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Duke and Duchess being allowed to return to live in England.
Relations had remained cool through the first ten years of her reign. The Duke had
been furious when she had declined to continue the £10,000 a year allowed him by
George VI. The royal family had not liked the stream of publications emanating from
the Windsors, inspired by their desire to set the record straight, their constant delusions
of impending poverty and the need for large sums to underwrite their extravagant
lifestyle. The Duke’s memoirs, A King’s Story, had appeared in 1951 while George VI was
still alive and the family had not enjoyed the raking-up of the Abdication story with all
its painful memories and dangerous implications. The royal view was that it was highly
undignified for an ex-sovereign and member of the family to ‘do a Crawfie’. The
Duchess’s autobiography, The Heart Has Its Reasons, came out in 1956 and like the
Duke’s was a best-seller. ‘Considering the malice in her mind, her book was surprisingly
mild in effect,’ wrote Charles Murphy, who had ghosted this book as he had the Duke’s
and persuaded her to suppress her ill will. More and unpleasant revelations from the
Duke’s past came with the publication in 1957 of Volume X of the captured German
documents relating to the Duke’s relations with the Nazis during his sojourn in Lisbon in
July 1940. Although there was no actual proof in the documents that the Duke had
contemplated treason, the papers did make plain at the very least that the Germans
believed that the embittered Duke could be persuaded to betray his brother by acting as
a substitute king in the event of a negotiated peace or a successful German invasion of
Britain. Churchill had attempted to have the papers destroyed in 1945 and in 1953,
under pressure from the Queen Mother, and then to delay their publication. 10 When the
time came, the Duke, advised by lawyer Walter Monckton, and the Foreign Office,
managed to play down the papers as coming from ‘a much-tainted source’ and being ‘in
part complete fabrications and in part gross distortions of the truth’. In Elizabeth’s eyes,
the Windsors were at best a nuisance and at worst an embarrassment.
There had been more trouble over the official biography of the late King by Sir John
Wheeler-Bennett, published in 1958. The Duke had given Wheeler-Bennett several
interviews and access to his archive; he was understandably furious when the Palace
refused his request to see in typescript the passages which referred to him. After all, he
argued, ‘in the references to me… you are actually writing part of the history of a living
former Sovereign’. Wheeler-Bennett replied cautiously that he would first have to
consult Elizabeth, who after all had commissioned the book. She told him that she would
read the book before deciding which other members of the family should see it before
publication. An authorized biography of a sovereign is like an official monument;
Elizabeth felt that only she should exercise the right of final decision as to how her
father’s life should be presented. The Duke took her decision as yet another slight,
writing furiously to his lawyer in July 1956, ‘I am incensed over this latest display of
rudeness towards me from the Palace, and am determined that, unless my niece has the
common courtesy to give me an opportunity of reading all references to myself in
Wheeler-Bennett’s official biography of my late brother, then no mention of me
whatsoever shall appear therein.’ 11 According to the Duke’s biographer, Michael Bloch,