Although his articles in Life, serialised in the Sunday Express in Britain in 1947, were a jaunty, innocuous and even favourable account of the royal family and its daily life, to Queen Mary they were deplorable.

"I was surprised you thought it a pity I wrote so many private facts," the Duke replied to one of her steely missives.

"I would submit that the personal memoir of Papa undertaken by John Gore at your and Bertie's request contains far more intimate extracts from Papa's diaries and glimpses into his character and habits that I would have dared to use."

This seems a fair point.

Fuelled by a gnawing sense of injustice that he was refused the role of a roving ambassador to the US by his brother, Bertie, Edward wrote his version of the abdication."A King's Story: The Memoirs of The Duke of Windsor" was published in 1951. It's eminently readable, with some priceless lines. "Christmas at Sandringham was Dickens in a Cartier setting," he wrote.

He describedbeing dispatched, in tears, to the Royal Naval College in the Isle of Wight in 1907 the bizarre assurance from his father that "I am your best friend."

Although he was desperately hurt by his family's refusal to accept Wallis Simpson, he still tempered his account.The book was a commercial success, selling 80,000 copies in the UK in the first month. But the royal court, and courtiers, were aghast.

"All of them express disgust at a former King of England selling for money his recollections of his family life, in a form that is indecent and for a motive that it squalid," thundered his former equerry, Alan "Tommy" Lascelles.

What upset Lascelles the most were the passages detailing the Duke's love for Wallis Simpson the omission of which would have been glaring, considering that the King had abdicated for her. "It is obscene to write gainfully about ones own love affairs," the equerry fumed.

That is exactly what the Duchess of Windsor did in her autobiography, "The Heart Has Its Reasons", which she published in 1969, long after any form of reconciliation with her in-laws was likely.

Follow this link:

'Finding Freedom' suggests the Sussexes have not yet burned their bridges - Telegraph.co.uk