George V

• 1. Introduction

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  Near the end of his life in January 1936, King George V of the United Kingdom asked his secretary a question. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin later described the scene. Each time the dying king regained consciousness, he had some kind inquiry or word of thanks for whoever was near him. Then his secretary came in, and George asked: “How is the Empire?” Baldwin thought it an unusual way to put the question. The secretary replied, “All is well, sir, with the Empire”, and the king gave him a smile before sinking back into unconsciousness.

  George reigned from 1910 until that death, as King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and as Emperor of India. Few people had expected it. He was born in 1865 as the second son of the Prince of Wales, and he stood third in line to the throne. His reign saw the British Empire reach its greatest territorial extent by the start of the 1920s. It also saw the rise of socialism, communism, fascism, Irish republicanism and the Indian independence movement. Who was the unlikely heir who found himself at the centre of all this? What did the Empire mean to him? And what really happened on his final night, a story that stayed hidden for decades?

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• 2. Sailor Prince, Inherited Bride

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  In September 1877, twelve-year-old George and his elder brother, Prince Albert Victor, boarded the cadet training ship HMS Britannia at Dartmouth, Devon. Their father believed the navy was “the very best possible training for any boy”. The brothers were only 17 months apart, and a tutor named John Neale Dalton, appointed in 1871, taught them together. Neither shone as a scholar.

  From 1879, the princes spent three years at sea with Dalton in attendance. They toured the Empire's colonies in the Caribbean, South Africa and Australia. They also visited Norfolk, Virginia, South America, the Mediterranean, Egypt and East Asia. In Japan in 1881, George had a local artist tattoo a blue and red dragon on his arm. He was received by the Emperor Meiji, and the brothers gave Empress Haruko two wallabies from Australia.

  At Jerusalem in 1882, the princes attended a Sephardic Passover dinner and received tattoos of the Jerusalem Cross. Their father had been given the same tattoo twenty years earlier. George wrote, “I was tattooed by the same man who tattooed Papa.” Dalton later wrote up the journey as The Cruise of HMS Bacchante. In it he recorded a sighting of the Flying Dutchman, a mythical ghost ship, somewhere between Melbourne and Sydney.

  On their return, Queen Victoria complained that her grandsons could not speak French or German. The princes spent six months in Lausanne trying to learn another language, and the attempt ultimately failed. After Lausanne the brothers went separate ways. Albert Victor attended Trinity College, Cambridge, while George stayed in the Royal Navy and travelled the world. He commanded Torpedo Boat 79 in home waters and then on the North America and West Indies Station. His last active service was in command of HMS Melampus in 1891-1892. After that, his naval rank was largely honorary.

  Malta, where George served for many years under his uncle Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, was also where he fell in love. The object of his affection was his cousin, Princess Marie of Edinburgh. His grandmother, father and uncle all approved the match. His mother and Marie's mother opposed it. The Princess of Wales thought the family too pro-German. The Duchess of Edinburgh was the only daughter of Alexander II of Russia, and she disliked England. She also resented yielding precedence to George's mother. That mother's father had been a minor German prince until he was called unexpectedly to the throne of Denmark. Guided by her mother, Marie refused his proposal. She married Ferdinand, Crown Prince of Romania, in 1893.

  In November 1891, Albert Victor became engaged to their second cousin once removed, Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, known in the family as May. Six weeks later, on the 14th of January 1892, he died of pneumonia during an influenza pandemic. George had only just recovered from typhoid fever, which had kept him in bed for six weeks. It was the same disease thought to have killed his grandfather Prince Albert. George now stood second in line to the throne.

  Queen Victoria still considered May a suitable match, and the two grew close in their shared mourning. A year after Albert Victor's death, George proposed and was accepted. They married on the 6th of July 1893 at the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace. George admitted he could not easily express his feelings in speech, yet the couple exchanged loving letters and notes of endearment throughout their lives. Queen Victoria had already made him Duke of York, Earl of Inverness and Baron Killarney on the 24th of May 1892, and he began receiving lessons in constitutional history from J. R. Tanner.

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• 3. Stamps and Strictness

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  Harold Nicolson, George's official biographer, despaired of the years when George was Duke of York. He wrote that George “may be all right as a young midshipman and a wise old king”. But as duke, Nicolson complained, George did nothing but “kill” animals and “stick in stamps”.

  The Duke and Duchess of York lived mainly at York Cottage, a relatively small house at Sandringham in Norfolk. Their way of life resembled that of a comfortable middle-class family more than that of royalty. George preferred a simple, quiet routine. It stood in sharp contrast to the lively social life of his father.

  The stamps were no trivial hobby. George played a major part in building the Royal Philatelic Collection into the most comprehensive collection of United Kingdom and Commonwealth stamps in the world. In some cases he set record prices for single items.

  The Yorks had five sons and a daughter. Randolph Churchill claimed that George was so strict that his children were terrified of him. Churchill also attributed to him a remark about how his own father feared Queen Victoria, how he feared his father, and how he meant his children to fear him. No direct source exists for that quotation. It is likely that George's parenting was little different from most people's at the time. Even so, the children did resent his strictness, and Prince Henry later called him a “terrible father”.

  George's tastes were equally fixed. He disliked sitting for portraits and despised modern art. One portrait by Charles Sims displeased him so much that he ordered it burned. He did admire William Reid Dick, whose statue of him stands outside Westminster Abbey in London. He also admired Bertram Mackennal, who made statues of him for display in Madras and Delhi.

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• 4. Crown and Empire

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  In 1901, the Duke and Duchess of York set off on a tour of the British Empire. Stops included Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, Aden, Ceylon, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Mauritius, South Africa, Canada and the Colony of Newfoundland. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain designed the tour, with the support of Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. It was meant to reward the Dominions for taking part in the South African War of 1899-1902. George handed out thousands of specially designed war medals to colonial troops.

  In South Africa, the royal party met civic leaders, African leaders and Boer prisoners. They were greeted with elaborate decorations, expensive gifts and fireworks. Not everyone cheered. Many white Cape Afrikaners resented the display and its expense. Critics in the English-language press attacked the enormous cost at a time when families faced severe hardship.

  In Australia, George opened the first session of the Australian Parliament after the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia. In New Zealand, he praised the military values, bravery, loyalty and obedience to duty of New Zealanders. Back in London, he gave a speech at Guildhall about an impression among Britain's “brethren across the seas”. In his words, “the Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her colonial trade against foreign competitors.”

  On the 9th of November 1901, George was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. His father wanted to prepare him to be king. Queen Victoria had deliberately excluded Edward from state affairs, but Edward gave his son wide access to state documents. George in turn let May see his papers, valued her counsel, and often relied on her to help write his speeches.

  From November 1905 to March 1906, George and May toured British India. He was disgusted by racial discrimination and campaigned for greater involvement of Indians in governing the country. A trip to Spain followed almost immediately, for the wedding of King Alfonso XIII to George's cousin Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg. An anarchist, Mateu Morral, threw a bomb that killed the driver of the royal coach and more than a dozen spectators. The bride and groom narrowly escaped.

  On the 6th of May 1910, Edward VII died, and George became king. He wrote in his diary, “I have lost my best friend and the best of fathers.” George had never liked his wife's habit of signing documents as “Victoria Mary”, and he insisted she drop one of the names. Neither thought she should be called Queen Victoria, so she became Queen Mary.

  The coronation took place at Westminster Abbey on the 22nd of June 1911 and was celebrated with the Festival of Empire in London. In July, the king and queen visited Ireland for five days. Thousands of people lined the route of their procession to cheer.

  Later that year came the Delhi Durbar. On the 12th of December 1911, George and Mary were presented to an assembled audience of Indian dignitaries and princes as Emperor and Empress of India. George wore the newly created Imperial Crown of India and announced that the Indian capital would move from Calcutta to Delhi. He was the only Emperor of India ever to attend his own Delhi Durbar.

  While travelling the subcontinent, George took the chance to hunt big game in Nepal. Over 10 days he shot 21 tigers, 8 rhinoceroses and a bear. He was a keen and expert marksman. On the 18th of December 1913, he joined a shooting party at the home of Lord Burnham that killed over a thousand pheasants in six hours. That is roughly one bird every 20 seconds. Even George had to admit that “we went a little too far”.

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• 5. Peers and Ireland

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  In 1910, a radical propagandist named Edward Mylius published a claim that George had secretly married in Malta as a young man. If true, his marriage to Queen Mary would have been bigamous. The lie had first appeared in print in 1893, and George had shrugged it off as a joke. Now Mylius was arrested, tried and found guilty of criminal libel. He was sentenced to a year in prison.

  George also objected to the anti-Catholic wording of the Accession Declaration he would have to make at the opening of his first parliament. He made it known that he would refuse to open parliament unless it changed. The Accession Declaration Act 1910 shortened the declaration and removed its most offensive phrases.

  The throne came to George at a politically turbulent moment. The year before, the House of Lords, dominated by Conservatives and Unionists, had rejected Lloyd George's People's Budget. That broke the convention that the Lords did not veto money bills. Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith had asked Edward VII to promise to create enough Liberal peers to pass Liberal legislation. Edward reluctantly agreed, provided the Lords rejected the budget after two successive general elections. After the January 1910 election, the Conservative peers let the budget pass without a vote.

  Asquith then tried to curb the Lords through constitutional reforms, which the upper house blocked. A constitutional conference collapsed in November 1910 after 21 meetings. Asquith and Lord Crewe, the Liberal leader in the Lords, asked George to grant a dissolution and a second general election. They also asked him to promise to create enough Liberal peers if the Lords blocked the legislation again. Refusal would mean the Liberal government resigning, which would make the monarch appear to side with “the peers against the people”.

  George's two private secretaries gave him conflicting advice. The Liberal Lord Knollys urged him to accept the Cabinet's demands. The Unionist Lord Stamfordham urged him to accept the resignation. Like his father, George reluctantly agreed to the dissolution and the creation of peers. He felt his ministers had taken advantage of his inexperience to browbeat him. After the December 1910 general election, the Lords passed the bill once they heard of the threat to swamp the house with new peers. The Parliament Act 1911 permanently removed, with a few exceptions, the Lords' power to veto bills. George later came to believe that Knollys had withheld information about the opposition's willingness to form a government if the Liberals resigned.

  The 1910 elections left the Liberals as a minority government dependent on the Irish Nationalist Party. As the Nationalists wished, Asquith introduced a Home Rule bill for Ireland, which would never have been possible without the Parliament Act. The Conservatives and Unionists opposed it. As tempers rose, relations between the elderly Knollys and the Conservatives became poor, and he was pushed into retirement.

  Desperate to avoid civil war in Ireland between Unionists and Nationalists, George called a meeting of all parties at Buckingham Palace in July 1914. After four days, the conference ended without agreement. Events in Europe soon overtook the dispute, and Irish Home Rule was suspended for the duration of the war.

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• 6. The House of Windsor

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  On the 4th of August 1914, George wrote in his diary, “I held a council at 10:45 to declare war with Germany. It is a terrible catastrophe but it is not our fault.” He added, “Please to God it may soon be over.” For the British public, the face of the enemy was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who came to symbolise the horrors of the war. The Kaiser was George's first cousin.

  The family tree made the king an awkward target for anti-German feeling. His paternal grandfather was Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, so George and his children bore German titles as princes and princesses of that house. Queen Mary's father was the Duke of Teck, a descendant of the German Dukes of Württemberg. Other relatives who were British subjects carried German titles such as Teck, Battenberg and Schleswig-Holstein. When H. G. Wells wrote of Britain's “alien and uninspiring court”, George replied: “I may be uninspiring, but I'll be damned if I'm alien.”

  On the 17th of July 1917, George issued a royal proclamation renaming the royal house. The German-sounding House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha became the House of Windsor. He and all his British relatives gave up their German titles and styles and took British-sounding surnames. George softened the blow for male relatives by giving them British peerages. His cousin Prince Louis of Battenberg had been forced to resign as First Sea Lord earlier in the war because of anti-German feeling. He became Louis Mountbatten, 1st Marquess of Milford Haven. Queen Mary's brothers became Adolphus Cambridge, 1st Marquess of Cambridge, and Alexander Cambridge, 1st Earl of Athlone.

  Letters patent gazetted on the 11th of December 1917 narrowed who could use the style of Royal Highness and the title of Prince or Princess of Great Britain and Ireland. Only the children of the sovereign, the children of the sovereign's sons, and the eldest living son of the eldest son of a Prince of Wales kept them. Relatives who had fought on the German side lost their British peerages. These included Ernest Augustus, Crown Prince of Hanover, and Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Their peerages were suspended by a 1919 Order in Council under the Titles Deprivation Act 1917. Under pressure from his mother, George also removed the Garter flags of his German relations from St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.

  Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, another first cousin, was overthrown in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The British government offered the Tsar and his family political asylum. Worsening conditions at home, and fears that revolution might spread to the British Isles, led George to think the Romanovs' presence would look inappropriate. Lord Mountbatten of Burma later claimed that Prime Minister David Lloyd George opposed the rescue. The letters of Lord Stamfordham suggest instead that it was George who opposed it, against his government's advice. MI1, a branch of the British secret service, planned a rescue in advance. The strengthening Bolsheviks and wider troubles in the war meant it was never put into operation.

  Nicholas and his immediate family remained in Russia, where the Bolsheviks killed them in 1918. George wrote in his diary: “It was a foul murder. I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men and thorough gentleman.” In 1919, Nicholas's mother, Marie Feodorovna, and other members of the extended Russian imperial family were rescued from Crimea by a British warship.

  Two months after the war ended, the king's youngest son, John, died aged 13 after a lifetime of ill health. Queen Mary broke the news to George. She wrote that John had been “a great anxiety to us for many years” and that “the first break in the family circle is hard to bear”.

  Before the war, most of Europe was ruled by monarchs related to George. During and after it, the monarchies of Austria, Germany, Greece and Spain fell to revolution and war, as Russia's had. In March 1919, Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Lisle Strutt was sent on the king's personal authority to escort the former Emperor Charles I of Austria and his family to safety in Switzerland. In 1922, a Royal Navy ship was sent to Greece to rescue George's cousins Prince and Princess Andrew.

  In May 1922, George toured Belgium and northern France, visiting First World War cemeteries and memorials under construction by the Imperial War Graves Commission. Rudyard Kipling described the visit in a poem, “The King's Pilgrimage”. That tour and one short visit to Italy in 1923 were the only times after the war that George agreed to leave the United Kingdom on official business.

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• 7. The Ordinary Fellow

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  On the 22nd of June 1921, George opened the Parliament of Northern Ireland with an appeal for conciliation. General Jan Smuts helped draft the speech, and Lloyd George approved it. George had already told the Prime Minister of his horror at government-sanctioned killings and reprisals. A few weeks later, a truce was agreed. Negotiations between Britain and the Irish secessionists produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty. By the end of 1922, Ireland was partitioned, the Irish Free State was established, and Lloyd George was out of office.

  George and his advisers feared the rise of socialism and the labour movement, which they mistakenly equated with republicanism. In reality, the socialists no longer believed in their anti-monarchical slogans. They were ready to make peace with the monarchy if it took the first step. George obliged. He was most at ease among naval officers and landed gentry, yet he adopted an inclusive stance that crossed class lines. He cultivated friendly relations with moderate Labour politicians and trade union officials. This shift in royal behaviour boosted the family's popularity through the economic crises of the 1920s and for more than two generations afterwards.

  The years from 1922 to 1929 brought frequent changes of government. In 1924, no party held a clear majority, and George appointed Ramsay MacDonald as the first Labour Prime Minister. That government lasted less than a year. Even so, the king's tact reassured Labour sympathisers that he would not work against them. During the General Strike of 1926, he advised Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government against inflammatory action. He objected to calling the strikers revolutionaries, saying, “Try living on their wages before you judge them.”

  In 1926, George hosted an Imperial Conference in London. There the Balfour Declaration described the Dominions as “autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another”. The Statute of Westminster 1931 formalised their legislative independence. It also meant the succession to the throne could change only if every Dominion Parliament and the Parliament at Westminster agreed. Its preamble called the monarch “the symbol of the free association of the members of the British Commonwealth of Nations”.

  In 1931, in the wake of a world financial crisis, George encouraged the formation of a National Government led by MacDonald and Baldwin. He volunteered to reduce the civil list to help balance the budget. He was also concerned by the rise to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. In 1934, he bluntly told the German ambassador, Leopold von Hoesch, that Germany was now the peril of the world. He predicted war within ten years if Germany carried on at its present rate. He also warned Eric Phipps, the British ambassador in Berlin, to be suspicious of the Nazis.

  In 1932, George agreed to deliver a Christmas speech on the radio, which became an annual event. He had not favoured the innovation at first. He was persuaded that it was what his people wanted. By the Silver Jubilee of 1935, he had become a well-loved king. Faced with the crowd's adulation, he said, “I cannot understand it, after all I am only a very ordinary sort of fellow.”

  Historian David Cannadine called King George V and Queen Mary an “inseparably devoted couple” who upheld “character” and “family values”. George set a standard of conduct for royalty that reflected the values of the upper middle class rather than the vices of the upper class. He was a traditionalist by temperament and never fully approved of the revolutionary changes under way in British society. Yet he acted as a force for neutrality and moderation, seeing himself as a mediator rather than a final decision maker. He once explained, “it has always been my dream to identify myself with the great idea of Empire.”

  George's eldest son, Edward, was a constant disappointment in these later years. The king was upset that Edward would not settle down, and appalled by his many affairs with married women. He was far fonder of his second son, Prince Albert, and doted on his eldest granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth. He nicknamed her “Lilibet”, and she affectionately called him “Grandpa England”. In 1935, he said of Edward: “After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months”. Of Albert and Elizabeth, he said: “I pray to God my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne”.

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• 8. Decline and Death

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  On the 28th of October 1915, George was seriously injured when his horse threw him at a troop review in France. The war took a toll on his health, and his heavy smoking aggravated recurring breathing problems. He suffered from chronic bronchitis. In 1925, on his doctors' instructions, he was reluctantly sent on a recuperative private cruise in the Mediterranean. It was his third trip abroad since the war, and his last.

  In November 1928, George fell gravely ill with septicaemia. It settled between the base of his right lung and his diaphragm as an empyema, which needed draining. For the next two years his son Edward took over many of his duties. In 1929, a suggestion of further rest abroad was rejected by the king “in rather strong language”. Instead, he spent three months at Craigweil House in Aldwick, in the seaside resort of Bognor in Sussex. As a result, the town gained the suffix Regis, Latin for “of the King”. A myth later grew that his last words, on hearing he would soon be well enough to revisit the town, were a rude dismissal of Bognor.

  George never fully recovered. In his final year he was occasionally given oxygen. The death of his favourite sister, Victoria, in December 1935 depressed him deeply. On the evening of the 15th of January 1936, he took to his bedroom at Sandringham House complaining of a cold. He never left the room, and he grew gradually weaker.

  By the 20th of January, George was close to death. His physicians, led by Lord Dawson of Penn, issued a bulletin saying, “The King's life is moving peacefully towards its close.” Dawson's private diary was unearthed after his death and made public in 1986. It records that George's last words, a mumbled “God damn you!”, were aimed at his nurse, Catherine Black, when she gave him a sedative that night.

  The diary revealed something more startling. Dawson supported the gentle growth of euthanasia in the hands of medical professionals, and he admitted that he ended the king's life. At about 11 o'clock, he judged that the final stage might drag on for many hours. He wrote that this would deny the king the dignity he deserved and would exhaust those watching. So he injected morphine and then cocaine into the king's distended jugular vein. Within about a quarter of an hour, the breathing was quieter and the physical struggle was gone.

  Dawson recorded that the death came at 11:55 pm. He wanted it announced in the morning edition of The Times rather than in what he called “less appropriate... evening journals”. He had told nobody beforehand, not the royal family and not the king himself. British Pathé announced the death the following day, describing George as “for each one of us, more than a King, a father of a great family”.

  The German composer Paul Hindemith went to a BBC studio on the morning after the king's death. In six hours he wrote Trauermusik, or “Mourning Music”, for viola and orchestra. That same evening it was broadcast live, with Adrian Boult conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Hindemith as soloist.

  George's will was read at a private family meeting at Sandringham on the 22nd of January 1936. He had reportedly saved £487,000 from the Civil List during his reign, and he left a private fortune of approximately £3,000,000. His four surviving younger children, Albert, Mary, Henry and George, each received £750,000. The new king, Edward VIII, asked why nothing had been provided for him. The solicitor, Sir Bernard Halsey-Bircham, explained that George V had assumed his eldest son would have built up a substantial fortune from the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall.

  At the procession to Westminster Hall, where the coffin would lie in state, the cross on top of the Imperial State Crown fell off. It landed in the gutter as the cortege turned into New Palace Yard. Edward VIII saw it fall and wondered whether it was a bad omen for his reign. George was interred at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on the 28th of January. Before the funeral, his four surviving sons mounted a guard at the catafalque, known as the Vigil of the Princes. Edward abdicated before the year was out, leaving Albert to take the throne as George VI. The vigil was not repeated until 2002, at the death of George's daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

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