An hour later, the Dutch government announced that the rumor was false, and the Dutch ambassador went back to bed and slept the sleep of the saved. Joe Kennedy had a more turbulent night. The evening’s events had confirmed his fears that Britain was unready to meet the real war that he was sure was imminent. “There is a very definite undercurrent of despair because of the hopelessness of the whole task for England.”

The next day the press was full of speculation about Churchill succeeding Chamberlain, but, oddly, there was very little discussion or analysis of how that change would alter Britain’s war aims. With Churchill in office, there would be no more talk of teaching Germany that aggression does not pay, or of inducing changes of heart and mind. Under a Churchill government, Britain’s war aim would be victory, complete and unambiguous, even if that meant a return to the total war of a generation earlier.

CHAPTER SIX

THE ROGUE ELEPHANT

May 9 was another day of melting beauty and black news. The British position in Norway continued to crumble, the rumors of a German offensive in the West continued to multiply, and the leadership crisis in Westminster continued to intensify. In the May Gallup poll, Chamberlain’s unfavorability rating rose to 67 percent. “That bastard Chamberlain; I can’t put into words what I think about him.” “Oh, Christ, he’s frightfully obstinate.” “He won’t see any point but his own.” The man-on-the-street interviews in Political Crisis, Mass Observation’s report on the Norway debate, spoke forcefully of what the report called “genuine . . . mass pressure to change the Prime Minister.” The morning-after coverage of the debate also spoke forcefully of the desire for change. Several major papers were administering last rites to Chamberlain on their front pages, and several others already had him dead and buried and had his political obituary on their front pages. The requiems were premature. A majority of the Conservative MPs in the House of Commons still supported the prime minister. So did the new young king, George VI, who knew something about public abuse himself.

In the spring of 1940, George VI was in the third year of his reign, just long enough to have become a favorite piñata of the chattering classes in London and Paris. “A very dull man,” said the British writer Nancy Mitford. “Another snipe from the Windsor Marshes,” said the MP Harold Nicolson. A “moron,” declared former French premier Édouard Daladier. Daladier’s remark was particularly uncharitable. It was true that George VI had placed sixty-eighth out of sixty-eight on his entrance exam for the naval college at Osborne, and sixty-first out of sixty-seven on his exam for the naval college at Dartmouth; but placed in context, the scores were not as bad as they looked. As one observer noted, the “average London club man” would not have done any better. It was also true that the king lacked personal glamour, but his older brother, Edward VIII, had possessed bucketfuls of glamour and no character—and look what that had wrought: Wallis Simpson and the yearlong abdication crisis. Devon, Dorset, Kent, Norfolk, and Suffolk were happy to have the earnest, stable, trustworthy, dull George VI and his strong-minded, porky little Scottish queen in Buckingham Palace.

The king’s friendship with Chamberlain had its roots in the abdication crisis. Then chancellor of the Exchequer, Chamberlain’s skillful handling of the financial side of abdication had impressed the new king, and in time respect led to trust and trust to “a bond” between the two men. Devoted to “duty and family,” the king and the prime minister had much in common, says British historian Andrew Roberts. “They were both intensely private individuals. Furthermore, both wanted to regard German claims in the best possible light, feeling as they did a deep dislike for Bolshevism.” Beyond that, both men were sensitive to the cry of Never Again! And, as king-emperor, George VI was particularly sensitive to warnings that a new German war could cost Britain its empire and its great power status. If 1914–18 had demonstrated anything, it was that the delicate architecture of the imperial state did not stand up well to the rigors of total war. In 1914 the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires had seemed as enduring as time; eight years later, the kaiser was a farmer in Holland, and the czar and Charles I (the ruler of Austro-Hungary) were dead. One day not long after the war began, a Foreign Office official found the king feeling “a little defeatist” after a talk with Ambassador Kennedy, who had given George VI a lecture on “the loss of prestige of the British Empire in the changed circumstances in which we live.”

The relationship between Chamberlain and the king also had a political dimension. Under British law, a sovereign’s political powers are severely circumscribed; but even in the twentieth century, royal prestige could make a wink, a nod, and a word from the palace go a long way; and George VI, reticent in other spheres of life, was less reticent about employing this unofficial source of power and influence.