{"id":242893,"date":"2026-05-25T07:45:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T07:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/242893\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T07:45:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T07:45:15","slug":"the-queen-was-worried-about-andrew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/242893\/","title":{"rendered":"The Queen was worried about Andrew"},"content":{"rendered":"

In August 1968 the Duke of Windsor, Britain\u2019s former king then in self-imposed exile in France, turned up at the funeral of Marina, Duchess of Kent, dead at 61 from a brain tumour. From the organ loft of King George\u2019s Chapel in Windsor Castle, a 14-year-old schoolboy from neighbouring Eton College examined the expressionless, white-haired aristocrat. He was dressed in the morning coat he had worn for his reign-ending wedding to the American divorcee Wallis Simpson in 1937, the summer after his abdication.<\/p>\n

\u201cI watched him for the whole 45-minute service. As he walked out under the organ screen I\u2019d never seen such sad eyes on a man,\u201d says the 74-year-old Hugo Vickers, whose teenage obsession with Queen Elizabeth II and her highly extended family has led to a distinguished career as a royal biographer, pundit and ultra-royalist.<\/p>\n

I meet him in his cluttered Regency flat in Kensington, which is lined with scrapbooks, aristocratic correspondence and monarchical memorabilia (Simpson\u2019s black leather Cartier clutch bag perches next to me). On a banister, rather than over the coffin it befits, is draped a pall-like red cloth with golden tassels and the cypher EIIR. Vickers sewed it himself. This crowded house\/museum at present also manages to accommodate his three adult children \u2014 although not, as yet, Vickers\u2019s unlikely new girlfriend, Cindy Jackson, a \u201cqueen\u201d herself, but of plastic surgery, whose recent entry into his life I must, of course, address.<\/p>\n

\u201cVery tactfully, the duke came over alone,\u201d Vickers says of the funeral. \u201cThe duchess had some other engagement in Paris. She wasn\u2019t going to inflict her presence, as it were.\u201d<\/p>\n

The duke and duchess, Edward and Mrs Simpson, are newsy again with the imminent release of Mike Newell\u2019s feature film My Duchess about Wallis Simpson\u2019s decrepit final years under the control of her French lawyer, Suzanne Blum (who died aged 95 in 1994). It has spurred an updated edition of Vickers\u2019s spookily brilliant and fanatically detailed 2011 biography Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic Untold Story of Wallis Simpson, which has earned warm commendations from the film\u2019s stars, Joan Collins<\/a>, who plays the duchess, and Isabella Rossellini, the sinister Blum.<\/p>\n

\"JoanJoan Collins as the Duchess of Windsor and Isabella Rossellini as Suzanne Blum in My Duchess Rory Mulvey\/John Gore Studios\/PA<\/p>\n

In its gothic menace his book is Hitchcock\u2019s Rebecca meets George Cukor\u2019s Gaslight. \u201cThe way I put it is if you\u2019re a very rich widow and you\u2019re in a failing house, you have no relations of your own, you\u2019re not on brilliant terms with your husband\u2019s relations and you\u2019ve got a sly butler, a dodgy doctor, an avaricious Swiss banker and a dishonest lawyer, you\u2019re in serious trouble,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what happened to her. They closed in on her. Ma\u00eetre Blum gradually got rid of all the people who were protecting her, who could have protected her, and took the thing over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Employed by Burke\u2019s Peerage, the young Vickers first crossed the threshold of the Windsors\u2019 home in the Bois de Boulogne outside Paris in 1972, just a few days before the duke\u2019s death. He would visit many more times but heard the duchess\u2019s voice just once, and then over the phone to her private secretary. He did meet Blum, however. \u201cShe started off charming and then menaced if she had to. It was, \u2018Attends, beau monsieur,\u2019 and all that stuff but I wasn\u2019t taken in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vickers is all but sure that a letter of authorisation apparently initialled by the duchess in 1975 was a fake made later during her incapacity. It allowed Blum to publish anything the Windsors had written over their lifetime. A book of the \u201clove letters\u201d was duly serialised by the Daily Mail days after the widow\u2019s death in 1986. The duchess, Vickers maintains, wanted the papers to go to the Queen. \u201cBlum must have made lots of money out of it. It was an international bestseller.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was a nasty betrayal but how sorry for them need we feel? Wasn\u2019t the duke a crypto-fascist who, visiting Hitler in 1937, was so impressed that he came back convinced the F\u00fchrer was a pacifist? \u201cI don\u2019t think the duke was particularly keen on Hitler,\u201d says Vickers, who insists he certainly had no intention of returning to Britain as a puppet king after a German victory. \u201cHe spent a lot of time abdicating and getting away. I don\u2019t think he had any wish to come back. My theory about him is he didn\u2019t want to be king. He would have denied it but if you woke him up at four in the morning and said, \u2018Do you have any regrets?\u2019 he would have said no, he didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DuchessThe Duke and Duchess of Windsor in 1966Circa Images\/GHI\/Universal History Archive\/Universal Images Group\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

But wasn\u2019t it Simpson who wanted him to abdicate? \u201cI\u2019m sure she didn\u2019t. I\u2019m sure what she liked was being the king\u2019s friend and I don\u2019t mind what interpretation you put on the word \u2018friend\u2019. Can you imagine? When she\u2019s giving a dinner party, anyone would come to it to get to the king. Gold plates and flowers and delicious food would come around. Suddenly she\u2019s having to look after a man who\u2019s got absolutely nothing to do. There\u2019s a poignant moment in the honeymoon when they\u2019re in, I think, Austria, and they say, \u2018What do we do now?\u2019 She had to look after him and fill his days as best she could, and she did: she fed him better food in more beautiful surroundings in the second half of his life than he had in the first half. But it was kind of pointless.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an interesting parallel with the Sussexes now, I suggest. \u201cIt\u2019d be the only interesting thing,\u201d he says. \u201cMeghan lured Harry into his escape. The duchess certainly didn\u2019t do that, of that I promise you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"MeghanThe Duke and Duchess of Sussex this monthSplash news<\/p>\n

But I have another comparison. This is with Vickers\u2019s private life and its turn towards the mildly sensational. In April the Daily Mail reported that Vickers had himself fallen for a glamorous American, a 70-year-old veteran of the plastic surgeon\u2019s knife who was recently delayed by passport control officials unconvinced her wrinkle-free face tallied with her birthdate. Of her romance with Vickers, Cindy Jackson said: \u201cPeople have been surprised. They didn\u2019t realise that people could experience such joy at our age. I tell them that it\u2019s a plot twist and this is our final chapter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAh yes,\u201d he says, \u201cbut that article! I have been divorced since 2014, so I didn\u2019t suddenly sort of dive off.\u201d (Like any divorce, he says, his, from his second cousin and namesake Elizabeth Vickers, was \u201cawful \u2014 especially when the lawyers get involved\u201d.)<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s a British citizen but she comes from Ohio, yes. She lives in London,\u201d he says of Jackson. They have been together for about seven months and met through friends while he was finishing his book Queen Elizabeth II: A Personal History<\/a>. \u201cSo I shouldn\u2019t have been doing anything else except finishing my book but I invited her out to dinner and she came, so one thing led to another.\u201d<\/p>\n

What can they have in common? \u201cWell, we have lots to talk about always and we obviously know a lot of the same people, I suppose. And she\u2019s very supportive. We have a lot of nice times together.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Jackson is not his Wallis Simpson? \u201cShe is not a Wallis Simpson, no, no.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there is one thing Jackson and the duchess have in common, I say, for Jackson too has been traduced in print. \u201cShe\u2019s had a terrible time in the press at different times in her life, yes. But she\u2019s a brilliant adviser on cosmetic surgery and things. She herself looks about 36. She\u2019s very, very kind and thoughtful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"HugoHugo VickersAndrew Farrar for the Times<\/p>\n

Her website fumes that she has been the target of \u201ccountless made-up clickbait stories\u201d. She has not undergone \u201cdozens of full-scale operations\u201d, nor did she hold the world record for plastic surgery; indeed there is no such category, although she did once possess \u201ca title for cosmetic procedures, mainly nonsurgical\u201d.<\/p>\n

She was also, which she does not deny, a girlfriend of Princess Diana\u2019s lover James Hewitt, a reformed cad who Vickers in his new book on Elizabeth II says \u201cproved oversexed\u201d. Naturally he is too much of a gentleman to discuss a lady\u2019s past. \u201cHer name gets linked with people but I don\u2019t know whether it\u2019s true. That\u2019s for her to say, not for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Vickers has a fault as a biographer, or indeed as an interviewee, it is not that he is afraid to wield the knife but that he won\u2019t point it at anyone royal. Fortunately, occasionally mischief gets the better of him, as when I ask about the rumour that the Duke of Windsor had an unusually small penis. \u201cI don\u2019t think I put anything like that in my book, but I have heard people say that a page had helped to adjust the duke\u2019s kilt and said afterwards, \u2018Was it for this\u2026 !\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

More seriously, reviewers have criticised his new book on Elizabeth for neither addressing Prince Philip\u2019s alleged affairs nor conceding that the great monarch was a poor mother, distant to her older children but absurdly indulgent of her errant second son.<\/p>\n

\"PrinceMountbatten-WindsorChris Jackson\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cPrince Andrew was the politest little boy you could possibly imagine,\u201d Vickers responds. \u201cOK, it changed, but, you know, that\u2019s probably the little boy the Queen saw. And he was good with the Queen. She was worried about him as well, worried what was going to happen to him. Thank God she didn\u2019t live to see what they did to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

They did to him?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, that\u2019s an Emily Maitlis moment, isn\u2019t it?\u201d he says, as if I would be offended by the comparison. \u201cWell, look what\u2019s happened. Listen, I don\u2019t want to get involved in the Prince Andrew thing but he hasn\u2019t actually been convicted in a court yet,\u201d Vickers says, though he reflects on the possibility that he may yet be. \u201cHe\u2019s a complete pariah. Everything\u2019s been thrown at him. And I\u2019m fairly certain the Queen didn\u2019t think he was guilty of the things he was being accused of.\u201d Mountbatten-Windsor has denied any wrongdoing.<\/p>\n

There was a rumour in the Eighties that a teenage Vickers made tiny dolls of the royal family he kept in a doll\u2019s house. This rumour turns out to be almost true and no secret (although I think he forgivably denied it to me when I was on the Times Diary back in the day). What he had constructed was a model of King George\u2019s Chapel peopled with handmade dolls of \u201cthe deans, the military knights, the garter knights and the royal family\u201d. The Lilliputian nobs now reside in Vickers\u2019s second home in the country.<\/p>\n

The innocence of yesteryear, I think, but then think again. As the life and death of the Duchess of Windsor demonstrates, there never was an age of innocence.<\/p>\n

The revised edition of Behind Closed Doors by Hugo Vickers is published by Penguin on June 4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In August 1968 the Duke of Windsor, Britain\u2019s former king then in self-imposed exile in France, turned up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-242893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}