2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster
A moment in history when Wallis Simpson, the abdicated king Edward VIII of England, French fashion, Cecil Beaton, appeasement, USA investments in Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War and Salvador Dali come together. And a quietly brilliant palace coup.
2 May 1937. Cecil Beaton photographs for American Vogue the twice-divorced American heiress soon to marry the ex-King Edward VIII. Wallis Simpson wears a Schiaparelli ‘waltz dress’ with a Salvador Dali red lobster down her skirt. The setting is a French chateau belonging to the American businessman who a few months later will mastermind the Windsors’ honeymoon tour of Germany. But what – other than Wallis Simpson - connects all these people?
As the newly appointed king, but not yet crowned, Edward VIII secretly told the Nazis he admired, that he was going ‘to concentrate the business of government in himself…. Who is king here? Baldwin or I?’ Did Prime Minister Baldwin get rid of the King because he was too pro-Nazi, as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, maintained? Or was there another reason?
We complete our exploration of the dark shadows in the background of Cecil Beaton’s sunny photograph. The laws of the time made it perfectly possible to prevent Edward VIII from marrying Wallis Simpson. Then there wouldn’t have been any point in abdicating. But nobody even tried. Did the yet-to-be-crowned king himself manufacture the crisis? Or had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, by never revealing the private letters he had from Wallis Simpson, carried off a very British palace coup?
Oops slip of the tongue - thanks to Harriet who’s pointed out we mistakenly refer to Edward VIII’s younger brother as George V not George VI.
By far the best way into this period is Juliet Gardner’s richly researched and beautifully written The Thirties (2010).
The most sensible introduction to Edward VIII is Deborah Cadbury’s reliable and readable Princes at War (2015).
The best outline of the abdication crisis is in a lecture Vernon Bogdanor gave at the Museum of London in March 2017, which you can read – or watch - here.
Add to those:
Richard Buckle (ed.), Self Portrait with Friends. The selected diaries of Cecil Beaton 1926-1974 (1979) and the biographies of Beaton by James Danziger (1980) and Hugo Vickers (1985) and you have most at least of the easily accessible outlines of the story. For Beaton’s context see Martin Francis, ‘Cecil Beaton’s Romantic Toryism and he Symbolic Economy of Wartime Britain,’ Journal of British Studies 45 (2006).
To cut through the many myths about the lobster dress, you will need to track down Claire Eldred’s ‘Encounters and Exchanges with Elsa Schiaparelli’s Lobster Dress: an object biography’ in Laura Petican (ed.), Fashion and Contemporaneity. Realms of the Visible (2019).
The best way to see the dress itself is here.
After that, you’re into academic territory, getting to grips with British foreign policy: David N. Dilks’s ‘The British Foreign Office between the wars’ is a good introduction, though it’s difficult to find, appearing in Opinion politique extérieur en Europe II 1915-45 (published by the Ecole Francaise de Rome in 1984).
Read it alongside Robert Manne, ‘The Foreign Office and the Failure of Anglo-Soviet Rapprochement,’ Journal of Contemporary History 16, (1981) and Keith Nielson, ‘Orme Sargent, Appeasement and British Policy in Europe, 1933-39,’ 20th Century British History 21 (2010).
Also B.J.C. McKercher, ‘The Foreign Office, 1930-39: strategy, permanent interests and national security,’ Contemporary British History 18 (2004).
You can find a sensible perspective on appeasement in Norrin M. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy’s ‘Wishful thinking or buying time? The logic of Appeasement in the 1930s’, in International Security 33 (2008).
Glance at Paul H. Hehn, A Low, Dishonest Decade (2002) and read a bit of Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism (2003) and R. Mitchie, et al, The British Government and the City of London in the 20th Century (2004) for the broader British context.
Paul R. Sweet, ‘The Windsor File’, in The Historian (1997) is a good yarn by the American scholar who fought to publish the German papers on Windsor. It is still the most quoted consideration of his fascism.
A very readable route into the French background is Benjamin Martin, France in 1938 (2006). A revealing and well-considered survey of travellers’ accounts of Hitler’s Germany is Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich. The rise of fascism through the eyes of everyday people (2017)
Stephen Cretney’s ‘Edward, Mrs Simpson and the divorce law,’ in History Today 53 (2003) is the definitive, lawyer’s account of the technicalities – and unexplained mysteries - of the Simpsons’ divorce case.
There are, of course, hundreds of websites that claim to recount details of Wallis Simpson’s affairs and Edward Windsor’s links to the Nazis. Believe them at your peril.