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it was only after a threat of legal action that Elizabeth allowed him to see relevant
portions of the text and then only at proof stage. Otherwise, he can have had little to
complain of in Wheeler-Bennett’s book. Elizabeth had seen to it that the wounds caused
in the family by the Abdication had not been reopened. References to Wallis Simpson
were sketchy in the extreme. (The Windsors’ marriage at Candé rated a footnote of oneand-a-half
lines in which the name of the Bedaux château was misprinted as Landé.) All
family anguish and controversy were suppressed. Elizabeth obviously preferred not to
have the family’s dirty linen washed in public. The papers of Baldwin and Chamberlain
relating to the financial settlement were placed under embargo. (When H. Montgomery
Hyde wrote his life of Baldwin, he saw everything which was closed to subsequent
historians; Elizabeth blue-pencilled a passage in his book referring to a letter written by
the King which made unfavourable references to the Duchess of Windsor.) Wheeler-
Bennett made no more than a passing reference to the bitter quarrel between the royal
family and the Duke of Windsor which had followed the King’s decision in 1937 to
withhold the title of Royal Highness from the Duchess, the one single factor which
divided the family irrevocably. It was not until the 1980s when the researches of various
historians produced documentary evidence of these quarrels that Elizabeth finally
allowed Philip Ziegler, official biographer of Edward VIII, to print letters which showed
all too clearly the gulf between the two sides.
Two years later Elizabeth had made amends for the difficulties over the Wheeler-
Bennett book by giving the Duke and his co-author, Lord Kinross, access to the Windsor
archives to research a slim volume of memoirs to be published as A Family Album. At the
time of A King’s Story, George VI, deeply unhappy about his brother’s project, had
refused him and his assistants any such facilities. A Family Album promised to be a far
less controversial book and Elizabeth was anxious not to exacerbate relations with her
uncle unnecessarily. Even then, as Time magazine noted, she did not avail herself of the
opportunity to see him. Just before Christmas 1959 the Duke and Lord Kinross had
turned up at Windsor Castle to visit the archives. Elizabeth, who must have known that
they were coming and the time of their visit, had left one hour earlier to join Philip at a
shooting lunch, preferring not to have a faintly embarrassing meeting with her uncle
whom she had not seen since 1953. Some hours later the Duke and Kinross emerged
from the rear entrance as Elizabeth and Philip were arriving at the Sovereign’s
Entrance. Elizabeth’s unwillingness to meet her uncle may not have been unconnected
with the knowledge of the Duke’s illegal, possibly even criminal, currency dealings on
the black market of which she had been informed that summer and which had at one
moment threatened a scandal which would have affected ‘the position and reputation of
the Crown’. 12
When the Duke was at Windsor in the late summer of 1959 (the family was once
again not there to meet him, being away on holiday at Balmoral), he had walked into a
dust-sheeted room. It was almost as if he had opened the door of the chamber in which
the Monster of Glamis had been shut up, a shameful secret hidden from the public eye. It
was the room from which he had made his famous Abdication broadcast in 1936.