Ben Pimlott: Special Branch, the Queen Mother but no smoking gun
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Your support makes all the difference.What role did Special Branch play in the abdication? This is one of the key questions raised by the belated release of important documents by the Public Record Office relating to Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, later Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
The papers have been withheld for more than twice as long as the usual 30 years – supposedly to avoid embarrassment while the Queen Mother was alive.
Yet – disappointingly – there is no Bowes-Lyon smoking gun. The Queen Mother's name is seldom mentioned in the papers, and never in a way that alters existing assumptions. Why, then, the delay?
Bureaucratic inertia may be one answer. Another could be that it was not so much the Queen Mother who might have been embarrassed, as Whitehall and Downing Street. At any rate, suspicions that the security services may have been involved in telephone taps of leading Royals in the 1990s are made more plausible by documents showing that Special Branch was trailing Mrs Simpson months before the death of George V in 1936.
The most tantalising Special Branch paper in the collection is that claiming Mrs Simpson had a secret lover. Who authorised her surveillance, to what end, and was George V kept informed?
The answers are not known, but we may wonder what might have happened if the Prince had been tipped off about Guy Trundle. Would his attitude to Mrs Simpson have altered and would the abdication have happened?
Meanwhile, Special Branch kept close to the Prince, confirming that he and Mrs Simpson "were on very affectionate terms and addressed each other as 'darling'."
There are other curiosities. We find Eamon de Valera, then the Irish Prime Minister, playing dog-in-the-manger by pointing out a change to the monarchy would require the sanction of the Irish Free State, still a dominion, and raising the possibility of Edward reigning in Ireland but not England.
Of special interest is the draft of the abdication speech Edward wanted to broadcast in which he expressed the hope that, after a cooling-off period, the people of the Empire might demand his return.
Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, refused to let him make the speech on the basis that it was unconstitutional.
The documents also reveal Special Branch as institutionally racist and snobbish. There is a reference to the "notorious Nancy Cunard who is very partial to coloured men and who created a sensation some years ago by taking up residence in the Negro quarter of New York".
Although the documents do not fundamentally change our take on the monarchy's biggest trauma of the 20th century, they provide plenty of material for scholars and royalty-watchers to chew over for years to come.
Ben Pimlott is Warden of Goldsmiths' College
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