Noël Coward acted covertly on behalf of the British government in the early years of World War II. Coward kept mum about his involvement, but the recent publication of his letters, with commentary by Barry Day, has “pulled a fair amount of the covert nitty-gritty out of the archival murk,” as Stephen Koch writes.
Being Noël Coward, he also partied—notably with the recently abdicated pro-Nazi Duke of Windsor and his more intelligent and even more pro-Nazi wife. The Windsors may have looked like Coward’s type, but Coward had always privately despised the former king. In 1936, he wrote, “I’ve known for years that he had a common mind and liked second-rate people, and I am sure it is a good thing for England that he abdicated.”
By 1940, the Windsors had graduated from mediocrity into real menace. One factor in the abdication had been that the prime minister had been told, reliably, that the woman inflaming the king’s already fascistic sentiments was a friend of Ribbentrop and the next thing to a Nazi agent. After the abdication, the Windsors were married in the residence of a Nazi collaborator. As the Battle of Britain approached, British intelligence believed—correctly—that Hitler, assisted by Ribbentrop, planned to restore the duke to the throne as a quisling monarch. Worst of all, intelligence suspected that the couple may have been complicit in this treachery….
We can only speculate whether Coward was keeping unofficial tabs on the couple.