Andrew Vine: The day a King cast aside his crown, and a news story that put him on route to abdication

AT 10am on this day 75 years ago, four brothers gathered in Fort Belvedere, a turreted country house in Windsor Great Park and rewrote the course of history.

The act was done in moments, only as long as each needed to sign a brief, two-paragraph document, but its repercussions resonate with us three-quarters of a century on.

The first to sign was Edward, then Albert, Henry and George. There was not much talk in the room; everything had been said in the fraught weeks and months before that morning of Thursday, December 10, 1936, and besides, nobody could find the right words.

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It had already been a momentous year, with much to remember. A resurgent Germany had sent troops into the Rhineland, a demilitarised zone since the end of the Great War, an invention called television had gone on air in Britain, unemployed men had marched from Jarrow to London to demand jobs, a black athlete called Jesse Owens had delivered the firmest of ripostes to Nazi race theories by winning gold at the Berlin Olympics and an aircraft named the Spitfire had taken to the skies for the first time.

All, though, paled before that moment in a quiet room, in which Edward VIII signed away his birthright and became the only British monarch to abdicate. The act, when it was announced, made the entire world stop for a moment to catch its breath in astonished disbelief.

The American journalist H L Mencken described the abdication as “the greatest story since the Crucifixion”, and it has been pored over endlessly ever since, variously told as the love story of its century with its noble young king sacrificing everything for the woman he could not live without, or as a twisted fairytale of obsession and inadequacy with sinister undertones of support for Hitler.

It is rarely the fate of newspapers to play a pivotal part in world events of such magnitude as the abdication, but in those momentous winter days of 1936, the Yorkshire Post found itself cast in such a role.

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The relationship between Edward and the American divorcee Wallis Simpson was an open secret in much of the world, especially the United States where it was a widely-reported sensation, but the British public knew nothing about it thanks to a conspiracy of silence between the press and the establishment.

Even the most well-informed newspaper readers had no idea about the agonised discussions between Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the King over his determination to marry Mrs Simpson, which had dragged on for weeks and in early December appeared to be leading towards the unthinkable prospect of abdication.

That was to change a little more than a week before Edward and his brothers gathered at Fort Belvedere. The Bishop of Bradford, Alfred Blunt – whose surname was an accurate reflection of his character – was in the habit of providing the Yorkshire Post with advance copies of what he considered to be important addresses, so that they could be given due consideration before being committed to print.

On December 1, a reporter called Harry Franz was told to collect a speech that Dr Blunt was to deliver at the Bradford Diocesan Conference in which he reflected on the meaning and solemnity of the forthcoming coronation of Edward VIII. Franz took the text back to the Yorkshire Post’s offices, where it was typed up, and then delivered the original back to the bishop by teatime that same day.

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The bishop would later insist that he knew nothing of the King’s involvement with Mrs Simpson at the time he wrote the speech, and was simply airing public concern at Edward’s perceived “indifference to religious observance”. If that was the case, his words nevertheless were prescient. “The benefit of the King’s coronation depends, upon God, upon two elements: firstly, on the faith, prayer and self-dedication of the King himself – and on that it would be improper for me to say anything except to commend him and ask you to commend him to God’s grace, which he will so abundantly need, as we all need it – for the King is a man like ourselves – if he is to do his duty faithfully. We hope that he is aware of his need. Some of us wish that he gave more positive signs of such awareness.”

The editor of the Yorkshire Post, Arthur Mann, knew about the King and Mrs Simpson. In 1936, it was astonishing that a senior churchman would dare to voice even the faintest criticism of the monarch, let alone deliver what appeared to be a coded warning that a relationship with a twice-divorced woman was incompatible with his role as defender of the faith.

A leading article was written for the Yorkshire Post of December 2 that took the bishop’s words as a signal that reference was being made to Mrs Simpson. It read: “Most people, by this time, are aware that a great deal of rumour regarding the King has been published of late in the more sensational American newspapers... But certain statements which have appeared in reputable United States journals, and even, we believe, in some Dominion newspapers, cannot be treated with quite so much indifference. They are too circumstantial and have plainly a foundation in fact. For this reason, an increasing number of responsible people is led to fear lest the King may not yet have perceived how complete in our day must be that self-dedication of which Dr Blunt spoke if the coronation is to bring a blessing to all the peoples of the empire and is not, on the contrary, to prove a stumbling block.”

The fact was that most people had not been aware. They were now; the wall of silence had been breached, and that a newspaper of the stature of the Yorkshire Post had alluded directly to an issue with potentially grave consequences for Britain and her Empire emboldened the rest of the press. The constitutional crisis was front page news thereafter. The public had to wait until December 11 to hear from the newly-created Duke of Windsor, and the radio address in which, over the course of a little more than seven minutes, he gave his own account of why he had abdicated.

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The story of what followed today’s anniversary is, ultimately, a depressing one for its central figure. A life of indolent uselessness stretched before the former King for the next three-and-a-half decades until his death in 1972, as he and his duchess played out an empty charade of royalty, feted and fawned over as they toured the world sponging off the fascinated wealthy who exhibited the faded golden couple like specimens under glass.

Anniversary follows quickly upon anniversary; in a matter of weeks, in February, the Queen will mark her Diamond Jubilee. Without the abdication, Britain would have had the feckless Edward VIII and not the dutiful Albert who had signed his name and spent the years after his accession as George VI preparing his eldest daughter for the burden she would one day have to carry.

Sixty years of service, of duty, of the affection of her people, have their roots in that anniversary of today.