When King Edward VIII acceded to the throne in January 1936, Stanley Baldwin hailed him as the best qualified of British monarchs. The British people needed no such reassurance. They knew him to be widely travelled; to be goo-looking, eloquent, quick-witted, charming beyond the normal measure of humanity; to have concerned himself with patently sincere good will in the problems of unemployment, poverty and homelessness which plagued his people. For the first time this extraordinary story is told by someone who has enjoyed unrestricted access to the treasure house of the Royal Archives; has seen the private papers of courtiers hitherto jealously guarded by their descendants; studied the secret Cabinet documents of the period, the reports of the police and security services, the embargoed papers of such statesman as Chamberlain, Baldwin and Winston Churchill.