I was right. It is exactly like the Queen Mother in Love. Actually, it’s even more fundamentally dishonest and distortive. To give some idea, repeatedly when talking about how David wasn’t the man Wallis loved and how unhappy she was it pans to a picture of Wallis looking really miserable to illustrate its point. The problem? The photo in question is the famous one taken of her looking out the window of Buckingham Palace right after David died. It’s like, really? You’re trying to illustrate a point about how she didn’t love him by showing how miserable she was after he died? Obviously, the context of the photo is not explained. It’s made even more amusing considering in pretty much all the photos they show of Wallis and David together she’s smiling and laughing. Then again, maybe the person they hired to pick the photos for this thing was fed up with their bullshit and decided to troll them. I really hope that’s the case.
Just like in The Queen Mother in Love they keep using words like “extraordinary” and “revelations”. Everything interesting was in the Daily Fail article. More than that, they keep repeating the same quotes over and over again which proves they don’t have all that many. Considering there are fifteen letters, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was stuff that wasn’t read on purpose. Furthermore, a lot of the “revelations” like her uncertainty about the divorce and her continued communication with Ernest (though she’s vague about the time period because it affects the legality of her divorce), is revealed in her memoirs. So while the letters may have been “secret” a lot of the stuff revealed in them was not only not a secret but about as unsecret as anything having to do with Wallis could be.
Furthermore it keeps claiming “in her time of trouble Wallis turned to Ernest” when she was also writing to David (in more revealing and affectionate terms) and her Aunt Bessie at the same time. Then Anne Sebba makes the claim Wallis actually mocked David behind his back and actively disliked being with him. This is entirely based on her referring to him as Peter Pan in one of the letters. But not only is that nickname mentioned in Wallis’s memoirs, she uses it in one of her letters to David as well. So she was mocking him and obviously disliked him because she used a nickname behind his back that he knew about and seemingly didn’t have a problem with. Now, the letters do very much indicate Wallis felt bad about how things went with Ernest and that the ensuing scandal made her fearful and miserable. In fact, pretty much every revelation (except the fact that she missed Ernest after they broke up, which literally every person who’d ever broken up from a long-term relationship knows is normal) was mentioned in her memoirs. Also, they act like the fact that she was using the made up word “eanum” with Ernest as a sign she was mocking David. It’s been known she had used it with Ernest for a while (I have an article from 2004 on letters Ernest wrote to Wallis that mentions this); it wasn’t something special between Wallis and David it was something from Wallis’s childhood that she shared with both Ernest and David. The letter from Ernest from the 2004 article indicates Ernest was in on it before she even met David. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d shared it with past boyfriends as well. Also they made David out to be some creepo abuser for absolutely no reason. They didn’t claim he actually beat Wallis like The Queen Mother in Love said about Bertie and Elizabeth but the implication was very much the same.
It even tries to paint Wallis as tragic and pretends to be sympathetic by pointing out how tragic she was because she had to marry David who was obviously so awful. Fun fact: Wallis told her friend Aline that David was the most wonderful man she ever knew and that she had more fun chatting with him than at any party. Also, considering the whole thing painted Wallis as a lying golddiger I’m sure that if Wallis was alive she would have some choice words for Anne Sebba about this “sympathetic” portrayal. Then again Wallis is so hated I suppose any book that doesn’t paint her as a Nazi could be considered sympathetic.
Also, why do all these things interview the exact same people? Except Anne Sebba all of these people have been in every royal documentary for the last twenty years.
tl;dr: Anne Sebba is a lying bitch who didn’t read Wallis’s memoirs.
