When the King and Queen returned to Buckingham Palace after the Coronation on May 6, they were greeted by 4,000 troops lined up on the lawns of the palace gardens. Members of the UK and Commonwealth Armed Forces gave a royal salute to the newly crowned couple and paid their respects with a chorus of “three cheers”.
Decades earlier, in September 1940, those gardens were the site of devastation. A German bomber flew straight up the Mall and dropped six bombs directly onto the palace. George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the present King’s grandparents, were at home but escaped unharmed; they swiftly left the palace to visit bomb-damaged East End
The Windsors at War: The Nazi Threat to the Crown is the sequel to Alexander Larman’s 2020 book The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication which traced the constitutional crisis precipitated by Edward VIII’s intention to marry Wallis Simpson, and which led to his abdication in December 1936 and the accession of George VI. The Crown in Crisis touched on Edward VIII’s “political sympathies” and in The Windsors at War Larman provides an account of what Edward did next.
The title refers to two conflicts. First, the 1939-1945 war with Nazi Germany in which the royal family played a significant role both publicly and privately. It traces the major events leading up to the war and ends with VE Day in May 1945, when the king publicly gave thanks to “Almighty God for a great deliverance”. Secondly, it deals with a battle within the House of Windsor, between the royal family and the Duke of Windsor, the former king.
Larman admits frankly that he did not warm to Edward VIII during his research; but his account of him comes off as well balanced. The picture that emerges is of a man obsessed by apparently petty grievances and disappointments, from the lack of a royal response to his wedding to Wallis Simpson in 1937 to his strained finances and his family’s treatment of his wife. He was, remarkably, corresponding with Churchill about the possibility of his wife being made a Royal Highness as late as December 1943.
The book addresses whether the Duke of Windsor did indeed harbour Nazi sympathies and explores various plots to draw him further into the Nazi sphere of influence before and during the war. Both duke and duchess were received by Adolf Hitler in 1937; Larman recounts the view of Sir Henry “Chips” Channon that had he not abdicated, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938 would not have taken place “as the monarch would have been able to appeal personally to Hitler”.
In addition to the main story, there are also some extremely diverting subplots. Larman writes engagingly of the Church of England vicar Robert Anderson Jardine, who officiated at the Windsors’ wedding in France without a licence, and who ended his days destitute and, in Larman’s view, “a victim of collateral damage in the duke’s orbit”.
Meanwhile, the British lawyer and politician Walter Monckton was dispatched in August 1939 to meet the duke in France and discuss what role he might play during wartime. When Monckton landed in France, he and his pilot “were arrested on suspicion of being German spies”. It was only the poor quality of their spoken French that alerted a local clergyman to the fact that they must be British, and they were released.
Larman also outlines the details of Operation Willi, an unsuccessful Nazi plot carried out in the summer of 1940, initially to coerce and then to abduct the duke from his temporary residence in Lisbon so that he could be used to try to broker peace with the British.
Larman’s book is based on newly available documents and provides a variety of views on the conflict, including those of royals, politicians and individuals in their circles and in their service. It is a gripping, fast-paced and absorbing work that deftly interweaves excerpts from letters and historical documents with background information and narrative. It is a fascinating way to reread the history of the Second World War and a valuable study of the monarchy during a time of international crisis.
Dr Alexandra Lloyd is a Fellow by Special Election of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
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