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Prince Not-So-Charming

Because I write about monarchs, people have sometimes asked me whether I’ve read Frances Donaldson’s Edward VIII. ‘Not my period,’ I would stupidly reply, but the historian’s get-out-of-jail card was a ruse: the fact was I doubted whether a book on the Abdication written back in the 1970s could still be of interest. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Elizabeth Longford once observed that Frances Donaldson’s biography of Edward VIII had more effect than any other book on the future of the monarchy. Edward VIII was explosive: it shattered the romantic myth of the golden prince who abdicated because he was unable to rule without the ‘help and support of the woman I love’. By revealing the real man as shallow and fickle, it demonstrated the worth of sterling work and devotion to duty. The book is also a tract for our times today. Watching the play Charles III – which hinges on the scenario of the abdication of a future King Charles – I was struck by the relevance of Frances Donaldson’s story. The king comes to the throne, stubbornly resolved on a fatal course of action, is betrayed (as he sees it) by his family, and his support melts away: it’s all here in Edward VIII, which should be required reading for anyone interested in the monarchy’s future.

The book was published in 1974, only two years after Edward’s death. It was not an authorized or official life. The author had no access to his papers, though she held some trump cards, such as the revealing letters and diaries of Edward’s equerry and closest male friend, ‘Fruity’ Metcalf and his wife Lady Alexandra Metcalf, and she interviewed Mrs Dudley Ward, the prince’s first mistress. Donaldson says in her introduction that the book was the product of four years spent thinking about the strange man behind the Abdication. Her thought processes, engagingly described, are what make the book remarkable. Reasonable, non-judgemental and, above al

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Because I write about monarchs, people have sometimes asked me whether I’ve read Frances Donaldson’s Edward VIII. ‘Not my period,’ I would stupidly reply, but the historian’s get-out-of-jail card was a ruse: the fact was I doubted whether a book on the Abdication written back in the 1970s could still be of interest. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Elizabeth Longford once observed that Frances Donaldson’s biography of Edward VIII had more effect than any other book on the future of the monarchy. Edward VIII was explosive: it shattered the romantic myth of the golden prince who abdicated because he was unable to rule without the ‘help and support of the woman I love’. By revealing the real man as shallow and fickle, it demonstrated the worth of sterling work and devotion to duty. The book is also a tract for our times today. Watching the play Charles III – which hinges on the scenario of the abdication of a future King Charles – I was struck by the relevance of Frances Donaldson’s story. The king comes to the throne, stubbornly resolved on a fatal course of action, is betrayed (as he sees it) by his family, and his support melts away: it’s all here in Edward VIII, which should be required reading for anyone interested in the monarchy’s future.

The book was published in 1974, only two years after Edward’s death. It was not an authorized or official life. The author had no access to his papers, though she held some trump cards, such as the revealing letters and diaries of Edward’s equerry and closest male friend, ‘Fruity’ Metcalf and his wife Lady Alexandra Metcalf, and she interviewed Mrs Dudley Ward, the prince’s first mistress. Donaldson says in her introduction that the book was the product of four years spent thinking about the strange man behind the Abdication. Her thought processes, engagingly described, are what make the book remarkable. Reasonable, non-judgemental and, above all, sharply intelligent, she engages the reader in a 400-page conversation which even today is completely absorbing. The young prince rebelled against his father, but Donaldson doesn’t demonize George V. Her analysis is more subtle than that. She tells us that the king loved his children, but he was over-anxious, and this made him harsh and fault-finding and a hectoring disciplinarian. The ‘little walled-in family’ saw no other children, turned their backs on the treasures of the Royal Collection and shut their ears to all music except bagpipes. George V was aware of the inadequacy of his own education at naval colleges, and he decided to send his son to naval colleges too, knowing that he would grow up as ill-educated as himself. The prince was bullied and he made no friends with other boys – something that the king considered an advantage. Edward was a small man, about 5 feet 7, thin and physically indefatigable. He drank little, lunched on an apple and chain-smoked cigarettes. His tours of the empire made him world-famous, idolized for his straw-coloured hair and his friendly, natural manner. Rejecting his parents’ aloof formality, he shook hands with people in the crowd and delighted huge audiences with his speeches. His extraordinary ability to rivet the sympathy of the Commonwealth during the fractured interwar years helped to ensure the empire’s support in the Second World War. Official tours are the bane of royal biographies, but thankfully Donaldson is less interested in the details of Edward’s itineraries than the psychological effects. In private, the prince was sometimes depressed, he was ‘ruthlessly unpunctual’ and he chucked engagements which bored him. When he wanted, he could be more charming than anyone. But he showed an unpleasant tendency to pull rank and deliver a ‘royal snub’. As Donaldson examines the prince’s character, the word ‘spoilt’ recurs. This judgement seems perhaps a little harsh today, in the light of Princess Diana and our understanding of the toxic psychological effects of celebrity, but Edward’s rock-star popularity certainly warped his character. At home, the prince spent his evenings dancing in nightclubs, especially the Embassy Club, and he was a leader of the generation addicted to the single-minded pursuit of pleasure. The old upper classes thought him vulgar. His loud tweeds and his addiction to golf revealed his ignorance of their tribal rules of U and Non-U, as later delineated by Nancy Mitford in Noblesse Oblige. Donaldson is excellent on the interwar social scene, and she is fascinated by the class system. Accents intrigue her. The prince, she says, spoke with a Newmarket stable-boy accent. ‘None of the royal family had strictly upper-class voices,’ she tells us, ‘the guttural accent of earlier generations having given way to an impure vowel sound.’ Donaldson paints a sympathetic picture of Mrs Dudley Ward, the prince’s first mistress, whom he telephoned every morning and visited each evening when he was in London for fifteen years. For the prince she was more a mother than a lover: he was abjectly, slavishly in love. People said that she was good for him because she teased him. But his relationship with her stopped him from marrying; it was the start of what Donaldson calls his ‘regal suicide’. There came a fateful day in 1935 when Mrs Dudley Ward telephoned the prince, and his receptionist (with whom she was friendly) said: ‘I have something so terrible to tell you that I don’t know how to say it. I have orders not to put you through.’ That was the prince’s way of jilting her. Wallis Simpson was still alive when Frances Donaldson wrote, and much more material about her role in the Abdication crisis has appeared since her death. Though Donaldson credits Wallis with more responsibility for the crisis than many writers would allow today, her shrewd views are still valuable. She briskly dismisses the view that Wallis’s hold over Edward was based on her ability to satisfy him sexually: ‘during the whole of his youth the Prince was criticized for over-indulgence in the sexual act while ever since he has been believed incapable of it until he met his wife’. It was, she says, a matter of Wallis’s psychological need to dominate, and the prince’s need for domination. They were like children who couldn’t resist showing off. He draped her in ever more ostentatious jewels, and their life together was nothing but parties and holidays. On the day that George V died, Edward ordered the clocks at Sandringham, which ran thirty minutes fast, to be put back. The thoughtlessness of this act, which upset family and servants, was, as Donaldson painstakingly shows, entirely characteristic. This supposedly modern and democratic king came to the throne with no plans for reform. He continued to spend much of his time at Fort Belvedere, his country retreat, where his household were forbidden to come. He neglected his red boxes and ignored the advice of his private secretary, Alec Hardinge. He was a rotten king with no understanding of his role. He was insincere too. When the plight of the Welsh miners moved him to utter the famous words, ‘Something must be done’, he had already made up his mind to abdicate. After his abdication, Edward claimed that he was the victim of a plot. He accused Baldwin the Prime Minister of using his marriage to Mrs Simpson as an excuse to dethrone him. This was the story pitched by the Duke of Windsor, as he then became, in exile in his books. Donaldson’s careful, detailed account of the events of 1936 demolishes the plot theory. Baldwin liked Edward and tried to save him. But once Mrs Simpson had divorced her husband Ernest, the king was determined to marry her. His private secretary defected and warned him that the government would resign rather than agree to his marriage to Mrs Simpson. This forced the king to choose between the throne and the woman he loved. He was in no doubt about the answer. Throughout the crisis he insisted that he must marry her. The broadcast made by the ex-king on the eve of his abdication was a brilliant publicity coup. More than anything, it created the story that he and Mrs Simpson were the most romantic of lovers. Ever afterwards, Edward was convinced that he had acted honourably in giving up the throne. Donaldson considers that the opposite was the case. Particularly telling in her view is the fact that he underwent no moral struggle. ‘From the moment he fell in love with Mrs Simpson he proceeded wilfully and entirely unnecessarily to compromise both her and his own position.’ Donaldson makes no attempt to conceal her sympathies with the upright, dutiful members of his family who thought his actions contemptible. In exile the Duke of Windsor tasted the bitter fruit of oblivion. Most of his friends melted away. His brother, the new King George VI, had no time to speak to him on the telephone. His happiness was blighted by George’s refusal to allow Wallis to use the title Her Royal Highness. This rankled most bitterly of all, the more so as the royal family refused to receive her. The Duke expected to return home to England to take part in public work, but no job offers came. He took his revenge by attempting to set the record straight in his book A King’s Story, a skilfully ghosted account of the crisis. This was clever because the royal family was unable to answer him. Frances Donaldson was the first to refute his version of events, and the first to expose his true character. People who write critical lives of recently dead monarchs can’t usually expect to please the royal family. But this was not the case with the Duke of Windsor: by destroying the myth that he had been unfairly treated, Frances Donaldson did the family a huge favour. Today, the book seems perhaps over moral in its tone. But it is still a cracking read, and what makes it work is Frances Donaldson’s clearheaded,even-handed narrative voice. The book won the Wolfson Prize for history, but they should have made her a dame.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 45 © Jane Ridley 2015


About the contributor

Jane Ridley has written a biography of Edward VIII’s grandfather, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, and has just finished a very brief life of Queen Victoria for Penguin.

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