THE LEAST CULTURED ROYALS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

DESPITE having both had a decent education, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor may well have been the least cultured royals of the 20th century.

Once, after fidgeting through a private concert organised by Lady Cunard, the Duke asked pleasantly: ‘Did that Mozart chap write anything else?’

He wasn’t much interested in prose, either. Too nervy ever to settle down with a book or magazine, he was flummoxed when a former lover, Freda Dudley Ward, handed him a copy of the Victorian classic, Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte.

‘Who is the “Bront” woman?’ asked the Duke, who’d never willingly read a book in his life.

And when Winston Churchill dutifully sent him the latest signed volume in his multi-volume work, A History Of The English-Speaking Peoples, the Duke wrote back: ‘Thank you so much for sending me a copy of your latest book. I have put it on the shelf with all the others.’

Wallis didn’t read books, either, though that didn’t stop her hiring two ghostwriters to do her autobiography.

After she started fiddling with his careful prose, the second ghostwriter moaned to his editor: ‘My worst problem, aside from her desire to change ideas, is that never in my experience have I seen anyone who knows so little what a paragraph is, what a chapter is, and what a book is.’ Nor did she know much about art. On one occasion, the Duke, who preferred traditional to modern art, deliberately hung an abstract she’d bought upside down in their sitting room.

Wallis never noticed.