George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert; 3 June
1865 – 20 January 1936) was
King of the United
Kingdom and the
British
Dominions, and
Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 until his
death in 1936.
He was the second son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward
VII), and the grandson of the reigning British monarch, Queen Victoria. From the time of his birth, he
was third in the line of
succession behind his father and his elder brother, Prince
Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. From 1877 to
1891, George served in the Royal
Navy, until the unexpected death of his elder brother in early
1892 put him directly in line for the throne. On the death of his
grandmother in 1901, George´s father became King-Emperor of the British Empire, and George was created
Prince of Wales. He succeeded his father in
1910. He was the only Emperor of India to be present at his own
Delhi Durbar.
His reign saw the rise of socialism, communism, fascism, Irish republicanism, and the Indian independence movement,
all of which radically changed the political landscape. The
Parliament Act 1911 established the
supremacy of the elected British House of
Commons over the unelected House of Lords. As a result of the First World War (1914–18) the
empires of his first cousins Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany fell
while the British Empire expanded to its greatest effective extent.
In 1917, George became the first monarch of the House of Windsor, which he renamed from the
House of Saxe-Coburg and
Gotha as a result of anti-German public sentiment. In 1924 he
appointed the first Labour ministry and in 1931 the Statute of Westminster recognised
the dominions of the Empire as separate, independent states within
the Commonwealth of Nations. He was
plagued by illness throughout much of his later reign and at his
death was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward VIII.
George was born on 3 June 1865, in Marlborough House, London. He was the
second son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Albert Edward and Alexandra. His father was the eldest son
of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and his mother was the
eldest daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark. As a
son of the Prince of Wales, George was styled His Royal
Highness Prince George of Wales at birth. He was baptised at
Windsor Castle on 7 July 1865 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Longley.[1]
George as a young boy, 1870
As a younger son of the Prince of Wales, there was little
expectation that George would become king. He was third in line to
the throne, after his father and elder brother, Prince
Albert Victor. George was only 17 months younger than
Albert Victor, and the two princes were educated together. John Neale Dalton was appointed as their
tutor in 1871. Neither Albert Victor nor George excelled
intellectually.[2]
As their father thought that the navy was "the very best possible
training for any boy",[3]
in September 1877, when George was 12 years old, both brothers
joined the cadet training ship HMS Britannia at
Dartmouth, Devon.[4]
For three years from 1879, the royal brothers served on HMS Bacchante, accompanied
by Dalton. They toured the colonies of the British Empire in the Caribbean, South Africa and Australia, and visited
Norfolk, Virginia, as well as South
America, the Mediterranean, Egypt, and East Asia. In 1881 on
a visit to Japan, George had a local artist tattoo a blue and red
dragon on his arm,[5]
and was received in an audience by the Emperor Meiji; George and his brother presented
Empress Haruko with two wallabies from Australia.[6]
Dalton wrote an account of their journey entitled The Cruise of
HMS Bacchante.[7]
Between Melbourne and Sydney, Dalton recorded a sighting of the
Flying Dutchman, a mythical ghost
ship.[8]
When they returned to Britain, Queen Victoria complained that her
grandsons could not speak French or German, and so they spent six
months in Lausanne in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to
learn another language.[9]
After Lausanne, the brothers were separated; Albert Victor attended
Trinity College, Cambridge,
while George continued in the Royal
Navy. He travelled the world, visiting many areas of the
British Empire. During his naval career he commanded Torpedo
Boat 79 in home waters then HMS Thrush on the North
America station, before his last active service in command of
HMS Melampus in
1891–92. From then on, his naval rank was largely
honorary.[10]
As a young man destined to serve in the navy, Prince George
served for many years under the command of his uncle, Prince Alfred, Duke
of Edinburgh, who was stationed in Malta.
There, he grew close to and fell in love with his uncle´s daughter,
his first cousin, Marie of Edinburgh. His grandmother, father
and uncle all approved the match, but the mothers—the
Princess of Wales and the Duchess of
Edinburgh—both opposed it. The Princess of Wales thought
the family was too pro-German, and the Duchess of Edinburgh
disliked England. Marie´s mother was the only daughter of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. She
resented the fact that, as the wife of a younger son of the British
sovereign, she had to yield precedence to George´s mother, the
Princess of Wales, whose father had been a minor German prince
before being called unexpectedly to the throne of Denmark. Guided
by her mother, Marie refused George when he proposed to her. She
married Ferdinand, the heir to the King of Romania, in 1893.[11]
In November 1891, George´s elder brother Albert
Victor became engaged to his second cousin once removed, Princess Victoria Mary of Teck. She was known
within the family as "May", nicknamed after her birth month. May´s
father, Prince Francis, Duke of Teck, belonged
to a morganatic, cadet branch of the house of Württemberg. Her mother,
Princess Mary Adelaide
of Cambridge, was a male-line granddaughter of King George III
and a first cousin of Queen Victoria.
On 14 January 1892, six weeks after the formal engagement,
Albert Victor died of pneumonia, leaving George second in line to the
throne, and likely to succeed after his father. George had only
just recovered from a serious illness himself, after being confined
to bed for six weeks with typhoid fever, the disease that was thought to
have killed his grandfather Prince Albert.[12]
Queen Victoria still regarded Princess May as a suitable match for
her grandson, and George and May grew close during their shared
period of mourning.[13]
A year after Albert Victor´s death, George proposed to May and was
accepted. They married on 6 July 1893 at the Chapel Royal in St James´s Palace, London. Throughout their
lives, they remained devoted to each other. George was, on his own
admission, unable to express his feelings easily in speech, but
they often exchanged loving letters and notes of
endearment.[14]
The death of his elder brother effectively ended George´s naval
career, as he was now second in line to succeed to the throne,
after his father.[15]
George was created Duke of York, Earl of Inverness and Baron Killarney by Queen Victoria on 24
May 1892,[16]
and received lessons in constitutional history from J. R. Tanner.[17]
After George´s marriage to May, she was styled Her Royal
Highness The Duchess of York.
The Duke and Duchess of York lived mainly at York
Cottage,[18]
a relatively small house in Sandringham, Norfolk, where their way of
life mirrored that of a comfortable middle-class family rather than
royalty.[19]
George preferred a simple, almost quiet, life in marked contrast to
the lively social life pursued by his father. His official
biographer, Harold Nicolson, later despaired of
George´s time as Duke of York, writing: "He may be all right as a
young midshipman and a wise old king, but when he was Duke of
York ... he did nothing at all but kill [i.e. shoot]
animals and stick in stamps."[20]
George was an avid stamp collector, which Nicolson
disparaged,[21]
but George played a large role in building the Royal Philatelic Collection into
the most comprehensive collection of United Kingdom and
Commonwealth stamps in the world, in some cases setting record
purchase prices for items.[22]
George and May had five sons and a daughter. Randolph Churchill claimed that George was
a strict father, to the extent that his children were terrified of
him, and that George had remarked to Edward Stanley, 17th
Earl of Derby: "My father was frightened of his mother, I was
frightened of my father, and I am damned well going to see to it
that my children are frightened of me." In reality, there is no
direct source for the quotation and it is likely that George´s
parenting style was little different from that adopted by most
people at the time.[23]
In October 1894, George´s uncle-by-marriage, Tsar Alexander III, died and his cousin,
Tsar Nicholas II, ascended the Russian
throne. At the request of his father, "out of respect for poor dear
Uncle Sasha´s memory", George joined his parents in St. Petersburg
for the funeral.[24]
George and his parents remained in Russia for the wedding a week
later of Nicholas to another one of George´s first cousins,
Princess Alix of
Hesse-Darmstadt, who Queen Victoria had once hoped would marry
George´s elder brother.
As Duke and Duchess of York, George and May carried out a wide
variety of public duties. On the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901, George´s
father ascended the throne as King
Edward VII. George inherited the titles of Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay, and for much of the rest
of that year, he was styled His Royal Highness The Duke of
Cornwall and York.
In 1901, George and May toured the British Empire. Their tour included Gibraltar,
Malta, Port Said, Aden, Ceylon, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand,
Mauritius, South Africa, Canada, and the Colony of Newfoundland. The tour was
designed by Colonial Secretary
Joseph Chamberlain with the support of
Prime Minister Lord Salisbury to reward the Dominions for
their participation in the South African War of 1899–1902.
George presented thousands of specially designed South African War
medals to colonial troops. In South Africa, the royal party met
civic leaders, African leaders, and Boer prisoners, and was greeted
by elaborate decorations, expensive gifts, and fireworks displays.
Despite this, not all residents responded favourably to the tour.
Many white Cape Afrikaners resented the display and expense, the
war having weakened their capacity to reconcile their
Afrikaner-Dutch culture with their status as British subjects.
Critics in the English-language press decried the enormous cost at
a time when families faced severe hardship.[25]
In Australia, the Duke opened the first session of the Australian Parliament upon the
creation of the
Commonwealth of Australia.[26]
In New Zealand, he praised the military values, bravery, loyalty,
and obedience to duty of New Zealanders, and the tour gave New
Zealand a chance to show off its progress, especially in its
adoption of up-to-date British standards in communications and the
processing industries. The implicit goal was to advertise New
Zealand´s attractiveness to tourists and potential immigrants,
while avoiding news of growing social tensions, by focusing the
attention of the British press on a land few knew about.[27]
On his return to Britain, in a speech at London´s Guildhall, George warned of "the
impression which seemed to prevail among [our] brethren across the
seas, that the Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain
her old position of pre-eminence in her colonial trade against
foreign competitors."[28]
On 9 November 1901, George was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester.[29][30]
King Edward wished to prepare his son for his future role as king.
In contrast to Edward himself, whom Queen Victoria had deliberately
excluded from state affairs, George was given wide access to state
documents by his father.[15][31]
George in turn allowed his wife access to his papers,[32]
as he valued her counsel and she often helped write her husband´s
speeches.[33]
As Prince of Wales, George supported reforms in naval training,
including cadets being enrolled at the ages of twelve and thirteen,
and receiving the same education, whatever their class and eventual
assignments. The reforms were implemented by the then Second (later
First) Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher.[34]
From November 1905 to March 1906, George and May toured
British India, where he was disgusted by racial
discrimination and campaigned for greater involvement of Indians in
the government of the country.[35]
The tour was almost immediately followed by a trip to Spain for the
wedding of King Alfonso XIII to Victoria Eugenie of
Battenberg, a first cousin of George, at which the bride and
groom narrowly avoided assassination.[36]
A week after returning to Britain, George and May travelled to
Norway for the coronation of King Haakon VII, George´s cousin, and
Queen Maud, George´s sister.[37]
On 6 May 1910, King
Edward died, and George became king. He wrote in his diary, "I
have lost my best friend and the best of fathers ... I never
had a [cross] word with him in my life. I am heart-broken and
overwhelmed with grief but God will help me in my responsibilities
and darling May will be my comfort as she has always been. May God
give me strength and guidance in the heavy task which has fallen on
me".[38]
George had never liked his wife´s habit of signing official
documents and letters as "Victoria Mary" and insisted she drop one
of those names. They both thought she should not be called Queen
Victoria, and so she became Queen Mary.[39]
Later that year, a radical propagandist, Edward Mylius, published a lie that George had
secretly married in Malta as a young man, and that consequently his
marriage to Queen Mary was bigamous. The lie had first surfaced in
print in 1893 but George had shrugged it off as a joke. In an
effort to kill off rumours, Mylius was arrested, tried and found
guilty of criminal libel, and was sentenced to a
year in prison.[40]
George objected to the anti-Catholic wording of the Accession
Declaration that he would be required to make at the opening of his
first parliament. He made it known that he would refuse to open
parliament as long as he was obliged to make the declaration in its
current form. As a result, the Accession Declaration Act
1910 shortened the declaration and removed the most offensive
phrases.[41]
King George and Queen Mary at the Delhi
Durbar, 1911
George and Mary´s coronation took place at Westminster Abbey on 22 June
1911,[15]
and was celebrated by the Festival of Empire in London. In July, the
King and Queen visited Ireland for five days; they received a warm
welcome, with thousands of people lining the route of their
procession to cheer.[42][43]
Later in 1911, the King and Queen travelled to India for the
Delhi Durbar, where they were presented to
an assembled audience of Indian dignitaries and princes as the
Emperor and Empress of India on 12 December
1911. George wore the newly created Imperial Crown of India at the
ceremony, and declared the shifting of the Indian capital from
Calcutta to Delhi. They
travelled throughout the sub-continent, and George took the
opportunity to indulge in big game hunting in Nepal, shooting 21
tigers, 8 rhinoceroses and a bear over 10 days.[44]
He was a keen and expert marksman.[45]
On 18 December 1913, he shot over a thousand pheasants in six hours[46]
at the home of Lord Burnham,
although even he had to acknowledge that "we went a little too far"
that day.[47]
From 1914 to 1918, Britain and its allies were at war with the Central Powers, led by the German Empire. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who for the British
public came to symbolise all the horrors of the war, was the King´s
first cousin. The King´s paternal grandfather was Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and
Gotha; consequently, the King and his children bore the titles
Prince and Princess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Duke and Duchess
of Saxony. Queen Mary, although British like her mother, was the
daughter of the Duke of Teck, a descendant of the German
Dukes of Württemberg. The King had
brothers-in-law and cousins who were British subjects but who bore
German titles such as Duke and Duchess of Teck, Prince and Princess
of Battenberg, and Prince and Princess of Schleswig-Holstein. When
H. G. Wells wrote about Britain´s "alien and
uninspiring court", George famously replied: "I may be uninspiring,
but I´ll be damned if I´m alien."[62]
On 17 July 1917, George appeased British nationalist feelings by
issuing a royal proclamation that changed the name of the British
royal house from the German-sounding House of Saxe-Coburg and
Gotha to the House of Windsor.[63]
He and all his British relatives relinquished their German titles
and styles, and adopted British-sounding surnames. George
compensated his male relatives by creating them British peers. His
cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, who
earlier in the war had been forced to resign as First Sea Lord through anti-German feeling,
became Louis Mountbatten, 1st Marquess of Milford Haven, while
Queen Mary´s brothers became Adolphus
Cambridge, 1st Marquess of Cambridge, and Alexander
Cambridge, 1st Earl of Athlone.[64]
George´s cousins Princess Marie
Louise and Princess
Helena Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein dropped their territorial
designations.
In Letters Patent gazetted on 11 December 1917
the King restricted the style "His (or Her) Royal Highness" and the
titular dignity of "Prince (or Princess) of Great Britain and
Ireland" to the children of the Sovereign, the children of the sons
of the Sovereign and the eldest living son of the eldest living son
of a Prince of Wales.[66]
The Letters Patent also stated that "the titles of Royal Highness,
Highness or Serene Highness, and the titular dignity of Prince and
Princess shall cease except those titles already granted and
remaining unrevoked". George´s relatives who fought on the German
side, such as Prince Ernst
August of Hanover, 3rd Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale (the
senior male-line great-grandson of George III) and Prince Carl
Eduard, Duke of Albany and reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and
Gotha (a male-line grandson of Queen Victoria), had their
British peerages suspended by a 1919 Order in Council under the provisions of the
Titles Deprivation Act
1917. Under pressure from his mother, Queen Alexandra, George
also removed the Garter flags of his
German relations from St George´s Chapel,
Windsor Castle.[67]
When Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, George´s
first cousin (their mothers were sisters), was overthrown in the
Russian Revolution of 1917, the
British government offered political asylum to the Tsar and his family,
but worsening conditions for the British people, and fears that
revolution might come to the British Isles, led George to think
that the presence of the Russian royals would be seen as
inappropriate.[68]
Despite the later claims of Lord
Mountbatten of Burma that Prime Minister Lloyd George was opposed to the rescue of
the Russian imperial family, the letters of Lord Stamfordham
suggest that it was George V who opposed the rescue against
the advice of the government.[69]
Advanced planning for a rescue was undertaken by MI1, a branch
of the British secret service,[70]
but because of the strengthening position of the Bolshevik revolutionaries and wider difficulties
with the conduct of the war, the plan was never put into
operation.[71]
The Tsar and his immediate family remained in Russia, where they
were killed by Bolsheviks in 1918. The following year, Nicholas´s
mother (George´s aunt) Maria Feodorovna
(Dagmar of Denmark) and other members of the extended Russian
imperial family were rescued from the Crimea by
British ships.
Two months after the end of the war, the King´s youngest son,
John, died at the age
of 13 after a lifetime of ill health. George was informed of his
death by Queen Mary, who wrote, "[John] had been a great anxiety to
us for many years ... The first break in the family circle is
hard to bear but people have been so kind & sympathetic &
this has helped us much."[72]
In May 1922, the King toured Belgium and northern France,
visiting the First World War cemeteries and memorials being
constructed by the Imperial War Graves
Commission. The event was described in a poem, The King´s Pilgrimage by Rudyard Kipling.[73]
The tour, and one short visit to Italy in 1923, were the only times
George agreed to leave the United Kingdom on official business
after the end of the war.[74]
| Name |
Birth |
Death |
Spouse |
Children |
Edward, Prince of Wales
Later Edward VIII, then Duke of Windsor |
23 June 1894 |
28 May 1972 |
Wallis Simpson |
None |
Prince Albert, Duke of York
Later George VI |
14 December 1895 |
6 February 1952 |
Lady Elizabeth
Bowes-Lyon |
Elizabeth II
Princess Margaret,
Countess of Snowdon |
| Mary,
Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood |
25 April 1897 |
28 March 1965 |
Henry Lascelles, 6th
Earl of Harewood |
George Lascelles,
7th Earl of Harewood
The Honourable Gerald
Lascelles |
| Prince Henry, Duke of
Gloucester |
31 March 1900 |
10 June 1974 |
Lady Alice Montagu
Douglas Scott |
Prince William of Gloucester
Prince Richard, Duke of
Gloucester |
| Prince George, Duke of Kent |
20 December 1902 |
25 August 1942 |
Princess Marina of
Greece and Denmark |
Prince Edward, Duke of Kent
Princess
Alexandra, The Honourable Lady Ogilvy
Prince Michael of Kent |
| Prince John |
12 July 1905 |
18 January 1919 |
Never married |
None |
