Authors: Jim Wilson
In their biography of Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister at the time of Edward’s abdication, authors Keith Middlemas and John Barnes describe the scandal:
About Mrs. Simpson greater suspicions existed … she was under close scrutiny by Sir Robert Vansittart and both she and the King would not have been pleased to realise that the Security Services were keeping a watching brief on her and some of her friends. The Red boxes sent down to Fort Belvedere were carefully screened by the Foreign Office to ensure that nothing highly secret should go astray. Behind the public facade, behind the King’s popularity, the Government had awakened to a danger that had nothing to do with any question of marriage.
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A member of the German Foreign Office staff, Paul Schwarz, in his biography of Ribbentrop, confirmed that secrets from the British government dispatch boxes were being widely circulated in Berlin and he strongly implied that Wallis was the source.
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Then in 1939, three years after the abdication, a secret FBI report to President Roosevelt stated:
It has been ascertained that for some time the British Government has known that the Duchess of Windsor was exceedingly pro-German in her sympathies and connections, and there is a strong reason to believe that this is the reason why she was considered so obnoxious to the British Government that they refused to permit Edward to marry her and maintain the throne … Both she and the Duke of Windsor have been repeatedly warned by representatives of the British Government that in the interest of the morale of the British people, they should be exceedingly circumspect in their dealings with the representatives of the German Government.
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Collin Brooks noted in his diary, on 18 November 1936, what informed comment in London was saying about Edward: ‘the suggestion has been made in many quarters that he could, if he wished, make himself the Dictator of the Empire.’
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Chips Channon said he was ‘pro-German’, and Ribbentrop noting Edward’s sympathies called him ‘a kind of English national socialist’.
Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, unlike the fascist dictators on the Continent, identified strongly with the monarchy, and Mosley himself saw the possibilities of achieving political power if he and his policies could win royal support. ‘He who insults the British Crown thus insults the history and achievements of the British race’ was the popular BUF message for which Mosley cunningly sought to win support.
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The Blackshirts saw no impediment in Edward’s relationship with Wallis Simpson. ‘The King,’ Mosley declared, ‘has been loyal and true to us. My simple demand is that we should be loyal and true to him.’
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He stated that the king deserved, after many years’ faithful service as Prince of Wales, the right to live in private happiness with the woman he loved. Mosley, like Hitler, had much to gain in trying to ensure Edward remained king. He knew perfectly well the king was covertly sympathetic to his right-wing views. Stephen Dorril, in his book
Blackshirt
, says that Mosley had a number of close contacts with the king and he claimed to have had secret correspondence with Edward.
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Collin Brooks, confiding in his diary, thought the king might do anything in the face of growing pressure on him to renounce his mistress – even the extreme act of dismissing Prime Minister Baldwin and sending for Mosley to attempt a fascist coup d’etat.
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There were government ministers, too, who seriously believed this could happen. Certainly Mosley was planning and scheming to bring about such a situation, and it was an open secret to many who were close to the palace that Edward had expressed sympathy with the concept of dictatorship. He was greatly impressed with fascism as a modernising and patriotic force, one that could solve the problems of unemployment he had publicly agonised over as Prince of Wales. Many fascists regarded the new king as one of ‘them’; a member of the younger generation who had been held back by the politicians of an older era. The Blackshirts tried hard to rally public opinion with a vociferous ‘Save the King’ campaign involving leaflets, canvassing public support through meetings and a campaigning newspaper which sold many thousands of copies on the streets, particularly in the capital.
Princess Stephanie, still seeking to fulfil Hitler’s wish, was the person who originally floated the concept of a morganatic marriage as a solution to the king’s dilemma. She, like the diplomats in the German Embassy, was desperate to find a means of keeping Edward and Wallis in power in Buckingham Palace.
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The device of a morganatic marriage, she explained, would have allowed Edward to marry Mrs Simpson, but on the condition that she would merely be his consort and would not take the title Queen of England. It was very much in Hitler’s interests that a way should be found out of the constitutional maze which threatened to force Edward off the throne. Princess Stephanie quoted, in support of her suggestion, the example of the marriage of the heir apparent to the Austrian throne. Had the royal couple not been assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand would have become emperor, but his wife would not have been given the title empress, nor would any children of the marriage have inherited any rights to the succession. The ploy suggested by Stephanie was backed by some supporters of the king, notably Stephanie’s employer Lord Rothermere. At Stephanie’s suggestion the press baron arranged for his son, Esmond Harmsworth, to lunch with Wallis at Claridge’s and to urge her to accept the idea of a morganatic marriage and abandon any thought of ever becoming queen. She would have accepted the idea, but there was never any hope of such a device being adopted, by either Parliament or the dominions. Under English law, such an innovation would have required a special Act of Parliament, and it would also have needed the full support of countries throughout the empire. Edward himself, like Wallis, would probably have accepted this solution, but Baldwin had to inform the king that neither the dominions nor Parliament would countenance the idea. In any case, the Prime Minister had warned the king he himself would resign if Edward married Wallis Simpson.
On the night of his abdication, 10 December 1936, 500 Blackshirts shouting support and giving the Fascist salute gathered outside Buckingham Palace chanting, ‘We Want Edward’. The next day, at a BUF rally in Stepney, Mosley demanded the question of the abdication be put to the British people in a referendum. When the abdication statement was read out in both the Commons and the Lords, Unity Mitford, Hitler’s friend and admirer who had just returned from Berlin, exclaimed: ‘Oh dear, Hitler will be dreadfully upset about this. He wanted Edward to stay on the throne.’
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In Germany, on Hitler’s express instructions, Goebbels ordered the media to make no mention of the constitutional crisis raging in Britain. He noted in his diary: ‘He [Edward] has made a complete fool of himself. What’s more it was lacking in dignity and taste. It was not the way to do it. Especially if one is king.’
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In contrast, Rothermere’s newspapers came out with banner headlines such as, ‘God Save the King’. Edward had reigned just 325 days.
Having decided that his only course was to abdicate, Edward sent a message to Mosley thanking him for his offers of support and explaining that he felt unable to take advantage of them.
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The king’s decision undoubtedly avoided an even greater political and constitutional crisis. It seems highly probable that the pressure on Edward was exerted by Baldwin and others as much because of Edward’s known sympathies with Hitler, his autocratic tendencies, his advocacy of a close alliance with Germany and the distrust and downright suspicions that surrounded his mistress and her political leanings, as because of the scandal of his romantic entanglement with a twice-divorced American woman and a commoner to boot. Both Baldwin, as premier, and Ramsay MacDonald, as a former Labour Prime Minister, shared the opinion that Edward had acquired dangerous views and an unconstitutional and potentially dangerous interest in foreign affairs.
One senior civil servant close to Baldwin went on record as saying that it became obvious Ribbentrop had been ‘stuffing Hitler with the idea that the Government would be defeated and Edward would remain on the throne’. A message from Ribbentrop to the Führer attempted to explain the abdication as being the direct result of ‘the machinations of dark Bolshevist powers against the “Führer-will” of the young King’. He blamed a conspiracy of Jews, plutocrats and reactionaries in the British Establishment opposed to Germany.
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He needed an excuse to explain why German diplomacy in London had singularly failed to keep a Nazi-leaning king and his mistress in office. For his part, Hitler said that if Edward had remained on the throne there would have been no differences and no war between England and Germany. The king had been deposed because he wanted Anglo-German rapprochement.
Ribbentrop was intrigued by Stephanie and her closeness to the Führer, but he became suspicious when he realised that she was the mistress of Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler’s closest adjutant. Wiedemann was at that time nearer to the Führer than Ribbentrop himself; he was persuasive and had the Nazi leader’s ear. Ribbentrop’s dislike of Wiedemann was mutual. Wiedemann could not stand Ribbentrop; he hated the man’s vanity and his self-importance, and he was contemptuous of Ribbentrop’s overwhelming subservience to Hitler. Among most of the top leaders of the Third Reich, below the Führer himself, mutual detestation was not uncommon. But one thing united them: they nearly all despised Ribbentrop.
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In 1936 Ribbentrop became Hitler’s ambassador to Britain. He was installed in office in time for the coronation of George VI, in May 1937. When he presented his credentials to the new king, he performed the Nazi salute with such a display of fascist formality, rigour and clicking of heels that it caused something of a scandal. The king’s courtiers were furious, whilst the press gave huge prominence to the story of embarrassment at court. They characterised Ribbentrop with tabloid humour as ‘Herr Brickendrop’.
To mark the accession of George VI, the new ambassador, ever pleased to curry favour in society, threw a lavish party for 1,400 guests at the opulent, newly restored German Embassy in London. Fritz Wiedemann was among the official German delegation, but to her dismay Princess Stephanie was not on the guest list, and she took this as a direct snub from Ribbentrop.
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Rothermere had asked her to interview the head of the delegation, Hitler’s personal representative, the then Reich Minister for War Werner von Blomberg, for an article in the
Daily Mail
. Stephanie was not to be bypassed in what she regarded as such an insulting fashion by Ribbentrop. She asked her lover Wiedemann to request Hitler to speak directly to Ribbentrop about it. Hitler did so, insisting Ribbentrop apologise to the princess, which eventually he grudgingly did.
The grand party was a major social event in London, attended by royalty in the person of the king’s younger brother, Prince George of Kent. It was the first time Hitler’s personal adjutant and the princess had been seen in each other’s company in England, a fact that did not go unnoticed in social, diplomatic and political circles. Nor did it escape the attention of British intelligence, who had already been informed by the French security service that she was the mistress of the Führer’s close friend and aide-de-camp.
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Writing years later, Princess Stephanie recorded her impressions of Ribbentrop, and they were still bitter:
He considered himself the one and only infallible political authority on England in the Third Reich, and anyone who did not agree with him that the English were hopelessly decadent, that they would never stand up to fight the Germans, and that their world empire had reached its zero hour, was a personal enemy of his. Leading Nazis like Hitler, Goering, Hess, Goebbels, Streicher, and Himmler had never been to England and could neither speak nor read English, in Ribbentrop’s eyes I was an arch fiend, a subversive meddler, a pestilential intruder.
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For Ribbentrop and his master in Berlin, the abdication was the end of a dream of a British king and his consort both sympathetic to the Nazi regime and both playing a key part in working for a rapprochement between Britain and Germany.
Although no longer on the throne and in exile, Edward was still potentially valuable to the Nazi cause. Princess Stephanie set to work with other Nazi agents to keep alive the hope that, ultimately, a Nazi sympathiser might return to the British throne. Following his abdication, Edward and his mistress had to wait until Wallis’ divorce proceedings had been legally completed before they could pursue their intention to marry. While she waited in France, Wallis engaged a lawyer to look after her interests. The man she turned to, Armand Gregoire, was a Nazi activist whose political sympathies were well known to French intelligence. The Sûreté Nationale described him as ‘one of the most dangerous of Nazi spies’, despite his outward position as a prominent lawyer with offices in Paris’ Place Vendôme, and his and his wife’s socially high-flying lifestyles.
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Intelligence archives in Paris and Washington contain bulky files on Gregoire’s activities as a leading Nazi agent, and as lawyer for Ribbentrop and Otto Abetz (later to become the Nazi ambassador to Paris and an acquaintance of Princess Stephanie). At the end of the war the French put him on trial, accused of collaboration with Nazi Germany, and he was sentenced to hard labour for life.
Edward and Wallis Simpson eventually married in France in June 1937. The ceremony took place at the sixteenth-century Chateau de Cande in the Loire Valley, owned by multi-millionaire Charles Eugene Bedaux, another man long suspected of being an agent of the Germans. Bedaux was a fascinating character. Born in Paris, he was a stocky figure with black hair, jug ears, the face of a prize-fighter and the slightly bow-legs of a racing jockey. Having dropped out of school, he had amassed a fortune in the United States as one of the leading pioneers of scientific management – time and motion study. The FBI and American Military Intelligence had kept him under surveillance when he was in the United States during the First World War. Later, after a time spent back in Europe, he reappeared in America in the 1920s. By 1925 he had established nineteen offices worldwide with 600 industrial clients, most of them big household names like Campbell’s Soup, Kodak and General Electric. He became a US citizen and made a considerable fortune pushing the new philosophy of mass production and business efficiency through a series of companies he created across the US and Europe. In the States he worked with leading industrialists, including Henry Ford, and companies of the status of General Motors, ITT, DuPont and Standard Oil – companies that, when the Second World War broke out in Europe, became members of a loosely connected group in the States dubbed ‘The Fraternity’; all of them firms that while aiding the United States’ war effort, also aided Nazi Germany’s.
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