Foreign News: Baldwin the Magnificent

“Not only did the Prime Minister show himself a great Minister of the Crown, but the whole British people displayed a moral force,” said Le Temps of Paris last week. “This test, which was very perilous, has magnificently confirmed the value of British institutions!”

Even Stanley Baldwin’s warmest enemy, sanctions-badgered Benito Mussolini, was enough of a Great Editor last week to agree that the Prime Minister had been great in handling the Empire crisis of Edward VIII. Il Duce dictates daily the tone of Italy’s press and the following handsome admission in Giornale d’ltalia might have been tagged To Stanley from Benito: “Prime Minister Baldwin has served the interests of his country worthily by facing the painful but necessary battle to separate, even up to extreme consequences, Edward’s private life from the duties that are his toward the Empire.”

The way in which Squire Baldwin did this in the House of Commons was intensely moving, mellow and dramatic without melodrama, in fact it was magnificent.

Here was Mr. Baldwin, the massive Victorian figure of a John Bull who has not a nerve in his body, who reads the newspapers as little as a statesman can nowadays, who simply will not use the telephone in international crisis—because one never knows who is listening—and is, in short, a middle-class English company director who never went out to make a sale in his life. Here, on the other hand, was the “Empire Salesman,” the ever-young and pepful crowned head. In him Britain had invested millions to build up Edward as Heaven’s gift to the masses and to British trade— not to mention women of both hemispheres. Could this investment last week be saved?

If not, could the liquidation be accomplished without impairing the Royal Family’s immense goodwill dating from Queen Victoria? Could humdrum Mr. Baldwin keep steady and do his awful duty while narrow Downing Street echoed to such cries as “God save the King—from Bald-win! FLOG BALDWIN! FLOG HIM!! WE—WANT—EDWARD!!!” The last man in the world whom such cries could disconcert is Mr. Baldwin, and the last woman is Mrs. Baldwin.

Mrs. Baldwin says she “knows that the inscrutable hand of Providence guides” her husband, and Mr. Baldwin is not alone in thinking she is right. He was last week the absolutely ideal Prime Minister to weather an English crisis by applying precisely those qualities of bulldog smugness which have strewn his career in foreign affairs with disaster after disaster and are today threatening to gum the works of British Rearmament and imperil the Empire (TIME, Nov. 23 et ante). Again & again Mr. Baldwin has told the House of Commons that “my lips are sealed” until this has become a 1936 British byword for hypocrisy. Came last week, however, the Supreme Crisis in which the curiosity of the world had to be kept unsatisfied day after agonizing day if good great Mr. Baldwin was to wear down and tame his passionate and obstinate King Emperor. In his own time, and it seemed an outrageously long time, Mr. Baldwin, who is 69, last week entirely tamed a Sovereign of 42, recalling him to that state of dignity (see p. 15) minus which a King Emperor is not worth to Great Britain the millions per year he costs, and securing his abdication.

How he did this Mr. Baldwin explained to the House of Commons last week as truthfully as a bank president reassuring alarmed depositors. Mr. Baldwin observed: “I would like to say at the start that His Majesty, as Prince of Wales, honored me for many years with a friendship which I value, and I know that he would agree with me in saying to you that it was not only a friendship, but, between man and man, a friendship of perfection.”

There could not have been in the House of Commons a single member who did not know that this opening was a bland reversal of the facts—yet so bold and sweeping that it rose not to the crescendo of a lie but to that of the most convincing and comfortable assurance which a Prime Minister could feel it his awful duty to make. Mr. Baldwin went on to tell how these two perfect friends had confided to each other that the one wanted to marry Mrs. Simpson and the other, while not venturing to advise, still less to blame, had expressed the opinion that the Home and Dominion Parliaments would never enact such legislation as would permit Mrs. Simpson to take the status of a morganatic wife, as the King wished. That was about all, according to Mr. Baldwin, except that his royal friend had required a little time to decide to abdicate rather than make Mrs. Simpson his Queen, and Mr. Baldwin later most vehemently declared that the entire Royal Family had congratulated him upon his zeal in pressing Edward VIII unceasingly NOT to abdicate.

“I am convinced that where I failed no one could have succeeded,” concluded the Prime Minister. “Let no word be spoken that causes pain to any soul and let us not forget today the revered, beloved figure of Queen Mary.” The speech also contained that little throb of penitence which has for years been the trademark of every “crisis speech” by Stanley Baldwin. A democratic Prime Minister must undertake no great matter without informing at least three or four principal members of the British Cabinet. Of his approach to Edward VIII on this gravest issue, the Prime Minister told the House of Commons: “I consulted—I am ashamed to say it, but they have forgiven me—none of my colleagues.”

It is for taking this kind of risk that an officer under fire is afterward either shot or plastered with medals. As Mr. Baldwin had just laid before the House the irrevocable abdication of Edward VIII, “signed by his own hand,” the Prime Minister was not exactly under fire. The House was offered a choice of voting either for or against His Majesty’s “irrevocable decision.” It was ratified by a vote of 403-to-5 in the Commons and passed without dissent in the Lords. Dominion Parliaments hastened to concur by rubber-stamp landslides, all excepting the Irish Free State (see p. 18). Finally Parliament so legislated that Prince Edward and his heirs shall be free to marry whom they please without having first to obtain the King’s consent as ordinary members of the Royal Family must do, further that neither Prince Edward nor any heir of his shall ever occupy the British Throne.

This was the simple, masterly solution of a great British crisis as schoolbooks will read about it for generations. Here and there a rare scholar will dip into the official record of Parliamentary proceedings and shake his head before passing over the fact that in the House last week there was the inevitable Scotsman who never will hold England’s peace. George Buchanan, an ordinary cheerful Independent Laborite from the Glasgow slum area in which pinch-faced Scots so often cheered royal Edward said: “Today I have listened to more cant and humbug than ever before in my life. I have heard praise of the King which I feel now is not held sincerely in any quarter of the House. If he had not stepped from the Throne voluntarily, everybody knows that those who pay lip service would have poured shame and filth on him.

“You will go on praising the next King as you have praised this one. If he is half as good, or one-tenth as good, as you say, why are you not keeping him? Why does everybody want to unload him?”

During the long career of the Prime Minister he has always hitherto, “refused to answer hypothetical questions.” Last week he squashed Scot Buchanan flat by simple silence. The Empire thanked God that he did so, turning happily to George VI and crying “God Save the King!” Mrs. Baldwin knew, and she was right, that Mr. Baldwin, under Providence, had done the saving.

British officials last week at last felt free to talk for publication about the abdication and what led up to it. Herewith a toned down, minimum synthesis of utterances made on royal premises and in official Whitehall:

“So much brandy and soda was continually taken by His Majesty during the early stages of the crisis, particularly after the steadying influence of Mrs. Simpson was removed, that the work of the Prime Minister was really of heartbreaking difficulty. … In the cursing, mindchanging rage of the Sovereign, books were flung as well as epithets of embarrassing virility. … To one of these Mr. Baldwin re-joined, ‘That is something new, Sir. I have never been called that before. . . .’ Much of the dispute was about money and at least once His Majesty took back a verbal proffer of abdication when he found that he would not receive for life the $500,000 annual revenue of the Duchy of Cornwall. … It was necessary once to apply a stomach pump [Dec. 4], and after this the Sovereign moderated his consumption of spirits but not his choler. . . . The worst day was Dec. 5, but by Dec. 6 the King was ‘steady’ and his actual signature upon the irrevocable instrument of abdication steadied him further. … In the evening of Dec. 10 he expressed regret that he had abdicated earlier that day, but threw off this melancholy and remarked to a servitor who was leaving his service in characteristic American slang, ‘Well X—, I guess you and I are well out of this bloody racket!’ . . . Such expressions as these were among the most painful under which the Prime Minister kept always steady.”