Birthed in a Shanghai Brothel: The Abdication Crisis and the Creation of Eire

Monarchy's most attractive and most ludicrous feature is its resting of national well-being on the reproductive dynamics of a single family. Walter Bagehot considered this one of hereditary government’s strengths: making family affairs into affairs of state gave every person in the realm, even the most apolitical or disenfranchised, an empathetic connection with the government. On the other hand, marriage and childbearing raise strong and divisive emotions, and predicating a nation’s stability on how those experiences affect one particular clan can prove, shall we say, misguided. The death of childless monarchs led to recurrent political crises and succession wars in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The marital and extramarital foibles of George IV and Edward VII produced their own upheavals in early modern Britain.

Instability in one country can create political opportunity in another, especially when the other is a colony or dependency of the first. The leaders of the Irish Free State, the uncomfortably-dependent dominion which governed most of Ireland after 1921, found in the controversial marriage plans of a British monarch a unique constitutional opportunity. After winning the national elections of 1932, Eamon de Valera and his Fianna Fail party began whittling away at the Free State’s constitutional dependence on London. Unlike their predecessors in Cumann na nGaedheal, de Valera and his partisans embraced confrontation rather than negotiation. Over Britain’s protests they eliminated the hated oath of allegiance to King George, demoted the governor-general to a figurehead, and refused to pay Ireland’s remaining land annuities, for which Westminster retaliated with costly tariffs on Irish imports. The Irish parliament stopped short of declaring independence because the members knew Ireland lacked the military manpower to enforce such a declaration if Britain objected. Instead, de Valera (“Dev” to his friends) and his colleagues waited for a British political crisis that would distract Westminster and let the Irish peacefully assume more sovereignty.

The crisis and the opportunity came in 1936. The cause was both bewildering (to non-English observers) and perplexing (to Parliament). George V, sovereign of Great Britain and its dominions since 1910, died. His successor Edward VIII announced his intention to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. Simpson’s attractiveness to the Prince of Wales proved hard for his social circle to explain. Some gossips attributed it to her American libertinage, and to dark sexual arts Mrs. Simpson had learned in East Asia, perhaps even in a house of ill repute.* More likely Edward enjoyed the company of a mature adult with her own opinions, one not trained since birth to simper and swoon in the presence of royalty. It didn't hurt that both Wallis and the prince shared similar political opinions: both were deep-dyed racists and Nazi sympathizers, and a common interest in eugenics and fascism surely enlivened their conversations if not their physical intimacies. The heart, at any rate, wants what it wants, and King Ned wanted to marry the woman he had chosen, political consequences be damned.

Really, they all deserved each other.

Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin informed the king that the decision would damn him indeed: his English subjects would not tolerate a sovereign who openly defied the canons of the Church of England. Edward’s regnal duties included the governorship of the C of E, and Anglicans could not marry divorcees unless their new spouses were also widowed. (Wallis wasn’t). While working-class Britons supported the king, as they generally did in the modern era, middle and upper-class Englishmen, along with the Tories in Parliament, unitedly opposed his spousal choice. Baldwin told Edward his government would resign if he went ahead with his unacceptable marriage. Rather than back down or create a political crisis, Edward quit the throne.

No-one was brave enough to tell Dev what "Shanghai Squeeze" meant.

Ireland entered into the abdication controversy via the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty and the 1931 Statute of Westminster. The former made the Free State a dominion within the British Empire, with the same status as white settler societies like Canada. The latter required the consent of all the dominions’ legislatures to approve a change in the royal succession. De Valera had already accelerated the king’s abdication by declaring Catholic Ireland would never accept a divorcee as its queen. When Edward stepped down, Dev and the Irish parliament made it clear they would only accept a new monarch on their own highly restrictive conditions. New laws removed all remaining powers exercised by the king and his officers within Ireland, retaining the monarch only as a ceremonial “organ” of foreign policy. Westminster could perhaps have found a way to block the new legislation, but since the Free State had combined the king's marginalization with its recognition of his kingship, blocking the new Irish laws would essentially have annulled Ireland's approval of the Abdication and called Edward's successor George VI's legitimacy into question. Preoccupied and outmaneuvered, Baldwin and his Cabinet let Fianna Fail's legislative declaration of independence stand. The following year, a new Irish constitution made the monarch's restricted status permanent, and (not coincidentally) changed the country's name to "Eire."

Irish independence remained incomplete, albeit by design. Schools in Ireland remained under the control of a supernational body, the Catholic Church. The 1937 constitution guaranteed preferential treatment of that Church by the state. Indeed, De Valera sent the new constitution to the Vatican for its blessing, a courtesy he extended to Westminster only grudgingly. Even after Ireland proclaimed itself a republic in 1949, its government continued to give the Catholic episcopate a veto on social-welfare policy. Essentially, the Irish state exchanged its political dependence on London for greater moral and social dependence on Rome. An appropriate consequence, perhaps, of an act of political separatism predicated on the abdication of a king who offended the English Establishment's own prudishness. Birth your independent state in a brothel, even a hypothetical one, and you will wind up consigning it to a nunnery.


Sources: A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945 (Oxford UP, 2001), 398-402; Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms, 661-663; Cathal Brennan, "The Abdication of Edward VIII and Irish Independence," The Irish Story, 4 March 2011; Joanna Scutts, "Wallis Simpson Was No Bold Forerunner," The New Republic, 6 March 2018.
  

* Allegedly these included the use of kegel exercises to stimulate her partner’s genitals during intercourse, a practice that contemporaries labeled “the Shanghai Squeeze” (after the location of the alleged brothel) or “the Baltimore Grip.”