George V

George V: The King Who Invented the Windsors

In 1917, with anti-German feeling at its height and his armies dying in France, the King of England abolished his own family's name. The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became the House of Windsor, called after a castle. He is reported to have put the matter with characteristic bluntness: "I may be uninspiring, but I'll be damned if I'm an alien!" It was the single most consequential act of public relations in the modern history of the British monarchy, and it was performed by a man nobody had ever considered clever.

A Second Son at Sea

George Frederick Ernest Albert was born on 3 June 1865 at Marlborough House, the second son of the future Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark, and a grandson of Queen Victoria. Second sons were not trained to reign, so he was sent to sea: a naval cadet from the age of twelve, alongside his elder brother, in a service he fully intended to make his career. The Navy formed him permanently. It gave him a taste for order, punctuality and plain speech, and it left him with the manner of a competent captain rather than a courtier.

The Brother Who Died

In January 1892 Prince Albert Victor died of influenza. George, at twenty-six, became heir presumptive, left the Navy, was created Duke of York on 24 May that year, and began an accelerated education in British politics that he never entirely finished. On 6 July 1893 he married Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, who had been engaged to his dead brother. It was an arrangement of dynastic convenience that became, by every account, a long and happy marriage. They had six children: Edward, Albert, Mary, Henry, George and John. The youngest, John, had epilepsy and died at thirteen following a seizure. Their father was strict and critical, a fact that would matter enormously when his eldest son inherited the throne.

A King in a Constitutional Crisis

Edward VII died on 6 May 1910 and George was proclaimed king at once, crowned at Westminster Abbey on 22 June 1911. He inherited a constitutional emergency. The House of Lords had blocked the Liberal government's budget, and the new King agreed, if required, to create enough Liberal peers to swamp the upper house. The threat alone settled the matter. It was a decision that took the monarchy off the side of hereditary privilege at the precise historical moment when staying there would have been fatal. Later that year he went to the Delhi Durbar, the only British monarch ever to appear in India as King-Emperor.

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The War, and the Name

The First World War made him. George made over 450 visits to his troops and more than 300 to hospitals; on one of them his horse fell on him and fractured his pelvis, leaving pain he carried for the rest of his life. Then, in 1917, came the renaming. Dropping Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was not a gesture but a recognition that a dynasty which looked foreign in a war against Germany might not survive the peace. Within a year the Russian throne, occupied by his own first cousin, had fallen. His did not.

The Romanovs

The same calculation produced the darkest episode of his reign. After the revolution of 1917, George declined to offer political asylum to his first cousin Tsar Nicholas II and the imperial family, judging the association with Russian autocracy too dangerous to the British throne. The Romanovs were murdered the following year. The decision shocked contemporaries who knew of it and has never been explained away; it is the clearest evidence that the King's instinct for the survival of his institution overrode a great deal else.

Radio, Labour and the Jubilee

The last decade was spent making the crown intelligible to a mass democracy. He took a deliberately conciliatory line through the Irish settlement and the industrial confrontations of the 1920s, and cultivated relations with the Labour Party and the trade unions as the depression bit — a monarch of Victorian formation dealing courteously with men his father's court would not have received. In 1932 he delivered the first royal Christmas broadcast, inventing an annual ritual that still runs. His Silver Jubilee in 1935 was, in the words of the official royal biography, an occasion of great public rejoicing, and it visibly astonished him.

By then he was failing. The 1915 accident had left chronic breathing trouble, aggravated by heavy smoking, and he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease by 1925 and needed oxygen in his last year. On 15 January 1936 he complained of a cold. He declined over five days, was given morphine and cocaine by his physician, and died at Sandringham on 20 January.

Why George Is Called a Genius

He is not, and no serious account has claimed it. George V read little, cared nothing for the arts, and was described even in sympathetic biography as lacking intellectual sophistication. He was a man of rigid naval habits and plain tastes. If the word is applied to him at all, it can only be by way of a specific and unusual political intelligence that had nothing to do with books.

That intelligence is real and deserves precise description. George possessed an exceptional sense of institutional timing: an ability to see, earlier than his advisers, which of the monarchy's inherited attributes were assets and which were about to become liabilities. Between 1910 and 1935 he gave up the Lords' veto, gave up the German name, gave up the aristocratic register of his father's court in favour of an upper-middle-class respectability the country could recognise, and gave up the mystery of distance in exchange for a wireless microphone. Each concession looked like a loss and each one bought survival. The Russian throne, held by a first cousin he closely resembled in station and blood, did not survive the same decade. His ended the reign more secure than he found it.

The counter-case must be stated with equal force. The same survival instinct condemned his cousins to be shot. His coldness as a father contributed to producing an heir who abdicated within a year of his death. And a talent for knowing when to retreat is not the same as originality; George invented nothing except a Christmas broadcast and a surname. What he had was judgement, which is rarer than brilliance and much harder to admire.

Legacy

Every British monarch since has reigned under a name George V made up in the middle of a war, and has spoken to the country each December in a format he invented. He took a throne that still looked like a German dynasty's hereditary property and left one that looked like a British national institution. He was, by his own cheerful admission, uninspiring. He was also, on the evidence of what survived him, right about almost everything that mattered to the survival of his house.