Buchman returned to London a few days before the abdication of Edward VIII. At the height of that crisis, at four o'clock in the morning, he received a telephone call from the home of the Comptroller of the King's Household. It was from a close friend of the King, one of those who had been on the boat to South America in 1931, begging him to do something to help. 'All I could say,' he told a friend next morning, 'was, "There's nothing I can do now."' Justly or unjustly, he felt that those close to the King, particularly his spiritual advisers, had failed to help him to find a stable foundation for his life. 'The reason is because they are not arch-revolutionaries,' he wrote to a Swiss friend on the day after the Abdication. 'They support an archaic system, and no one can read the story of Russia, where the Church was bereft of the Christ it sought to bring, without seeing its significance.' Of the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, he wrote, 'Humanly he has done a good job. But it is certainly God's plan, in a situation like this, that a Prime Minister should have been able to change the King and bring him under the guidance of God.'39

A week later he had the chance to talk with Baldwin. It had been arranged by the Prime Minister's right-hand man, Sir John Davidson, who had been present at the Hatfield weekend. Baldwin had often heard news of the Group from his cousin, Mrs J. W. Mackail, and Mrs Baldwin had attended Group luncheons. When Buchman had held a meeting in the Albert Hall in July 1936 the Prime Minister had booked a box, but cancelled it on being asked by a Sunday newspaper whether he had 'joined' the Group.

At Chequers Baldwin told Buchman that his work was done and that he was planning to resign after the coronation of George VI. Buchman replied that the recent crisis had shown that he had an authoritative voice to unite the Empire on a great issue. Now there was something even greater at stake, to become 'the authoritative voice for the spiritual rebirth of the Empire'. Baldwin replied, 'Yes, I know I ought to. But I'm afraid I can't.'

Many of these people first met Buchman in the Chelsea home of the Dowager Countess of Antrim, a former Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria and Queen Alexandra, who gave a weekly lunch for him when he was in town. It was during the late 1930s that she and her sister, Lady Minto, made the two-month journey with Buchman through the Balkans and the Middle East which Michael Barrett had found so demanding. 'Wherever we stopped,' she wrote in her diary, 'Dr Buchman was received not only by small, virile local teams, but by Rulers, Statesmen and business men. Everywhere they demanded interviews and asked for advice, seeming to realise that only by a God-controlled world can the difficulties which confront us be overcome.'

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