Drawing upon newly released archives, bestselling biographer Andrew Lownie tells the story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's lives after Edward abdicated the throne—a world that was riddled with treachery and betrayal.
Andrew Lownie’s Traitor King begins on Dec. 11, 1936, with the last act of Edward’s 326-day reign...As he read his abdication speech into a BBC microphone at Windsor Castle, Wallis listened in the South of France, muttering 'the fool, the stupid fool'...Throwing over a kingship was only the beginning of his folly...Edward and Wallis soon had a new shared goal: To undo his error and her humiliation by returning to Britain, ideally as king and queen (and definitely without paying income tax)...The closest they came was in the summer of 1940...France had fallen, and Edward and Wallis were dawdling in neutral Portugal in the company of Nazi agents...Did Edward, as Mr. Lownie claims, commit treason?...The 'conventional line,' Mr. Lownie writes, is that Edward’s attitude to Nazi Germany differed little from that of his family, much of Britain’s aristocracy, and most of its Conservative government...In the Bahamas, Edward and Wallis continued to socialize with pro-Nazi figures, including the Swedish businessman Axel Wenner-Gren, who, like Santo, was involved in moving German money into South America...But their last chance had passed...The rest of their story, and the rest of Mr. Lownie’s narrative, descends into freeloading, snobbery and irrelevance...They never paid for anything, treachery included.
The central section of Lownie’s book is concerned with the shady activities of the Windsors during the war...Most damning is the period they spent in Spain and Portugal in 1940 after the fall of France...Still worrying about their tax burden and diminished status if they returned to Britain, they headed to neutral Portugal to consider their options...A huge amount of intrigue accompanied them along the way, with Lownie’s descriptions of the antics of various intelligence agents outdoing anything you might read in spy fiction (one British agent was reportedly told to shoot them if they looked like falling into enemy hands)...Again the Windsors made terrible choices, ending their journey with a stay in the palatial home of a Portuguese banker who also happened to be a German asset...This part of the Windsor saga has been covered in detail before, but Lownie suggests a new interpretation of the incriminating German files on the couple held in the National Archives...Did the Duke knowingly collude with the Nazis?...Every previous biographer has given him the benefit of the doubt, suggesting that while he became a pawn in their game, there is no direct evidence that he worked with them...Lownie sticks his neck out here...'The argument of this book is that there is plenty of evidence … that the Windsors were not foolish and naïve, but actively engaged with the German intrigues'...Lownie is dutiful in compiling his evidence on this matter and his argument is convincing...But it’s a niche debate...The court of public opinion (along with The Crown) decided on the Duke’s guilt long ago.
The reader might be forgiven for groaning at the publication of yet another book about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor...It must be said that there is very little in Andrew Lownie’s briskly written and compulsively readable account that will not be familiar to the addicts...There is Wallis Simpson’s hypnotic but still not quite comprehensible hold over the little Prince, from almost the moment they met at a party in 1931; and her bizarre emotional history, including her affair with the German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, who sent her seventeen carnations a day in acknowledgement of the number of times they had slept together...There is Edward VIII’s determination to marry her, despite her previous two marriages and the monogamous teaching of the Church of England; their exile in France after his abdication in 1936; the dodgy friends...We read of the unquestionable links with Nazis, among them Edward’s cousins, and of the late escape from France after the German invasion...Lownie sticks strictly to the story of Edward and Mrs Simpson, and is never tempted to draw parallels with more recent times...There will probably be no other reader of the book with my cheap mentality, who finds any resemblances between a fundamentally stupid British prince marrying an American divorcée and laying down his royal duties, while at the same time wanting to hang on to all the privileges and wealth that went with his former position; or with a prince rich as Croesus whingeing about money and 'writing' a vengeful memoir to bring in yet more millions...If any reader were vulgar enough to allow these thoughts to flicker across their mind, it would at least remind them that, however preposterously selfish the modern equivalents may be, they are not actually Nazis...One Nazi uniform worn as a tactless joke at a party doesn’t make a Parteitag.
