Feuds, power and entitlement: 5 revealing royal books

British publishing, like its women’s magazines, feeds off the royals. The latest tabloid furore is over Charles, Earl Spencer’s book, Swan Song, honouring his late sister Princess Diana. Spencer’s claim that King Charles spoke dismissively about his late wife soon after her death has already earned a sharp, and unusual, rebuke from the Palace

Spencer’s memoir will be released this week. While we can’t yet assess its merit, a few books amid the dross do capture the peculiarities of the modern monarchy: its extreme wealth and the combination of tradition and celebrity that helps explain its persistence.

I begin this list with author Hilary Mantel’s apt observation in her acerbic 2013 lecture Royal Bodies. “Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do,” she noted. “But pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment […] everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.”

Prince Harry is the most recent royal to escape the cage, while still wanting to feast off the bamboo.

1. The Crown in Crisis – Alexander Larman

No scandal has shaken the British crown in the past century as much as the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 “to marry the woman I love” the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. There are many books on the subject, but the best might be Alexander Larman’s The Crown in Crisis (2022), which captures the pair’s romance and the battle within the establishment to prevent their marriage.

The strength of the book is its discussion of divisions over the suitability of such a marriage and the determination of the prime minister at the time, Stanley Baldwin, to uphold the Anglican prohibition on divorce. As Larman points out, later revelations of Edward’s flirtations with Nazi Germany meant his abdication avoided possibly even greater constitutional problems.

2. The Queen – Ben Pimlott

Of the many books about the late Queen Elizabeth perhaps the best is Ben Pimlott’s The Queen (updated edition 2002). Pimlott reveals that beneath the pomp and glitter, the monarch had real influence on British affairs.

Most significant was her clash with former prime minister Margaret Thatcher over the role of the Commonwealth, an institution badly understood in Australia. (Monarchists deliberately ignore the fact that most of its member nations are in fact republics.) The Queen clearly favoured taking a hard line against the white supremacist government in Rhodesia, which placed her in opposition to Thatcher.

At the end of her reign, the Queen used her influence to ensure the Commonwealth would confirm Charles as its head but he will struggle to exercise the same degree of support from the 54 member countries Elizabeth built up over 70 years.

3. And What Do You Do? – Norman Baker

I’d balance Pimlott with Norman Baker: And What Do You Do?: What The Royal Family Don’t Want You To Know (2020). Baker’s book takes a far more critical view of the monarchy, its extraordinary wealth and the foibles of many of the royals.

He points to the deliberate confusion between the private wealth of the monarchy and its support through the Sovereign Grant, which provides public funds for the monarchy’s running costs, along with the practice, developed under Elizabeth, of paying sums to a considerable number of the monarch’s relatives.

Baker, a former British cabinet minister, is a supporter of monarchy, but wants to exchange the imperial model for “the modern bicycling alternative”, akin to those in other European countries.

4. Entitled – Andrew Lownie

When it comes to feeding off the public purse the prize goes to Andrew and Sarah, now Mr and Mrs Windsor, whose foibles were dissected in Andrew Lownie’s Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York (2025). The couple’s closeness to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein ultimately brought them down.

Andrew and Sarah, writes Lownie, were equally guilty of extraordinary extravagance and relentless exploitation of Andrew’s royal connections, with Sarah constantly in debt while making huge sums out of her many ventures. There was something Trumpian in the way the couple decorated their first home Sunninghill: 35-foot (around 11-metres) high ceilings, a lobby “adorned with a medieval soldier’s helmet from Windsor Castle and the head of a North American buffalo”.

Also Trump-like is the way in which, Lownie claims, their children, the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, were given profitable access to some of the Middle East potentates whom Andrew courted, while he was on official UK business trips.

Lownie is circumspect, but it is clear the late Queen protected Andrew, while well aware of his alleged corruption. King Charles was more ruthless, cutting off Andrew to save the monarchy.

5. Spare – Prince Harry

For connoisseurs of royal feuds it’s worth reading Prince Harry’s Spare (2023), which I described at the time of its release as “rather as if the Grimm brothers were to retell the life of the Kardashians”.

The title of the book reminds us Harry is following a pattern established by former “spares”, Princess Margaret and ex-Prince Andrew, in both resenting and exploiting their position as next in line – until their elder sibling has children of their own.

His book suggests a genuine desire to break out of the expectations of “the firm”, and deep antipathy to his elder brother, the heir, Prince William. The recent return of the Sussexes to Britain suggests a sequel might well be forthcoming.

Other dysfunctional royals

Of course, the British royals are not alone in fermenting feuds and scandals. The current travails of the Norwegian royal family will certainly produce several books, if not a mini-series.

Saddest perhaps is the story of the former King Juan Carlos of Spain, who played a significant role guiding Spain back to democracy after the death of Franco but ended up in exile in Abu Dhabi after allegations of corruption. (Investigations against him were later dropped or shelved by authorities). For a study of his career, read Paul Preston’s Juan Carlos: The People’s King (2004), written before he was forced to abdicate.

It would be tempting to explore the richly scandalous lives of royal families in the Middle East and Asia, where the current Japanese royals are notable in being seemingly immune from claims of corruption. But if we limit ourselves to the family who, bizarrely, we share with the Brits, the Canadians and the Papuans, I’d finish by reading Robert Barnard’s Death and the Princess (1982).

Barnard was a prolific writer of mysteries, wittier than Agatha Christie’s but less ingenious. His novel about a fictional British princess who survives while her courtiers are murdered, is frivolous but nonetheless captures some of the absurdities of monarchy in the current world.

In the end, Britain’s monarchy will survive because its political leaders are trusted even less than its hapless royals.