Without Regrets

A KING'S STORY (435 pp.)--The Memoirs of The Duke of Windsor--Putnam ($4.50).

The Duke of Windsor long obeyed "the rule of reticence that binds kings and princes in a constitutional society." But after years of widespread "error and supposition" about his eleven-month reign and abdication, he decided to forget his royal reticence, write down his own account of just what happened.

Three times longer than the serial version that appeared in LIFE in 1947 and 1950,* A King's Story covers the same ground in more detail. It begins on June 23, 1894 at White Lodge, Surrey, where his royal father, later George V, recorded in his diary: "A sweet little boy was born and weighed 8 Ib." It ends 42 years later when the Duke of Windsor, briefly Edward VIII, boarded H.M.S. Fury to leave England and his throne to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson. The duke tells his story with simple sincerity.

Preposterous Beetle. In describing the British royal family with its galaxy of relatives and retainers, he shows himself a shrewd and sympathetic observer. Although his bon vivant grandfather, Edward VII, was obviously closer to his ideal, he treats his strait-laced father with filial forbearance. "It would not be correct to say that he rejected the twentieth century. It was only that he was determined to resist as much of it as he could."

He is less forbearing with the men who forced him to give up the throne. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin emerges from A King's Story half Machiavelli, half clown who "hummed intermittently to himself, cracked and snapped his fingers in his peculiar fashion, and puffed contentedly on his pipe," drove a "preposterous little beetle of a motorcar." For the Most Rev. Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, the duke has still less use. The archbishop had an "overanxiety to please," was "more interested in the pursuit of prestige and power than the abstractions of the human soul."

Hackneyed Image. Of the violent public reaction to his romance with Mrs. Simpson he writes bitterly: "The press creates; the press destroys. All my life I had been the passive clay that it had enthusiastically worked into the hackneyed image of a Prince Charming. Now it had whirled around and was bent upon demolishing the natural man who had been there all the time." But he can also be whimsically philosophical. "In the clash that . . . followed, some professed to see the workings of fate. But the fault lay not in my stars but in my genes."

Although the duke still patently doubts the political "necessity" that forced him off the throne, he nowhere implies regret. "So far as I was concerned, love had triumphed over the exigencies of politics."

*LIFE'S Charles J. V. Murphy, who collaborated on the serial version, also helped with the book.

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