant who “clung to [him] like a drowning man to a spar” and who provided the secret intelligence showing the extent of German rearmament and plans, right up to his premature and mysterious death—some said from illness, others suicide—in December 1936.

  Churchill had been right about Germany. He was right about the weakness of his country’s armed forces, right about Hitler, right about Chamberlain and appeasement, and right about the stakes for Britain and her empire. No other major political figure detected the immediate future so clearly, or appeared to have so accurate a perception of the mood and capacities of his country, save Hitler himself, probably because the Führer spent so much time reading foreign newspapers and ignoring much of the expert advice that was offered to him. Churchill knew well, as the diplomatic diarist Harold Nicolson put it, that the “British people, in fact, have for years been the victims of too little information and too many phrases. . . . They crooned themselves to sleep with the lullaby of ‘collective security.’ . . . How sane; how sensible; how sinuous; how sound!” The challenge was to avoid being dubbed a Cassandra and to find some way to do something about it.

  If the king were thrust into performing a role he said he had never wanted, Churchill thrust himself into the part he had always aimed to play. The king was bound by duty and the desperation of his family, the country, and the institution during a crisis that never should have happened but was predictable and predicted, most of all by Churchill. Although neither man would have been fully aware of it, both, again, found themselves in the right places at the right moment. Imagine if Edward had remained on the throne, even without a Queen Wallis, with appeasement in the air and his integrity thrown into question. The charge against him (and even more so, against her) of Nazi sympathy was exaggerated and probably unfounded, but it was there nonetheless. It did not apply to his younger brother, who, by contrast, had served under fire in the last war and was married to a woman who lost a brother in it. German heritage notwithstanding, there was no love lost for Nazis anywhere in George VI’s household. The public knew this as well as they knew Churchill’s own sympathies.

  The story actually was not so simple. In the end, according to Nicolson, it had been Halifax more than anyone else who, as foreign secretary, swayed this king from his loyalty to Chamberlain, under whom Halifax served, and to the “dual policy of resistance and conciliation” that they had designed. It is not easy to disaggregate the prime minister’s character and intentions, and he was not the only guilty party. Chamberlain, in fact, was a more complicated figure whose reputed malevolence, weakness, or incompetence lies in the eye of the beholder. “Do not mind overmuch the attribution of false motive,” Baldwin liked to say. But Chamberlain has yet to overcome the verdict of posterity: that he really was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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  In early 1939 in London, Halifax unveiled a large map of Europe and said, “What a bloody place it is.” The scars there had only just begun to heal—and to heal badly, in that the scar tissue was a thin one of idealism, escapism, even hedonism, followed by cynicism. Cynicism makes a poor alloy. It divides and it dilutes. An “avenging march of the mediocrities” was under way. How easy, then, is it to dismiss or otherwise to succumb to an ahistorical depiction of the policy of appeasement?

  The term “appeasement” reveals its linguistic root: peace. Nearly everyone was desperate to preserve it. George V had forewarned, “I am an old man. I have been through one world war. How can I go through another?” He repeated: “I will not have another war. I will not.” Chamberlain had perhaps erred in his tactics, but his effort was not irrational and certainly not unpopular. Nicolson has reflected the mood upon Chamberlain’s return from Berchtesgaden in September 1938:

  When he said these words, “as a last resort,” he whipped off his pince-nez and looked up at the skylight with an expression of grim hope. . . . “It was,” he said with a wry grin, “my first flight,” and then he described the whole visit as “this adventure.” He said that his conversation with Hitler had convinced him that the Führer was prepared, on behalf of the Sudeten Germans, “to risk world war.” As he said these words a shudder of horror passed through the House of Commons. . . . He raised his face so that the light from the ceiling fell full upon it. All the lines of anxiety and weariness seemed suddenly to have been smoothed out; he appeared ten years younger and triumphant. “Herr Hitler,” he said, “has just agreed to postpone his mobilisation for twenty-four hours and to meet me in conference with Signor Mussolini and Monsieur Daladier at Munich.”

  First, complete silence. Then an eruption of joy. Nicolson remembered it as “one of the most dramatic moments” he had “ever witnessed.”

  For most of his career in politics, Chamberlain did not conform to the umbrella-wielding caricature. He was rather a tough and sometimes principled politician who drove a hard bargain. People who met him noted his strong arms and gaze. The British Empire he led was still seen as powerful and permanent. When he touted the small piece of paper that brought “peace in our time,” he most probably meant it. Yet he had never experienced the kinds of adversity known to either Churchill or the king. Whether this made him more naïve is not possible to know, but it may have made him less courageous and thoughtful. He had high powers of concentration but also a myopic quality when exercising them. “Injudicious they may have been, ignorant never.” This was both an asset and a liability. “Indeed,” Donald Cameron Watt has diagnosed, “that was precisely the trouble. So much of Chamberlain’s thinking, so much of his analysis, was conditional, tentative, contingent. He doubted; but he was never certain. He distrusted; but he did not totally disbelieve.” He was—in other
both positive and negative terms—a small-minded person who excelled in a place like Birmingham in peacetime but was ill suited to lead the world’s largest empire in war. The more out of depth he was, the more close-minded and stubborn he became.

  For the moment, however, he inspired confidence. Channon, one of his biggest fans, was not alone: “Of course a way out will now be found. Neville by his imagination and practical good sense, has saved the world.” Another Tory later commented, with reference to the security guarantee given to Poland, “You know, I am a trifle uneasy about this Polish agreement. It seems to me to imply a definite commitment on our part.”