Unprivate Lives (Cont'd)

P: H. R. H. the Duchess of York, weekending with the Earl & Countess of Pembroke, reacted with hard gaiety on Sunday to a cautious question by a titled guest as to whether the King is resolved to marry Mrs. Simpson. "Everyone knows more than we do," replied the Duchess of York, "we know nothing. Nothing!" Her Royal Highness followed this with a brittle laugh.* To Edinburgh this week traveled the Duke of York to be installed as Grand Master Mason of Scotland.

P: King Edward some weeks ago pained the Cabinet by gratuitously announcing that he will not deliver a fireside broadcast on Christmas as King George used to do (TIME, Jan. 5, 1935). Last week efforts to persuade Queen Mary to fireside on Christmas brought an intimation of refusal from Her Majesty. When it recently became known that she had suffered a slight chill. Lloyd's again raised their already sky-high insurance rate against postponement of the Coronation. The death or grave illness of the Queen would, of course, upset all Coronation plans. Last week Her Majesty's health did not figure in dispatches but Lloyd's again raised their rates.

P: Crowning absurdity in British interference with freedom of the Press came last week when London newsdealers refused to handle the Christmas number of Esquire. Reason: it contains a dreary piece of pseudo-satire entitled "POPULAR YOUNG MATRON--Mr. Simpson's Daughter Only Proved the Generalization That Stupidity Is No Handicap to a Proper Woman." No character in this piece of obviously pure fiction remotely resembles anyone appertaining to the King's Mrs. Simpson.*

P: The biggest guns of the London morning Press boomed against King Edward because of Mrs. Simpson as never before last week--without mentioning her name. Editor Geoffrey Dawson of the London Times, who has been sniping from haughty ambush at His Majesty (TIME, Nov. 23), emerged partially from cover with a most ingenious leader written around the appointment of the new Governor General of the Union of South Africa, blameless Patrick Duncan. As though admonishing Mr. Duncan, but obviously admonishing King Edward, the Times referred to the office of Governor General thus: "It is a position--the position of the King's deputy no less than that of the King himself --that must be kept high above public reproach or ridicule and that is incomparably more important than the individual who fills it."

This was well calculated to make the King feel like a worm or sardine, /- but Edward VIII found an unexpected press champion next morning in Viscount Rothermere. T his noble Lord's mass London organ, the Daily Mail (which has eight times the circulation of the Times), came out with a smashing pro-King-Emperor and anti-Prime Minister editorial. Recalling Stanley Baldwin's recent bumbling admission in the House of Commons that he would have told the public of the war danger Britain faces except that he was afraid that would lose him the last General Election, the Daily Mail cried: "Surely those who have recently confessed that they dare not tell the people the truth will realize the gulf between their conduct and the King's methods in Wales!"

The King fortnight ago visited the depressed areas of South Wales (TIME, Nov. 30), and was overheard to exclaim to Welsh proletarians: "Something must be done for Wales!" This having been printed by Viscount Rothermere's Daily Mail, Baron Camrose's Daily Telegraph hotly retorted: "Those who would make a whip to beat the Ministers out of the kind and human feelings the King has shown are not helping the depressed areas but are doing His Majesty a grave disservice."

P: All this might have been only a tempest in the best journalistic pots of Fleet Street, except that Government departments in Whitehall seethed last week with rumors of personal clashes between Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and King Edward in Buckingham Palace. A grave impression was produced when an audience which scores of British officials knew Mr. Baldwin had had with Edward VIII was unprecedentedly omitted from mention in the royal Court Circular next morning. British public life moves with such regularity in its accustomed grooves that for the Prime Minister, suddenly by telegraph, to summon members of his Cabinet to drop everything and rush to meet him at No. 10 Downing Street is a sign that the Empire is facing a national crisis comparable to threatened war and the Prime Minister gave that sign last week. He followed it by conferring with the Leader of the Opposition, Laborite Clement Attlee.

Usually London's great financial houses know within a few hours what is brewing in such circumstances. Last week Britain's statesmen made supreme efforts to keep their secret, but United Press, after three days of careful source-tapping and cross-checking cabled: "It is understood that Mr. Baldwin's meeting with Mr. Attlee established a common front of the Conservative and Labor parties on their attitude toward the friendship between the King and Mrs. Simpson, and left no doubt that the friendship had precipitated one of the most serious constitutional crises of modern times." In the London Times appeared the most thinly veiled of warnings to King Edward that an attempt on his part to marry Mrs. Simpson would be opposed by a united House of Commons. "In any crisis that may arise, whether foreign or domestic," pontificated the Times, "the House of Commons may well prove itself what the country has often required at similar times during a long history but has seldom been given--a Council of State which is able to demonstrate its solid power."

There was no other issue last week to which the London Times could conceivably have found it necessary to refer in such fashion, and the Cabinet was reported contemplating, as the most practicable means of thwarting the match, proceedings by the Attorney General to see whether Mrs. Simpson can be legally blocked from obtaining her final decree of divorce April 27, thus forcing her in England to remain the wife of Mr. Simpson. Sir Claud Schuster, Permanent Secretary to the Lord Chancellor was reported to have advised the Cabinet that legally the King cannot marry Mrs. Simpson without the Government's consent. The New York Times credited the highly exasperated King-Emperor with having told his Prime Minister something to this effect: "I am now happy for the first time in my life and I wish you would let me alone."

P: Unhappy were the King & Mrs. Simpson when she began to receive last week anonymous notes postmarked in London's fashionable Mayfair and threatening her life. Many were written in such cultivated terms as to suggest that some of the poison-penpushers may very well be peeresses or at least English gentlemen with a public school background.

Sample: "Beware, the fate of all Kings' mistresses will soon be yours!" This was written on an expensive letter card, Mayfair-postmarked, and three days later Mrs. Simpson received an identical card in the same typewriting which read: "Had you been living 200 years ago, means would have been found to rid the country of you. but no one seems to possess the courage required to order you back to the U. S. A. where marriage is a mockery, so it has fallen to my lot as a patriot to kill you. This is a solemn warning that I shall do so." In numerous other notes polysyllabic English writers informed Mrs. Simpson that the date draws nigh when she will indubitably perish.

P: First book-form biography of Mrs. Simpson will be published this week under the title Her Name Was Wallis Warfield.* It also contains one of the "sparkling epigrams" for which Mrs. Simpson has a reputation. The epigram: "Soup is an uninteresting liquid which gets you nowhere." Almost an epigram was Mrs. Simpson's crack when British friends suggested and subsequently arranged that she should be presented at Court in 1931 to their King George.

"Very well," said Mrs. Simpson, "I'll do it if it doesn't cost anything."

Keynote of the biography on page 117, the last page: "Wallis Simpson IS a queen--the queen of romance, of glamour and the unfulfilled longings of a love-starved World." In Lancaster, Ohio last week the Eagle-Gazette announced that it will never again refer in print to the King & Mrs. Simpson unless: 1) they "elope"; 2) King Edward permits himself to be "directly quoted" on Mrs. Simpson; 3) the affair gives rise, as the horrified Eagle-Gazette fears it may, to "a Continental revolution."

*Even as Prince of Wales, the present King was inclined to tease the Duchess, calling her "Queen Elizabeth," by which he implied that he might renounce his rights thus making her husband King (TIME, May 9, 1932).

*She is still the wife of London Ship-Broker Ernest Simpson, although she has obtained a decree nisi of divorce scheduled to become final on April 27. She first met Mr. Simpson, then married to a previous wife, at the home of a Mrs. Jacques Raffray of Manhattan. Last week Mrs. Raffray arrived in England and was met by Mr. Simpson. They traveled up to London in the same railway compartment, separated on the platform of Waterloo Station, ran out by separate doors, jumped into the same taxi, curled up together on the floor to escape the notice of reporters. When exhorted to sit up and show themselves they sat up screaming with laughter. To Manhattan reporters Mrs. Raffray had denied recently that it was her ambition to get a divorce and marry Mr. Simpson.

/- Because of his inconsiderable physique, His Majesty when a cadet at Osborne was nicknamed by his fellow cadets "The Sardine."

*Dutton ($1.50).

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