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The future king, George V, second son of Edward, Prince of Wales, was born in 1865. As a child and young man, George's main role in life was to exert a steadying influence on his older brother Albert Victor (Eddy), an unprepossessing youth, whose physical delicacy and mental dullness were compounded by lethargy and self-indulgence. When, aged 12, George embarked on the navy career traditional for royal younger sons, Eddy and a tutor came too. From that time on, George had little formal education. He had none at all after the age of 18 and is not known to have read a book as an adult. In his rigidly ordered and largely uneventful naval life, his most intense relationship was with his mother, with whom he exchanged effusive letters ('Motherdear', 'darling Georgie-boy'). Escape from scandal Eddy, meanwhile, had spent two years at Cambridge before joining the army. He had also become a promiscuous bisexual and in 1889 came close to being named in a court case involving a homosexual brothel. The police finally damped the scandal down, but for Eddy – and for the royal family – it was a narrow escape. The decision was taken to marry Eddy off to his second cousin once removed, Princess Victoria Mary (May) of Teck. In January 1892, just weeks before the wedding, Eddy contracted pneumonia and died. George, now second in line to the throne, had to leave the navy. Eighteen months later, largely at the instigation of the Queen, he married Princess May and the couple set up house in York Cottage in the grounds of Sandringham. Shooting and stamp-collecting Though he missed the sea, George quickly adapted to a life of ceremonial appearances and well-heeled leisure. Shunning the world of drink, gambling and adultery in which his father moved, he devoted himself to shooting and stamp-collecting. He kept all the clocks at York Cottage 30 minutes fast to give him extra daylight for shooting and is thought to have killed up to a million birds. His stamp collection filled more than 300 albums (and is now worth £100 million). George and May – now Queen Mary – had their first child in 1894 and a second the following year. Princes Edward and Albert had an upbringing as strict as George's own. Edward, in particular, grew to identify more with his grandfather the king than with his father. George had revolted into respectability; Edward's rebellion would take a more conventional form. Peer pressure In 1910, shortly before George's 45th birthday, Edward VII died. That winter, George and Mary visited India. There his coronation was celebrated with a Durbar – ostensibly an Indian ceremony dating back to the Moghul emperors but actually a multicultural collage, uniting elements from disparate Indian traditions within an essentially British framework. Durbars had been held to celebrate Victoria's proclamation as Empress of India and Edward's coronation, but George was the first reigning monarch to attend one. Afterwards though, he declined to tour India, preferring to shoot tigers. Back in Britain, George faced a political crisis. Lloyd George's government had tabled a bill to limit the legislative powers of peers and threatened to pack the House of Lords with Liberals if it was rejected. Since peerages are granted by the monarch, the threat was underwritten, reluctantly, by George. In the event, the bill was passed so George was spared the indignity of mass-producing Liberal peers. But he was forced to collaborate in eroding the powers of the British aristocracy. Change of name In 1914, Britain and Germany went to war. A wave of hostility to all
things German or merely foreign reached as far as George, whose cousins
included Csar Nicholas II of Russia as well as Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany.
The last straw was A more difficult choice arose after the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the Romanov royal family sought asylum in Britain. While several minor Romanovs were given shelter, 'cousin Nicky' himself was turned away because George feared that giving sanctuary to a foreign despot might threaten his own throne. Nicholas and his family were shot by the Bolsheviks. Public relations After the war, George and Mary made a series of low-key public appearances. This new approach to royal public relations culminated in George's 1932 Christmas radio broadcast, scripted by Rudyard Kipling. It was the first broadcast by a reigning monarch and the start of a new tradition. Prince Edward was now a star in his own right; his good looks and charisma complemented his father's quiet respectability. For George, however, Edward was little more than an ill-mannered playboy. George was now the reactionary old fogey he had always threatened to become, railing against jazz, cocktails, short skirts and motorcycles. Relations with his younger son were more harmonious. In 1923, 'Bertie' married the Scottish aristocrat Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and in 1926 their daughter Elizabeth was born. George had a close relationship with Bertie and Elizabeth, and doted on 'Lilibet'. Final spin One final coup remained. The Silver Jubilee celebrations of 1935 were a massive demonstration of popular affection for the king. George was now in poor health and deeply troubled by the thought that Edward, who was consorting openly with the married Wallis Simpson, would succeed to the throne. 'After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in 12 months,' George prophesied. (Edward, who was 41, abdicated 11 months after his coronation.) In January 1936 George fell ill and on the 20th he lapsed into a coma. Towards midnight the royal physician administered injections of cocaine and morphine. The euthanasia was timed to ensure that the death notice would appear in the first edition of the next day's The Times. Unglamorous, unimaginative and rather dull, George V was held in deep affection by his subjects, as much because of those qualities as in spite of them. He created an image of the royal family as ordinary people – an image that has been significant in protecting the monarchy against republicanism. He died believing that the monarchy he shaped would be ruined by the glamorous but flawed Edward. In fact it would soon be safe in the hands of the dull but reliable Bertie – and his beloved Lilibet. |
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