Strange story of the king and hypnotist doctor
Pastor Dale Morgan
Strange story of the king and hypnotist doctor*
By Ben Fenton
Last Updated: 1:59am GMT 30/11/2006
In the months immediately before his abdication, Edward VIII was
hypnotised by a doctor who was fascinated by the occult and counted
fascists among his patients, it was claimed last night.
A report from a country vicar that Dr Alexander Cannon, a qualified
psychiatrist who used spirit mediums to "advise" hypnotised patients on
how to counter alcoholism and other problems of addiction, reached the
Archbishop of Canterbury on Dec 4, 1936.
So seriously did the archbishop, Dr Cosmo Lang, take the information
that he immediately questioned a Harley Street doctor to find out about
Dr Cannon and later informed Downing Street of the news.
According to a BBC documentary broadcast last night, the news reached
Lambeth Palace when a parishioner in Eye, Suffolk, told her vicar she
had heard Dr Cannon boasting that he was treating the king for alcoholism.
Dr Cannon's other patients included George Drummond, a banker who
subsidised Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, and his British Union
movement.
The timing of the information was critical.
Two days earlier, a speech by the Bishop of Bradford had brought into
the open what everyone "in the know" in Britain had been gossiping about
for months: the affair that the king had been conducting with Mrs Wallis
Simpson, a divorced Roman Catholic American.
Both Church and State were in a fevered state of uncertainty as to how
the King would act and whether his mental frailties would cause an
implosion of the royal dignity.
It was in this context that the vicar contacted the archbishop to tell
him about the King's hypnosis treatment, the programme claimed. Dr
Lang's chaplain immediately replied asking for further details.
Tellingly, the chaplain wrote: "He regards the information which you
have supplied as worthy of consideration as it appears to offer a
possible explanation of certain things which are known to His Grace.
"You will of course treat this as strictly confidential."
By then, Dr Lang had already contacted Dr William Brown, an eminent
Harley Street psychiatrist, for his opinion of the eccentric doctor.
Dr Brown replied that one of his own patients had consulted Dr Cannon
and described how he "put a medium into a trance and invited her to ask
questions of the medium".
It was not a procedure he himself would use.
By the time his information reached the archbishop, on Dec 10, the King
had just been persuaded to abdicate, but it seems likely that this
information would have been used as part of the effort by Dr Lang and
Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, to achieve exactly that end.
Philip Ziegler, official biographer of the Duke of Windsor, as the King
became, said last night: "I find this very intriguing.
"I very much doubt that Edward would have consulted this man for
alcoholism: it was the one thing his critics never accused him of and
although, of course, he did drink, it did not become a problem."
He agreed it was possible that the King was being treated for a sexual
problem and perhaps even Dr Cannon, a profound bragger, stopped short of
committing that degree of indiscretion against his royal subject.
The second part of the report on the King and the hypnotist is on BBC
Look North at 6.30pm tonight.