The king and the hypnotist

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.

View: Full Article | Source: The Telegraph