GREAT BRITAIN: Crown & State

Since King Edward’s accession, officials of the Court have found His Majesty always ready to do his duty but difficult to find,* and with great perspicacity they took advantage of the fact that one day last week he would naturally spend at Buckingham Palace, the day on which Mrs. Simpson had to be alone at Ipswich to get her divorce. Shoals of British dignitaries had audience of Edward VIII that day, the Court Circular released next morning was one of the longest of his reign, and the Court staff congratulated themselves on a good job. It was next the duty of His Majesty to prorogue Parliament after its short session last week and reopen it again this week, each time with a Speech from the Throne.

The insomnia of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin abated during his prolonged vacation (which had continued up to last week since last July), and he was back at No. 10 Downing Street to shake up the British Cabinet before it again faced the House of Commons. Mr. Leslie Hore-Belisha, the smart, young Jewish Liberal who seems never to take a vacation but fills British newspapers all summer with personal publicity about his “Belisha Beacon” and other traffic gadgets (TIME, Nov. 26, 1934), was rewarded by promotion of his Ministry of Transport from sub-Cabinet to full Cabinet status. Minister of Agriculture, Walter Elliott, the tall, taciturn, sagacious Scot who has long been considered one of the Conservative Party’s ablest younger men, was shelved by giving him the sinecure Secretary of State for Scotland, and the Prime Minister made his especial favorite at the Treasury, Civil Servant William Shepherd Morrison the new Minister of Agriculture.

In the House of Commons last week, British tradition insured the hearty cheers by all parties with which the Prime Minister was greeted on his return to Parliament. A few minutes later his Cabinet’s continued refusal to sell arms to the radicals of Madrid caused radical Labor M. P.’s to shake their fists at Mr. Baldwin and shout at his Cabinet, “Butchers! Murderers!”

Aplomb never leaves Squire Baldwin, but Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was visibly nervous as he denied that Britain had put pressure on the radical French Cabinet to force them to propose the Neutrality Agreement barring arms shipments to Spain. “I wouldn’t believe Eden on a stack of Bibles!” bawled Communist William Gallacher, M. P., and then savagely attacked Adolf Hitler’s new Ambassador to Britain, onetime Champagne Salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop, who last week arrived at his post in a Nazi brown shirt. “He comes with his hands red with murder!” shrieked Red William. “I demand that this man, who is not an Ambassador but an agent for War, be driven out of this country!”

The Prime Minister was at his comfortable best when he got slowly to his feet, leaned heavily on the dispatch box and observed like a true John Bull: “I don’t think there was any Fascism in Italy before Communism began. The same thing was true of Germany. Force begot force, as it always does. In this country, thank God, these two forces are not worth that together!”—here Mr. Baldwin snapped his fingers. “A curious feature,” he continued, “is that at this moment in England we are reversing the process of Italy and Germany, and the petty efforts of the Fascists are making Communists. We will take jolly good care that neither of them will take root!”

It was wholly in vain that the high-strung leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Laborite Major Clement Attlee, barked like a terrier at St. Bernard Baldwin: “The Mediterranean has been abandoned to the Fascist State! The Far East has been abandoned to Japan! What is left? The policy of this Government has not brought us nearer to Peace, but closer and closer to War!”

When a Labor M. P. asked whether, “in view of the great public interest,” a newsreel could be made of Parliament in action, the Prime Minister growled, “No, Sir!”

“I, Me, My!” King George employed the pronouns “we” “us” and “our” in addressing his Lords and Commons, but King Edward insisted upon “I,” “me” and “my” in the Speech from the Throne proroguing Parliament, which was read last week, in the absence of His Majesty, by the Earl of Onslow.

Before there were even rumors in the United Kingdom that Edward VIII might marry Mrs. Simpson, His Majesty last spring obtained from the House of Commons the passage of a bill under which his spouse will receive $200,000 per year. In what was considered an allusion by the King to this, the Speech from the Throne declared: “Members of the House of Commons, I thank you for the arrangements you have made for the maintenance of the honor and dignity of the Crown!”

Main Roads & The League. Eight black horses borrowed, as usual, from a brewery were ready to draw the King’s State Coach to the opening of Parliament this week and His Majesty’s valet had laid out an admiral’s uniform over which he was to wear a great royal black and crimson mantle. Abruptly Edward VIII, giving the excuse that it had started to rain cancelled all the traditional British pageantry, popped into a motor car and whisked off to Whitehall through what United Press reported as “a lack of crowds considered unprecedented.”

His Majesty has yet to be crowned and the Imperial State Crown was not on his head but carried before Edward VIII as coroneted peers, the jewelled peeresses and M. P.s in black suits stood to hear the new King take his required oath to be a faithful Protestant and accept from Viscount Halifax Lord Privy Seal, his rolled-up Speech from the Throne, written by the Cabinet. This was in the “I,” “me,” “my” form which is the new King’s trademark. Otherwise it was as dull, turgid and noncommittal as Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin could make it. Only arresting feature—and that was arresting only in the United Kingdom—was a promise that His Majesty’s Government will introduce a bill taking main motor roads out of the hands of British county officials, all fanatically jealous of their local prerogatives, and vesting these in the Ministry of Transport of smart, blatant Leslie Hore-Belisha who thus scored heavily in his new full Cabinet rank. Since the present Cabinet notoriously let the League of Nations down in the matter of Ethiopia, it was significant that Mr. Baldwin placed in the mouth of his King as the keynote of the Speech from the Throne these words: “The policy of the Government continues to be based on membership in the League.”

In the only part of the Speech in which the King sounded as if speaking for himself he said: “I hope, when the solemnity of the Coronation has been celebrated, to revisit the Indian Dominions and there to make known, in the same manner as my revered father, to the princes and the peoples of India my succession to the Imperial Crown.”

*Verbatim Court comments are apt to contain an unprintable word or two, but one of the King’s staff recently remarked, “Oh yes, he does his job and works hard at it but we can never get at the little —he’s always off to Belvedere or someone’s house.” This was harmlessly and genially meant, much as the Royal Dukes, brothers of His Majesty, are apt to stroll in and heartily inquire, “Well, where’s the Bloody Monarch this morning?”