The American that stole our king

Behind Closed Doors - The Tragic, Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor

The Duchess of Windsor spent her final years paralysed and kept in isolation by her ruthless lawyer Maître Suzanne Blum. It is a creepy story and it has already been told with panache by Caroline Blackwood (The Last of the Duchess, 1995). Now, with interest in Wallis resurgent as Andrea Riseborough portrays her in Madonna's forthcoming film W.E., Hugo Vickers rides in on the high horse of scholarship, footnotes and appendices dangling, to tell the tale of her twilight years authoritatively.

He is the perfect man for the job. He was reading Whitaker's Almanack while other boys preferred the Beano. "At prep school I developed a keen interest in the royal family." Soon he was getting close to the royals - admittedly, mainly at their funerals. As a lay steward at St George's Chapel, Windsor, he was on duty "for many hours" at the lying-in-state of Edward VIII; next, at the duchess's funeral, he admired his own wreath, then saw her coffin come by "so close I could have touched it". (Something of a connoisseur of royal funerals, he handily provides a map of St George's Chapel at the back of the book, together with a list of names and seat numbers, so we, too, can reconstruct in our minds exactly where all those personages, some royal, some less royal, were sitting - hours of fun!) Vickers's Pooterish devotion, with all its strange undercurrents, is almost more interesting than the subject herself. You never know when he is going to pop up next. The sale of the duke and duchess's possessions in New York in 1998 is in full swing when he suddenly mentions that he came away with half a lot containing towels and bathmats, "paying rather over the odds for them".

This is an exhaustive work of scholarship, and almost every walk-on character gets a fussy biographical sketch (Vickers is a proud alumnus of Burke's Landed Gentry) as well as, quite frequently, a grisly footnote detailing the date, place and manner of their death, usually along the lines of "collapsed and died of a heart attack near his home in Paris in July 1993" but sometimes more rewarding, such as: "Died in New York in a doctor's waiting room with the teddy bear that the Prince of Wales had given her in her handbag." We are never more than a whisper away from macabre here - with misplaced solicitousness, the author spends a whole paragraph fretting about the gender of the gendarme who sat in on Wallis's embalming.

To call this a "sympathetic" new biography is going too far, but the author is determined to be chivalrous in his approach to Wallis. She was, after all, a duchess. Still, he cannot really find anyone - bar Diana Mosley - to say anything nice about her (even her schoolfriends, he concedes, didn't like her much) so he settles for giving her two lovely appendices which trace her lineage all the way back to the Plantagenets and Charlemagne. A quintessentially well-mannered biographer, he winces when she is treated with discourtesy. He is sad when Maître Blum disallows fresh flowers in her sick room (in better days the duchess's floral arrangements were sprayed with Diorissimo) - and shocked enough to mention it when, in a paparazzi photograph, the pitiful invalid appears to be wearing supermarket pyjamas. We can never know what the duchess experienced, of course, and in lieu of any conclusive scoop, Vickers goes into alarmingly minute detail about the lacklustre sandwiches supplied to her night-nurses ("the bread was thin and unevenly buttered "). This is the madness of a frustrated biographer: Vickers, for all his talent, is stuck here like a bloodhound coming up against a locked door.

Still, he makes a staggering inventory of all the Windsors' missing objets, paintings and jewels - including 25 bespoke Van Cleef & Arpels pieces - which should rightfully have come back to Britain, or funded, as the duke wished, a Welsh foundation, instead of slipping into the hands of Maître Blum. British protocol and propriety can seem silly in Burke's Peerage, but they codify an honourable approach to life. Vickers has in his possession a passionate letter from the duke to Queen Mary, but he does not have permission to print it, and so he forgoes a scoop. His scruples do him credit.