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The Crown in Crisis by Alexander Larman review – abdication, assassination and the Nazis

<span>Photograph: Pa News/PA</span>
Photograph: Pa News/PA

It says something about how close the abdication of 1936 has come to slipping from living memory that Alexander Larman feels obliged to plant broad reminders early on. Remember that natty cove played by Alex Jennings and Derek Jacobi in the first three series of The Crown? That’s our leading man, the Prince of Wales, AKA Edward VIII, AKA the Duke of Windsor. Recall Andrea Riseborough being all brittle and American and fiercely-eyebrowed in W.E., that royal flop written and directed by Madonna in 2011? That’s Wallis Simpson, AKA the Duchess of Windsor. Larman doesn’t mention Edward & Mrs Simpson, the Bafta and Emmy-winning TV series of 1978, in which Edward Fox played the spoilt king to the manner born. But there again, people who watched that are old enough to remember for themselves the way that, 40 years ago, you knew not to mention the abdication in front of your grandparents for fear of being sent out of the room.

Edward & Mrs Simpson was based on Frances Donaldson’s explosive book Edward VIII: The Road to Abdication, written two years after the death of the Duke of Windsor in 1972. Donaldson’s great achievement was to show the story from the inside and in real time, by drawing on the private papers of Edward’s equerry “Fruity” Metcalfe and his wife, Baba. Donaldson was sufficiently detached from the court to be able to call out the chilly, costive atmosphere in which Edward grew up. She showed how a bleak childhood (George V remote and shouty, Queen Mary glacial and simmering) gave rise to a forlorn boy-man, who chased acceptance in all the wrong places, including fast women and fascist politics.

In choosing to abandon his country to marry the woman with whom he was obsessed, Edward had clearly never given a thought to anyone else. He really believed he could shuffle the boring bits of being king on to the dutiful Duke of York (George VI) before resuming his place as a royal gadabout alongside his brothers Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Prince George, Duke of Kent. Before he agreed to go he asked for an annual allowance of £25,000 (roughly £1.5m today) completely string-free. It was preposterous so, naturally, he got it.

Rumour has it that the royal family was thrilled with Donaldson’s book, with Princess Margaret telling a friend: “It was such a relief for all of us to have the true story told at last.” So Larman has big shoes to fill. Sensibly, he doesn’t go in for startling revisions, but instead makes use of the new sources and interpretive lenses that have become available in the intervening four decades. In particular Larman insists on bringing the Germans back into the narrative, reminding us just how badly Hitler wanted to keep Edward on the throne. Unlike his predecessor George V and Prince Albert (later George VI), Edward was known to have a soft spot for the Nazis. Holding him close would allow the Third Reich to carry on invading mainland Europe while the playboy king and his wife, who increasingly resembled a pair of exquisite costume dolls, looked the other way.

Joachim Von Ribbentrop, left, with Joseph Stalin, right, in Moscow after signing the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, August 1939.
Joachim Von Ribbentrop, left, with Joseph Stalin, right, in Moscow after signing the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, August 1939. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

To help things along, Hitler installed the gaffe-prone Joachim von Ribbentrop as ambassador to the Court of St James’s in August 1936. The idea was that the noisy salesman with the “dentist’s smile” would somehow be able to bounce Wallis on to the throne and put black-shirted Oswald Mosley into No 10. But “Brickendrop”, as the English toffs called him, had hopelessly misunderstood the principles of constitutional monarchy. For one thing he couldn’t grasp why Edward didn’t just shoot his ministers when they refused to do what he said. To be fair, Brickendrop’s boss was equally clueless. The Führer had been heard bewailing the fact that the king of England was being prevented from marrying “a girl of the people”, which is an odd way to describe an American socialite with more designer dresses than a duchess.

The centrepiece of Larman’s book, though, is the 1936 assassination attempt on Edward by a man called George McMahon, who may or may not have been in league with the Germans or the Italians or MI5, or even all of them. Ever since the relevant files were declassified in the National Archives, historians have struggled to work out what really happened on 16 July 1936, when McMahon half-heartedly pointed a revolver at the king as he trotted over Constitution Hill in military dress. McMahon – the quintessential “man in the brown suit” – always insisted that, as a true patriot, he had been trying to foil the assassination by deliberately botching his attempt on the king’s life. In a recently discovered unpublished memoir, McMahon maintained that he had tried to warn MI5 and Special Branch that an assassination was imminent, but they ignored him.

Larman speculates that there might be two reasons for this. The most obvious one is that McMahon, who was an alcoholic, was such a rackety, unpersuasive source that MI5 assumed from the outset that he was a Walter Mitty figure and didn’t take him seriously. The more exciting possibility is that the spooks were secretly delighted that someone was planning to take out the troublesome monarch and let McMahon go ahead, while ostentatiously looking the other way. Whatever the real sequence of events, the denouement of Constitution Hill left the authorities looking incompetent and so, in an attempt at damage limitation, McMahon was found guilty of the minor offence of “unlawfully possessing a firearm and ammunition to endanger life”, for which he received a 12-month sentence. Larman is more than happy to let us ponder whether in the months leading up to Edward VIII’s scheduled coronation in May 1837, the establishment were busy coming up with ways to kill him.

The couple meeting Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1937.
The couple meeting Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1937. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

When it comes to Wallis Simpson, Larman follows recent revisionary accounts in suggesting that she was more sinned against than sinning. What she wanted was a fling with a movie-star prince. What she got was a life sentence with a soiled man-child who refused to leave her alone. Once she realised that her mistake would be as damaging to Edward and to Britain as it was to her, she did everything she could to extract herself so that history could settle and then jog on as before. Writing in her 1956 autobiography (The Heart Has Its Reasons) about the moment when Edward phoned her to confirm that he had abdicated and would be joining her the next day in Cannes, she declared: “That night, I drained the dregs of the cup of my failure and defeat.” Which hardly sounds like a woman who is thrilled at what is coming down the pike.

Larman shows a delicate touch too in not banging home the obvious contemporary resonances. Instead he lets us find our own fun in such remarks as that made by Howell Gwynne, editor of the Morning Post, who declared that it was the job of the press to “follow the government and not dictate to it”. Or the time when Edward asked Duff Cooper why the government didn’t have greater control over the BBC and, when the nature of its editorial independence was explained to him, said “loudly, with a laugh, ‘I’ll change that … It will be the last thing I do before I go.’” Finally, and most restrained of all, Larman waits until the acknowledgements section at the end of the book to thank “the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for considerately announcing their own abdication of sorts a few months before this book was published”.

• The Crown in Crisis is published by W&N (RRP £20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.