38656356325923

oyal family but the Scottish public. For the Duke of York, the most hurtful aspect of it
all was the way his brother excluded him from any consultation over the major changes
he intended to make on the Balmoral estate. ‘David only told me what he had done
when it was all over,’ he complained to Queen Mary, ‘which I might say made me rather
sad… I never saw him alone for an instant.’
Elizabeth and her family were at Glamis for the last week of their holiday in mid-
October. She and Margaret Rose, as her sister was still called, were always happy there.
‘Margaret Rose says that the Castle is alive,’ the Duchess wrote to Osbert Sitwell, ‘I
believe she is right.’ On 18 October the Duke was in his element, out partridge-shooting
with his father-in-law and seven brothers-in-law at Colliedrum. It was the last day for
many months that he would enjoy peace of mind. On the 19th he took the night train
for London with his family, only to be told on arrival by Alec Hardinge that on the 27th
Mrs Simpson would be petitioning for a divorce from her husband and that the King had
refused the Prime Minister’s appeal to prevent the divorce from going forward.
Hardinge warned the Duke of York that the affair might end with his brother’s
abdication. Prince Albert was ‘appalled and tried not to believe what he had been told’.
The Yorks remained on the sidelines as the situation worsened; Prince Albert made
repeated attempts to talk to his brother, but the King either fobbed him off or refused to
talk about the matter, until on the morning of 17 November he summoned Bertie to the
Palace to tell him what he had told the Prime Minister and Queen Mary the previous
evening: that he intended to marry Mrs Simpson, with or without the Government’s
approval, and that, if necessary, he was prepared to abdicate in order to do so. ‘Oh,’
Bertie replied, ‘that’s a dreadful thing to hear. None of us wants that, I least of all.’
Three days later, on Edward’s return from Wales where, shocked by the numbers of
unemployed, he had uttered the famous words ‘Something must be done…’, he told his
brother George that he was going to marry Wallis and that she would be ‘Queen of
England… and Empress of India, the whole bag of tricks’. That evening, at Chips
Channon’s dinner-party, the King was euphoric, triumphantly in love. Wallis wore on
her finger their ‘engagement ring’, a magnificent emerald which had once belonged to
the Great Mogul and had cost the King a cool quarter of a million pounds.
But, as the rest of the royal family saw it, it was David’s duty to his country and to the
Empire to put the public interest before his private passion. Not only was divorce widely
regarded as taboo at the time (and particularly so in royal circles where it would be
many years before a divorced person would be permitted to set foot in the Royal
Enclosure at Ascot), but there was a supra-national dimension to the question. Since
1931 the Statute of Westminster had granted autonomy to the self-governing Dominions
of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland and the Irish Free
State. The Crown was ‘the symbol of the free association of the members of the British
Commonwealth of Nations… united by common allegiance to the Crown’, and the King
was individually sovereign of each of those countries. As King he was Supreme Governor
of the Church, which still did not recognize divorce; it was unthinkable to his family that
he could contemplate marriage to a twice-divorced woman. As King, however, he was