This book depicts a time of international upheaval and chaos, so it is grimly appropriate that it was researched and written during a pandemic. Nonetheless, there are many who have contributed to its genesis in the kindest and most generous of fashions. The team at Weidenfeld & Nicolson has been consistently professional, including my excellent editor Maddy Price, my superb project editor Sarah Fortune, my peerless copy-editor Jane Selley, my picture editor Natalie Dawkins and the painstaking campaigns director Elizabeth Allen, and it has been a pleasure to work with them once again.
It has also been an honour 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 Sarah Schoof, and SMP’s marketing manager Michelle Cashman; it has been an honour to continue our professional association with this book.
My literary agent Ed Wilson has been a committed and supportive advocate of my career for some time, and I thank him on both a personal and professional level for being a sounding board, a cheerleader, a source of invaluable advice and that wonderful thing with an agent, a friend. I am honoured to be his client.
As with The Crown in Crisis, there are many distinguished historians and authors whose advice, counsel and insights have been invaluable. I was fortunate enough to talk with Philip Ziegler during the writing of the earlier book. In the course of our lengthy conversation, he offered me the incalculable benefit of his experience and wide-ranging thoughts on the subject, including his own encounters with the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson, which have proved helpful once again here, as did a splendidly entertaining evening with Susan Williams. I am also grateful to Anne Sebba, Andrew Roberts, Walter Monckton’s daughter-in-law Marianna, Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac, Deborah Cadbury, Tim Bouverie, Sarah Bradford, William Shawcross and Michael Bloch, whose contributions, directly or through their published works, have been hugely useful.
Public and private archival collections have lain at the heart of my research. I would like to thank many people, but especially Bethany Hamblen at the Balliol College Archives, Julie Crocker at the Royal Archives, Mark Ballard at the Kent History and Library Centre, Nick Melia at the Borthwick Institute, Madelin Evans at the Churchill Archives, Emma Quinlan and Ben Copithorne at Nuffield College, Oxford, and Hannah Carson at the Bodleian Library’s Special Collections department. Particular gratitude goes to Lord Hardinge and Alex Murray for dealing with all my queries about the Hardinge archive so kindly and courteously. Additionally, I am grateful to the staff of the National Archives, the Oxford Union, the Parliamentary Archive and, in particular, the ever-excellent London Library, whose invaluable care packages of books made it possible for me to continue my research even through national lockdowns in early 2021.
When I’m not in the depths of an archive or library stack, it is conversations with fellow writers and friends both recent and of long standing that steer my thinking in fresh directions. To this end, I owe deep gratitude to many who have stood with me, in some cases contra mundum, including Sophie Buchan, Dan Jones, Gustav Temple, Amanda Craig, William Boyd, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Brice Stratford, Thomas Grant, Ben Schott, Catherine Bray, Nigel Jones, Mark Atherton, Toby White, Francesca Peacock, ‘Boothby’ Renshaw, James Douglass, Raymond Stephenson and many others besides.
My greatest thanks must go to my wife Nancy, who has been on a professional level supportive and incisive, and on a personal level the best and kindest of companions. Our magnificent and lovely daughter Rose, meanwhile, continues to enthral and delight, even if I fear that this volume will be joining the (thankfully) growing ranks of ‘Daddy’s boring books’. I can only trust that one day she enjoys what her father has written.
Finally, it is my honour to dedicate the book to Alan Samson, who commissioned both The Windsors at War and The Crown in Crisis. Every writer hopes they will have a mentor of Alan’s perceptiveness, generosity and boundless good humour, and his guidance throughout the project has been consistently welcome.