Reimagined Royalty

Edward VIII—the only English monarch, to date, to have voluntarily abdicated, taking on the title of Duke of Windsor thereafter—has not had the best reputation when it comes to his historical standing. He is widely regarded as a dilettante playboy, a Nazi sympathizer, and grotesquely irresponsible and selfish in both his life and reign. Having now written three books that revolve largely around his actions between the years 1936 and 1953, I believed that I knew virtually all there was to know about this most capricious and pathetic of monarchs. It is a narrative that has been echoed and supported by other biographers, even his official chronicler, the late Philip Ziegler; the case, such as it is, for the rehabilitation of the Duke of Windsor did not seem a compelling one.

Well, we live in a topsy-turvy world now, especially when it comes to biography. Damning criticisms of the likes of George Orwell and Charles Dickens—heterosexual white men who treated their wives either indifferently or actively badly, depending on who you believe—are counterbalanced by attempts to offer a more rounded portrait of historical figures who have been damned by posterity. While we may yet wait in vain for a sympathetic life of Hitler or Stalin (although who knows about the latter in the current climate), Jane Marguerite Tippett has decided, for her first book, to restore the reputation of the former monarch, using previously little-known archival material.

She announces in her introduction that “it was the desire to give the Windsors back their voice that convinced me this was the book I was meant to write, at least for now.” Tippett, who describes herself as “a consultant archivist and fine art curator,” originally focused her intentions on the immediate aftermath of Edward’s abdication in 1936, a period that would have included everything from his sparsely attended June 1937 marriage to Wallis at the home of the Nazi sympathizer Charles Bedaux (something of a common thread in the duke’s life, alas), to his ill-fated visit to Germany and notorious audience with Hitler in October that year.

Tippett had always intended her book to defend Edward, who she considers unfairly maligned by existing biographers such as yours truly. She writes that “I had hoped to rescue Edward from the one-dimensional stereotypes that now exist of him, produced in part by such contemporary efforts as the television series The Crown.” (You can almost hear the disdain toward popular television.) Yet Tippett, her archivist background coming to the fore, instead focused her attentions on the writer Charles Murphy, a journalist who had a protracted and largely unenjoyable collaboration with the Duke of Windsor between 1947 and 1951. Murphy’s papers are kept at Boston University, where Tippett headed to in order to produce her account.

The result, albeit with some further research and archival detail, is Once a King, which styles itself as Edward’s own uncensored memoir, presented with historical commentary and analysis by Tippett. Certainly, it is a bold and welcome attempt to venture into the well-worn area of Windsor studies in search of something different. Given how damning writers have been about the former monarch, it is almost a relief to find that Tippett, mindful of the potential for being a pro-Edward voice among those who have declined to put the case for the defense, declares that her intent is to “[liberate] Edward … from the caricature-like status to which popular culture has reduced him” and that “the candor and vitality of his words … bring him to life again, restoring his humanity and opening a new window into his character.” Still, there are many who would examine his life, particularly during this period, and struggle to find the “intelligence, loyalty, love and resolve” that Tippett credits him with. Instead, most biographers have weighed the existing evidence and found him distinctly wanting. Has his latest chronicler proved us all wrong?

The problem with Once A King—if we leave aside Tippett’s literary style, which is serviceable but relies heavily on quotation by other, more experienced writers—is that the book’s central aim is so all-consuming that it ignores any inconvenient facts that contradict its central thesis. If you believe Tippett, then the working relationship between the Duke of Windsor and Murphy was largely harmonious and happy, and produced “subtle enjoyment.” In fact, Murphy was driven to distraction by working with the former king, and later wrote in his scathing 1979 biography The Windsor Story, which featured first-hand details of his time with Edward and Wallis, that “the flow of the Duke’s narrative could never, even at best, invite comparison with a cataract; his span of attention … was two and a half minutes maximum, and when the story of the preceding night was plainly written in his trembling hands and bloodshot eyes [I] knew that another workday would have to be scrubbed.”

Nor was he enamored of Wallis, who he believed was strangely jealous of the project and wished for it to fail. As he later said of her, “she wanted to deny the Duke the satisfaction of finally carrying something—anything—through to completion.” Money talked, however, and so he subsequently returned to work on Wallis’s 1956 memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons, during which he was fired on the grounds that she said, “I do not feel myself in the pages,” only to be rehired when his replacement, society writer Cleveland Amory, proved to be even less effective at capturing Wallis’s unique tone of voice. Amory, like many of the people left in the Windsors’ wake, was sharply critical of her subsequently, jeering that “you can’t make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” and remarking that “I would say never have so many worked so hard to keep so much out.”

So it proves in Once A King, which ends up being a diverting but ultimately unpersuasive attempt to accomplish the apparently impossible task of rehabilitating a dismal man. Anne Sebba’s superb 2011 Wallis biography That Woman has already done a sterling job of presenting his wife in a far more three-dimensional way than previous lives have done, and the opportunity for someone to do the same with the duke was obviously a tantalizing prospect. Still, it is hard not to conclude, despite Tippett’s clear commitment to restoring her subject’s reputation, that this task will have to wait until either there is a yet more seismic discovery of documents that somehow excuse and explain his petty self-absorption, snobbery, and bigotry—and worse—or alternatively when hell freezes over. Judged by this evidence, the latter looks considerably more likely.

Once a King: The Lost Memoir of Edward VIII
by Jane Marguerite Tippett
Hodder & Stoughton, 372 pp., $34.99

Alexander Larman is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of The Windsors at War: The King, His Brother, and a Family Divided (St. Martin’s Press).