Traitor King Read online

  Praise for The Mountbattens

  ‘A compelling new biography . . . superbly researched’ Daily Express

  ‘[A] well-researched, enjoyable book . . . fair-minded and revealing’ Jane Ridley, The Oldie

  ‘This impeccably researched joint biography is an enthralling portrait of two complex individuals whose public and private lives were somewhat inextricably entwined’ Daily Mail

  ‘Everything a top-notch biography should be’ Budapest Times

  ‘A hugely entertaining and readable royal biography’ Yorkpress.co.uk

  ‘Well-written and reads very easily . . . a valuable warts and all portrait of a couple who were centre stage in British public life for some sixty years. Recommended’ The Naval Review

  ‘Dares to go where no other Mountbatten biography has gone before’ The Lady

  Praise for Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess

  ‘An abundance of vivid detail . . . a matchless and splendidly exciting read’ The Times

  ‘An astonishing piece of research’ Sunday Times

  ‘A superb biography more riveting than a spy novel’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A remarkable and definitive portrait’ Frederick Forsyth

  ‘A superb biography . . . Brilliantly told’ Evening Standard

  ‘Exhaustively researched and absorbing’ New Statesman

  ‘Shrewd, thorough, revelatory’ William Boyd

  Praise for John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier

  ‘An affectionate, admirably well-researched study from an intelligent biographer. Well worth reading’ Daily Mail

  ‘Andrew Lownie has brought this most extraordinary man to life in a way no previous writer has’ Independent

  ‘Fascinating reading’ The Scotsman

  ‘Thorough and lucid’ New York Times

  First published in the UK by Blink Publishing

  An imprint of Bonnier Books UK

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  Copyright © Andrew Lownie, 2021

  Andrew Lownie has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The publisher has made every effort to contact rights holders for permission to use their material, but in the event of any omission, will happily make amends and update the publication at the earliest opportunity.

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  Contents

  1. The Year of Three Kings

  2. Waiting to Wed

  3. The Wedding

  4. Honeymoon

  5. The German Tour

  6. Interlude

  7. Countdown to War

  8. Phoney War

  9. Escape

  10. Operation Willi

  11. Exiled

  12. Under Surveillance

  13. Governor

  14. Murder in Paradise

  15. Beyond the Bahamas

  16. The German Documents

  17. A Life Without Purpose

  18. The Wandering Windsors

  19. Secret Affairs

  20. Settling Down

  21. The Heart Has Its Reasons

  22. Coming In From the Cold

  23. The Duchess Alone

  24. Relationships

  25. Traitor King

  Acknowledgements

  Fiction and Drama

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  CHAPTER 1

  The Year of Three Kings

  On Friday 11 December 1936, the final vote on the Abdication Bill was passed in Parliament and Edward VIII ceased to be king. He had reigned for 326 days. His father’s premonition that within twelve months of his death his son would ‘ruin himself’ had come true.

  The newly created Duke of Windsor spent the afternoon packing and reading letters of support and sympathy at his country house, Fort Belvedere, in Windsor Great Park. A sham Gothic royal folly with battlements, rows of cannons, turrets and a tower, it had been built for William, Duke of Cumberland between 1746 and 1757, then embellished by the Regency architect Sir Jeffry Wyatville in the reign of George IV.

  Prince Edward had taken over the grace and favour residence in 1929. He was later to write: ‘The Fort had been more than a home; it had been a way of life for me. I had created the Fort just as my grandfather had created Sandringham; I loved it in the same way; it was there that I had passed the happiest days of my life.’1

  Sir Giles Gilbert Scott had added a guest wing in 1936 and Edward had installed central heating, en-suite bathrooms, a tennis court, swimming pool, and in the basement, a Turkish bath. It was his private retreat where he had entertained most weekends and where his romance had played out with the woman for whom he had given up the throne. Now he was having to leave it and his staff to venture into an uncertain future.

  At 4 p.m., Winston Churchill, who had joined him for lunch and to help polish his speech, left the Fort, his eyes filled with tears, muttering a couplet by Andrew Marvell about the beheading of Charles I:

  He nothing common did or mean

  Upon that memorable scene

  Next there was a dinner to say goodbye to his family: his sister Mary and his mother, Queen Mary, widow of George V; his younger brothers, Henry, Duke of Gloucester; George, Duke of Kent; and Bertie, the new King George VI.

  At 7 p.m., his faithful chauffeur, George Ladbroke, drove him the five miles to Royal Lodge, where the family had gathered. It was a strained atmosphere. Bertie was coming to terms with the responsibilities and challenges of his new role, whilst the rest of the Royal Family was still reeling from the events of the past few weeks, when David (as Edward was known in the family) had threatened to commit suicide if he could not marry the twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson.

  The new Duke of Windsor, on the other hand, felt liberated. His obsession with Wallis had given him an excuse to renounce the role of king, which he had increasingly not wanted. It had also allowed the government, concerned about his political views, especially towards Germany, and whether he had the qualities needed to be monarch, to force him to abdicate.

  At 9.30 p.m., whilst the family was still at dinner, the lawyer Walter Monckton, Edward’s trusted adviser and a friend since Oxford days, arrived to escort him to Windsor Castle, where the former king was due to broadcast to the nation. They drove in silence down the Long Walk – Wallis’s cairn terrier, Slipper, on Windsor’s lap – turned into the huge Quadrangle and stopped at the Sovereign’s Entrance, where Sir John Reith, the Director-General of the BBC, was waiting. Windsor got out of the car ho
lding a cigar in one hand and Slipper in the other and introduced Monckton to Reith.

  The broadcast was to be in the king’s former living quarters, a small suite in the Augusta Tower; given its size, most of the electrical equipment had to be set up in the corridor. Windsor greeted the technicians affably and went into the sitting room, where the microphones stood on a table with a chair facing them and an evening newspaper beside them. Reith handed him the paper and requested him to read a few lines aloud to test the voice levels – he chose a passage on lawn tennis. He then popped into the loo, returning with words, ‘I expect that’s the last time I’ll use that place.’2

  Just before 10 p.m., Reith sat down at the microphone, waiting for the red light to flash. As it did so, he began, ‘This is Windsor Castle. His Royal Highness the Prince Edward.’ As he slid out of the chair to the left, the former king slid in from the right.

  ‘At long last, I am able to say a few words of my own.’ He praised his brother Bertie and spoke generously of the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, continuing:

  I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love . . . I now quit altogether public affairs, and I lay down my burden. It may be sometime before I return to my native land, but I shall always follow the fortunes of the British race and Empire with profound interest, and if at any time in the future I can be found of service to His Majesty in a private station I shall not fail. And now we all have a new King. I wish him, and you, his people, happiness and prosperity with all my heart. God bless you all. God Save the King.

  After the speech, the National Anthem was played. Monckton had been standing behind the former king throughout the broadcast. As he moved forward to collect the speech, Windsor laid his hand on his shoulder, saying, ‘Walter, it’s a far better thing that I go.’3 At Chartwell, Winston Churchill, who had tried so hard to prevent the Abdication, was in tears as he listened.

  Wallis Simpson listened to the broadcast in the sitting room at Villa Lou Vei, the home of her friends Herman and Katherine Rogers in Cannes, where she had taken refuge a few weeks earlier.

  ‘I was lying on the sofa with my hands over my eyes, trying to hide my tears,’ she later remembered. ‘After he finished, the others quietly went away and left me alone. I lay there a long time before I could control myself enough to walk through the house and go upstairs to my room.’4

  At 10.30 p.m., Windsor returned to Royal Lodge to say goodbye to his family. Dickie Mountbatten, for whom Windsor had been best man in 1922, had driven over from the Fort and remembered: ‘Everybody was still in tears when David came in, but David was jubilant. He was like a schoolboy going off on holiday. “It’s all over!” he kept saying. “It’s finished, thank God!”’5

  Queen Mary and the Princess Royal left first at 11.30 p.m. Chips Channon, basing his diary entry on a conversation with Monckton a few days later, wrote that ‘Queen Mary, ever magnificent, was mute and immoveable and very royal, and thoughtfully left off her mourning black for the evening so as not to cast more gloom.’6 Half an hour later, Windsor said his final goodbyes and the four brothers walked to the door. The Duke of Kent, his eyes swollen from crying, sobbed, ‘It isn’t possible! It isn’t happening!’7

  George VI later remembered, ‘We kissed, parted as Freemasons, and he bowed to me as his King.’8 Windsor bent over the new king and declared, ‘God bless you, sir! I hope you will be happier than your predecessor,’ and disappeared into the night, leaving the Royal Family speechless.9

  Accompanied by Chief Inspector David Storrier, his personal protection officer, Windsor was driven in heavy rain to Portsmouth by Ladbroke. Arriving at 1.30 a.m. at the Main, not Unicorn, Gate, they struggled to find the Royal Jetty. It seemed symbolic. A naval guard with rifles and fixed bayonets had been paraded for hours on the cold, dark and deserted quayside. Also waiting were members of his household: the Keeper of the Privy Purse, Ulick Alexander; his private secretary, Godfrey Thomas; and his equerry since 1919, Piers Legh, who had volunteered to go with him, after discovering his former master would otherwise go into exile alone.

  Windsor crossed the gangway onto HMS Fury – the original choice HMS Enchantress was not deemed appropriate – with Slipper under his arm. ‘I knew now that I was irretrievably on my own,’ he later wrote. ‘The drawbridges were going up behind me.’10

  1 The Duke of Windsor, A King’s Story (Cassell, 1951), p. 412.

  2 J. Bryan III and C.J.V. Murphy, The Windsor Story (Granada, 1979), p. 285.

  3 Lord Birkenhead, Walter Monckton (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), p. 152.

  4 The Duchess of Windsor, The Heart Has Its Reasons (Michael Joseph, 1956), p. 278. According to a maid interviewed by Wallis biographer Ralph Martin, a grim-faced Wallis muttered, ‘The fool, the stupid fool.’ Ralph Martin, The Woman He Loved (WH Allen, 1974), p. 295.

  5 Bryan and Murphy, p. 287.

  6 21 December 1936, Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), p. 103.

  7 Windsor, King’s Story, p. 414.

  8 Bryan and Murphy, p. 287. Windsor had joined the Household Brigade Lodge No. 2164 in 1919, Bertie the Navy Lodge No. 2612 in the same year.

  9 Rhodes James, Channon, p. 103.

  10 Windsor, King’s Story, pp. 413–15.

  CHAPTER 2

  Waiting to Wed

  HMS Fury left at 2 a.m. but, because the weather was bad, lay off the Isle of Wight so the Duke could get some sleep. The Captain, Cecil Howe, had hurriedly had to borrow linen, crockery and glasses from the Royal Yacht, and a Surgeon-Commander had been brought on board ‘in case the ex-King’s state of mental stress should cause him to require any medical attention while at sea’.1 Windsor was fine, preferring to sit in the wardroom until 4 a.m. drinking brandy and going over the events of the past few weeks with an exhausted Piers Legh and Ulick Alexander, who was also escorting him across the Channel.

  Much of the time was spent sending farewell cables to friends. When told that the wireless could not be used when the ship reached territorial waters, the Duke ordered Fury back to sea until he finished his list. ‘He later happily confided to another close associate, Lord Brownlow, how much money he had saved because all those cables were free.’2 The ship docked at dawn. Windsor’s first act was to telephone Wallis.

  She spent most of the Saturday in bed depressed by events. Her friend Constance Coolidge had told the journalist Helen Worden Erskine, after listening to the broadcast:

  Can you imagine a more terrible fate than to have to live up publicly to the legend of a love you don’t feel? To have to face, morning, noon and night, a middle-aged boy with no other purpose in life than a possessive passion for you?3

  Wallis, who was two years younger than the Prince of Wales, had first been introduced to him at a weekend house party given by Lady Furness in January 1931. Over the next three years she saw him socially and by January 1934 she had become his mistress. Soon the Prince began to talk of marriage – a situation that became more critical when he succeeded as King in January 1936 and when Wallis was granted a divorce in October from her second husband, Ernest Simpson, a dapper executive in his family’s shipping company, whom she had married in 1928.

  The problem was that Wallis was now twice-divorced – an early marriage at the age of twenty to an American naval aviator, Earl Winfield Spencer, had ended in divorce in 1927 – and the Church of England, of which the monarch was head, would not conduct the marriage of a divorced person if their spouse was still alive. The Prince would have to choose between marriage to Wallis and being King. Although Wallis had suggested they break off their relationship, Edward was determined to go ahead, even if it meant surrendering the throne.

  Quite apart from being divorced, there had long been concerns in Establishment circles about Wallis’s suitability as a possible Queen – not least her pro-German views, her lovers, and the fact that
the Prince had lavished large amounts of money on her, including expensive jewels. She was put under police surveillance.

  A June 1935 Special Branch report had noted that Mrs Simpson:

  was regarded as a person as very fond of the company of men and to have had many ‘affairs’. She was with different men at these addresses. Although she spends a great deal of time with the POW, it is said she has another secret lover who is kept by her.4

  The following month Lionel Halsey, the Prince of Wales’s treasurer, wrote to George V’s private secretary, Clive Wigram, that Wallis: ‘was at present receiving a very handsome income . . . I also told HM that in my opinion both Mrs S and her husband were just hand in glove in getting all they could out of HRH.’5

  It was against this background that over the past few weeks, Wallis had been receiving threats on her life and hate mail.6 For reasons of protocol, she and her lover were now living in separate countries until the decree absolute came through. On 9 December, an Essex solicitor’s clerk, Francis Stephenson, had filed suit at the High Court that the decree absolute should not be granted because of collusion and because Wallis had committed adultery with the former king in her homes at 5 Bryanston Court and 1 Cumberland Terrace, at Fort Belvedere, and on holiday on board the yacht Nahlin in the autumn of 1936. Having given up so much, there was now a danger they could not wed.

  In official circles, there were continuing concerns about the Duke’s supporters and Wallis’s own ambitions. On 10 December, a Scotland Yard official had written to the Commissioner, Sir Philip Game, stating that two personal protection officers needed to remain with her at Cannes as indications were she ‘intended to “flit”’ to Germany.7 A few days later, the officers reported a phone conversation where Wallis had told the Duke, attempting to sort out a post-abdication financial settlement, ‘If they don’t get you this (sic) things, I will return to England and fight it out to the bitter end. The coronation will be a flop compared with the story that I shall tell the British press.’8