On Tuesday, the 25th of August, 1942, a Short Sunderland flying boat of the Royal Air Force’s 228th Squadron rose from the Cromarty Firth at Invergordon in the north of Scotland. The aircraft, serial W4026, was bound for Iceland, where the Duke of Kent was to visit the airmen stationed there. Low cloud lay over the coast that afternoon, with fog in patches. The captain was Flight Lieutenant Frank Goyen; at the controls with him, as first pilot, sat the squadron’s commanding officer, Wing Commander Thomas Mosley.

Even the navigator had been chosen by drawing lots. There were fifteen men on board, eleven of them crew, and no one recorded any premonition. Thirty-seven minutes after takeoff, the flying boat flew into a hillside known as Eagle’s Rock, near Dunbeath in Caithness. Fourteen of the fifteen were killed.

The Duke of Kent was thirty-nine. The one survivor, the rear gunner, Sergeant Andrew Jack, came round injured, followed a stream downhill, and missed the rescue party coming up the other way. He collapsed, slept through the night, and did not wake until late the next morning. He lived until 1978 and for most of those years would not talk about the flight.

The Duke of Kent had not always been the man the RAF buried that week. He had been born Prince George, the youngest of the four sons of King George V and Queen Mary, on December 20, 1902, at York Cottage on the royal estate at Sandringham. His eldest brother, Edward, the Prince of Wales, had been born eight and a half years earlier, in June 1894. The age gap might have kept the two apart, but in his memoir, *A King’s Story*, published in 1951, Edward wrote that despite the years between them, he found in George’s character qualities akin to his own, and the two of them became more than brothers.

They became friends. By the late 1920s, by several biographers’ accounts, George was living in his brother’s London house, York House, inside St. James’s Palace. The danger to George came from an American woman born Alice Gwynne in Hempstead, New York, in 1898, called Kiki by everyone who knew her.

Her first marriage, to Horace Bigelow Allen, lasted from 1919 to 1924. In April 1925 she married a second American, Jerome Preston, known as Jerry, and the two settled beside Lake Naivasha in the Kenyan Highlands. That put her inside the Happy Valley set, the circle of rich settlers in colonial Kenya whose parties and drugs became a byword for scandal. Even in that company, Kiki Preston had a reputation.

Her nickname was the girl with the silver syringe. The historian Frances Osborne records that Kiki had been generous with her supplies of morphine. Exactly when George met her is not fixed; later accounts put it in the middle of the 1920s, with the drugs taking hold by around 1928. In the historian Hugo Vickers’ account, Kiki Preston soon had Prince George hooked, and getting him off was no easy business.

Philip Ziegler, chosen to write the official life of King Edward VIII with the royal archives at Windsor open to him, published his account in 1990. He wrote that things came to a head when George fell into the clutches of an attractive American called Kiki Preston, who introduced him to drugs. The drugs named around George in the record are morphine and cocaine; some later writers add heroin, but Ziegler does not, and the stronger sources keep to the two. Then comes the sentence on which the whole rescue rests: in 1929, the Prince of Wales somehow forced Mrs.

Preston to leave the country and to write to Prince George. Ziegler had the archive in front of him, and he did not say how. Kiki Preston was an American citizen, married to a wealthy American with a home in Kenya and the money to live wherever she liked. The heir to the British throne had no legal power to send her anywhere.

Whatever Edward used on her was not the law. It was the weight of being the next king applied to one woman, and the letter she wrote to George was the proof that it had worked. There was a reason that weight was heavier in 1929 than in any year before it. In the autumn of 1928, Edward had been in East Africa, making an official visit to Kenya and Uganda, Kiki Preston’s part of the world, then hunting in Tanganyika with his brother Henry.

The safari ended with a telegram: King George V was gravely ill, and Edward went home at once. On the 4th of December, with the king too sick to attend to the business of the realm, letters patent named a small group of counselors of state to act in his place: the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the Prime Minister, the Duke of York, and the Prince of Wales. When the king recovered enough to take back most of his work in June 1929, Edward was named a counselor again. Nothing in the record says Edward used that position against Kiki Preston, and it would be wrong to claim that he did.

But it shows what kind of man was making the demand. In the year she was made to leave, the person asking was not only the king’s eldest son. For months he had been one of the six people acting for the king. Beyond the fact that it was written, the letter itself has never been published, and no source quotes its words.

It is the first of several letters in the lives of these two brothers that matter more for what they did than for anything they said. The household around Edward knew what had been done. To one of his equerries, Bruce Ogilvy, getting Prince George off drugs was a very good mark for the prince. Ziegler’s own verdict on the brothers is that the affection between them was of the highest order.

The timing was not an accident of the calendar. 1929 was the year George’s old life ended. He had been in the Royal Navy since the age of thirteen, first at the naval colleges of Osborne and Dartmouth, then at sea, in the battleship *Iron Duke*, in the *Nelson*, and in the cruiser *Durban*, which worked out of Bermuda. In March 1929 he left the service for good.

The same year he earned a pilot’s license, and for a short time afterwards he worked inside the government, first at the Foreign Office and then at the Home Office, which made him something unusual: a king’s son with a desk and a job title. The year George came ashore for good was also the year his supplier was made to leave. A sailor at sea can be kept away from a woman in Kenya by the ocean. A prince living in London with no ship to report to needs somebody else to stand between them.

Edward was thirty-five that summer; George was twenty-six. The older brother had spent most of the decade on official tours around the world and was not known in the family as the responsible one. His father disapproved of his nightclubs, his friends, and his long affair with a married woman, Freda Dudley Ward. And yet, in the one emergency the official record shows inside the family in 1929, the son the king despaired of was the one who acted.

The letter did what it was meant to do for a while. Edward kept his brother close. In January 1931 the two princes sailed together for South America on the liner *Oropesa*. The official purpose was trade: Edward was to open the British Empire Trade Exhibition in Buenos Aires, which he called the objective of the journey of himself and his brother.

The trip was also a long run of flying. The brothers flew over the Panama Canal in an airliner of Pan American Grace, flew from Lima to Arequipa, and in Argentina landed at El Palomar with an escort of twenty-five Army airplanes. After the exhibition opened on the 14th of March, they set off on a four-day flying tour through Rosario and Cordoba, each in his own small Puss Moth, George’s lent to him by the de Havilland company. They came home on the *Arlanza* in the spring.

No document calls that journey a cure, and nobody on it said it was one. But for most of four months, the brother who had made Kiki Preston leave was traveling with the brother she had supplied. It was not enough. In 1932, George ran into Kiki Preston in Cannes on the French Riviera.

In Ziegler’s words, he had to be removed almost by force. The book does not say who did the removing. Three years after the letter, the danger had not gone away; it had only been moved out of reach, and on the Riviera it was back within reach. There is a far better known version of the rescue, almost certainly the one most people have heard.

In it, Edward takes George to his country house, Fort Belvedere, locks the doors, and sits with him for weeks while he comes off the drugs, with doctors on call and the older brother at his bedside. A line goes around with it, supposedly Edward’s, that he believed he was the only one who could help him. Neither the scene nor the line has a source. The men’s magazine *The Rake* introduces the bedside cure with the words popular legend, and no biography places a withdrawal at Fort Belvedere, at York House, or anywhere else, or names a doctor or a length of time.

The documented version is colder and explains far more: a supplier was driven out, a letter was dictated in effect if not in words, and three years later a brother was pulled out of a room on the Riviera. That is not nursing; it is guarding, and guarding is a job that never quite finishes. Two years after Cannes, George was engaged to a princess, and the guest list for the celebration before his wedding turned into a fight between Edward and their parents. By then Edward had a new woman in his life, and George had already met her.

Wallis Simpson, an American married to a British shipping executive, had become part of Edward’s circle in the early 1930s, and she liked his youngest brother too. In a letter to her aunt she put it lightly: she did well with the Windsor lads. In October 1934 George was created Duke of Kent. On the 29th of November he married Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark in Westminster Abbey, followed by a Greek Orthodox ceremony at Buckingham Palace, supported at the altar by his brothers.

Among Marina’s eight bridesmaids were two future queens, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands and the Duke of York’s eight-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth. The public story was a handsome prince settling down. The private story ran through the guest list. Two days before the wedding, the king and queen gave a ball at Buckingham Palace.

When they saw the list, they struck out Mrs. Simpson’s name. Edward’s answer was simple: if he could not invite his own friends, he would not come. The king and queen gave way, and Wallis went to the ball.

It was in those same days, by the account of the historian Christopher Hibbert, that she was presented to King George V. The brother who had guarded George now used George’s wedding to bring his own secret through the palace door. On the 9th of October 1935, the Kents’ first child was born, a son. They named him Edward, after his uncle.

Within fourteen months, the mere fact of his existence would put his father’s name into a conversation about who should be king. In January 1936 King George V died, and Edward became King Edward VIII. In June he made George one of his personal aides-de-camp. By then Wallis was divorcing her husband, and the king meant to marry her.

The government, the church, and most of the empire’s prime ministers would not accept her as queen. The crisis broke in public in early December. On the 10th of the month it ended at a desk in the house where the brothers had spent so many weekends. Two years after his own wedding, George sat down at Fort Belvedere and watched his brother sign the crown away.

The document, called the Instrument of Abdication, is one paragraph long. In it, King Edward VIII declares his irrevocable determination to renounce the throne for himself and his descendants. Underneath his signature are the words signed at Fort Belvedere in the presence of, followed by three names: Albert, Henry, George. The three younger brothers were the witnesses.

Edward remembered the scene in his memoir: sitting at the desk with his three brothers watching, he began to sign. Several biographers tell what George did at the desk. He shook his head and cried, almost fiercely, “It isn’t possible. It isn’t happening.

” None of them names the person who heard it, and one of them adds that George was in tears. It was happening, and the question of who came next was not as settled as the history books make it look. The line of succession ran from Albert to his two daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, then to Henry, who had no children. George was fifth.

But of the four brothers, George was the only one with a son: the boy born the year before, little Edward, was the only son any of the four had produced. In 1958, Dermot Morrah, a *Times* journalist who knew the court well, wrote that the men drafting the abdication bill had seriously considered the procedure that would be needed if the Duke of Kent were named as the successor. Later newspaper accounts of government papers have gone further, describing talk of Queen Mary acting as regent and passing the crown to George, but those rest on reporting that cannot be checked against the papers themselves. Morrah’s sentence is enough.

For a short time, the brother Edward had pulled off morphine and cocaine was a name on the list of men who might replace him. It did not happen. Albert became King George VI. On the evening of the 11th of December, the family sat down to a last dinner together at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park: Queen Mary, the Princess Royal, the three brothers, and Queen Mary’s brother, the Earl of Athlone, with his wife, Princess Alice.

Athlone remembered afterwards that the evening might have been gloomy and somehow was not. Then Edward drove up to the castle and spoke to the nation by radio. He came back to Royal Lodge to say goodbye, and in the small hours he sailed from Portsmouth on a destroyer bound for an Austrian castle called Enzesfeld, owned by the Rothschild family. By the Rothschilds’ own archive, the stay that followed lasted three difficult months.

Fifteen days later, on Christmas Day, the Kents’ second child arrived, a daughter, Princess Alexandra. Before that December, George was the king’s brother. After it, he was the new king’s brother, and the difference would decide what the next six years looked like. Ten weeks after the abdication, George arrived in Vienna at eighteen minutes to seven in the morning, February 1937.

A news agency wire recorded the arrival time and the fact that mattered: the Duke of Kent was meeting his brother, the Duke of Windsor, for the first time since the abdication. The two began with a morning visit to the vapor baths and spent the rest of the day sightseeing in the city. The *Daily Telegraph*’s correspondent had expected they might go skiing in the Tyrol. Of the three brothers who had watched Edward sign, George was the one who came.

The visit is a single day in the newspapers. No later meeting between the two brothers turns up in the sources. On the 12th of May, Albert was crowned King George VI in Westminster Abbey. Edward was not there.

On the 3rd of June, at the Château de Candé in France, Edward married Wallis Simpson. Louis Mountbatten, a cousin and once a close friend, had managed to fix a date for the wedding that suited Bertie, George, and the rest. Then other people stepped in. Not one member of the royal family came.

To attend, Ziegler explains, would have been taken as accepting Wallis into the family for all purposes. George sent a letter instead. “I am very sincerely sad at not being with you on June the 3rd,” he wrote. The sentence is gentle and careful.

It does not say who stopped him. The Kents also sent a wedding present, a box made by Fabergé. It went back. Edward’s comment on the box, as Ziegler quotes it, was that the only boxes he happened to be collecting now were those that could be delivered on the ears.

The anger was not only about a box. Edward knew where the line was being drawn and by whom. He would never forgive or forget the lead that Bertie had given them all in their behavior to him since he had left England. Follow where the anger lands: on the new king, and on the Kents’ present sent by the brother who wrote the gentlest letter of all and still did not come.

The man who had once dictated the terms of George’s life now had no say in it. The family had taken George back, and it decided where he went. That autumn, George was a few hours’ drive from his brother, and he wrote that he wanted to come for a night or two. The Kents were staying at a royal country house in Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia, as guests of Prince Paul, the Regent, who was married to Marina’s sister, Olga.

A few hours away at Wasserleonburg in Austria, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were spending their honeymoon in a rented castle. George wrote to Edward that he wanted to visit for a night or two. Then Queen Mary told Marina not to go. Edward’s answer was that both of them were welcome or neither was.

The king first told George to go anyway, even if Marina stayed behind. Then Queen Mary and the new Queen Elizabeth persuaded the king to change his mind, and the visit died. Edward found out how it had died, and he found out from George. The letter he sent his mother was furious.

“I unfortunately know from George,” he told her, “that you and Elizabeth instigated the somewhat sordid and much publicized episode of the failure of the Kents to visit us. ” Having his own mother cast out her eldest son was a great sorrow and disappointment to him. Put the two facts side by side. George was the brother who did not come.

George was also the brother who told Edward exactly why, and named the two women who had stopped him. He could not cross the line the family had drawn, but he would not pretend it was his own line. In 1929, one brother had kept the other’s secret. In 1937, the younger one handed the older one the family’s.

After that autumn, the two lives pulled apart. George became one of the working royals the new reign leaned on: master of Trinity House, the old corporation that keeps the lighthouses of England and Wales, and president of King Edward’s Hospital Fund. Before the war he was chosen to go to Australia as governor-general, a post that, in words later used in the House of Lords, circumstances prevented him from taking up. The circumstance was the war.

When it came, George moved from the navy he had left to the air force he had learned to fly with. In April 1940 he became a staff officer at the RAF’s training command. From July 1941 he was an air commodore in the welfare section of the inspector-general’s staff, traveling from station to station to look at how airmen were living and to be seen by them. Edward’s war went the other way.

In the summer of 1940, Winston Churchill sent him to the Bahamas as governor, a post far from London and far from the fighting. On the 4th of July 1942, the Kents’ third child was born at Coppins, their house in Buckinghamshire, and was christened Michael George Charles Franklin, the last name in honor of his godfather, President Franklin Roosevelt. Seven weeks after Michael was born, George climbed aboard the flying boat on the Cromarty Firth. On the 29th of August he was buried in the Royal Vault of St.

George’s Chapel at Windsor. Marina was there, with a baby not yet two months old at home. In September, Parliament paid its tributes. In the House of Lords, Lord Addison described a death in characteristic unostentatious service.

In the Commons, Churchill reminded members that George had given up the rank of air marshal to serve as an air commodore, and spoke of the King’s loss of a dearly loved brother, which had affected him most poignantly. The speech mourned one brother on behalf of another. It did not mention the eldest, sitting in Government House in Nassau. The official answer came in October.

The court of inquiry found an error of navigation, with too little allowance made for the wind. The Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, told the House of Commons that the aircraft had flown on a track different from the one in the flight plan, and too low to clear the rising ground. The engines had been working when it struck. The responsibility for this serious mistake in airmanship lay with the captain, who was dead.

That has never satisfied everyone. Some of the inquiry’s original papers, including the flight plan, are reported to be missing. Over the decades, writers have proposed that the aircraft was on a secret mission to Sweden, or that Rudolf Hess was somehow on board. Andrew Jack’s niece has said that he spoke of the Duke at the controls and of one more person on board than the manifest showed.

The squadron’s own association has rejected the story of the Duke at the controls. None of these theories has a document behind it. The inquiry’s finding is still the only official account. In Nassau, Edward heard the news on the afternoon of the same Tuesday.

He did not travel to the funeral. In the middle of the war, the governor of the Bahamas could not simply cross the Atlantic, and a news agency wire reported that the Duke of Windsor was unable to travel. Queen Mary wrote to her eldest son: “My thoughts go out to you,” she said, “who are so far away from us all, knowing how devoted you were to him. ” She asked him to give a kind message to his wife, who would help him bear his sorrow.

It was a warm letter, and it came from the same woman who had stopped Marina from visiting five years earlier. Wallis saw the grief at close range. In her memoir she wrote that of all the brothers, the Duke of Kent had always been closest to Edward, and his death, cut off at the outset of what promised to be a brilliant career, seemed to David almost a senseless caprice of fortune. Edward wrote back to his mother and told her that he had also written to Marina.

That letter never arrived. Two biographers’ accounts agree on that much. Marina received no word of condolence from the man who had been her brother-in-law, and she came to believe she had been deliberately snubbed. Whether the letter was lost in a wartime mail bag or never sent at all is something no surviving record settles.

The other letters Edward wrote that season did arrive. That summer, Nassau had seen riots over wages. Between November and December of 1942, he wrote to Winston Churchill. The file at the Churchill Archive Centre records what they covered: the death of his brother, racial disturbances in the Bahamas, his wish for a more stimulating post, and his request that the Duchess be given the rank of Royal Highness.

Churchill replied that the request would not be acted upon. One letter from Edward reached the Prime Minister with a request for his wife’s title. The letter meant for George’s widow reached nobody. Twenty-three years would pass before Marina and Wallis stood in the same room.

Go back to the summer of 1929 and the letter Kiki Preston was made to write. Of all the letters that passed through the lives of these two brothers, it is the only one that did exactly what it was sent to do. George’s letter about the wedding changed nothing. The Kents’ box came back.

The note about a night or two ended in a family quarrel. The letter of sympathy to Marina disappeared. The one letter that worked was the one Edward forced somebody else to write, at the moment when he still had the power to force anything. Kiki Preston did not grow old.

On the 23rd of December 1946, she jumped from a window of the Stanhope Hotel in New York. She was forty-eight. Even then, she was not quite out of the family’s story, and the person who kept her in it was Edward. A rumor had long followed George that he had fathered a son with her.

The boy at the center of it was born in Bern, Switzerland, in August 1926 under the name Anthony Curlslake, and was adopted as a baby by the American publisher Cass Canfield and his wife, who renamed him Michael. Michael Canfield grew up in New York society. In 1953 he married Lee Bouvier, the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy, and the marriage ended five years later. Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, recorded in her memoirs that Edward believed it.

Laura Charteris, who later married Michael Canfield, remembered a lunch at which the Duke of Windsor told her, “Yes, I am certain your husband is my brother’s son. ” The biographer Christopher Wilson has named a different woman as the mother, one who was sent to Switzerland in 1926, and the historian Glynn Gowans disputes the connection to George altogether. No document has ever settled it. Michael Canfield died in December 1969 of a heart attack on a flight from New York to London, at the age of forty-three.

What is on the record is that years later, the brother who had once sent Kiki Preston away still believed that something of George had been left behind with her. In 1965, Edward came to London for an eye operation. Marina came to see the Windsors. Wallis curtsied, and Marina stepped forward and embraced her instead.

It was the first time the two women had met since the abdication. For Wallis, it meant so much to David because George had meant so much to him. Marina promised that her children would visit their uncle and aunt. Marina died on the 27th of August 1968, at the age of sixty-one.

Edward came to her funeral; Wallis stayed away. That same week, George was taken from the Royal Vault at St. George’s Chapel and buried beside his wife in the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore, in the grounds of Windsor. Four years later, it was Edward’s turn.

He died in Paris on the 28th of May 1972. Three days afterwards, his coffin was flown to England in an aircraft of the Royal Air Force and landed at RAF Benson in Oxfordshire. The member of the family who stood on the airfield to receive it was the Duke of Kent: George’s eldest son, Edward, the boy born in 1935, the child whose existence had once put his father’s name into the conversation about the crown, now a man of thirty-six. The coffin had come by air, the way the brothers had once crossed South America together, and the way George had died.

On the 5th of June, the Duke of Windsor was buried at Frogmore, in the same ground where George had lain for four years. Saved is the kind word for what Edward did in 1929, and it is true as far as it goes. But the record shows something more exact than a rescue. Edward took custody of his brother.

He removed the danger, he dictated the terms, and he kept George within reach for years afterwards. When the crown went, so did the custody. The family took George back and decided where he could travel, whom he could visit, and what he could send. The brother who had once been the guard became the man the guards were posted against.

Every letter after the first one was answered by somebody else, or by nobody at all. Families like this one keep the portraits and lose the letters.