When Prince Harry released his memoir Spare, he lifted the lid on what life was really like behind closed doors in the Royal Family – from his perspective.

Breaking down in glorious technicolour his relationship with his brother Prince William and father King Charles, Harry didn’t hold back in his tome, and sources have even claimed that some of the allegations he made about his stepmother Queen Camilla upset King Charles so much it remains a kind of blockage in the father and son’s path to reconciling.

However, while it might have seemed like Harry’s memoir broke down boundaries the usually formal royals are keen to uphold in their public lives, he was by no means the first member of the House of Windsor to write a tell-all, with an even more senior royal doing it decades before and causing an absolute “sensation”.

The royal in question is none other than the former King Edward VIII, who sent shockwaves across the country when he abdicated the throne in 1936, after less than a year on the throne, with only 325 days as monarch. The abdication crisis saw Edward torn between his duties as King and his love for American divorcee Wallis Simpson – who he had met a few years before during her marriage to businessman Ernest Simpson. He was unable to marry Wallis and remain King and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and eventually decided to choose love over his royal duty.

After Edward abdicated, he was made the Duke of Windsor, and spent the rest of his life outside of the UK in exile, alongside his wife Wallis. Ten years after he decided to give up the throne in order to be able to marry the woman he loved, he released a shocking memoir entitled ‘A King’s Story’ that was ghostwritten by journalist Charles Murphy.

After Edward abdicated he and Wallis were exiled ( 
Image:
Getty Images)

Wallis also published a memoir ( 
Image:
Corbis via Getty Images)
Royal expert Robert Jobson noted that much like Harry, when the exiled former King Edward VIII wrote a memoir, it generated a huge amount of interest. He said it was “published to a media storm in the 50s. It caused a sensation.”

Murphy spent three years with the Duke of Windsor working on the book, and decades after the shocking memoir’s release, author Jane Marguerite Tippett came across the journalist’s and Edward’s original notes and book drafts in the Boston University Library. “[There was] box upon box of notes and memos, including Edward’s own first drafts scrawled on yellow legal pads, much of which never [have been published before]”, the author explained, writing for the Mail Online.

This material was turned into a new text, called, Once a King: The Lost Memoir of Edward VIII published in 2023, and saw the former King be incredibly candid about his royal life and decision to pursue Wallis, even while she was still married.

“I knew I was falling in love with another man’s wife. When found myself falling in love should have withdrawn. But remarkable business about love is that it happens before one knows it,” it reads.

Wallis Simpson also released a memoir a few years after her husband, called The Heart Has Its Reasons, which explored her relationship with the former King – and was also reportedly ghostwritten by Murphy.

Edward’s book caused a ‘sensation’

Another shocking royal book that was written decades before Harry’s was the memoir of the late Queen Elizabeth’s childhood nanny Marion Crawford. While Time Magazine noted that the final text of The Little Princesses: The Intimate Story of HRH Princess Elizabeth and HRH Princess Margaret by Their Governess was “gossipy but quite innocuous by today’s standards” – adding “the nursery secrets that Crawfie revealed were hardly earth-shattering” – trust between the former staff member and the Royal Family was destroyed. Its publication was seen by the Firm as a massive betrayal, and they quickly cut all ties with Crawford.

Although Harry’s memoir Spare may have used a more contemporary lens – with strikingly informal revelations about his frost-bitten penis and loss of virginity dominating headlines – these previously sensational books show that interest in the private lives of the Royal Family has long been a booming industry.