Alston wasn’t surprised. He invited them in, and then went through to his bedroom. Before the constable following him could stop him, he had grabbed the revolver which he kept in his bedside drawer, turned it to his temple and pulled the trigger.
Hundreds of other men and women were rounded up that morning and in the following month, including many members of the Right Club and the British Union of Fascists. But none of the senior members of the government, the armed forces or the civil service whom Alston had courted were imprisoned, nor the dukes and other aristocrats who had sympathized with him and Freddie.
Major McCaigue was helpful in identifying who needed to be kept under observation; it turned out that he had cultivated useful sources within Alston’s conspiracy. He stuck by his assessment that Conrad de Lancey was a Soviet spy and by his decision to send de Lancey’s ex-wife to keep tabs on him. Although de Lancey had Churchill’s support, McCaigue ensured the SIS kept an open file on him. A reliable man in a crisis, Major McCaigue.
A fear of a ‘fifth column’ of foreign spies and British Nazi supporters swept the nation, a fear shared wholeheartedly by the Prime Minister. In addition to the Britons suspected of sympathy with the Nazis, thousands of Germans and Italians were interned, including most of the Jews who had escaped to Britain from Germany and Austria. Anneliese was released from Holloway, only to be rearrested with her parents a week later. She and her mother were sent to Huyton near Liverpool, and her father was despatched to the Isle of Man.
Theo returned to Germany from his mission in Spain. Joachim von Ribbentrop mourned the loss of his star protégé, Otto Langebrück, on a dangerous mission in enemy territory. Intelligence from the Abwehr suggested that British spies had been responsible for Langebrück’s death in an attempt to keep the Duke of Windsor away from Britain.
Theo’s intelligence duties switched to Britain, which was natural given his education there. He read with great interest Abwehr intelligence reports of the collapse of Alston’s plans and of his suicide, and that the Duke of Windsor had decided to drive to Antibes from Biarritz instead of returning to England. With the defeat of France, invasion of Britain was becoming a real danger. But Admiral Canaris had Theo working on exaggerated reports from southern England of the number of British divisions available and the strength of their secret fortifications: armoured cars lurking in the bunkers of the golf courses of St Leonards, a catacomb of gun emplacements underneath the hill at Rye. These the admiral passed on to Hitler with gloomy assessments of the likely failure of a German invasion attempt. Theo was pleased to see his chief gradually moving towards his own position on where his true loyalty to his country should lie.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor travelled first to Antibes, and then, when France fell, on to Madrid and Lisbon. Concerned that his inclinations were known to be pro-Nazi and that he might become a focus for intrigue, Churchill forbade the duke from returning to England, and ordered him to take up a position as Governor General of the Bahamas, well out of the way.
Joachim von Ribbentrop sent Sturmbannführer Schellenberg to Lisbon to try to persuade the duke to remain in Europe, or if that failed, to kidnap him. Schellenberg offered the duke fifty million Swiss francs, and frightened him with claims that the British secret service was planning to assassinate him on the ship to the Bahamas. Echoing Venlo, Schellenberg suggested that the duke and duchess go on a shooting holiday at a forest on the Portuguese border, from where they could be easily spirited into Spain. They could wait there until they were needed in England.
The duke and duchess prevaricated, but eventually the duke’s friend and legal adviser Walter Monckton flew out to Portugal and persuaded them to leave Europe. They set sail for the Bahamas on 1 August, where they languished for the remainder of the war.
On 27 August 1940 a notice appeared in the Forthcoming Marriages section of The Times:
LIEUTENANT VISCOUNT OAKFORD AND MISS ROSEN. The engagement is announced between Lieutenant Conrad William Giles, second son of the late Viscount Oakford, G.C.V.O., V.C., M.C., and Lady Oakford of Chilton Coombe, Somerset, and Anneliese Gisela, daughter of Dr Werner Rosen of Douglas, the Isle of Man and Mrs Hilde Rosen of Huyton, Liverpool.
Author’s note
How much of this novel is based on truth?
It’s a fair question, and one that is surprisingly difficult to answer. But I shall try. The historical sources cannot be trusted. The main players had reputations to protect; governments had a war to win. Conspiracy and cock-up walk hand in hand through a jungle of lies, rumour, gossip and fabrication. Conspiracy theorists and many conspiracy novelists love the idea of cold, super-intelligent plotters driven by a thirst for power. There may have been one or two of these around in 1940, like the fictional Sir Henry Alston, but most of the actors were driven by fear, vanity, prejudice and panic.
Nowhere is this more obvious than the vexed question of whether the Duke of Windsor was a Nazi spy.
The idea for this novel first came to me after reading Martin Allen’s stimulating book Hidden Agenda, which makes the forceful case that the Duke of Windsor willingly passed secrets about the French defences to the Germans in the hope of securing a role as King or President of a pro-German Britain. The problem is that some of Mr Allen’s sources are suspect, such as a letter purporting to be from the duke delivered to Hitler in November 1939 by Charles Bedaux. A fascinating article by Ben Fenton in the Financial Times in 2008 points out that twenty-nine forged documents have been inserted into the Public Record Office at Kew, and that these have all been used as source material in three books by Mr Allen. Five of them were cited in Hidden Agenda. It is the only known case of documents being inserted rather than removed from the PRO. At the time of the writing of the article they had only been accessed by Mr and Mrs Allen and by the Foreign Office and MI6. There was a police investigation, but it was dropped. Martin Allen denied any knowledge that these papers were forgeries. Despite this mystery, much of Martin Allen’s argument is supported by more reliable sources quoted elsewhere, and in my mind, many of his points still stand.
The British Establishment was torn over how to treat the Duke of Windsor’s story. On the one hand, they wanted to vilify the man who had given up the throne for the love of a divorced American woman. On the other, they wanted to preserve the reputation of the monarchy. Thus, signs of cover-up are everywhere. Anthony Blunt was sent around Europe in the years immediately after the war in search of German documents relating to the duke. That’s the same Anthony Blunt who was spying for the Soviet Union and who, unlike fellow spies Philby, Burgess and Maclean who were publicly accused as soon as they were discovered, was allowed to continue as the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures until he was eventually exposed in 1979.
In September 1954, fearful of leaks by the Americans, the Stationery Office published messages sent by the German ambassador at The Hague in early 1940 to his bosses in Berlin informing them that the Duke of Windsor was unhappy with the British government and willing to impart information on Allied war plans. In 1954 these revelations provoked outrage in Parliament: Captain Kerby, Member for Arundel and Shoreham, asked Sir Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, why such clearly false allegations had been published by Her Majesty’s Government and whether an apology had been made to the Duke of Windsor. The Prime Minister assured the House that the duke had not raised any objections to the documents’ publication and that the Prime Minister agreed with the duke that the German ambassador’s allegations would be treated with contempt. ‘They are, of course, quite untrue.’ Yes, Prime Minister.