They were words that, if spoken in another era, would have been tantamount to treason.
The Palace’s senior courtier, Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, told Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin privately that it would be “for the best” if his boss, the future King Edward VIII, “broke his neck”.
The surprising statement was made in 1927 during Edward’s trip to Canada with the Prime Minister.
By then, Lascelles had served for seven years as deputy private secretary to Edward, who was then Prince of Wales and would reign for just 11 months before abdicating so he could marry the divorced Wallis Simpson.
Lascelles’ view of Edward began positively, to the point that he wrote that he had “great affection and admiration” for him.
King Edward VIII with his deputy private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, in Vancouver in 1924
Alan Lascelles began his royal career as assistant private secretary to the then Prince of Wales in 1920. In 1927, he told Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin privately that it would be “for the best” if his boss “broke his neck.”
But he resigned from royal service in 1928 after becoming desperate by his “unbridled pursuit of wine and women”.
He then returned to serve briefly as deputy private secretary after becoming king in 1936, having performed the same duty for Edward’s father, George V.
Lascelles’ memoirs were republished in 2020 under the title King’s Counsel: Abdication and War, The Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles.
The entry relating to his conversation with Baldwin at Government House in Ottawa read: “In his small sitting room I told him that, in my opinion, the heir apparent, in his unbridled pursuit of wine and women, and every selfish whim Whatever he was currently occupying, he was rapidly going to hell, and unless he mended his ways, he would soon not be a suitable bearer of the British Crown.
“I expected my head to be bitten off, but Baldwin listened to me to the end and, after a pause, said he agreed with every word I had said.
‘I continued: “You know, sometimes when I sit at York House waiting to get the result of some point he’s riding on, I can’t help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him, and the country, would be for him to break his neck.” “
Edward abdicated in December 1936 so he could marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Above: The couple on their wedding day in Monts, France, in June 1937.
‘”God forgive me,” said SB. “Many times I have thought the same thing.”
While the famously combative Lascelles came to view his boss with disdain, sentiments were similar in the other direction.
Edward later described him as “that wicked serpent”, when reading John Wheeler-Bennett’s official 1958 biography of his brother, King George VI.
He believed that Lascelles had influenced Wheeler-Bennett to ensure that he was presented “in the worst possible light”, while George VI emerged with his reputation intact.
Lascelles resigned from his position shortly after a trip to Kenya and Uganda in 1928 that Lascelles described as “the last straw that broke the camel’s back.”
She wrote: “She finally broke down over his incredibly insensitive behavior when we received news of her father’s serious illness.”
Lascelles became appointed to serve George V and remained in office when Edward succeeded to the throne in January 1936.
King Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales, seen with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in the 1920s
Archbishop Cosmo Lang with Edward VIII on Holy Thursday 1936
The King making his abdication broadcast to the nation on December 11, 1936
When Edward abdicated in December of that year, Lascelles said he was “like a fairy-tale child who had been given every gift except a soul.”
Another key figure who had a low opinion of Edward was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang.
In 2012, the emergence of letters and files preserved in the Lambeth Palace archives revealed how Lang conspired with the then editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, to threaten Edward over his affair with Mrs Simpson, telling him that the relationship would end. would reveal publicly unless he abdicated.
At that time, relationships outside of marriage were taboo. The fact that Edward was king and head of the Church of England made his situation even more dire.
Edward photographed with Captain Alan Lascelles (second from right), Brigadier Trotter (left) and David Boyle in the United States in 1924.
Former Prime Minister Winston Churchill with Alan Lascelles in 1949
Lang falsely alleged that the king was mentally ill, telling the Times editor: “My dear Dawson, I have heard from a reliable source that Her Majesty is mentally ill and that her obsession is not due to mere obstinacy but to a mind. upset.”
‘More than once in the past he has shown symptoms of persecution mania.
“This, even apart from the present affair, would almost inevitably lead to recurring disputes with his ministers if he remained on the throne.”
In a letter sent to then-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin at the height of the abdication crisis, Lang also said that Edward should renounce the crown immediately.
The bad blood went both ways, and Edward later wrote that Lang was “more interested in the pursuit of prestige and power than in the abstractions of the human soul.”
Lascelles served as private secretary to both George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, before retiring from royal service at age 66 in 1953.
