I can’t love Edward VIII. I know he had some good qualities. He was a people’s king, in contrast to his stuffy father, George V. He was a modernizer, refusing to be hidebound by outmoded tradition. And there is, even today, a romantic, Ruritanian Prisoner of Zenda quality to the idea of a man who could give up a throne for love.
Except that in the original Prisoner of Zenda Rudolf Rassendyll put his duty first, and gave up the woman he loved for the sake of a throne. That’s the difference. No matter how much I try to admire Edward VIII, I keep coming back to a story that Tommy Lascelles, the private secretary to George VI and Elizabeth II, told about an exchange between Edward and his mother at Marlborough House when the abdication crisis was at its height.
Edward had gone to break the news that he couldn’t continue as king without Wallis Simpson by his side, and Queen Mary suggested that he should reflect on the effect his actions would have on his family, the throne and the Empire. His only answer was, “Can’t you understand that nothing matters — nothing — except her happiness and mine?” It is difficult to forgive that. A king who puts himself first and the crown second has no business being a king.
There is, even today, a romantic, Ruritanian Prisoner of Zenda quality to the idea of a man who could give up a throne for love. Except that in the original Prisoner of Zenda Rudolf Rassendyll put his duty first.
In Once a King: The Lost Memoir of Edward VIII, Jane Marguerite Tippett tries hard to rehabilitate this flawed, selfish, politically naive man; or, in her words, to liberate Edward from the caricature-like status to which popular culture has reduced him. It is an uphill struggle, but that in no way detracts from her enormously readable book, which offers insights into the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s views of the events of 1936 and paints a fascinating picture of their subsequent aimless life, drifting between Paris and the south of France in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Her book is based on a surprising find she made in the archives at Boston University of the American journalist Charles Murphy, the ghostwriter of Edward’s autobiography, A King’s Story (1951). There, in Murphy’s notes and interview transcripts, she found what amounted to an uncensored early draft — the lost memoir of the title.
On and off for almost a decade Murphy trailed after the duke and duchess, initially working on a series of articles for Life magazine and later on Wallis’s memoir The Heart Has Its Reasons (1956). He stayed with them at La Croë, their rented château on the Riviera, and followed them to Paris and Tuscany and New York and back to Paris, gently drawing out the couple’s memories of lives that remain defined by that moment in December 1936 when Edward turned his back on the throne.
Tippett quotes liberally from Murphy, painting a sad picture of two bitter exiles. If their recollections — those they chose to share with him, anyway — were measured, their sense of hurt at being shunned by the royal family showed through now and then, as when the duke bitchily observed that his sister-in-law, the Queen Mother, “being a commoner, loved to bask in the glow of [being] a royal favorite”.
There’s a good deal of angry self-pity hovering beneath the surface as well. “Not one break was I given in the whole thing,” Wallis complained in a conversation about the stories that circulated about her learning sexual tricks in Chinese brothels. And she was still bitter, she told Murphy in December 1954, at “the brother’s order, denying me the title of HRH”, although she claimed unconvincingly that it was all on account of the hurt caused to her husband. “It meant nothing to me,” she insisted.
“Can’t you understand that nothing matters — nothing — except her happiness and mine?”
Murphy is the hero of Tippett’s story, refusing to give up the project as one deadline after another was missed, cajoling the duke into rambling reminiscences and fielding sharp interruptions from the duchess. At one point in 1955, when he was working on the duchess’s memoir, he was abruptly dismissed. “I am so terribly sorry that things have turned out this way,” Wallis wrote, but “I do not feel myself in the pages”. A few months later he was re-hired after his successor in the interviewer’s seat proved to be even less sympathetic.
The journalist’s relationship with his subjects was close, even intimate. In one of the most moving scenes in the book, he described the duke telephoning him at 7.30 one morning to announce that he was abandoning A King’s Story, leaving Paris and sailing immediately for New York. Wallis had gone there alone several weeks earlier, and the duke had come across American newspaper reports of her “romance” with the gay Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue. Some even hinted at the imminent break-up of their marriage.
The duke was so distraught that Murphy, having informed his boss that the project had collapsed, decided to sail with him. “I truly feared that he might commit suicide.” By the time they reached New York the duke had calmed down, and Wallis was waiting to meet him with a very public display of affection, although she continued to go about with Donahue.
Tippett’s final chapter, an optimistic defense of Edward’s flirtation with fascism, endorses Murphy’s verdict that “it was merely another example of the duke’s unworldliness and lack of judgment”. It was certainly that. Edward’s only comment on Ricardo Espírito Santo, the Portuguese banker and Nazi sympathizer who was reporting to the German minister in Lisbon on the prospects of turning the duke, was that he had “a fine collection of Lowestoft china”. Edward’s point of view concerning the “vast affairs in which he was both a spectator and an actor”, Murphy commented, “is less than penetrating”.
Wallis seemed unable to appreciate the magnitude of the events of 1936. She was adamant that Edward didn’t mention marriage until after the abdication (in which case, why did she think he was abdicating?) and with breathtaking honesty told Murphy that “the only thing I was interested in was getting a divorce [from Ernest Simpson], and I did not want it caught up in the silly business of a constitutional crisis … The divorce was what I wanted — that took precedence over everything else.”
Once a King hasn’t converted me, enjoyable though it is. I still find it impossible to love Edward VIII, and hard to forgive him. But I do pity him. Murphy expressed it perfectly when in November 1954 he described the former king as having a look about him that tried “to be determined and resolute, but succeed[ed] only in being desperately sad”.
Adrian Tinniswood is a British historian and the author of several books, including, most recently, Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War II