George V

Never a Dull Moment

Jane Ridley

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780062567499
• eBook ISBN: 9780062567512
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

From one of the most beloved and distinguished historians of the British monarchy, here is a lively, intimately detailed biography of a long-overlooked king who reimagined the Crown in the aftermath of World War I and whose marriage to the regal Queen Mary was an epic partnership

The grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, King George V reigned over the British Empire from 1910 to 1936, a period of unprecedented international turbulence. Yet no one could deny that as a young man, George seemed uninspired. As his biographer Harold Nicolson famously put it, "he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.” The contrast between him and his flamboyant, hedonistic, playboy father Edward VII could hardly have been greater.

However, though it lasted only a quarter-century, George’s reign was immensely consequential. He faced a constitutional crisis, the First World War, the fall of thirteen European monarchies and the rise of Bolshevism. The suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under his horse at the Derby, he refused asylum to his cousin the Tsar Nicholas II during the Russian Revolution, and he facilitated the first Labour government. And, as Jane Ridley shows, the modern British monarchy would not exist without George; he reinvented the institution, allowing it to survive and thrive when its very existence seemed doomed. The status of the British monarchy today, she argues, is due in large part to him.

How this supposedly limited man managed to steer the crown through so many perils and adapt an essentially Victorian institution to the twentieth century is a great story in itself. But this book is also a riveting portrait of a royal marriage and family life. Queen Mary played a pivotal role in the reign as well as being an important figure in her own right. Under the couple's stewardship, the crown emerged stronger than ever. George V founded the modern monarchy, and yet his disastrous quarrel with his eldest son, the Duke of Windsor, culminated in the existential crisis of the Abdication only months after his death.

Jane Ridley has had unprecedented access to the archives, and for the first time is able to reassess in full the many myths associated with this crucial and dramatic time. She brings us a royal family and world not long vanished, and not so far from our own.

Part One

Second Son

1865–1892

Chapter 1

‘My Darling Little Georgie’

1865–1879

On Friday 2 June 1865 the Prince and Princess of Wales hosted a grand dinner party of twenty-six guests, including three dukes and the leader of the Conservative Party. Alexandra, who was pregnant, had complained all day of feeling unwell and did not come down. While Bertie entertained his guests to the music of the Scots Fusiliers, upstairs Alix’s pains became acute. The doctors were called as she went into labour at around midnight, and shortly after 1 a.m. on Saturday 3 June a healthy prince was born. Bertie was present at the birth. This baby being third in line to the throne, the Home Secretary arrived immediately afterwards.¹

The birth of this second child was sudden and premature, but this time the doctors were not caught napping, as they had been by the birth of the princess’s first son, Albert Victor, also known as Eddy, who arrived two months early. This was an eight-months baby, about two pounds heavier than Albert Victor, who had weighed three-and-a-half pounds.² Alix had intended to nurse this baby herself, in defiance of Queen Victoria, who strongly disapproved of royal mothers breastfeeding, but a wet nurse was engaged.³

At 3.30 a.m., Queen Victoria, who was at Balmoral, was ‘quite startled’ by two telegrams being brought to her bedroom ‘which they said I must have’.⁴ These were from Bertie, announcing the birth. They confirmed the Queen’s fears that Alix would again be prematurely confined in this second pregnancy, the prematurity explaining why ‘we get such terribly small children wh. wd have annoyed dearest Papa so much’.⁵ ‘Dearest Papa’ was Prince Albert, who had died four years previously. The report from Dr Farre the obstetrician fuelled her forebodings. According to Farre, the rapidity of the labour was ‘not good & may really make it vy dangerous in future. Only 2 hours really ill, & only ¼ of hour’s bearing pains! Pleasant for dear Alix but not good for her health or for the Child.’⁶ When Victoria saw the two-week-old baby, she found him very small and not as pretty as the first child. ‘It is sad that the race shd become smaller & smaller,’ she remarked – sad indeed, as she herself measured no more than four 4 feet eleven inches.⁷

The christening was clouded by a spat over the child’s name. When Bertie told his mother that he proposed to name the little boy George Frederick Ernest, the Queen replied that she had hoped for a ‘fine old name’, unlike George, which ‘only came over with the Hanoverian family’.⁸ Bertie added Albert to the list, to please his mother, but wrote an ‘objectionable’ letter refusing to change the other names.⁹ The Queen observed, however, that the baby was ‘certainly like all our Children wh poor little Albert Victor is not. He is not at all robust and looks so pale & puny.’¹⁰ George, by contrast, was by now growing into ‘a much more satisfactory child’ – a sturdy little Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.¹¹

These two women – George’s stout, strong-minded, blunt-speaking grandmother Victoria and his pretty, defenceless Danish mother – shaped his early childhood. Since the birth of Eddy, the Queen had claimed ‘a strong right . . . to interfere in the management and education of the child or children’. Bertie must understand that ‘it was my duty to do so . . . he should never do anything about the child without consulting me.’¹²

George’s parents drew up no grand plan for their children’s education, as Victoria and Albert had done. Bertie was determined not to replicate the misery of his own childhood – regimented, timetabled, reported and spied upon by nurses and tutors. The nursery was Alix’s sphere: as Bertie wrote, ‘her whole life is wrapt up in her children’.¹³ She was a ‘capital nurse’, never happier than wearing a flannel apron in the nursery and tucking up her sleeves to bathe her baby.¹⁴ Her ideas about her children were simple but strongly held. She wanted to have her children with her all the time, and she wanted to give them the freedom that she had enjoyed as a child of the informal Danish royal family. When George was only fifteen months old she boasted to her sister that he and his brother were ‘already now just as wild as we were, and are climbing about on everything’.¹⁵

But Alix was torn. The devoted mother was an adoring wife who clung to Bertie and his hectic social life. As Victoria later wrote, he ‘never left her quiet a moment and she was dragged about everywhere’.¹⁶ In February 1867, when George was twenty months old, Alix became suddenly and frighteningly ill, allegedly with rheumatic fever. ‘I always feared they were wearing themselves out – & that some day a great crash would come! – And I fear it has come,’ wrote the unsympathetic mother-in-law.¹⁷ For three months Alix was confined to bed, and the illness left her with a permanently stiff right knee. Her semi-invalid state was worsened by her frequent pregnancies. Louise, born four weeks prematurely when Alix was ill (20 February 1867), was followed by two normal pregnancies – Victoria (6 July 1868) and Maud (26 November 1869): three births in under three years. Illness and recuperation brought long separations from her small children. Her deafness, which was inherited but made worse by her illness, meant that even when she was with them she was hard to converse with.

To Victoria, who had given birth to nine healthy children, Alix was a pathetic reproductive failure, producing ‘miserable, puny little children . . . I can’t tell you how these poor, frail little fairies distress me for the honour of the family and the country.’¹⁸ None of Alix’s children were to enjoy the vigorous health and long lives of Victoria’s brood. The Queen blamed Alix for insisting that her children stayed with her in unhealthy London, and counselled Bertie to ‘try and do as we did in former days’, and take the children to the country, especially in the summer when the London air was ‘poisonous’, polluted by effluent which had caused the Great Stink of 1858.¹⁹ But, as Bertie explained, the widow Queen’s refusal to come to London meant that he and Alix were forced to live there:

I think it is rather hard to say that we keep the children with us here for our own pleasure instead of looking after their health, which we in fact neglect. It would doubtless be far pleasanter to live much more in the country, but as you know we have certain duties to fulfil here – and your absence from London renders it more necessary that we should do all we can for society, trade and public matters.²⁰

The children had become entangled in the quarrel between the prince and his mother.

The conflict was always worse when Alix wanted to take the children to visit her family in Denmark. George first went to Denmark when he was three. The Queen insisted that the little boys could only travel if the doctors agreed. ‘They are the children of the country & I should be blamed for allowing any risk to be run.’²¹ Bertie intervened on his wife’s behalf: ‘I think a child is always best looked after under the mother’s eye – and the children are so very much with us,’ he pleaded.²² When their parents embarked on a journey to the Nile via Berlin, the children were sent home to Victoria at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, and they stayed with their grandmother for three-and-a-half months. She thought them ‘most wretched’ with perpetual colds, ‘excepting Georgie, who is always merry and rosie’.²³ From the Nile, Bertie worried that his mother ruled the nursery with a rod of iron. ‘We certainly do not wish that they should be spoilt . . . but if children that age are too strictly or perhaps severely treated, they get shy & fear only those whom they ought to love, & we should naturally wish them to be very fond of you, as they were in Denmark of Alix’s parents.’²⁴ It was a conflict between two very different ideas of child rearing. A generation later, when George’s children stayed for months with their grandparents, George was to complain that they were spoilt.

When George was five or six his grandmother’s interference increased. She was horrified by reports that Alix was in the habit of having all five children together in the room, ‘even when the youngest could hardly walk – without any nurse – writing herself – and not hearing! It is so very dangerous.’²⁵ ‘They are such ill-bred, ill-trained children, I cannot fancy them at all,’ grumbled the Queen.²⁶ Not only were they spoilt and rough, but they had no regular governess.²⁷ The Queen set about finding the boys a tutor. The man she stumbled upon was the curate to the vicar of Whippingham on the Isle of Wight, where she heard him preach: the Reverend John Neale Dalton.²⁸

There were two people who wrote letters addressed to ‘My darling little Georgie’. One was his mother. The other was his tutor, Mr Dalton.

Dalton arrived when George was nearly six and Eddy was seven. He was a 32-year-old bachelor with a deep, sepulchral voice, thinning hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. Instructed by the Prince of Wales to avoid the cramming which had ruined his childhood, Dalton devised a timetable for the boys at Sandringham which imposed a fixed daily routine and plenty of outdoor exercise but only four hours of lessons.

The process of Dalton’s appointment remains a mystery. Prince Albert had taken great care in selecting tutors for his sons. George’s father Bertie, on the other hand, allowed his mother to choose a tutor and made no attempt to appoint one for his sons himself.

Bertie’s tutor, Mr Gibbs, had come on the recommendation of Sir James Stephen, whose ward he was. This began a tradition of picking royal tutors from the Victorian intellectual aristocracy, many of whom by a curious twist were related to Virginia Woolf.^* Dalton, the son of a vicar of Milton Keynes, was not a member of this elite, but was descended from a well-established family of Cambridge-educated clergymen. No doubt he owed his appointment to the Queen’s recommendation, as most biographers suggest. There may have been another influence too. Dalton was a friend of Edward Carpenter, a Cambridge high-flyer and fellow of Trinity. Carpenter later claimed that he had been offered the post of tutor and turned it down, and it’s possible that he recommended Dalton in his stead.²⁹ When Carpenter resigned his fellowship to preach socialism and live openly as a homosexual, Dalton remained friends with him. The gay campaigner seems an unlikely role model for the royal tutor, but Dalton claimed that Carpenter left ‘an enduring influence’ on his moral and mental outlook.³⁰

Dalton swiftly earned the approval of the Queen. She found him ‘a very good, sensible man’, and her acid comments on the little boys turned to butter. ‘They really are very dear children,’ she wrote, ‘so quick & observant, so friendly, honest & truthful & without any pretension.’³¹ Dalton disciplined ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: In Search of George
• Part One: Second Son 1865–1892
• Part Two: Duke of York 1893–1901
• Part Three: Prince of Wales 1901–1910
• Part Four: Pre-War 1910–1914
• Part Five: War 1914–1918
• Part Six: Post-War 1919–1927
• Part Seven: Home Straight 1928–1936
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Also by Jane Ridley
• Copyright
• About the Publisher