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.

The Duke went willingly to the Bahamas as governor because the alternative was a court martial

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. As she puts it: ‘In the absence of diligent scholarship, the facts surrounding each have been merged with further hearsay about Edward’s political allegiances, which have in turn been augmented by supposition and gossip.’

But Karina Urbach’s Go-Betweens for Hitler (2015) comprehensively makes the case for the ‘traitor king’ with a wealth of documentation, including scores of files from the British, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese national archives, as well as the letters and diaries of Chips Channon, Robert Bruce Lockhart, Guy Liddell, Alan Lascelles and David Eccles – none of which Tippett mentions. On 1 July 1940 Channon wrote in his diary: ‘Diana C[ooper] told me today that the Windsors genuinely believe that they will be restored to the throne under German influence: he will become a sort of Gauleiter, and Wallis a queen. Perhaps!’

Tippett clearly has an agenda, which is not supported by the evidence, and she is very selective in her quotation. When she says that the Duke went willingly to the Bahamas as governor in 1940 she fails to mention that the alternative was a court martial. She claims that the British and American authorities were relaxed about the publication of the incriminating captured German documents on the Duke, but does not describe the panic in Whitehall and Washington at this unexpected ‘treasure trove’, the attempts to destroy, suppress and then delay publication, the threatened resignation of the editor-in-chief of them, Margaret Lambert, or the attempts to spin their contents to protect the Duke. The journalist Kenneth Rose noted in his diary in May 1979:

Clarissa Avon tells me that she has always hated the Windsors, and thought it ‘wicked’ of Winston to destroy the evidence about the Duke’s apparent readiness to become a German stooge in 1940.

Tippett also misses much which might have enriched a book about the writing of the book because her research and sources are so limited. We are not told that Rebecca West and Ernest Hemingway were originally considered as ghosts for the Duchess’s memoir. The account of the sacking of Cleveland Amory as the ghost omits the fact that Amory pulled out, because he had discovered everything Wallis had told him about her second husband, Ernest Simpson, his first wife and the divorce was not true. Amory’s wife Martha wrote to her in-laws: ‘The casual way they can be dishonest makes you know that ice runs through their veins.’

There is also no reference to the fact that The Heart Has Its Reasons was written not just to pay for the restoration of the Windsors’ country house outside Paris but also to counter critical publications such as Lese Majesty: The Private Lives of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor by Norman Lockridge (1952) and Geoffrey Bocca’s She Might Have Been Queen (1955). Neither book appears in the bibliography, nor is there any mention of Bocca’s papers, which are also at Boston University. Indeed, after 1951 there had been discussions about the Daily Mail’s Paris correspondent Noel Barber, later a successful novelist, writing articles about Wallis ‘approved by our good selves’, which ‘would automatically mean that no pirate biographies would ever see the light of day in England’.

Spin was behind the publication of the couple’s two memoirs and the same characteristic is true here. Once a King is entirely shaped by Tippett’s archival ‘discovery’, a partial account which suffers from the very weakness which explains why the Duke’s drafts were never used themselves – until now. It is not the real story.

Far from having a good working relationship with the couple, Murphy despaired of his task as ghostwriter. He later complained of the Duke that ‘his span of attention… was two-and-a-half minutes maximum: and when the story of the preceding night was plainly written in his trembling hands and bloodshot eyes… I knew that another work day would have to be scrubbed’. After the Duke’s death, Murphy published a critical biography of the couple. There is no mention of this, either, in Once a King.