It was to be expected, I suppose, that the Duke
of Windsor should have written his memoirs, which were published in America on Monday and reviewed by Robert Sherwood in the Daily Express. But it is a great pity. The abdication episode was a melancholy business, but it came swiftly to its climax, and the ripple on the national life lasted hardly a week. Few people today can doubt that the right thing happened. Even to raise that ques- tion—and of course the Duke's book raises it inescapably—is to involve comparisons which everyone, rightly, declines to make. Two of the chief figures in the drama, Lord Baldwin and Arch- bishop Lang, are dead, and in criticising them the Duke invites counter-criticisms of himself. There can be no virtue in that. According to Mr. Sherwood, "almost half of A King's Story is concerned with his romance with Wallis Simpson and the tempest in an Empire that resulted." Why? Nothing became King Edward VIII better than the fortitude and dignity with which he carried out the hard decision he had taken. To reopen a closed and controversial chapter now, for the benefit primarily of the American reading public, must be counted a declension from the high standard he then set himself.
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