‘The Crown’ Will End With Queen Camilla’s Triumph

Welcome to this week’s edition of to get all the latest royal news and gossip with Tom Sykes and Tim Teeman.

Take five

Princess Eugenie married her beau Jack Brooksbank five years ago and this week posted an adorable Instagram video celebrating the anniversary, including some flashback footage from October 2018 wedding.

Eugenie also posted an image of her and Jack and their two children, August (2) and Ernest (4) on a beach. The family now live in Portugal. The clip had a musical accompaniment to the tune of “You’ve Got the Love” by Florence and the Machine.

Sweet and sour

A rather heartbreaking reminder of the beloved terms in which Harry and William once held each other has emerged in the form of a Christmas Day menu from Sandringham House, featuring a message sent by a young Harry to his brother. Harry’s message reads “William, what are you talking about? Sign back.” The unruly scrawl, written in pencil, is in stark contrast to the formality of the menu for the 1993 Christmas buffet, which featured dishes such as filet of beef, foie gras, beef tongue, York ham and smoked turkey.

It is printed in French and adorned with the queen’s cipher. Harry would have been nine and William 11, and their parents were still married. The menu is understood to be the only known example of Harry’s hand­writing to come up for sale. A memorabilia expert was quoted by the Sun as saying: “This is absolutely genuine and a very interesting historical item that illustrates how close William and Harry were growing up.”

Royal biographer Ingrid Seward said: “This is very sweet and shows that the princes were having fun at a rather stuffy evening meal. But I look at it with a tinge of sadness as it shows that they were close and were allies, in a real contrast to their current relationship.”

Secrets of Edward VIII

Exciting news for followers of the saga of Edward VIII, the king who abdicated the throne for Wallis Simpson, and has been widely portrayed as a Nazi sympathizer.

American actor and archival specialist Jane Marguerite Tippett is to publish a new book based on what the Telegraph calls an “extraordinary treasure trove of forgotten documents” including an early draft of his memoir, which, Tippet suggests, has a lot of the juicy stuff in it that was ultimately left out of the published version, his 1951 memoir, A King’s Story.

Max Rossi/Reuters

Tippett cleverly checked the archive of Charles J.V. Murphy, a US journalist at Time magazine, who worked as ghostwriter for the Duke of Windsor, as he became known after abdicating. “As soon as I sat down in front of the material, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said. She found the first draft of the memoir, and “hundreds of pages of transcriptions of conversations between Murphy and the Duke.”

Tippett says: “It was all new material. How, I kept asking myself, could it not have been found before. My heart was racing.”

She will publish a book based on the new material later this year, titled Once A King. Among the documents she found were papers written between 1936 and 1947, which include Edward VIII’s visits to Nazi Germany. Tippett says: “They contain raw thoughts, comments and emotions, that were never meant to get out anywhere near the public space. We will never hear as directly from the Duke and Duchess as we do in this material. That is why for me it is unprecedented.”

This week in royal history

Happy birthday Fergie! Sarah, Duchess of York, ex-wife of (and still best buddies with) Prince Andrew, was born on October 15, 1959 in Marylebone, London.

Maja Smiejkowska/Reuters

Unanswered questions

Why does the royal family get so steamed up about The Crown when the show consistently shows them in a nuanced, open-minded, relatively sympathetic light? It certainly takes them far more seriously than the institution’s fiercest detractors.

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