The Windsors at War opens with a bravura prologue: “13 September 1940: It took courage to fly as low and as fast down The Mall as the German pilot did, dodging the clouds as he sped, but his task that Friday morning was a daring one: the destruction of Buckingham Palace.”
“I’m glad we’ve been bombed,” said the Queen later. “It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.” Nothing better demonstrates the speed with which she and her husband, George VI, had mastered the requirements of a job neither of them had wanted, and for which both they and virtually the entire political establishment felt they were hopelessly ill-equipped. Before the war the French prime minister had spoken of the King as “a moron” and the Queen as “an excessively ambitious woman who would be ready to sacrifice every other country in the world in order that she might remain Queen Elizabeth of England”.
Their transformation is the ostensible subject of Alexander Larman’s book, a sequel to his The Crown in Crisis, which dealt with the abdication of Edward VIII and its immediate aftermath. Both books come equipped with a six-page dramatis personae, a prologue and an epilogue, and each chapter ends with a cliff-hanger. The Windsors at War prologue concludes sensationally with a suggestion entertained by the King: that the precision targeting of Buckingham Palace by the German bomber must have been the result of insider information — from his brother, the newly created Duke of Windsor, perhaps?
Larman rings down the curtain on the prologue with a typical flourish: “As the war, for so long becalmed, lurched into its next stage, the battle lines were now drawn. Country against country, nation against nation. That it should also pit brother against brother seemed inevitable.”
That fraternal duel is the book’s real subject. In The Crown in Crisis, there was little doubt as to the author’s view of Edward himself. Here, Larman comes right off the fence: “If there is a public figure of comparable standing who displayed the lack of self-awareness, non-existent consideration for others and disdain for any reasonable standard of behavior as the Duke of Windsor, their name should live in infamy.”
Larman sharply contrasts the grim reality the world was facing with the solipsistic petulance of the duke and duchess. Worse, Edward convinced himself that he was personally well placed to effect a rapprochement with Hitler, whom he had once met, and that if he did, this demonstration of political legerdemain might lead to his being restored to the throne. Over and over again, the King and his advisers were obliged to confront the question of what to do with a semi-detached royal.
Before World War II the French prime minister had spoken of the Queen as “an excessively ambitious woman who would be ready to sacrifice every other country in the world in order that she might remain Queen Elizabeth of England”.
Fortunately, The Windsors at War is about a great more than them. If it has a hero it is the shy, complex man who never had the slightest desire to be King and made extraordinary efforts to rise to the job, finally earning the unqualified admiration of world leaders. This is well-trodden ground. What makes it fresh is Larman’s use of recently disembargoed diaries and letters of the King’s private secretary, the waspish Alec Hardinge (dubbed “the Black Rat” by diarist-politician Chips Channon). He also draws on the diaries of Tommy Lascelles, Hardinge’s successor, who at the end of the war sits down with the Duke of Windsor and gives him a tutorial on how to live the rest of his life: “Your idea of being a ‘younger brother’ under the king simply wouldn’t work. Wouldn’t it just be a good gesture on your part to accept these facts once and for all, and not continually embarrass the king by going on bringing them up for discussion, which can’t do anybody any good?”
Other scions of the House of Windsor, the King’s younger brothers, the dukes of Kent and Gloucester, are given their due. The recounting of the story of the handsome, sexually omnivorous, dope-addicted Kent, who reeled from affair to affair (Noël Coward was said to be among his lovers) but was transformed by war service into a brilliantly effective commander until his still-mysterious death in an air crash in the Highlands, is particularly vividly done.
Nothing in the book, though, can compete for sheer entertainment with the Windsors’ governorship of the Bahamas; incessantly whining, fraternizing with Nazi sympathizers and longing for shopping expeditions to New York.
Their Caribbean sojourn culminated in the Agatha Christie-like episode of the murder of the industrialist Sir Harry Oakes. Every detail of it seems to have been penned by the Queen of Crime herself, even down to the names: the prime suspect, the caddish Count Alfred de Marigny; the medic, Dr Quackenbush; the detectives, captains Melchen and Barker; the local chief of police, Colonel Erskine-Lindop. Unlike in a Christie novel, however, there was no solution to the mystery.
“I am afraid there is a lot of dirt underneath,” the awful but always witty Wallis observed. “I do not think there is a big enough laundry anywhere to take Nassau’s dirty linen.” Why there has been no big feature film about the preposterous duke and duchess is baffling. Perhaps W.E., Madonna’s risible film on the subject, has daunted potential successors.
In the three years since The Crown in Crisis appeared, everything has changed: the war in Ukraine; the end of the second Elizabethan age; the defection of the Sussexes, with its uncanny parallels to Edward and Wallis. Each one creates profound resonances for The Windsors at War. Will the House of Windsor continue to be central to the nation’s story, Larman asks at the end of the book. Already, with a new King and Queen Consort about to be enthroned, people are looking to the succession. Perhaps Larman’s biblical epigraph contains a warning: “And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.”
Simon Callow is an actor and director, and the author of several books, including an acclaimed three-volume biography of Orson Welles
