Ziegler’s earlier pageant-like study of Mountbatten (1985), another work of enormous readability and panache, had presented him with a difficult dilemma: how to sympathetically record, as official biographer, the life of one of the most self-aggrandising figures of his time. Nor did Ziegler flinch from examining more closely the nature of Mrs Simpson’s allure, drawing attention to the fanciful claims that she had dispelled Edward’s sexual hang-ups “by arcane arts studied in a Far Eastern brothel” but when Ziegler later contributed her entry in the Dictionary Of National Biography in 2004, he forbore (against the current of the times) to speculate on the precise nature of Wallis Simpson’s appeal to her monarch. Edward’s efforts to appease them were matched only by those he made towards his future wife, who, as Ziegler demonstrated through the testimony of innumerable eyewitnesses, delighted in exerting her supremacy over him. Cronies like “Fruity” Metcalfe were as disposable, and as disappointed, he noted, as the ranks of equerries, stewards and private secretaries who all came to despise him. Having been given access to the royal archives at Windsor, Ziegler mined some 25,000 of Edward’s letters, focussing his forensic lens not only on Edward’s youthful amours but also his inability to make or keep a genuine friend.
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