The Duke of Windsor had much to be thankful for

Once a King is trumpeted as ‘game-changing’, a ‘trove of never-before-seen papers which shed fresh light on the maligned Duke of Windsor’ and will ‘turn on its head long-accepted stereotypes’ about him. These are bold claims, but do they stack up?

‘The lost memoir of Edward Vlll’ actually consists of an early draft of the Duke of Windsor’s self-serving memoir, A King’s Story (1951), which Jane Marguerite Tippett found in the papers of the former king’s ghostwriter Charles Murphy in the Boston University archives. Far from being lost, the papers have been known to historians for 20 years and largely ignored in favour of more important collections elsewhere, not least the Murphy papers at the Virginia Historical Institute, of which Tippett seems unaware.

She argues that this first draft of history is more genuine and revealing than the final published version, which was polished by a ghostwriter and sanitised through interference from various courtiers. She interweaves the original text – found written in pencil in the Royal Archives and then typed up by Murphy, which covers the former king’s life until 1936 – with Murphy’s diary entries and correspondence with publishers. She then adds, in smaller type, her own annotations, which, in effect, tell the familiar story all over again.

There might have been new insights into, say, the Abdication; but there were good reasons why the Duke’s take on events was not used in the final version. As Lord Beaverbrook explained to Henry Luce of Life magazine in September 1949, sending him his account of the Abdication which was incorporated into A King’s Story: ‘Murphy, of course, could not have secured from the Duke the story I have told. The Duke did not know it. He never grasped the meaning of his own crisis.’

Tippett then moves on to the writing of the Duchess’s memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons (1956), and then, bizarrely, seeks to challenge recent scholarship that shows the couple to have been active Nazi intriguers rather than German pawns.