WINSTON AND THE WINDSORS: How Churchill Shaped a Royal Dynasty, by Andrew Morton
In 1954 Winston Churchill turned 80, and the British royal family bestowed upon him a set of coasters. He also got a bust of the Duke of Windsor, from the Duke of Windsor. And from Queen Elizabeth II he received a “subscription” to her late father’s prize racehorse, Aureole.
If not for Andrew Morton’s new book, “Winston and the Windsors,” readers might never have learned what this meant: that Churchill was invited to breed the queen’s horse with an (approved) mare of his own.
Morton first made a name for himself with the 1992 publication of “Diana: Her True Story,” when he got the scoop of a lifetime in the form of secret tapes from the princess herself. Today, he’s written biographies of everyone from Wills and Kate to Posh and Becks.
So it’s only natural that this elder statesman of the churned-out, authorized-or-otherwise biography would turn his eye to that other totem of Britishness, Winston Churchill.
The book is a savvy bit of nostalgia bait, weaving together two stalwarts of nonfiction publishing — World War II and the royal family — just in time for gifting season. All it needs is a murder mystery in a chocolate-box village to hit the airport-read trifecta.
In the age of the deconstructed royal biography, writers like Craig Brown and Ian Lloyd are rearranging their subjects into slap-happy cutout collages with no respect for the sanctity of the queue. Edward White’s “Dianaworld” is the latest to disrupt the genre, which for so long rested upon the notion that one date must follow another.
Morton’s work is a solid return to chronological form, and therefore, in its own humdrum way, subverts the subversives. The book measures Churchill’s life and career in monarchs, from Victoria to Elizabeth, and hoofs through 20th-century Britain’s greatest hits, like Aureole’s win at Ascot.
One may wonder if the world needs another primer on the abdication crisis, the Blitz or the king’s efforts to overcome his stutter. But then one gets to Page 191 and learns that during particularly trying times Churchill gained “intellectual stimulus” by muttering “wheezingly under his breath” and “pushing in with his stomach the chairs standing round the Cabinet table,” and we’re glad for another go-round.
Whether or not this particular bit of Winstonalia is apocryphal, the Windsors gave Churchill plenty to tummy-shove about. When he wasn’t arguing with them over the names of battleships (George V was most put out by Churchill’s suggestion of “H.M.S. Oliver Cromwell”) or vexing them by joining the Liberals, he was their chief fixer.
Churchill, for all his cheek and political flip-flopping, was steadfastly loyal to the Crown, which, as Morton relates, he viewed “as a mystical entity that represented the spiritual heart of the nation.” He saw the constitutional monarchy, what he called the “separation of pomp from power,” as a safeguard against despotism. And so despite (or because of) their human foibles, Churchill took it upon himself to save the Windsors from themselves.
In 1910, the Belgian-born journalist Edward Mylius wrote an article in which he blasted the British monarchy for being a “spectacle” of “immorality” and gave credence to an old rumor that King George V was a bigamist, having secretly married a commoner in his youth. It ran just before the general election, at a time when anti-establishment feelings were running high, and yet, in classic form, Buckingham Palace hemmed and hawed, not wanting to give oxygen to a baseless rumor. Churchill, then home secretary, rushed in and “demanded action.” A libel trial went ahead, the king’s good name was cleared and he was free to go back to his stamp collection.
Decades later, it was Churchill who understood that wartime England needed a mirror in which to reflect its collective self-sacrifice, and he advised against George VI sending his daughters to Canada. As Morton writes, “It was arguably Winston’s greatest service to the royal family,” fixing an image of them “as tribunes of loyalty, decency and quiet courage: a family at peace within a nation at war.”
The book lingers on Edward and Wallis, which makes sense since Morton has also written about them. But nowhere did Churchill show greater loyalty to the Windsors than in his dealings with the ex-king and his reviled consort, whom Churchill once described as “very pathetic but also very happy.” Thanks in large part to him, they managed to flit through the war with reputations largely intact, despite a habit of yachting with suspected Nazis — and certain pesky German files in which Edward “expressed himself strongly against Churchill and the war.”
Churchill helped shape the mythology of the Windsor dynasty, and they gave him some coasters. And then there’s the third part of the equation: the royal biographer who borrows from the bibliographies of all the great royal biographers who came before (including himself), to tell these stories again and again.
WINSTON AND THE WINDSORS: How Churchill Shaped a Royal Dynasty | By Andrew Morton | Hanover Square Press | 406 pp. | $32
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