40 The New York ReviewAn Unexpectedly Modern Monarch
Geoffrey WheatcroftGeorge V: Never a Dull Moment
by Jane Ridley.
Harper, 559 pp., $35.00Why does monarchy exist, and what
purpose does it serve? At a time when
the British monarchy has been much
troubled, even those who think it an
absurd anachronism must concede that
it has shown an astonishing capacity for
survival. If you start with Athelstan,
who from around 930 was called “king
of the English,” then England has been
ruled by kings and queens for nearly
eleven hundred years. Four years after
King George V acceded to the throne
in 1910 a terrible war ravaged Europe
and ended with the collapse of four
empires as well as the demise of many
other kingdoms and principalities
across the continent. But George—who
during that war changed his dynasty’s
name from Saxe- Coburg to Windsor in
an attempt to disown its German ori-
gins—was more secure than ever.
Maybe that flourishing genre, the
royal biography, helps explain this. Un-
like those historical figures who have
achieved greatness by personal qual-
ities quite out of the ordinary, many
monarchs have been exceedingly or-
dinary people, chosen by an accident
of birth to occupy extraordinary posi-
tions—and never was that truer than of
King George V. The title of Jane Rid-ley’s splendid George V: Never a Dull
Moment is half ironic. He reigned, as
she says, for “twenty- five of the most
tumultuous and eventful years” in re-
cent times; or as the courtier Sir Alan
Lascelles wrote in his diary, George
“was dull, beyond dispute—but my
God, his reign (politically and interna-
tionally) never had a dull moment.”
And never a dull book about him.
In 1983 Kenneth Rose wrote a prize-
winning life of the king, and there’s a
brilliant account by H. C. G. Matthew
in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. Those had been preceded
by two official biographies: in 1941 King
George V: A Personal Memoir by John
Gore, a prolific journalist and author
well known in his day, written with “the
agreeable virtues of tact and taste,” in
the words of the diplomat and writer
Sir Harold Nicolson, who published
in 1952 his own full- length life of the
king, in many ways an excellent book,
albeit marked not only by tact but by
quiet condescension and patriotic self-
congratulation. As Nicolson recorded
in his diaries, he had been instructed
by Lascelles that “I should not be ex-
pected to say one word that was not
true.... All I should be expected to do
was to omit things and incidents which
were discreditable.” Lascelles added,
“You will be writing a book on the sub-
ject of a myth and will have to be myth-ological,” which is the way quite a few
other biographers, of Churchill for no-
table example, have worked unbidden.
Nearly seventy years later Ridley
isn’t quite tactless or tasteless, but she’s
untrammeled by any restraints. This is
her third outstanding royal biography,
following The Heir Apparent (2013),
a full- dress life of King Edward VII,^1
and Victoria (2016), a short life of the
queen. And George might claim to
have done more, almost by accident,
than his grandmother or father to cre-
ate the modern monarchy.Like Henry VIII and Charles I,
George V didn’t at first expect to in-
herit the throne. All three were younger
sons who became heirs because of the
death of elder brothers. George, the
second son of the future Edward VII,
was born in 1865, a year after Prince
Albert, Duke of Clarence—“Eddy”
to the family—an unfortunate youth
of ungainly appearance and slow wits.
By 1892 Eddy was betrothed to Prin-
cess May of Teck, but he suddenly fell
ill and died, whereupon the families
adroitly married her to his brother in-
stead. George found himself second
in line for the throne and before longthe father of five boys and a girl. They
settled in York Cottage—“this horrible
little house,” as Nicolson called it—on
the royal estate at Sandringham.
During George’s years at York Cot-
tage, “all the basic stupidity of his char-
acter becomes apparent,” Nicolson
sneered in his diary; “he did nothing at
all but kill animals and stick in stamps.”
It was true that stamp collecting became
one of George’s passions, and shooting
the other. This was the golden age, if
that be the phrase, of battue shooting,
which Ridley writes about with undis-
guised distaste. Artificial breeding of
pheasants coincided with the advent
of the double- barreled twelve- bore
shotgun, which together meant that
birds could be slaughtered on an in-
dustrial scale. George became one of
the half- dozen best shots in the coun-
try, and was fiercely competitive. In his
personal tally of “Game Killed by Me
During Season 1896–97,” he reckoned
that he had shot 11,006 creatures of
all kinds, including 1,116 grouse, 2,509
partridges, and 5,993 pheasants.
With Victoria’s death in 1901, Ed-
ward VII became king and George
heir to the throne. He and Mary (as she
was now officially known, although he
always called her May) made a lengthy
imperial tour to Ceylon, Singapore,
Australia—where he opened the par-
liament of the new commonwealth—
South Africa, and Canada. George was
made Prince of Wales on his return to
a turbulent country, with increasingly
bitter industrial conflict, women agitat-
ing violently for the franchise, Ireland
unreconciled, and looming political
deadlock at Westminster.
Over the previous century the mon-
archy had changed character. George
III had been very much his own chief
executive, and his ministers were a pa-
trician oligarchy supported by a corrupt
and unrepresentative House of Com-
mons. In 1780 John Dunning’s famous
parliamentary motion had asserted
that “the influence of the crown has in-
creased, is increasing, and ought to be
diminished,” and much diminished it
was in Victoria’s time. Successive Re-
form Acts had widened the franchise
to about 60 percent of male citizens,
and the prime minister was no longer a
royal favorite but whoever commanded
a majority in the Commons.
By the time Walter Bagehot pub-
lished The English Constitution in
1867 he could distinguish between the
“dignified” monarchy, whose purpose
was to “excite and preserve the rever-
ence of the population,” and the “effi-
cient” prime minister and cabinet, who
could “employ that homage in the work
of government.” A monarch could no
longer make or break a government but
retained what Bagehot called “the right
to be consulted, the right to encour-
age, the right to warn,” as well as the
authority to choose the prime minister
in some circumstances and to act as an
impartial referee in political disputes.
And yet reform had left untouched
the hereditary House of Lords, which
threw out William Gladstone’s second
Home Rule Bill for Ireland in 1893 and
then, after the Liberals won a landslide
election in 1906, habitually rejected or
mutilated their legislation, culminating
in 1909 in the outrageous rejection ofKing George V; illustration by Hugo Guinness(^1) See my review in these pages, Septem-
ber 25, 2014.
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