The man known to history as King George V was born on the 3rd of June 1865 at Marlborough House in Westminster, London. His father was Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Queen Victoria of Britain, ruler of the British Empire since her accession in 1837. As her eldest male child Albert Edward was the heir presumptive to the throne, though George’s father frequently clashed with the queen as a result of the perception of him as a frivolous, unruly royal heir. George’s mother was Alexandra of Denmark, a scion of the royal house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg who had married Albert Edward in 1863. George was not their first child. In January 1864, just months after their wedding, Prince Albert Victor had been born, making him the second in line to the throne. When George was born the next year he became the third in line to the throne, after his father and his slightly older brother. In addition, Albert Edward and Alexandra had four further children, three daughters named Louise, Victoria and Maud, and a son called Alexander John who was born prematurely in 1871 and who died just 24 hours later. As a child of the royal family, George was largely raised by a series of nannies and various household staff across the royal palaces at Windsor, Westminster, Sandringham and elsewhere. This was typical of the age and George would have had protracted periods of little contact with his parents. He and his elder brother Albert were of a close enough age that they were educated together. Their primary tutor from 1871 onwards, charged with overseeing their education, though not handling it exclusively, was John Neale Dalton, a Church of England clergyman who had previously served as a private chaplain to George’s grandmother, Queen Victoria. Indeed, it was the queen who recommended Dalton, believing that the boys’ father was neglecting their education. He provided them with a varied curriculum over the next decade, much of it focused on Protestant texts such as The Book of Common Prayer, but also the Greek and Roman classics, the humanities being prized above the sciences in the late Victorian educational curriculum. George was not an especially gifted student, but he was doubtlessly the more able of the pair, Albert being prone to laziness and an obtuse attitude towards their tutor. Conversely, George and Dalton would develop a rapport which developed into a life-long acquaintance. When George was just twelve years of age, his father decided that he and Albert would benefit from joining the British Navy and exploring the world. They were enrolled in the Royal Navy in 1877 and, in 1879, after some initial seafaring training, the two young princes were sent off, with Dalton as their tutor in toe, on board the HMS Bacchante, a newly-built corvette of the Royal Navy. The ship was one of a new class of torpedo carriage ships and Queen Victoria was much concerned that her two grandsons would be lost at sea, but their father, a stern disciplinarian, stated that they needed to see the world. To convince his mother of the sturdiness of the vessel the Bacchante was ordered to sail into a gale-force storm near Britain in 1879. When it emerged unscathed Victoria agreed to let her two grandsons embark on the journey. The two boys and Dalton spent the next three years voyaging on the Bacchante, which had been tasked with patrolling the world’s sea lanes at a time when the Royal Navy effectively policed the world’s oceans. In total they travelled over 40,000 miles, visiting the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, South America, South Africa, China, Japan and Australia. In Japan they were amongst the first British royals to have direct experience of the rapid modernisation of Japanese society in recent years. They also met Emperor Meiji while there in 1881. The boys were even present in South Africa for some of the First Boer War. Accounts of their adventures were later collected together and published in 1886 as The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship Bacchante, 1879 to 82. Life at sea seems to have suited George and following his return to England it was determined that he would continue on as a commander in the Royal Navy, whereas Albert, as the second in line to the throne, was sent off to Trinity College, Cambridge to continue the education he had apparently had little taste for under Dalton’s tutelage. Conversely, George was sent to Malta, where his uncle, Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second eldest son, was serving as a senior figure of the British Mediterranean Fleet, becoming a Vice-Admiral in 1882 and Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet in 1886. Under his uncle George continued his training as a naval commander throughout the mid-1880s. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, George had reached an age and level of experience that resulted in him being made a commander of several ships in the Royal Navy. One was the HMS Thrush, a Redbreast-class gunboat which he took command of in 1890 during a tour of the Western Atlantic, largely operating between Nova Scotia in north-eastern Canada and the British colony of Bermuda further to the south near the Caribbean. Shortly thereafter he was placed in charge of the newly commissioned HMS Melampus, an Apollo-class cruiser which he was given command of in 1891, but it would be his last active command, as events in Britain in the early 1890s would change the future course of his life. George lived through his childhood and early adult years in the expectation that his father would succeed his aging grandmother one day as king, and then, after a presumably shorter reign than Victoria, Albert Edward would himself die and be succeeded by George’s elder brother, Albert Victor. It was assumed that George would not become king, but many people might have wished that he was second in line. His elder brother, Albert, was a problematic heir, with questions having been repeatedly raised about his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain and would have created problems had it become known that the second in line to the throne was gay. In 1889 his name was raised by the Metropolitan Police in London following an investigation into a male brothel on Cleveland Street in the city, though his involvement here was never conclusively proven. There were also questions about Albert’s psychological well-being, issues which have led to outlandish claims that Albert could have been the infamous Jack the Ripper. Yet in the early 1890s he seemed to be destined to become king one day and there was even talk of his being appointed as Viceroy of Ireland. But mother nature had other plans. Between 1889 and 1892 a pandemic known as the Russian or Asiatic Flu swept westwards from Asia into Europe. Albert fell prey to it and died on the 14th of January 1892 just shy of his 28th birthday. Now, all of a sudden, George became second in line to the throne. Provided he did not die before his father he would one day become King of Britain and Emperor of India. Albert’s premature death also had a significant bearing on George’s personal life. At the time that he fell ill in December 1891 Albert had been scheduled to marry Mary of Teck, the daughter of Count Francis von Hohenstein, Duke of Teck, one of the most senior figures in the German aristocracy. Although George had grown close to his cousin, Princess Marie of Edinburgh, who herself would one day become Queen of Romania, the decision of who he should marry was now largely taken out of his hands and it was decided that he should marry Mary of Teck, his older brother’s intended bride. The pair were wed at St James’s Palace on the 6th of July 1893 in what by all accounts became a relatively happy union despite its arranged nature. Children soon followed, with Edward born a year later in the summer of 1894, Albert late in 1895, Mary in 1897, Henry in 1900, George in 1902 and John in 1905. All except John, who unfortunately developed severe epilepsy and passed away in 1919 when he was just thirteen years old, would live long lives. As parents, George and Mary were not easy to define. George was a very strict disciplinarian, like his own father. This was not unusual by the standards of the late nineteenth century, but George appears to have instilled significant fear in his children, while he and Mary have also been otherwise criticised for failing to notice that a string of nannies that cared for the children in their earlier years were often emotionally and physically abusive towards them. However, on some occasions their children expressed affection for their parents in their later years and when George and Mary had to undertake a world tour for eight months in 1901 they were said to be deeply upset at being separated from the children for such an extended period of time. Overall, it was a complicated relationship between the pair and their children. George had become Duke of York in 1892 following the death of his older brother, a title which had been borne for centuries by many figures who were second in line to the throne of England and then Britain. His new position meant that he had to quit active service with the Royal Navy of any kind which might endanger his well-being. As such, following his marriage to Mary in 1893 much of their roles as Duke and Duchess were ceremonial and designed to expose the British people as much as possible to the man who would one day, perhaps many years from then, rule Britain and its empire. Thus, social engagements and photo opportunities became the order of the day, though unlike his father George was not an avid party-goer and generally preferred a quiet life at York Cottage in Sandringham to hobnobbing with British high society. Some of his formal duties involved travel overseas, notably when George joined his parents to attend the funeral of their cousin, Tsar Alexander III of Russia, in St Petersburg in 1894. There he spent considerable time in the presence of his cousin, the new Tsar Nicholas II, whose rule would become entangled in many ways with George’s years later. George’s time as Duke of York eventually came to an end in January 1901 following the death of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, after a reign of 63 and a half years. With her passing, which signalled the end of an age in British and indeed European history, George’s father, Albert Edward succeeded as King Edward VII of Britain and Emperor of India. He was already 59 years of age at the time of his accession and his health was deteriorating owing to a chronic smoking habit and years of excess of all kinds. He would spend much of his relatively brief reign dealing with bronchitis, as well as a form of skin cancer which attacked his nose, and even memory loss. It was consequently expected that George, who had become the Prince of Wales and heir designate in 1901, would succeed his father before too long. Nevertheless, Edward survived throughout the 1900s as George and Mary took on a string of ever growing responsibilities, notably a world tour in 1901 in which they visited the furthest flung reaches of the British Empire. There were several important aspects to this, notably his opening of the first session of the Australian Commonwealth Parliament and a visit to South Africa during the Second Boer War. Further visits to India and other parts of the empire followed in the course of the 1900s. Thus, by the time George’s father died on the 6th of May 1910, the subjects of the empire as well as Britain itself were familiar with the man who now ascended as their new king. He was 44 years of age at the time. George’s coronation as King George V of Britain and Emperor of India, along with the coronation of his wife Mary as Queen consort, took place at Westminster Abbey in London on the 22nd of June 1911. It was attended by an enormous number of the royal families and monarchs of Europe, including, for instance, members of the German imperial family, numerous other German princes and princesses, representatives of the Tsar of Bulgaria, the Romanian royal family, the Archduke Karl of Austria representing Emperor Franz Joseph and even the Crown Prince of the Ottoman Empire as a stand-in for the Sultan. Within a few years many of these imperial and royal houses would be shattered by the impact of the First World War and although few could have even guessed at it in the summer of 1911 this would be one of the last times when the many royal lines of old Europe would congregate in one place for such an event. In tandem the Festival of Empire was held at the Crystal Palace in London to celebrate George’s coronation. At this the Crystal Palace, which had first been built to house the first Great Exposition in 1851, became home to a myriad array of scenes designed to showcase the might of the British Empire at its height. In all 300 buildings replicating elements of other buildings from across the empire were reconstructed inside the Crystal Palace. But, even as the coronation plans were underway there was a political crisis also raging in Britain, one which involved the new king in a surprising departure from the general belief by the early twentieth century that the monarch’s role was simply to rubber-stamp what parliament decided upon. At the heart of the matter was the People’s Budget which the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, had first attempted to introduce in April 1909. The budget was very progressive for its time, with Lloyd George stating that it was effectively a wartime budget, with the enemy being poverty and squalor in Britain’s working class and industrial communities. As such it proposed large tax increases to pay for a revolutionary system of welfare measures and investment in public services. Much of this was political, with the Liberals believing that the best way to stall the rise of the Labour Party, who were perceived as dangerous radicals in the 1900s, was to introduce the welfare reforms which would prevent traditional Liberal voters from switching to Labour. Yet the People’s Budget provoked a furious response and the Conservative-dominated House of Lords refused to ratify the passage of the budget. Traditionally the Lords was seen as a rubber-stamping body, one which was not supposed to block legislation which had passed through parliament and so the impasse over the People’s Budget had provoked a constitutional crisis in the last months of the reign of Edward VII. By the time George ascended the throne, the budget had been allowed to pass through the Lords without a vote, ending the immediate crisis, but the new king was immediately faced with calls for constitutional reform of the House of Lords to ensure a development like this never occurred again. Within days of his accession George was being petitioned by the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith about various methods of constitutional reform which would prevent another impasse of the kind which had recently been seen. This was particularly necessary as British parliamentary politics in the early 1910s was balanced on a knife-edge, with the Ulster Unionists and the Irish Parliamentary Party often holding the balance of power between the Liberals and the Conservatives. One proposal which was floated was that George would agree to the creation of a large number of new Liberal peers who would turn the political balance in the House of Lords in favour of the Liberals and their allies. George was not entirely favourable to the idea of politicising the creation of noble titles in this way and in any event the Conservatives were more inclined to make concessions when they learned of this plan. As a result, a compromise was reached in the shape of the Parliament Act of 1911. The Act contained two provisions. Firstly, it stated that the House of Lords could not veto bills relating to the budget and other financial issues henceforth once they had passed through the House of Commons, while in return the Conservatives received an unofficial promise that their majority in the House of Lords would not be overcome by packing it with newly created Liberal peers. George gave his assent to the Act in August 1911 in what is one of the most significant reforms of the constitutional relationship of the upper and lower houses of parliament to each other in modern British history. Whatever government was going to control the political realm in Britain, one of their primary problems, whether Conservative, Liberal or socialist, was going to be Ireland. Ireland had long been a thorn in the side of the empire. As England had expanded its political control across the Atlantic Archipelago in the late medieval and early modern periods it had managed to bring Wales and Scotland under British control to a large extent and unite these disparate realms under a unified, Protestant British state. But Ireland had always been problematic. Successive waves of conquest and colonisation between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries had succeeded in creating an English, Protestant landholding class here, but the bulk of the population remained Irish and Roman Catholic and broadly opposed to British rule, a problem compounded by the existence of a Scottish, Presbyterian majority in the north of the island who in turn were opposed to the Catholics further to the south. By George’s time politicians in England were determined to bring about some solution to the endless unrest in Ireland by granting some form of self-determination to the island and if needs be by separating the northern counties from the southern ones. But the political environment was highly fractious there by the early 1910s. As a consequence the decision was taken that George should quickly visit Ireland following his accession, the better to reinforce the ties between the monarchy and the crown’s subjects in Ireland. George and Mary arrived to Dun Laoghaire near Dublin, a port which was then called Kingstown, on the 8th of July 1911, just over two weeks after his coronation in London. The entourage was considerable and eight carriages were needed to bring the king and queen to Dublin Castle where they resided while in Ireland. Visits to the Phoenix Park on the western outskirts of the city and Leopardstown race track followed, as well as more charitable endeavours such as a visit to the Coombe hospital in Dublin. Much effort was made to shroud the royal visit in a celebratory atmosphere, but there were tensions brewing underneath. Many of Dublin Corporation’s politicians were nationalists and socialists who favoured complete independence for Ireland from Britain and refused to participate in the events around the royal visit, while the king and queen’s visit to Cork, the republican-dominated city in the south of the country, was undertaken in a very tense atmosphere where it was clear the new monarch was not welcome. This aside, George and Mary’s route through Dublin was often lined by people cheering them and when he left Ireland five days later the king might well have imagined that with the right policies the island could still be reconciled to British rule. He would learn in time that this was certainly not the case. Ireland and all other parts of the empire were drawn increasingly towards conflict in the first years of George’s reign. For some time Europe’s great powers had been increasingly antagonistic towards one another. The Empire of Austria-Hungary, for example, were rivals of the Russian Empire for control over the Balkans where the Ottoman Empire, the dominant regional power for many centuries, was in terminal decline. The French Republic had old grievances against the German Empire from the conquest of its eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine during the Franco-Prussian War at the start of the 1870s. And Britain had its own growing rivalry with Germany, the newly emergent continental power. Yet few saw a war of the kind which erupted in the summer of 1914 coming. In the end it was a regional crisis caused by the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Ferdinand, by a Serb nationalist, in the streets of Sarajevo which cast the continent into war. By the start of August the British, French and Russians were at war with the Germans, Austrians and Turks. As monarch, it fell to George to oversee the council which decided that Britain would declare war on Germany in response to developments across the continent. He referred to these events in his diary later that day as a, quote, “terrible catastrophe,” but like many others he was naively of the view that the First World War would be a quick affair. Instead it dragged on for over four years of bloody trench warfare in northern France and elsewhere. The monarchy was somewhat compromised by the outbreak of the war owing to the close relations which existed between Europe’s major royal families by the early twentieth century. Nearly all of the royal houses were intermarried and George, Wilhelm II, the Kaiser of Germany, and Nicholas II, the Tsar of Russia, were all first cousins. Moreover, the king’s paternal grandfather, Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, had been Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a prominent German royal line. George and his family members still bore this title in 1914. Additionally, his wife Mary, although she had been born in England, was the daughter of Count Francis von Hohenstein, the Duke of Teck within the German aristocracy. All of this created the rather embarrassing impression when the war broke out that the royal family were more German than English when their bloodlines were examined. And certain sections of the British press hammered away at this point endlessly. Thus, in July 1917, George caved to public pressure and issued a royal proclamation which changed the name of the royal house from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor, a place long associated with the royal family owing to the construction of Windsor Castle as a royal residence all the way back in the days of William the Conqueror in the eleventh century, who ironically enough was a continental foreigner who conquered England. Beyond the concerns over the connections between the royal family and Germany, George and his family had a significant role to play in the conflict. Hundreds of members of the Royal Household and Staff were enlisted in the war effort. For instance, the woodcutters from the Windsor Castle estate were sent to France as trench sappers. George himself first visited the trenches of north-west France in November 1914, the first of five such visits during the war, while Queen Mary joined him in 1917. Back in Britain, the king and queen spent much of the mid-1910s visiting hospitals, nurses’ stations and clearing houses to meet with wounded and discharged soldiers and sailors. George’s two eldest sons, Edward and Albert, were also old enough to be involved in the armed forces during the war. Edward served in France and was awarded the Military Cross, while Albert served in the Royal Navy and was mentioned in dispatches for his role in the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the foremost naval engagement of the war between the British and the German navies. While care was taken to ensure that the heir and his younger brother were not placed at the coalface of the conflict, the fact that the king’s sons were on active duty during the war aided in cementing the idea that the war was everyone’s conflict, not just the lot of the average conscript. One of George’s visits to France was to acknowledge the intensification of the conflict there. For two years the Germans had been pressing towards Paris from Belgium and for two years the French and British, along with extensive detachments of Commonwealth soldiers from Canada, South Africa, India, Australia and elsewhere had pushed back. Then in the summer of 1916 the British and French launched the Somme Offensive against the German lines. The first day of the offensive, the 1st of July 1916, led to the greatest number of casualties experienced by the British army in history in one day. Over 19,000 soldiers were killed and a further 38,000 were wounded or otherwise rendered unable to fight. Plans were quickly put in place for George to cross to France and on the 10th of August 1916, with the fighting still raging, he visited troops at Ypres and proceeded further down the British lines along the Somme. Curiously, he also met with General Henry Rawlinson, the commander of the British Second Army, with whom the king conversed about the news of efforts within the military to have General Douglas Haig, the commander of the British forces in France, replaced. Yet this never materialised. Haig remained in overall control of the British Expeditionary Force, while the slaughter at the Somme continued, eventually resulting in the deaths of approximately 300,000 troops. Yet the stalemate in the war was not broken and two more years of trench warfare in north-eastern France would follow. While there was no change in military leadership in 1916, there was a change in the government back home in Britain. At the outset of the war in 1914 the Liberal Party, led by Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister, had a tenuous hold on power in Britain. To gain increased political stability during wartime, a unity government was formed with the Conservatives being granted numerous important ministries and the Labour Party, which was still viewed as a dangerous socialist movement by many in Britain, even being invited to join the government. However, by late 1916 Asquith’s coalition was increasingly unpopular at home and facing growing opposition over its prosecution of the war, notably the costliness in lives and resources of the Somme Offensive, which had promised much and delivered little. He was eventually ousted from power in December 1916 when the Secretary of State for War, David Lloyd George, formed a new unity coalition and became Prime Minister. By the early twentieth century the king had little say in these matters and accepted Lloyd George as the new Prime Minister, but it would be a tense relationship between the pair at times in the years that followed, with the conservative George often at loggerheads with the radical Welsh Prime Minister over policy in France, Ireland and elsewhere. Moreover, recent studies have revealed the extent to which George involved himself in the politics of the British army in France and how this often saw him and Lloyd George intriguing against each other, as Lloyd George was convinced Haig should not be continued as the head of the British forces in France and instead sought to strengthen the position of the French general and Supreme Allied Commander in France, Ferdinand Foch, at Haig’s expense. Such actions aside, both George and Lloyd George’s efforts to intervene in the military handling of the war were both rendered largely null and void when the United States joined the war on the side of Britain and France in April 1917, thus making German defeat in the long-run an all-but certainty. Lloyd George and the king also clashed over another problematic matter which arose internationally in 1917. This concerned events in Russia, where a revolution had been initiated to overthrow the government of George’s cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, in February. This was a relatively conservative revolution at first and there was the possibility of the Russian royal family being able to abscond from Russia and seek asylum elsewhere in Europe. At first George was anxious to offer Nicholas the option of resettling, at least temporarily, in Britain. But Lloyd George was vehemently opposed, believing that the presence of the Russian imperial family in Britain could act as a lightning rod for socialist and revolutionary elements within Britain who were looking at Russia and considering whether an overthrow of the political system in Britain might also be possible, while there were also concerns that the presence of the deposed Tsar in England could entangle Britain in Russia’s domestic politics at a time when Russia was still theoretically its ally in the war, although admittedly Russian resistance to the German advance all along the Eastern Front was collapsing in the spring and summer of 1917. In the end the king came to agree with Lloyd George’s viewpoint, although the British secret services nevertheless prepared a plan for how to rescue Nicholas and his family from Russia, one which was never put into action. In the end a more radical second revolution struck Russia in October 1917, bringing the Bolshevik Communists to power. The Tsar and his family were murdered on the orders of the new government in Russia in the summer of 1918. The final years of the war also witnessed an intensification of the Suffragist Movement in Britain. The Suffragettes had been campaigning for a decade and a half in Britain in order for women to be given the right to vote in political elections, a right which was still denied women and indeed many men if they did not meet certain qualifying criteria. The Suffragists had effectively engaged in a campaign of political pressure and limited violence over the years to fight for their cause. Indeed George had been present at the Epsom Derby on the 4th of June 1913 when a Suffragette, Emily Davison, ran out in front of the racing horses and attempted to catch hold of the king’s own contender in the race, Anmer. The horse struck Davison as she attempted to grab the reigns and she died from her injuries four days later, becoming a Suffragette martyr in the process. For his part George had been more concerned for the horse and jockey in the aftermath of the incident, though in his defence he did not know the full extent of Davison’s condition at the time. Now, nearly five years later, the king found himself giving the royal assent to the Representation of the People Act in February 1918, a bill which gave women of 30 years and over the right to vote, while also extending the male franchise to nearly eight million poorer Britons. The Act was a sign of how the First World War and the contribution of the British people to the war effort forced the political establishment to accelerate much needed political reforms such as those the Suffragettes had campaigned for over many years. The Representation of the People Act was passed as the stalemate in the war on the continent was coming to an end. With the United States having joined the fight on the side of Britain and France and with the economies of Germany and Austria-Hungary beginning to collapse under the pressure of four years of war, the strategic situation changed in the summer and autumn of 1918. It was over by November 1918, not owing to complete military victory, but because the governments in both Berlin and Vienna had fallen to domestic revolutions. Lloyd George led the British delegation to France in the summer of 1919 which negotiated the terms of the post-war settlement. The resulting Treaty of Versailles with Germany forced the German government to accept the blame for causing the war, stripped the country of all its colonies and a sizeable proportion of its territory in Europe and imposed huge war reparations payments on the German people for decades to come. It was a punitive peace settlement, one which was matched by the hubris which the British and French governments displayed in carving up the Middle East and the defeated nations’ African colonies between them. Lloyd George sent a letter to the king on the 5th of August 1919 informing him that he believed the treaty was, quote, “worthy of the heroism and endurance displayed by your Majesty’s forces by sea, land and air, and by all classes of Your Majesty’s subjects who worked at home during the five years of grievous struggle.” And there was a great degree of truth to the Prime Minister’s letter, but nevertheless the treaty had sown into it the seeds of another war many years later. The cessation of the conflict in November 1918 did not bring any respite to Europe. Indeed the next five years were even deadlier for the continent. This was partly owing to the collapse of the old political order and numerous revolutions and civil wars in countries like Russia, Germany and Turkey. Yet much of it was also owing to disease outbreaks at a time when the continent’s people were weakened owing to years of rationing and want. The disease which swept across Europe in 1918 and into 1919 is known as the Spanish Flu, even though it originated in the United States. By early 1920 it had infected over half a billion people and is estimated to have killed somewhere between 20 and 50 million people, though reliable statistics for Asia and Africa are not available. The royal family was not immune to it and indeed such were the ravages of disease outbreaks on the Windsors in recent decades, notably the death of George’s older brother, Albert Victor, in 1892, that they were anxious to avoid contagion. Consequently, the royal court fled from London, but by then it was too late for the king to avoid the Spanish Flu. Just two months after it first surfaced in the US, George was struck by it in May 1918. He made a full recovery, though, something which cannot be said of many others. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, also contracted it and nearly died. While the Spanish Flu had largely passed the king and his immediate family by in 1918, the revolutions which followed the end of the First World War would have a more enduring impact. These sprung up all across the continent, generally in the countries which were defeated during the war such as Germany, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the latter of which was fragmenting into several smaller states by the time the armistice was declared in November 1918. However, it was not confined to these and some of the revolutions elsewhere impacted directly on the monarchy. Such was the case with the 11th September 1922 Revolution which occurred in Greece as a spill-over from the Turkish Revolution. Here senior officers within the Greek army and navy initiated a coup against the reigning government of King Constantine, George V’s cousin. He was quickly replaced by his son who became George II of Greece, but not without a severe backlash against the royals in the Mediterranean nation. Such was the danger implicit in this that George V had to send ships of the Royal Navy to the Mediterranean nation to rescue his cousins, Prince Andrew and Princess Alice, the paternal grandparents of the present king of Britain, Charles III, from Greece. More broadly George was sceptical about the revolutions which subsumed Europe at this time, viewing most as dangerously revolutionary and socialist, developments which George as a conservative British monarch was deeply opposed to. One of these revolutions was closer to home than all others. While Britain itself avoided conflict in the aftermath of the war, it could not prevent unrest across the Irish Sea in Ireland. In the decade since George had visited the country, just days after his coronation in England, Ireland’s political problems had mounted. At the outset of the war in 1914 the Irish Parliamentary Party, the country’s largest single political party at Westminster, had made an agreement with the government in England. It would convince Irish men to sign up to the war effort and head for the trenches of France and in return the British government would grant Home Rule to Ireland, whereby an Irish parliament would be established in Dublin, one which would rule many aspects of Ireland, albeit still as part of the British Empire. However, the war years saw this consensus fall apart. On Easter week in 1916 a coalition of nationalist revolutionaries had led a botched military revolt against British rule, seizing large parts of Dublin. This was soon crushed, but in its aftermath support for the Irish Parliamentary Party collapsed and was replaced with support for a new political movement, Sinn Fein. These won a landslide in nearly all the Irish constituencies outside of Ulster in the 1918 general election and promptly refused to take their seats in Westminster, instead convening their own parliament in Dublin. It was the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. The War of Independence was fought in Ireland between 1919 and 1921. It was a bitter, bloody affair with the Irish engaging in guerrilla warfare and the British government relying on army irregulars called the Black and Tans to fight the conflict. The latter were soon engaging in acts of atrocity and heavy-handed violence against the civilian population. For his part, while he was opposed to Irish independence, George was appalled by the escalating violence in Ireland and the tactics being employed by the Black and Tans. He censured Lloyd George on several occasions for what was occurring and was a major driving force within England in finding a solution to the conflict. In the summer of 1921, a part of that solution was dividing Ireland so that the Scottish Presbyterians in the northern counties could have their own country that would remain closely tied to Britain. Six counties there were partitioned from the south in May 1921, bringing Northern Ireland into existence. George visited Belfast in June to address the opening sitting of the new, Unionist-dominated parliament there. His speech is believed today to have been significant in preventing a war between the Unionists of the north and the Republicans of the south in the months that followed. Instead, a truce was agreed with the Republicans a few weeks later and the south of Ireland was effectively granted partial independence from Britain, while the north remained part of the empire, although a bitter civil war was fought in the south over the terms of independence between 1922 and 1923 and the country remained tied to Britain in some particulars until the mid-1930s. George’s role in establishing the peace in the early 1920s was quite substantial. Ireland was not the only issue confronting Britain’s empire in the 1920s. The number of nations which had formed part of the empire, but which were now largely autonomous, nations like South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, had been growing for some time. But the constitutional arrangement for these ‘Dominions’ was still largely unclear. Were they still part of the empire, wholly autonomous or partially subject to Britain in terms of their foreign policy and certain trade matters? These issues came to a head at the Imperial Conference held in London in 1926, which was presided over by George and chaired by the former Prime Minister between 1902 and 1905, Arthur Balfour. Here an agreement was reached that the ‘Dominions’ constituted a ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ which were each equal to each other in their common allegiance to the crown. Thus, under the terms of what has become known as the Balfour Declaration the growing independence of Britain’s former colonies was acknowledged, but a new Commonwealth centred on the monarchy and the rule of George V as head of state of the Commonwealth was put down in law. Five years later the Statute of Westminster of 1931 would grant further legislative independence to the Commonwealth nations. While these measures largely resolved the issues inherent in the status of the Dominions, there was still a major policy issue in the 1920s concerning the core element of Britain’s Empire: India or the British Raj, as the great conglomeration of territory covering not just India but also modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh. George was emperor of India and indeed had visited Delhi in 1911 where he became the only British ruler of India to attend a Delhi Durbar or Court to be proclaimed as Emperor in person. Yet despite his efforts to make himself physically present in India on occasion, George faced growing calls for Indian independence throughout his reign, particularly the non-violent opposition led by Mahatma Gandhi. The responses during George’s reign were two bills, the Government of India Act of 1919 and the Government of India Act of 1935. Both sought to ensure British control of India for some time to come by offering moderate Indian nationalists a range of concessions, while also trying to take account of the varied religious and social tapestry that was the Raj. None of it was enough, though, and while George was not the last British Emperor of India, it was largely during his reign that the Independence Movement gained sufficient traction to lead to independence in the mid-1940s. George’s attitudes towards domestic British politics in the 1920s were a delicate balancing act between his role as a figurehead within the government and his own rather conservative political views. He, like many others in Britain, was wary of the emergence of the Labour Party as a major political movement. It created some dismay then for the king and large sections of the British political establishment when the general election of December 1923 resulted in a hung parliament, neither Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives, Herbert Asquith’s Liberals nor Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour securing a majority. In the days that followed it emerged that the only government which was feasible was a minority Labour administration which would be supported on a case by case basis by the Liberals. Thus, MacDonald became Prime Minister and Labour formed a government for the first time. There were genuine concerns at the time that George, whose constitutional roles involved officially appointing new governments, would try to block the formation of the new Labour regime. Yet he didn’t. Whatever his personal politics might have been, George knew that he was not supposed to intervene publicly in the politics of the day. Yet there is also evidence that George’s personal politics might have been shifting at this time. The minority government soon collapsed and the Conservatives returned to power in late 1924, yet when a general strike broke out across the UK in 1926 over pay and working conditions in Britain’s mines and other sectors of the economy, it was George who urged a moderate approach on the Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, stating that Baldwin needed to put himself in the shoes of the average working man when negotiating with the strike managers. While Britain’s politics were difficult in the mid-1920s any issues encountered were tempered by the fact that the global economy was booming during these years. Yet all this came to an end in the autumn of 1929 with the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Great Depression. At the time of the Wall Street Crash MacDonald had just led Labour back into government in remarkably bad timing. His administration faced a huge crisis, with over 1.5 million people out of work across Britain by the start of the spring of 1930, a situation which deteriorated further over the next year and a half as the value of the pound sterling and its ties to the Gold Standard looked increasingly precarious. By August 1931 it was impossible for MacDonald to get any budgets or policies through and so George urged the Labour leader to call an election and form a government of national unity. It was wise advice. A National Government, containing Labour, Conservative and Liberal ministers was formed in October 1931 and the British political establishment worked together to move through the crisis created by the Great Depression, whereas other nations ended up with increasingly fractious and extreme politics. George also facilitated the MacDonald governments to manage the economic crisis in other ways. The civil list, which was effectively a list of individuals to whom the British government paid money in the form of honorary pensions, as well as royal subventions, was drastically reduced in 1931 and the king and the royal family decided not to accept an annual payment of £50,000 due to them in recognition of the economic situation. That money was sent back into the exchequer and used for welfare payments and to help create jobs during the crisis. These and other measures ensured that George was an increasingly popular monarch by the early 1930s. This was perhaps at odds with his own personality. By nature he was a rather diminutive, retiring figure, one whose favoured pastimes were stamp-collecting and hunting. Back in 1893 George had been made honorary vice-president of the Royal Philatelic Society, the most significant stamp-collecting society in the world. George served in that role until he became king and his contributions to the Society’s collection were considerable. For instance, in 1904 he purchased a rare Mauritius two pence blue stamp for £1,450, a record for a single stamp purchase at that time. George ultimately contributed significantly to the Royal Philatelic Collection, which is valued at approximately £100 million today. Elsewhere, George became the first monarch to take advantage of the new mass communications medium of radio to reach out to his subjects. On Christmas day 1932 he became the first king or queen to address the entire nation in this way. George had resisted the idea of doing so for many years, believing radio was for entertainment rather than an extension of the political realm, but in the 1930s, as the crisis deepened across the country and other politicians such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the then governor of New York, began using radio to communicate with their constituents, George relented and gave the first Royal Christmas Speech in 1932. The king’s speech was scripted by Rudyard Kipling, the great author of Kim and The Jungle Book, whose knowledge of the British Empire and British India in particular qualified him for writing a speech which was broadcast to all of George’s subjects, not just in Britain, but in the Raj and the Commonwealth nations as well. The speech sought to offer some comfort in the context of the tumultuous years Britons and citizens of the empire alike had just lived through: “It may be that our future may lay upon us more than one stern test. Our past will have taught us how to meet it unshaken. For the present, the work to which we are all equally bound is to arrive at a reasoned tranquillity within our borders; to regain prosperity without self-seeking; and to carry with us those whom the burden of past years has disheartened or overborne.” George’s speech was a major success and the tradition has continued almost interrupted ever since. While Britain ultimately managed to pull itself out of the Great Depression in the mid-1930s via the mainstream political parties forming a unity government and acting in unison with each other, the same was not true for other nations. In Germany in particular the massive economic crisis provided the basis for the rise of extremist politics and ultimately the ascent to power early in 1933 of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. George was wary of the rise of the German fascists from the beginning, as were many within the political establishment in Britain, but few had as prescient a view of what might occur as did the king. In a meeting with the German ambassador to Britain, Leopold von Hoesch, in 1934 the king expressed concern about the jingoistic rhetoric emanating from Berlin, where the Nazis were already making noises about remilitarising in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles and their desire to build a Greater Germany by reclaiming the territory they had lost in 1918 and much more besides in Central and Eastern Europe. Von Hoesch, who was a career diplomat and not a Nazi ideologue, did not necessarily disagree. The following year a more aggressive Nazi programme of remilitarisation was commenced with, but George would not live to see the war between Britain and Germany which so concerned him in his last years. George V suffered for much of his adult life from respiratory problems, a hereditary condition in the family which was exacerbated by his chain smoking. By the time he was in his late fifties, in the 1920s, he was suffering from severe bronchitis, and his ability to travel extensively was limited, though doctors did recommend a visit to the Mediterranean in 1925 hoping that the warmer climate would lead to an improvement in his condition. It didn’t and further suggestions that he should do the same in later years were vociferously rejected by George. Instead he accepted a certain level of ill health which only continued to get worse as he entered his sixties, leaving London and the royal palaces in the Home Counties only to spend time in the seaside resort of Bognor in Sussex. Into the 1930s things only got worse and by the middle of the decade his respiratory problems had deteriorated to incorporate several other ailments, including breathing problems, a lack of energy, regular colds and blood issues. It was clear that he did not have long left to live. George’s imminent death was complicated to a very great extent by his relationship with his eldest son and heir. Edward, Prince of Wales, had always been problematic. He did not display a strong character and George was reluctant to pass too many responsibilities to him even as his own health deteriorated from the mid-1920s onwards. Most worrying was Edward’s love life. He had not married and produced an heir, but engaged in a string of short-lived romances. And when one finally seemed to stick in the mid-1930s it was highly problematic. The subject of Edward’s attentions was Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee who was still married to her second husband, Ernest Aldrich Simpson, an American with extensive business affairs in Britain. Edward and Wallis had entered into an affair in the mid-1930s, but it was considered unacceptable to the Conservative Party leader, Stanley Baldwin, and viewed with great dubiousness by George V who repeatedly advised his son to end the liaison and marry a more acceptable woman, one who would not have been divorced and was British or European. The issues inherent in Edward and Wallis’s affair were still hanging over the succession as George’s health declined dramatically in the course of 1935. By the summer of 1935 the king was regularly receiving oxygen in order to continue breathing properly. Things got worse in the months that followed and on the 15th of January 1936 he retreated to his bed at Sandringham House in Norfolk outside London. He spent the next five days here, with his situation deteriorating precipitously. By the 18th he was slipping in and out of consciousness and was in a confused state whenever he pulled himself back to the point of being able to converse with those surrounding his death bed. It was clear that he was suffering by this point and his royal physician, Bertrand Edward Dawson, was faced with a difficult decision. At approximately 11pm on the night of the 20th of January 1936 he effectively decided to speed along the king’s death, administering a large dose of morphine and cocaine sometime afterwards. Nothing could have been done to save the king’s life and the decision most likely spared George several further days of agony, though Dawson’s decision has been controversial ever since owing to the fact that he did not consult with George’s family before taking this action. Subsequent events are well-known. A protracted royal funeral followed, with George eventually being laid to rest at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on the 28th of January. Edward succeeded his father as King Edward VIII of Britain. However, he was steadfast in his determination to marry Wallis Simpson, who was now in the process of finalising her second divorce from Ernest Simpson. This created a major problem. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and other members of the royal family including Edward’s younger brother, Albert, were convinced that the British public would not stand for their king marrying a multiple divorcee from America, while it would clearly emerge in the process that the new king had begun seeing Wallis while she was still married. A constitutional crisis brewed in the months that followed as Edward refused to budge from his position. When he was eventually confronted by the government and the royal family, he agreed to abdicate the throne and married Simpson. His younger brother Albert succeeded the childless Edward in December 1936, taking the regnal name George VI. Thus, less than twelve months after George V’s death the Abdication Crisis resulted in his younger son succeeding his older son. George V was in many ways one of Britain’s least well-known monarchs, despite spending a quarter of a century on the throne. Perhaps this was because his reign was largely book-ended by the even lengthier and more substantial reigns of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, who ruled for much of the nineteenth century, and his granddaughter, Elizabeth II, whose reign marked the transition from the post-war period through to the twenty-first century. Compared with these, George’s period on the throne seems misleadingly brief and static. Moreover, today he is broadly overshadowed in the public imagination by other political figures of his time, notably David Lloyd George, who dominated the country’s politics during the First World War, and then the rise of Winston Churchill during the interwar period. Furthermore, George was a modest character who preferred stamp collecting and spending time with family to courting controversy. A man whose interests lay in stamps cannot hope to vie with the Russian civil war and the rise of the Nazis in the pages of history books detailing the interwar period of European history. Finally, George’s lengthy reign was in many ways overshadowed immediately by the short, controversial reign of his elder son and the Abdication Crisis. Yet to suggest that because George’s reign was in many ways rather banal for its time that it was without merit would be to do it and the man a disservice. George provided simple, uncontroversial leadership as King of Britain during a tumultuous period of British and European history. From the outset he was a man who disliked violence and wished to see the First World War ended as quickly as possible. In the aftermath of it he approached the revolutions which Europe was inundated with in the late 1910s as something which needed to be overcome while maintaining a conservative political landscape. And in the 1920s and 1930s he largely stayed out of the way and let the politicians get on with dealing with a changing Britain and a troublesome Europe, which was effectively the role of the monarch by this time. George was hard-working, dutiful and moderate. In many ways he set the template for the modern monarchy, one which was followed in all major specifics by his son, King George VI, and his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II. As such, while George V was in some ways an unremarkable monarch, he was also widely admired and liked by the British people by the time his considerable reign came to an end in the mid-1930s. What do you think of King George V? Was he one of Britain’s most under-appreciated monarchs? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.