The Great Depression (56 page)

Now, King told himself, the old man would have something to tell his children – of how the Prime Minister of Canada had actually walked with him, arm in arm, offered him his cane, spoken of him as a neighbour, and taken him to his door, “all of which is illustrative of the opportunity of Canada as contrasted with the peasant life as it has been in Russia for generations.”

But King felt it necessary to conclude these remarks with a less agreeable comment: “The only unfortunate part of the whole story is that the Jews have acquired a foothold of Sandy Hill, it will not be long before this part of Ottawa will become more or less possessed by them. I should not be surprised if, some time later, Laurier House was left as about the only residence not occupied by Jews in this part of the City.”

In September, King set off for Europe, where he met a variety of statesmen and diplomats ranging from Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, to Winston Churchill. Litvinov told him, presciently, that Hitler was unpredictable and not to be relied on – that he would go after Czechoslovakia and Austria before turning on the Soviet Union. Churchill told him that England had never been in greater danger and that within five years it might be a vassal state of Germany.

At Arras, King viewed the great Vimy memorial with mixed feelings. It was “exceedingly fine and impressive,” but he felt it would have been more suitable as a monument to all the Allied forces, not just the Canadians. This massive, twin-spired structure seemed to him a bit out of proportion. It was, in fact, “the most pretentious war memorial in the world.” King was not enamoured of pretension. He was more impressed with the restored trenches, which had been his own idea, and also by the fact that the battlefield was Canadian property, tended by Canada and not by the Imperial War Graves Commission. That was also his
doing. He had wanted it kept “distinct from any Imperial association,” an expression of his stubborn nationalism.

In England, Mackenzie King heard for the first time whispers of the affair between Edward VIII and Wallis Warfield Simpson, a scandal that had been kept from the British public by an accommodating press. He would be meeting the King himself and wondered what that encounter might bring. He had a feeling that Edward didn’t care for him, that others had prejudiced the monarch against him. “It is strange that I have had no word from him thus far.” Not so strange, however, in the light of Edward’s near total preoccupation with the approaching crisis involving the woman he loved.

Certainly there were those who were doing their best to prejudice the Canadian prime minister against the King. Nearly a decade before, during Canada’s Jubilee celebration, Stanley Baldwin had hinted at a weakness in the young Prince of Wales. The problem that concerned him, he told Mackenzie King at the time, was “what shld. be done if the Royal Family were to ‘throw-up’ a sort of George IV”

“Let your fertile mind work on that,” Baldwin said pointedly. As King noted at the time, the British prime minister did not “feel too secure with the present heir to the throne.”

Now the British establishment felt even less secure. King’s ears were assailed by gossip about the monarch. At a house party at Stanstead Park, Lady Kipps, an elderly courtier, while praising the previous reign, complained that there was “no sense of security or stability.” Another, Mrs. Arthur James, “a real character,” spoke disparagingly of the new King’s going to the Vimy reunion without a hat, his hair blowing about, and “looking very dirty.”

“She says he likes to look dirty,” King wrote, “has no sense of responsibility, is not normal.” He came away with a feeling of great uncertainty about the state of the British throne.

The following day there was more talk of the sovereign’s deficiencies: his disinclination to attend church, his indifference to his obligations, and his refusal to listen to counsel. Ramsay MacDonald, the former prime minister, added to the chorus. “My own mother,” he told King, “would not have stood for some of the things that he is causing people to submit to.” MacDonald criticized the monarch for visiting the mining districts of Wales and asking the miners to call him by his Christian names, David or
Albert. He had actually slapped them on the back and “has no regard whatever for the accepted standards of behaviour.” These were strange sentiments to come from the man who had headed the first Labour government in British history.

But the real problem was the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson. The British press was maintaining a discreet silence, but the Americans were headlining the scandal. It could not long be kept from the British public.

Now a concerted attempt was made to get the Canadian prime minister to reason with the King. Nobody else, it appeared, dared to attempt this embarrassing and distasteful task. Geoffrey Dawson of
The Times
was one who urged Mackenzie King to bell the cat. But King wanted no part of it. “Quite clearly,” he wrote, “all were trying to get me to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.” It was a phrase he used more than once as the pressure increased. “In certain circles,” he discovered, “there was greater concern over the King’s alliance with Simpson than there was in the worsening situation in Europe.”

He travelled to Chequers on October 23 to confer with the Prime Minister. Baldwin met him at the door and told him he had come as close to a breakdown as he ever expected. Later, in the library, he confided that he wished he could leave England, “get out of this land and never see it again.” The strain of office had become unendurable, he said; no man could cope with it for long.

It was Baldwin’s view that Mrs. Simpson’s hold on Edward VIII wasn’t so much sexual as motherly. “He was a man in some particulars, in others he was not yet grown up.” It was clear, too, that Baldwin wanted his Canadian counterpart to speak to the sovereign. So did Major A.H.L. Hardinge, the royal secretary. “I hope you will impress on him … that the Canadian people feel it.… He will listen to you.” King refused; it was a matter, he said, for the people of England.

“I can see others are trying to use me,” he confided to his diary that night, “… but I don’t intend to be drawn into anything unless the King himself brings the subject up.”

But the monarch had no intention of doing anything of the sort. The following day, October 27, Mackenzie King presented himself at Buckingham Palace in his soft morning coat, silk hat, and Gladstone cufflinks. Following a ceremony that saw the installation of three new imperial privy councillors, Edward asked the
Canadian to stay behind for a few minutes. King thought he looked much better, less dissipated, more buoyant, his hair still thick and golden, his eyes bright and clear. Moments like these in the presence of the high and the mighty always produced in Mackenzie King a sense of awe and a kind of reverse humility – a wonder that
he
of all people should have risen to such heights. He could not help noticing the portrait of Queen Victoria immediately opposite and thinking “how stranger than fiction was the fact that I should be looking at this portrait while standing in the presence of her grandson, the present King, not only as one of his advisers but as a Prime Minister.”

He was not given any opportunity, however, to tender any advice on the one matter that was about to consume the nation. The two men covered a range of subjects from the Vimy pilgrimage to Mitch Hepburn (who the King thought was a communist). They talked of war and peace. Edward said he intended to keep England out of war “at all costs,” even (“Let me say this to you within these four walls”) at the cost of giving up some of Britain’s colonies – a revelation that, had he known it, would have disturbed Winston Churchill, then trying to rally a party of “King’s men” to support the monarch.

They talked candidly, even intimately, but there was no mention of Edward’s obsession with an American divorcée. The closest they came was when the Canadian prime minister, on taking his leave, told Edward that the whole future of the Empire depended upon him, that he, the monarch, had the power to save civilization, and that he must follow “what he knew in his heart was the right thing to do.” That was laying it on a bit thick, and it caused Edward to draw back a little and in a shy sort of way murmur that Mackenzie King was saying too much. “No, sir,” said the Prime Minister, “you are far too modest.”

When he returned to Canada the pressure continued, this time from the Governor General, who said that Canada was the key to the situation; Edward would be influenced by the senior dominion. King told him, in effect, to keep out of it. By late November he was convinced that Edward intended to marry his paramour “regardless of consequences.” Privately, he wasn’t sure those consequences would be fatal “either to the Empire or world relationship which the English aristocracy in particular believe they will be.” King’s long suspicion – it amounted to disdain – of the
aristocracy comes through in the diary entry: “His action would be of submarining a lot of the false and rotten life of society, and in accord with a showdown on realities, such as the world is witnessing in its social revolutions of today. The King clearly is throwing in his lot with the masses, and will be prepared to defy the classes. It may be the saving of the Crown and of revolution.…”

But King wanted to make sure that if a crisis came Canada would not be blamed for it. The latest dispatches from London incensed him because they suggested that Canada was taking the lead in trying to resolve the matter. King immediately put a muzzle on Vincent Massey. He was not to represent the Canadian government or attend any conferences on the crisis. King himself would communicate directly with London, not through the High Commissioner: “By putting a spoke in that practice, I have secured communication direct and uncoloured by the atmosphere in Government circles in London.” The British wanted King to cable directly to Edward, tendering his advice. That the Prime Minister refused to do.

But on December 8, with abdication almost certain, he changed his mind and decided that a letter sent directly to the King through the Governor General would at last be appropriate. Couched in sympathetic terms, it would stress the fact that Canada believed he should renounce Wallis Simpson and remain on the throne.

To his surprise, he found the Cabinet divided. J.L. Ilsley, the Minister of National Revenue, said he didn’t want to grovel before a King who had acted in a worthless way and didn’t deserve any expression of sympathy. Neither Dunning nor Lapointe, two of his senior ministers, favoured a compassionate message.

The Prime Minister, however, was “unwilling to have my worst enemy undergo the torture of mind and soul which the King must be suffering.” It was their duty, he told his ministers, to save the Empire, if possible, from such a calamity as an abdication. Once again, Mackenzie King had shifted his position. What he had earlier seen as a possible “saving of the Crown” he now presented as a potential disaster. And he now found himself veering toward the King’s side. He blamed “fashionable society” as much as he blamed Edward for the impasse.

The Cabinet reluctantly came round. The Prime Minister deleted a sentence linking the Cabinet’s view with that of the country
as a whole and struck out the final sentence, which referred to the rejoicing there would be if the King made the right decision. “Rejoicing,” the Cabinet felt, was too strong a word. Even after sending the official letter, King continued to vacillate; in his diary he wrote that “the King’s usefulness was pretty well gone now, and it would be better if he was off the throne.”

The Prime Minister’s purpose had been to make it clear that Canada was in no way responsible for the abdication and had, on the contrary, tried to save the monarch from such a step. As usual, King’s reasoning was circuitous. He didn’t want Canada on the record as not having tendered advice, but advice offered at an earlier stage might, he thought, have been seen as an effort to force abdication. On the
other
hand, “advice at the present time would make clear our desire to see the institution of the monarchy held in the regard and reverence to which it should be held.”

For most of the fall, Canadians had been agog over the royal drama, which served as a focus to relieve the boredom of the Depression. They learned of it from their own press, which was not inhibited by any self-censorship, and also from the American newsmagazines, which gave the story elaborate coverage. Large numbers sympathized with the King, if not with the elegant divorcée who was clearly his mistress. They had idolized him in the twenties during his well-publicized tours of the country – a glamorous bachelor, indeed a true Prince Charming, with his flaxen hair and his ready smile. In a sense they felt he was one of them; after all, he had purchased a ranch in Alberta! He symbolized all the glitter of the twenties, but now, in a darker decade, even that glitter was fading. When he abdicated on December 11, the entire country went into a tailspin.

There were those who felt betrayed by their sovereign, as they had felt betrayed by their own leaders. Mackenzie King put it into words when he wrote in his diary: “If that is the kind of man he is, it is better he should not be longer on the Throne.” It was inconceivably sad, King thought, that “a man who has the highest position any man could hold or has ever held, could fall into the deepest abyss – be so blinded by his lust as to lose all moral sense, and sense of what he owes … to the subjects all over the world.…”

Just before five that afternoon, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet had gathered to hear Edward’s abdication speech, broadcast by short wave. Mackenzie King would always remember the scene: his
ministers grouped in a semi-circle around the short-wave radio, he himself in the prime minister’s chair, the oddly affecting voice distorted by distance. “As we listened to the King’s voice, there were times when it seemed almost as though it were being given through a terrific storm, as if the elements were raging and blowing across sea and land; a more dramatic effect could not possibly have been arranged had it been deliberately planned.”

As they left the room, King remarked that history would record that Edward had been in some sense a sacrificial lamb; that he had given his life, as others had in the past, that others might be saved; that the person who really sought the abdication was Mrs. Simpson. That was King’s romanticism coming to the fore. History has not been so kind.