By the beginning of 1936 the King was obviously failing. He can-not have been cheered by news of Rudyard Kipling's death—supposedly the trumpeter of empire went first to herald its Sovereign into eternity. On 20 January George, wearing a flowered dressing gown, held a final Privy Council meeting in his bedroom at Sandringham. He could barely sign his name and soon lapsed into a coma. His doctor, Lord Dawson of Penn, issued that celebrated announcement: "The King's life is moving peace-fully towards its close."" Dawson himself fulfilled this prophecy with a remarkable act of euthanasia, only recently revealed. He injected a lethal mixture of morphine and cocaine into the King's jugular vein. This was done, with the royal family's approval, to ease the King's suffering and to ensure that his death was reported with suitable dignity in the morning papers, notably The Times, rather than in "the less appropriate evening j ournals." In her diary Queen Mary wrote, "the sunset of his death tinged the whole world's sky." But the fading of royal glory, like the lowering of house lights, had to be stage-managed. Even in death—particularly in death—veneration for the monarchy had to be kept alive. The King's body was embalmed to guard against its exploding during the funeral pro-cession as the Duke of Teck's had done. George V's exit was a bizarre culmination of a long, intensive propaganda campaign which aimed, as Leonard Woolf wrote, "to establish in the people a superstitious 'loyalty' towards the royal family." According to an American resident in London, the "royal publicity machine," which outdid "that of any film star," was responsible for the central paradox of English life. This was the coexistence of an "advanced political democracy" with a "retrogressive social aristocracy." The British themselves had no difficulty in accepting the paradox, observed the American. They were shocked by the deification of Stalin and Hitler but they failed to see that their own adulation of royalty surpassed that "inspired by any Dictator in Europe." 85 Doubtless this was an exaggeration. But now a people which had rejoiced at the Jubilee was encouraged to indulge in a communal catharsis. The nation donned black. The air waves resounded to a perpetual threnody. The BBC devoted so much time to prayers, hymns, incantations, tolling bells and solemn music that some wondered whether king-worship had taken over from faith in God. (At his first State banquet the future Lord Longford absent-mindedly genuflected to the King.) Equally mourn-ful were the press and the cinema. They provoked a frenzy of grief, as if trying to convince their audiences that the King's death was "the greatest event in human history since the Crucifixion."86 The arrival of his body in London aroused something close to mass'hysteria—a foretaste of the emotions generated, six decades later, by the passing of Diana, Princess of Wales. Slowly and sadly, in cold pale sunshine, the funeral cortege made its way from King's Cross Station to Westminster Hall. The coffin, shrouded in the royal standard and surmounted by the Imperial State Crown, a gold circle encrusted with gems such as the fiery white Cullinan diamond and the massive blood-red ruby given to the Black Prince and worn by King Henry on St. Crispin's Day, travelled on a gun carriage. As it entered New Palace Yard, the apex of the diadem, a Maltese Cross con-taining St. Edward's huge sapphire, the oldest crown jewel of all, jolted loose and flashed to the ground. A Grenadier sergeant major retrieved it and King Edward VIII, following the bier, exclaimed: "Christ! What will happen next?"87 Some of his subjects regarded this mishap as a terrible omen. But most were overwhelmed by poignant emotions engendered during George V's lying-in-state. Conservative MP and diarist "Chips" Channon, who watched the coffin being placed on its purple catafalque, was "left with the feeling that nothing matters . . . almost an eve-of-war reaction."" Over the next four days almost a million people queued for hours in hushed awe to pay their last respects to the King. Late one evening his four sons came down to the dimly-lit hall and took over the duties of the long-booted, plume-helmeted Household troops keeping silent vigil at each corner of the catafalque. It was another "excellent piece of public relations," according to Edward VIII's official biographer, though in order not to cheapen the gesture news of it was not given out in advance. The new Sovereign had another reason for being discreet: "King Carol of Rumania might have come and insisted on standing on top of the coffin."Almost everything else in Edward VIII's short reign was a blaze of indiscretion. This chiefly arose from his dangerous liaison with Wallis Warfield Simpson. She seemed to have bewitched him. She had, declared Mrs. Baldwin, "stolen the fairy Prince." A Baltimore girl who was said to have spent her youth in "much seduced circumstances," Wallis had, according to malign gossip, learned the arts of love in Chinese brothels. But the secret of her success with Edward was probably not Eastern sexual techniques but Western ruthlessness. Certainly she looked more determined than beautiful, having obstinately straight hair, hard sapphire eyes and a firmly pointed chin. With her svelte figure and lustrous complexion, she seemed "chic rather than feminine, half artifice, half steel." Often she would spend a whole day on her make-up, burnishing an appearance which combined animal allure and soignée sophistication. Loving jewellery, bibelots and objets dartwith a passion worthy of Queen Mary (who rightly saw her as an adventuress), Wallis herself was a sparkling social ornament. She was brittle and witty, punctuating tart, staccato sentences with salvoes of silver laughter. She was vital, clever, modern, flirtatious .. . and voracious. Unlike her deferential English rivals, she had no hesitation in meeting Prince Charming's quasi-masochistic needs. Perhaps because he had been bullied and spoiled throughout his early years, Edward yearned for a regime of strictness tempered with tenderness. Soon after their affair began in 1934 Wallis was ordering him to fetch her cigarettes while forbidding him to smoke. She criticised his clothes and got him to paint her toenails. He loved her "madly tenderly adoringly" and, it is clear, sexually—despite giving George V his word of honour that she was not his mistress. Wallis responded firmly, coolly, even contemptuously. She told him that he had not grown up where love was concerned and she occasionally reduced him to tears. His billets-doux were often puerile, sometimes infantile and always full of self-abasement. Complaining that Mussolini seemed to have planned the Ethiopian crisis just to ruin his holiday, he wrote to her: "Your blue-eyed charmer is the most dis-appointed small boy you can imagine." Now King Edward flouted convention by insisting that Mrs. Simpson be invited to royal occasions, neglected his duties to visit her, smuggled Paris fashions into the country for her, showed her the confidential government papers (which he dis-missed as bunk) in his red boxes. His Private Secretary was aghast at such irresponsibility: "Before her the affairs of state sank into insignificance .. . every decision, big or small, was subordinated to her will." At first this was little more than a political inconvenience. The government suspected that Mrs. Simpson was an informer of the German Ambassador Ribbentrop, though it found evidence only that she was an agent of the American press magnate William Randolph Hearst—to whom Edward later wrote in "ardent admiration."Many in official circles believed that the King himself was "pro-Nazi." Ribbentrop himself thought that he was "a kind of English National Socialist." Certainly the King threw his weight against intervention when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in March 1936. But Britain's failure to resist was already a fore-gone conclusion. The opinion of Sovereign and subjects coincided.
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