Does anyone want to read yet another book about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor? Perhaps not, but if you tackle this most recent one, there will be no need to read any more on the subject. Among the dozens of biographies, memoirs, diaries, novels, documentaries, interviews, musicals, dramas, and films that have emerged over the last eighty years, none—until Andrew Lownie’s book Traitor King—has fully uncovered the devastating truth of what the two were really up to in their collaboration with Hitler and the Nazi Party. Although there are descriptions of Edward VIII’s character and behavior—weak, spoiled, and infantile—during the eleven-month period before his coronation was due to take place, Lownie concentrates on the period after his abdication in 1936 and his marriage to Wallis Simpson, scrutinizing the couple’s life in microscopic detail.
Only the intelligence services and the royal household were aware of Wallis Simpson’s earlier Nazi ties. In 1935 the Viennese princess and Nazi spy Stephanie von Hohenlohe had been sent to London to find lodgings close to Simpson’s flat in Bryanston Square, befriend her, and report back information to Hitler and the Nazi Party. And there was another such: Wallis’s dressmaker Anna Wolkoff, who was part of a spy ring (she was imprisoned as a spy in 1940) and was passing on “confidential” information from Wallis’s conversations with the Prince of Wales. But, in any case, Wallis was in the pocket of the German ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, with whom she had