It is with regret that I must now conclude my ‘Windsors trilogy’, but as ever, there are many people to thank, without whom neither this book nor the preceding two would exist. The team at Weidenfeld & Nicolson has been consistently superb, including my brilliant editor Ed Lake, my excellent project editor Sarah Fortune, my copy-editor Jane Selley, my picture editor (and highly accomplished photographer) Natalie Dawkins and the painstaking campaigns director Elizabeth Allen. It has been a pleasure to work with them all once again.
It has also been a privilege to be published by St Martin’s Press in the United States, and I would like to thank the peerless Michael Flamini, editor par excellence, as well as his assistant editor Hannah Phillips, my publicist Sophia Lauriello, and SMP’s marketing manager Michelle Cashman; it has been an honour to continue our professional association with this book.
My literary agent and good friend Ed Wilson has been a continued source of inspiration, wine and advice throughout the creation and editing of Power and Glory, and his insights are always eagerly awaited by me – as I’m sure they are by all his clients. My former editor Alan Samson, meanwhile, remains my first port of call for any discussion of matters literary or historical, and so it has proved here; his insights into the subject, from proposal stage onwards, have been invaluable.
As with The Crown in Crisis and The Windsors at War, there are many distinguished historians and authors whose advice, counsel and insights have been invaluable. I was fortunate enough to talk with the late Philip Ziegler as I researched The Crown in Crisis, but so wide-ranging was our conversation that I continue to use his insights to this day. His erudition and generosity were enormously helpful to me as a young(er) historian and biographer. I am also grateful to Anne Sebba (as ever), Andrew Roberts, Walter Monckton’s late daughter-in-law Marianna, Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac, Ben Pimlott, Sarah Bradford, William Shawcross and Michael Bloch, whose contributions, directly or through their published works, have been invaluable.
Public and private archival collections are crucial to any writer’s research, and a few of the people who have made the greatest contribution include Bethany Hamblen at the Balliol College Archives, Julie Crocker at the Royal Archives, and Hannah Carson at the Bodleian Library’s Special Collections department. I should like to thank the Master and Fellows of Balliol College for permission to quote from the Walter Monckton archive. Additionally, I am grateful to the staff of the National Archives, the Hoover Library at Stanford, the Oxford Union, the Parliamentary Archive and, in particular, the ever-excellent London Library. And, of course, I would like to thank His Majesty King Charles III for his kind permission to quote from letters and documents in the Royal Archives.
I owe deep gratitude to many friends and fellow writers, including Sophie Buchan, Dan Jones, Gustav Temple, Amanda Craig, William Boyd, David Taylor, Daisy Dunn, Oliver Soden, Dominic Green, Michael Bhaskar, Philip Womack, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Brice Stratford, Thomas Grant, Ben Schott, Catherine Bray, Emrys Jones, Mark Atherton, Toby White, Sophie Dunn, Sean Herdman-Low, ‘Boothby’ Renshaw, James Douglass, Raymond Stephenson and many others besides.
Six books in, my wife Nancy has yet to murder me in understandable frustration at having her husband taken away from her through his research and writing, so I must thank her for that, as well as the countless other kindnesses she shows me each and every day. However, it is to the dedicatee of this book, our wonderful daughter Rose, that I must offer my greatest thanks and love. Power and Glory is nothing if not a paean to a father’s love for his daughter, and you, my wonderful girl, are the very finest, kindest and most rewarding child I could ever have hoped to have.