Until very recently, books treating Edward, Prince of Wales (later, King Edward VIII, and after his abdication, the Duke of Windsor) largely approached their subject biographically, frequently through the lens of scandal. In the last fifteen years, however, historians have begun to examine the Prince of Wales as part of the institution of the monarchy, turning their attention to the various ways Edward performed diplomacy, promoted the British Empire, and transformed the royal family from a sacral to a celebrity dynasty. Ted Powell's new biography synthesizes this scholarship to make a case for the essential Americanness of Edward's inner life, which he sees as key to his abdication in December 1936. Edward, Powell argues, was psychologically split in two: “The public persona was the quintessentially British ‘Edward’ the Prince (and later King); the private, genuine persona was the informal, Americanized ‘David,’ David being the name by which he was known to his family and lovers” (4). The abdication, then, “represented a form of suicide by ‘Edward,’ cutting ‘David’ free from his alter ego. He was not simply choosing Wallis Simpson over the throne, but an Americanized version of himself over his British identity” (221).

King Edward VIII argues that Edward/David's split personality mirrored his reception in Britain and the United States; in the former he was a royal, in the latter, a celebrity (136). The prince clearly preferred how he was viewed in America. Much of the book details the specifics of Edward's long relationship with the United States: the American films, products, women, and freedom he viewed, used, courted, and admired. Powell concludes that, long before Edward met Wallis Simpson, his travels in the United States and his love affair with all things American had transformed him from an English prince into an American private man.

Powell sees Edward as a modernizer, intent on refashioning the monarchy for the twentieth century. Edward, he argues, understood far better than his father or palace officials that the monarchy had to change with the times. Powell characterizes Edward's proposed changes as creating a more “presidential” monarchy, one in which the king would participate more overtly in the political process and eschew nonpartisanship (205). Further evidence of Edward's modernizing inclinations were his beliefs that the formalities of royal ceremonial needed to be eliminated and that the monarch needed to circulate more among the people in order to remain relevant (160).

While it is true to say that the image of Edward as celebrity was controversial within the House of Windsor and among politicians, it was also the case that many of his contemporaries viewed that celebrity as fundamentally damaging to the monarchy. In their view, Edward came to believe that the attention he received from adoring crowds was due to his personality, and not because he was the heir to the British throne. As Ross McKibbin astutely put it in Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (1998), “the career of Edward VIII demonstrates the difficulties of someone who came to rely almost exclusively upon the mass media … it sometimes appeared as if he had no existence independent of them” (9–10). Rather than pointing the way towards a new form of kingship, Edward's courting of public adulation broke from the trajectory George V envisaged for the monarchy, from one manifested through ritual and ceremony to one premised upon service and duty.

In this respect, Powell's book would have benefited from engagement with the longer evolution of the monarchy's role within the British political system, an enquiry undertaken successfully in the volume edited by Matthew Glencross, Judith Rowbotham, and Michael D. Kandiah, The Windsor Dynasty 1910 to the Present: “Long to Reign over Us”? (2016). This collection of essays, part of the series Palgrave Studies in Modern Monarchy, agrees with Powell that the legal and constitutional arguments made in 1936 for the abdication were actually policy decisions made on political and personal grounds, later justified by legal and constitutional arguments (190). But the collection also makes a strong case that Edward was not the modernizer of the British monarchy his celebrity might suggest. Rather, it establishes that innovation in the House of Windsor began earlier, with Edward's father. George V understood that monarchy was essentially an undemocratic institution, and for it to survive into the twentieth century members of the dynasty had to add value; that is, royals had to prove that they were not simply living off the public's money, but actually contributing by way of philanthropy and service. Both the transition to the service monarchy and the monarchy's move away from partisan politics (partisanship being a striking feature of Victoria's reign) were, in fact, modernizing elements introduced by George V to make the monarchy palatable to the wider public. Reconciling democratic government with the ancient, and distinctly undemocratic, institution of the monarchy in these ways did more to assure the long-term success of the latter than could the pronouncements of a royal who did not want to do the work required by his position but who loved the adulation of crowds.