TRAITOR KING

THE SCANDALOUS EXILE OF THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF WINDSOR ANDREW LOWNIE

Blink Publishing, 352pp, £25 Andrew Lownie’s book on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had reviewers reaching eagerly for modern parallels. ‘It is packed with stories of fraternal feuds, bickering sisters-in law, arguments over titles and money, ill-judged memoirs and reckless relationships with unsavoury people,’ wrote Marcus Field in the

Evening Standard. In fact, it should be ‘urgent reading for royals’.

Lownie has concentrated on the Windsors’ life after the abdication, particularly their ‘shady’ activities during the war. Historians have argued about the extent of the Windsors’ dealings with Hitler’s Germany but Lownie is firmly of the opinion that they were actively engaged in German intrigues. AN Wilson in the TLS enjoyed the book enormously (‘briskly written and compulsively readable’) but thought Lownie had found little that ‘will not be familiar to the addicts’. But what a story it still is, full of spies, crooks and dodgy friends. ‘There is Wallis Simpson’s hypnotic and 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 Ribbentrop, who sent her 17 carnations a day in acknowledgement of the number of times they had slept together.’

In the Spectator, Francis Beckett praised a ‘meticulously researched book’ and wondered why the Duke had not been imprisoned. ‘He could even have been tried for treason after the war.’ But the Windsors remained at liberty, forever exiled in ‘a gilded, lonely, pointless life’.