About a decade ago, with my writing career going nowhere fast, I received some savvy advice from my then-literary agent. “Write about the royal family,” he said. “There’s an endless appetite for books about them. They combine history, social commentary and gossip with old-fashioned fascination with the rich and powerful. You can’t go wrong.”
I listened to his advice and wrote a trilogy of books about the Windsors: The Crown in Crisis, The Windsors at War and Power and Glory. The first two sold very well, and the third was barely noticed, but I was glad that I took my agent’s counsel, even if we had to part ways because he had practiced what he preached, and diversified from historical biography into his own career writing about the royals.
That agent was Andrew Lownie, whose devastating biography of the former prince Andrew, Entitled, was a vast success upon its publication in the United Kingdom last year. Unfortunately for readers in the United States, its passage has been less happy. It was to have been published by Simon & Schuster’s imprint Gallery Books, but they canceled it, calling the book “unreadable.” Lownie has accordingly issued legal action against the publisher, and denounced their decision as “very damaging.”
The problem with most of these books is that they are abysmally written and teeter on the edge of camp
Gallery has not commented publicly on why it chose to pass up the chance to release such a presumably lucrative title, but the knowledge that Lownie’s UK publisher HarperCollins had to recall around 60,000 copies of the book, in order to delete some defamatory and “unverified” claims that Jeffrey Epstein introduced Donald Trump to Melania, might have given them pause. The First Lady has since said: “The lies linking me with Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” and called the claims “mean-spirited attempts to defame my reputation.”
Still, if a royal biography does not contain some talking-point revelations, there is little point in its existence. At a time when, on both sides of the Atlantic, there is far less reverence toward the royal family than there once was, there is an opportunity for writers to come up with something mischievous and genuinely original. So why is much of the contemporary writing about the Firm so dreadful?
It is not as if there isn’t enough material. As King Charles prepares to make his first state visit to America – an event that has been far more controversial than anticipated, thanks to the Iran war and subsequent fallout between Donald Trump and the hapless British Prime Minister Keir Starmer – he does so in the knowledge that he is (briefly) in the same country as his estranged younger son Harry, albeit on different coasts.
The triangular relationship between father, son and his elder brother, heir to the throne Prince William, has excited more attention than virtually everything else in recent years. Excepting, of course, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, whose recent arrest, on his 66th birthday no less, was front-page news worldwide.
You would have thought, then, that the royals would attract genuinely top-notch writing. Yet the greater surprise is that, if you skim the shelves, most of the books about the institution are somewhere between dutifully dull and hilariously bad. In the former category are those titles that carry the imprimatur of access or “authorization,” in which some dutiful yes-man or woman is given a limited amount of firsthand contact with a member of the royal family in exchange for a sycophantic, even hagiographic, account. If you believe most of these dismal books, then the late Queen was nothing short of a saint, her son is a poetic and artistic visionary and William and Catherine are the world’s greatest golden couple. Harry and Andrew, you notice, are not usually mentioned. The more irreverent books, however, are more fun, albeit not usually intentionally. Titles including Omid Scobie’s Endgame, royal butler Paul Burrell’s The Royal Insider and Tom Bower’s Betrayal, to name but three, take a partisan side and brutally dismantle the opposition through a mixture of innuendo, indiscreet (and usually anonymous) sources and, one imagines, the tacit or not-so-tacit assistance of palace insiders, keen to see their employers’ perspective put out into the world.
The problem with most of these books is that they are abysmally written (the Burrell book contains lines such as “she was never going to abdicate, but sadly she did deteriorate”) and teeter on the edge of camp in their obvious delight in reporting royal feuds. Forget about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, if you want old queens engaging in furious games of one-upmanship with one another, it’s royal biography that provides all the jaw-dropping detail that you could imagine.
Perhaps from an American perspective, there has not been a truly significant book that combines gossip with off-the-record insight since Kitty Kelley’s The Royals, first published in 1997 and never brought out in Britain for fear of that country’s libel laws. The book contained a host of questionable claims, from the Queen Mother conceiving her elder daughter via artificial insemination to her son-in-law Prince Philip being a committed philanderer with bisexual tendencies.
Yet it was bang on the money when it came to the exploration of Edward VIII’s Nazi sympathies and uncomfortably close links to Germany, before, during and after his brief reign and subsequent abdication. While The Royals was not one of my major sources for The Crown in Crisis and The Windsors at War, I doubt that I would have been able to write those books – and treat Edward’s fascist leanings with the candor that they deserved – without Kelley having paved the way.
A few decades ago, things were very different. Royal biography was incurious and sycophantic in the extreme, whether its subjects were alive or dead. You could go to your nearest bookstore and buy a life of Queen Victoria written by an ancient historian with trembling hand and reverent eye, or you could purchase a quasi-souvenir about some living member of the royal family that treated even the minor members as if they were proto-Taylor Swifts.
I was amused to discover that the author Lisa Sheridan wrote a book, in 1962, simply entitled A Day with Prince Andrew, which consisted of nothing more than carefully posed photographs of the toddler prince with witless captions. Lovers of irony might note that one of these captions read “Well, he’s clean now!”, just as another said simply “Was that really such a good idea?” Six decades later, the latter question might be asked repeatedly.
Still, if the royals are treated as an amusing but somehow inessential sideshow by serious historians and biographers, resulting writing about them is largely left to the second-raters – and it shows. In Britain, openly expressing republican sympathies is seen as a no-no and books that demand the abolition of the monarchy are unlikely to attract a publisher.
In the United States, however, there is a far greater reverence not just for the institution of the royal family but for its leading members. When King Charles visits the country, he will be greeted with an enthusiasm, even an excitement, that is largely absent in his own country. And this is reflected in the many undistinguished books that have been written about him, both when he was the longest-serving Prince of Wales and since he became monarch.
The really jaw-dropping titles, then, are the ones that originate from within the royal family itself. The Duke of Windsor’s memoir, A King’s Story, might now seem very tame indeed – largely because royal courtiers saw to it that all the most shocking material, largely consisting of his candid thoughts about his family and politicians, was excised long before publication – but his great-great-nephew’s memoir Spare was royal gossip on steroids, and duly became the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time.
Are we richer and better-informed for such things? I don’t think so
Today, it can largely be found cluttering up thrift shops, but Prince Harry’s revelations about his family, and himself, threw a grenade into the reputation of the Firm from which it has never really recovered, despite the many PR attempts to do so – of which the state visit is just the latest. And, of course, Andrew Morton’s biography of Harry’s mother, Diana: Her True Story, saw her supply the writer with revelatory material that turned it into a global bestseller.
Yet there are relatively few of these books, for obvious reasons. The royal family has always abided by the motto “never complain, never explain,” which served them well for centuries, both from a reputational and, latterly, a publishing perspective. When Princess Elizabeth and Margaret’s nanny Marion “Crawfie” Crawford published an anodyne memoir of her time with the girls, The Little Princesses, in 1950, its very existence was enough to send her to reputational Siberia; she attempted suicide. Some 75 years later, we have Prince Harry’s frostbitten penis, Princess Diana’s butler describing how members of the royal household attempted to sexually assault him and, in Entitled, every kind of princely wrongdoing under the sun.
Are we richer and better informed for such things? I don’t think so, on balance. Royal biography has become ever more sensational and, in many cases, poorly written. The 19th-century economist Walter Bagehot counseled against too close a scrutiny of royal life, saying, famously, “We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Well, now we have endless daylight, and the revelation has been that there isn’t much magic, or anything else for that matter.
The genre needs a new approach and a new breed of writer to transform it from the prosaic gossip that it has become mired in. Otherwise, we will tire of the endless books about the royals long before we weary of the institution itself.
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