Was he, or wasn’t he ?

Andrew Lownie’s book Traitor King is about the life of Edward VIII after the abdication. The book itself is a quick moving, highly enjoyable read, taking us from the abdication, through the years of exile up to the rather sad end for the former king-emperor, and the even more desperate final years of his wife. It’s a well written narrative which is easy to follow and the author has obviously made use of lots of documents including private diaries of people on the periphery of events.

The title of the book indicates, correctly, that quite a lot of time is spent discussing the Duke’s relations with the Germans during WW2, particularly when he lived in Spain and Portugal delaying his departure to his posting in the Bahamas. The author is convinced of the Duke’s traitorous activities during this period which is a view shared by Andrew Morton in his book about the same time period (see my review here). Quite a lot of time is also given to the Duke’s involvement, or at least knowledge of, some very shady activities by criminals in the Bahamas.

The author does a great job in presenting more rounded figures than the caricatures we are so used to reading about by adding lots of details to the lives of the exiled couple. Having said that, they still come across as entitled, isolated and impervious to advice. It is also fair to say that neither of them was particularly bright and they were both vain and often shallow. I am not sure that their life of exile made either of them very happy and they do seem to have misjudged situations remarkably frequently to their own detriment.

This is a good read and a very enjoyable book. I have read this author’s biography of the Mountbattens recently (see review here) and I enjoyed that too.