ANDREW MORTON
Michael O’Mara Books, 2015, 327 pages
The 1936 abdication had it all for Royal soap opera
addicts. The King of England, Edward
VIII, gave up the crown so he could marry Wallis Simpson, who, as an American,
a divorcée
and not being “PLU - People Like Us”, had three strikes against her being allowed
to become Queen, as Andrew Morton explores in 17 Carnations. The real
story, however, lay elsewhere, well-concealed, in Edward’s untimely ardour for
Hitler when Nazism shifted from being a valued defence against the Red Menace
to posing a threat to the British empire.
Edward was a “miserable prince”, depressed by, as the
party-boy complained, having to ‘hit up with a lot of old-fashioned and boring
people and conventions’. Sure, the
privileges of royalty were nice - Edward would rise “not much before eleven”, before
an afternoon of golf or fox-hunting or polo followed by cocktails in the
evening and then the nightlife until the early hours - but the dull ‘Princing’
duties and the limited pool of royal mating partners were too much to bear.
When the untitled Simpson hove in to view from Baltimore, Edward
was infatuated. Also excited was Adolf Hitler
who took a political interest in the pro-Nazi love-birds. Hitler had earlier attempted to broker a
marriage between German royalty and the Prince, and now set Joachim von
Ribbentrop, his foreign affairs point-man, to the cynical ploy of engaging in a
carnation-strewn, clandestine affair with Simpson to gain access to the new
king.
Edward was receptive to the Nazi cultivation. He was a man of staggering wealth who
thought, like most of the pukka aristocracy, that Britain’s very own Blackshirts
were ‘a good thing’ for sorting out trade unions and communists. His anti-Semitism, his hatred of Indian and
Irish nationalists, his dislike of ‘those bloody suffragettes’ and his “lifetime
loathing of the Bolsheviks” because of the execution of Czar Nicholas (Edward’s
god-father) also made this right-wing extremist into a potential Nazi recruit.
Hitler’s hopes were rewarded when the newly-crowned King leant
on the British government to not respond to the Nazis’ early expansionism in
Europe. Hitler was aghast then, when
Edward abdicated, but Plan B was to get the now demoted Duke to be a celebrity
voice for ‘peace’ (on Nazi terms) and ultimately to be installed as the Nazis’ puppet
King of England.
To keep Edward away from Nazi temptation, the government
ordered him from semi-banishment in Nazi-threatened France to the Bahamas as governor
in 1940, where he continued to entertain Hitler’s plans, telling an interviewer
(and undercover FBI agent) that ‘it would be a tragic thing for the world if
Hitler were to be overthrown’ by revolution in Germany.
Crisis, however, loomed for the monarchy when Edward’s Nazi-friendly
past threatened to publicly emerge after the war. The Allies had agreed to a joint US, UK and
French history of Nazi foreign policy as a re-education tool for the German
population, based on seized German Foreign Office archives.
These documents, however, contained Edward’s compromising comments
on Nazism, causing Buckingham Palace and Whitehall to attempt to suppress ‘the
Windsor file’ in order to cover up the existence of a treacherous
rat-in-waiting, and his like-minded circle, at the heart of the monarchy, the
“beating heart of the nation” as they liked to see it.
The US and French (but not the British) editors, as
professional historians, bridled at the political interference and threated
resignation. Their would-be censors
eventually agreed this would be a bad look for academic freedom in the victorious
capitalist democracies and, after re-jigging the publication schedule to keep
the offending file away from public eyes until 1957, opted for public relations
massaging on its release. Edward, soothed
the Foreign Office via a compliant establishment media, was an “innocent party
caught in a web of Nazi intrigue, a royal dupe rather than a traitor king”.
Morton, alas, joins this rehabilitation chorus – Edward “made
mistakes, said things he shouldn’t and met people he should have shunned” but
“he was a nuisance not a traitor”. Morton
ends up soft-soaping Edward, including, for example, ignoring the Prince’s fascist
propensity for street violence when he volunteered as a strike-breaking
‘special constable’ in the 1926 General Strike.
Despite declaring an antipathy to Royal history-writing “on bended
knee”, Morton’s book is intrinsically deferential to (and fascinated by) the
cult of monarchy, including its very English King who was knee-deep in fascist
mud of his own making.
