George V

King of the United Kingdom (r. 1910-1936)

• Born: June 3, 1865
• Birthplace: Marlborough House, London, England
• Died: January 20, 1936
• Place of death: Sandringham, Norfolk, England

George V brought stability and prestige to the British monarchy at a time of unprecedented turmoil. He was a model of constitutional propriety, and he fused Victorian and Edwardian elements of kingship to form the popular modern monarchy.

Early Life

As the second son born to the Prince and Princess of Wales (later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra), Prince George, christened George Frederick Ernest Albert, was expected to follow a career in the navy. He became a naval cadet in 1877 and remained in active service until the death of his brother, Prince Albert Victor, in 1891 brought him into direct line of succession for the throne. The navy left its mark, and George was as much a “Sailor King” as the ancestor who carried that popular title, William IV.

As king, George revealed the limitations and benefits of a naval upbringing. He showed little imagination or mental subtlety and was obsessed with detail and punctuality. During his reign, the royal household followed a clockwork routine. He had a rough sense of humor and was largely indifferent to the fine arts. Yet the king was tenacious, robustly patriotic, and dedicated to duty. He possessed a sailor’s simple Christianity, and he inherited Queen Victoria’s devotion to family and her rigid standard of morality.

George was created the duke of York in the summer of 1892. In 1893, he married Princess May of Teck (she was named Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, but until she became queen was known as “May,” after the month in which she was born), the fiancé of his deceased brother. Dignified and well educated, the princess was the model royal consort. She was, as even Queen Victoria said, “an excellent, useful and good wife.” The couple settled in York Cottage on the Sandringham estate, a modest residence, for the next thirty-three years. They lived quietly while the duke collected stamps (in 1936, he left 250,000 stamps, a collection of almost incalculable value) and shot pheasants. Occasionally and reluctantly, the duke set aside his stamps and shotguns for tours of the Empire. In 1901, he and the duchess visited Australia and New Zealand. They followed a demanding program that set the pattern for all future royal tours of the Empire and Commonwealth. In 1905, the royal couple, now the Prince and Princess of Wales, toured India, and in 1908 they visited Canada.

In his public appearances, George, who was five feet six inches tall and slight of figure, lacked the commanding presence of his father, but he dressed with meticulous care in an unchanging style, and always wore a well-trimmed beard. At first he was compared unfavorably with Edward VII, but late in his reign, George V’s settled habits and Victorian appearance made him, according to an observer in 1935, “a centre of calm in a blowing wind of change a signal of comfort and assurance on a ship driving rapidly forward.” Queen Mary’s unfashionably dated style of dress also reinforced this image of the Georgian monarchy.

Life’s Work

George succeeded his father in May, 1910. Soon after his accession, he faced his first testing crisis because of a political struggle between the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The Liberal government, with a majority in the Commons, proposed in 1910 to curb the veto of the Lords by act of Parliament. Conservatives hoped that the king would assist them in preserving the powers of the Lords. The king suppressed his subjective notions, however, and followed the advice of his current set of ministers. To pass a Parliament bill, the king promised to create a government majority in the House of Lords, perhaps creating as many as five hundred peers. Faced with this pledge, the Lords capitulated and in 1911 passed a bill that severely curtailed their powers.

Politicians on the Left subjected George V’s actions in 1910 and 1911 to close scrutiny because the quarrel over the Parliament bill was a vital contest over the power to determine the fate of progressive legislation. Their confidence in the monarchy followed from the king’s decision to accept the advice of his responsible ministers. This was the right formula for constitutional monarchy, and it was a pattern of behavior followed by all the king’s successors. The caution of George V during the crisis over the Parliament bill did not lead to an automatic and mechanical exercise of the royal prerogative by his ministers. Over the issue of home rule for Ireland, the king demonstrated in 1913 and 1914 that he was not a mere conscript of the government.

The Liberal government introduced a home rule bill for Ireland in 1912, seeking to fulfill a policy that William Ewart Gladstone had adopted for the party in 1886. Ireland, including the predominantly Protestant counties of Ulster, was to obtain a measure of autonomy from Great Britain. Irish home rule, however, provoked a bitter struggle between the Liberal and Conservative parties that threatened to involve the Crown. No longer able to use the House of Lords to veto undesirable legislation, the Conservatives sought to use the Crown as a means of avoiding the “disruption” of Great Britain and the “coercion” of Ulster into an Irish parliament. George was encouraged to refuse assent to the Home Rule Bill, to dismiss his Liberal ministers, or to dissolve Parliament and ensure a general election.

The king declined to act in a partisan manner, but he did believe that the virtual emasculation of the House of Lords placed an additional responsibility on his shoulders. Privately, he pressed the Liberal government to put home rule to the test of a general election. The government refused to consider an election, but the prime minister agreed, at the king’s insistence, to private meetings with the leader of the opposition late in 1913 and early in 1914. Largely to appease the king, the prime minister and other leading participants in the dispute also met at a roundtable conference at Buckingham Palace in July, 1914. Differences were too wide, however, and the conference proved fruitless. George deliberately chose to maintain a public position of neutrality during the home rule crisis. He did not hesitate to press his advice on the government in private, however, and he took the initiative in urging the politicians to seek a compromise solution of the Irish problem.

During World War I, the king undertook a heavy schedule of public appearances. In four years, he made 450 visits to troops, three hundred to hospitals, and hundreds to munitions factories and shipyards. He admired the common soldier and took pride in personally conferring fifty thousand awards for gallantry. In the atmosphere of World War I, however, even the king’s tireless public service was not enough to still whispers about his foreign ancestry. It was rumored that his German blood kept him from giving his wholehearted support to the Allied effort. To restore public confidence, George made a dramatic gesture in 1917. He repudiated his German family name and proclaimed his dynasty the House of Windsor. By the war’s end, the king’s Englishness was unquestioned. With the signing of the armistice on the morning of November 11, 1918, large crowds in London spontaneously drifted to Buckingham to cheer the triumph of national qualities personified by the royal figure on the palace balcony.

After the war, the king showed his best qualities by working in a relaxed, noncondescending way with the Labour governments of 1924 and 1929. Although a fervent republican early in his career, Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Party leader, appreciated the king’s goodwill and came to respect his counsel. MacDonald, in turn, became the king’s favorite prime minister. Labour circles also appreciated the king’s style of kingship. They found the king a more praiseworthy person than Edward VII and his court less extravagant. This cordial response to monarchy on the part of Labour was extremely important because the appearance of Labour ministers at Buckingham Palace was a clear sign of a tremendous shift of power in the British constitution.

The royal family acknowledged the need to adapt to the new political facts by making a conscious effort to broaden its symbolism. Members of the royal family began to extend the range of their activities by visiting industrial sections of the country and putting the royal approval on humble and useful services. George moved with ease among the working classes, and in private he urged his ministers to show generosity and compassion for the unemployed and poorer members of the community.

The most controversial act of George’s career came in 1931, when he commissioned MacDonald to form a national government. Unable to agree on economies deemed necessary to restore international confidence in the pound, the Labour government of that year, with MacDonald as prime minister, prepared to resign. The king, however, acting on the advice of opposition leaders, persuaded MacDonald to see the country through its financial crisis by forming a national government. The collapse of the Labour government and its replacement by a national administration transformed the political scene. Labour chose to go into active opposition and even expelled MacDonald from its ranks. In October, the party lost more than two hundred seats (288 to 52) in a general election, and it was not to form another government until 1945. The national government, composed mostly of Conservatives, won overwhelming public endorsement and held power throughout the 1930’s.

For the king, the 1931 crisis was the supreme political moment of his life. His own advisers thought that he had been able “to play the Sovereign for once, and give a lead to his rattled Ministers.” The king acted in a perfectly constitutional manner in 1931, but some questioned the wisdom of his actions. The election of 1931 rid the country of a vigorous opposition for a decade, and the king drew attention to himself and ran the risk of becoming involved in political controversy. The danger was minimized, however, because the king voiced no personal political preference and the national government received no open endorsement.

After long suffering from poor health, George died in January, 1936, only months after celebrating his silver jubilee.

Significance

When George came to the throne in 1910, on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday, he seemed ill-equipped to be king. However, during his reign he gained the respect and affection of his subjects. He not only performed business duties effectively, and with studied neutrality, but also became, unexpectedly, the admired symbol of his country. Quite unwittingly, the king created a synthesis of the best of the Victorian and Edwardian monarchies. Edwardian magnificence was maintained, but it was wrapped in an aura of Victorian duty and respectability and was presided over by a man whose character and dedication gave him unassailable prestige. Thus, while most of the European monarchies, many of them rooted for centuries, were eclipsed by a republican tide, the British monarchy under George V emerged more firmly established than ever.

The king’s success did not rest on character alone. He was fortunate in war, and he reigned over a reasonably content and form-conscious country. Moreover, an effective parliamentary system enabled the king to avoid fatal political mistakes made by other royal houses. George also had a series of wise private secretaries, advisers appointed at his sole discretion, who played an indispensable role in maintaining good relations between the king and his subjects.

Bibliography

Clay, Catrine. King, Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who Led the World to War. London: John Murray, 2006. A family biography about three cousins: George V, Kaiser William II of Germany, and Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Clay maintains that a rift in the cousins’ relationships was one of the causes of World War I.

Gore, John. King George V: A Personal Memoir. London: John Murray, 1941. An installment of the official biography that describes the king’s private life and gives a picture of his homes, friendships, tastes, and hobbies. A well-written and tactful account.

Morrow, Ann. Cousins Divided: George V and Nicholas II. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2006. Examines the relationship of the two cousins and why George refused to give Nicholas sanctuary in Britain during the Russian Revolution.

Nicolson, Harold. King George V: His Life and Reign. London: Constable, 1952. A superb biography, this is the official chronicle of the king’s public life written by a man of letters. Based on papers in the Royal Archives, the book examines the king’s attitude toward successive political issues of his reign.

Pope-Hennessy, James. Queen Mary, 1867-1953. London: Allen and Unwin, 1959. An elegantly written and authorized life of Queen Mary by a prominent man of letters. This splendid biography is based on materials in the Royal Archives.

Rose, Kenneth. King George V. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. A polished, lively, and perceptive narrative that combines the private and public lives of the king. Not an official biography, but the author acknowledges the assistance of members of the royal family and dedicates his study to Edward, duke of Kent, a grandson of George V. Based on private papers, secondary accounts, and extracts from the Royal Archives made by Harold Nicolson.

Thompson, J. A., and Arthur Mejia, Jr. The Modern British Monarchy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971. This book traces the development of the British monarchy from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century and explains how a seemingly anachronistic institution came to play a vital role in contemporary Great Britain. Its authors place the Georgian monarchy in perspective and describe it as a synthesis of the best of the Victorian and Edwardian legacies.