Wilfred was one of the three most important measures approved by the Allied Supreme Council on the twenty-eighth. The second was Royal Marine, the mining of German waters, which would commence a day earlier than Wilfred, with the mining of the Rhine, and conclude on the fifteenth, with the mining of the German canals. On April Fools’ Day, the plan for Wilfred was expanded to include a British ground force, bearing orders to land in Norway if the Germans landed first or if “there is clear evidence they intend to do so.” The third measure was the no-separate-peace pledge, which was widely hailed by the French and British press the next day, but which would be remembered by posterity for its tragic ending.

March had also been a busy month in Germany. Late in the month, British intelligence reported that the Germans were “concentrating aircraft and shipping for operations [against] . . . Norwegian aerodromes and ports.” On the twenty-eighth, the day the Allied Supreme Council met, there was another warning about a German operation against Norway. Two days later, in a radio address to the British public, Churchill said, “It seems rather hard, when spring is caressing the land . . . that all our thoughts must be turned and bent upon sterner war.” Then he warned his listeners to prepare themselves for an “intensification of the struggle.”

The first days of April brought more ill tidings. From the intelligence services came reports of a large troop concentration in Rostock, the German port closest to Norway; and from France came a request from Daladier, now minister of defense in the Reynaud government, for a three-month delay in the implementation of Royal Marine. The mining operation would provoke retaliatory German bombing raids, and Daladier wanted more time to prepare France’s air defense and to evacuate men and war industries from threatened areas. Was Daladier telling the truth? In part, yes, but there were also rumors that the request was an act of spite. One rumor had it that Daladier was jealous of Reynaud’s success in London; another, that he was “a peasant” and that the French peasant was famously vindictive. But the most persistent rumor linked Daladier’s request to the feud between the Marquise de Crussol and the Comtesse de Portes, and there may have been something to that. When Daladier refused to dine with him and Reynaud during an early April visit to Paris, an abashed Churchill declared, “what will centuries to come say if we lose this war through lack of understanding?” Spears knew what Paris would say: “All Paris recognized that unless a bomb eliminated both the ministers’ dulcineas [mistresses],” the Reynaud-Daladier feud would continue. For those inclined to enjoy such a spectacle, Spears’s friend Georges Mandel had a warning. If Daladier brought down the Reynaud government out of spite or for some other reason, Édouard Herriot, president of the French Chamber of Deputies, and Pierre Laval, an influential French senator, would come to power on a peace platform.

In early April, with the British war budget (for 1940) still 40 percent below the German, and the British unemployment rate—another metric of war readiness—still at nearly a million, Chamberlain was facing a political crisis of his own. The Vigilantes, the All Party Group, the Watching Committee, and other opposition groups were intensifying their calls for a change of government. Linked only by a shared fear of Chamberlain’s complacency and incompetence, sixty-five-year-old Leo Amery, a Liberal imperialist whose loyalties were to an England that died at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, had little in common with Hugh Dalton, a Labour MP whose gaze was fixed on the welfare-state Britain of 1945, or with Clem Davies, a Unilever executive and political moderate, other than the desire to remove Chamberlain from office.

Davies, founder of the All Party Action Group, and Lord Salisbury, founder of the Watching Committee, were slower in embracing this ambition than many of the prime minister’s other critics. Both men had founded their groups with the intention of providing advice and counsel to Chamberlain and his cabinet. Only when the prime minister showed little interest in accepting advice did Davies’s and Salisbury’s desire to assist the prime minister become the desire to unseat him. In this journey from friend to enemy, the events surrounding the reshuffle of the Chamberlain cabinet on April 3 played an important role.

Despite mounting criticism from the opposition groups, at the beginning of April Chamberlain still looked politically invulnerable. In the March Gallup poll he had a 57 percent favorability rating—a high number but, as events were about to show, an empty one. By the beginning of the eighth month of war, a large segment of the British public had developed significant reservations about the prime minister’s leadership. But, as yet, the doubts and reservations had not found a catalyzing event. The cabinet reshuffle would provide it. For months, the press and Parliament had been urging Chamberlain to bring new faces into the cabinet and to lighten the departmental duties of the cabinet ministers so they could devote more time to oversight of the war. There had also been calls to bring Labour and Liberal MPs to the cabinet so the government would have a national rather than a narrowly partisan character. Little of this advice was evident in the cabinet reshuffle of April 3. Chamberlain’s inner cabinet went into the reshuffle with nine ministers, all Tories and all burdened with heavy departmental responsibilities that interfered with their war work; and the inner cabinet emerged from the reshuffle with eight ministers, all Tories and all burdened with heavy departmental responsibilities besides their war work. The absence of Labour and Liberal ministers was not Chamberlain’s fault—no member of either party would serve under him—but the cautious, unimaginative character of the cabinet changes were. More to the point, they were also reminders of everything that people disliked about the prime minister.