April 7, 2022 41David Lloyd George’s “People’s Bud-
get,” which proposed modestly higher
taxes on the rich to pay for both social
programs and battleships. It was finally
passed the following year, but not be-
fore it had provoked a constitutional
crisis. And so when Edward VII died in
May 1910, George ascended the throne
“at one of the few moments in the de-
velopment of the modern British consti-
tution,” in Matthew’s words, “when the
powers of the crown, so often regarded
as dormant, were required to be alive
and active.” The crisis only ended in
August 1911, when the peers, or enough
of them, caved and passed the Parlia-
ment Act, curbing their own power.For George, it was a relief to leave that
autumn on a magnificent imperial visit
to India. Cheering crowds and the great
Durbar in Delhi, where gorgeously ca-
parisoned Indian princes paid homage,
gave him a comforting but misleading
sense of loyalty. He returned in Febru-
ary 1912 as H. H. Asquith introduced
the third Home Rule Bill, offering Ire-
land self- government within the United
Kingdom. Arthur Balfour had been
ousted as Tory leader and succeeded by
Andrew Bonar Law, who openly urged
Protestant Ulster to resist Home Rule
by any means, including armed force,
and was soon unmistakably inciting the
army to mutiny. When the king implied
to Asquith that he might refuse to give
royal assent to the Home Rule Bill, it
was something so utterly without prec-
edent that Nicolson brushed over it, but
even so, George was surely right when
he told Asquith that it was his own “duty
by every means in his power to prevent
civil war.” The bill was finally passed in
1914 but suspended with the outbreak
of war. In 1930 the king looked back
and said, “What fools we were not to
have accepted Mr. Gladstone’s Home
Rule Bill,” which would have avoided
so much woe and bloodshed.
One of the few men in Europe who
could match George as a shot was
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.
In the spring of 1914, and with painful
dramatic irony, the archduke invited
both George and Kaiser Wilhem II to
shoot with him that autumn, not guess-
ing that by June he would be a target
himself. The Great War that followed,
Ridley writes, “tore apart the dynastic
realm of Queen Victoria’s extended
family,” with sorry consequences for
most of her descendants who ruled
European countries in 1914, of whom
there were no fewer than nine, but it
only enhanced the position of the Brit-
ish Crown. “To the arbitrator monarch
of 1910–14 was added a service monar-
chy, making direct contact with ordi-
nary people, similar to the institution as
it is today.” The king visited the army
in France, where he was badly injured
when thrown from his horse, and he
and the queen toured the industrial cit-
ies of northern England with their great
munitions factories and shipyards.
When H. G. Wells’s novel Mr. Brit-
ling Sees It Through (1916) derided “an
uninspiring and alien Court,” George
snorted, “I may be uninspiring, but I’ll
be damned if I’m alien.” All the same,
Wells was right when he said that “the
European dynastic system, based upon
the intermarriage of a group of mainly
German royal families, is dead to- day.”
Implicitly recognizing this, the king re-
luctantly allowed the removal from St.
George’s Chapel at Windsor of the ban-ners of the German knights of the Gar-
ter, before the “Change of Name,” as a
new file opened by Lord Stamfordham,
the king’s private secretary, was called.
After some puzzlement as to what to
call the royal family (or indeed what its
existing name actually was), Stamford-
ham hit on their most famous castle, and
Windsor was chosen as a pleasing new
name. In July 1917 George recorded that
“I relinquished all my German titles for
myself & family.” Just as significant was
his decision “that our children should be
allowed to marry into British families.”
All that was nothing compared with
events in Russia. In 1917 the February
Revolution overthrew George’s cousin
Tsar Nicholas II, and Sir George Bu-
chanan, the British ambassador in
Petrograd, reported that the provisional
government expected the tsar to be of-
fered refuge in England, as previous
deposed rulers like Louis Philippe and
Napoleon III had been. But Nicholas
was not. Much later a completely false
story was mentioned by the American-
born social butterfly and brilliant dia-
rist “Chips” Channon and subsequently
repeated by the deplorable Lord
Mountbatten: the king wanted to help
the tsar but Lloyd George prevented
him. This was the reverse of the truth.
Lloyd George was ready to give the
tsar refuge if it kept Russia in the war
but, as Ridley unravels the story, it was
George, nervous about his own position
amid republican murmurs, who could“not help doubting, on general grounds
of expediency,” in Stamfordham’s
words, “whether it is advisable that the
Imperial Family should take up their
residence in this country.” The fate of
that family was sealed by the Bolshe-
viks’ October Revolution. “Nicky and
Alicky,” as George knew the tsar and
tsarina, were sent to Yekaterinburg,
where in July 1918 they and their son
and four daughters were brutally killed
on Lenin’s orders. Ridley admits that if
George felt sorry for their fate, there’s
no sign that he felt remorse. Successful
dynasties don’t survive without a ruth-
less instinct for self- preservation.After the Armistice in November
1918 the royal couple drove for five days
through cheering crowds in the poor-
est quarters of London. The king was
alarmed by the threat of socialism and
shared Stamfordham’s hope that the
masses would come to see the Crown
“as a living power for good.” He was
dismayed by the violence that erupted
in Ireland soon after, not only the IRA’s
terrorist campaign but the Black and
Tans’ cruel reprisals. “Are you going
to shoot all the people in Ireland?” he
angrily asked Lloyd George. “I cannot
have my people killed in this manner.”
Lloyd George tried to spirit the prob-
lem away with his 1920 Government of
Ireland Act, offering separate parlia-
ments for six- county Northern Irelandand the twenty- six- county south, and in
June 1921 the king courageously went
to Belfast to open the smaller parlia-
ment with a speech pleading for peace
and unity of spirit in Ireland. (A hun-
dred years on, there may be peace, but
unity of spirit has proved more elusive.)
By then George’s position as an in-
dependent arbitrator was stronger than
ever, which was just as well given the
bewildering succession of events that
awaited: from 1922 to 1924 there were
three elections, four governments, and
four prime ministers. The king was ap-
palled by Lloyd George’s sale of hon-
ors to unworthy men, which came to a
head in June 1922 when the birthday
honors “were flagrantly corrupt,” Rid-
ley says. “Five new peers were listed,
four of whom were crooks or tax evad-
ers.” Weakened by the scandal, Lloyd
George resigned in October 1922 after
a majority of Tory MPs decided to leave
the coalition, to be succeeded by Bonar
Law, who served as prime minister for
only seven months before resigning
when he was diagnosed with terminal
throat cancer.
Now the king had to choose a suc-
cessor. Some thought that it should be
Lord Curzon, the imperious foreign
secretary, a view certainly held by Cur-
zon himself, but George chose Stanley
Baldwin instead. Soon afterward, and
against the king’s expressed wish, Bald-
win called a general election in which
the Tories lost their majority. Although
“the palace had dreaded a Labour gov-
ernment,” it came to power on January
22, 1924, with Ramsay MacDonald as
prime minister. While wondering what
“dear Grandmama” Victoria would
have thought of it, George told his
mother, “They have different ideas to
ours as they are all socialists but they
ought to be given a chance.”
MacDonald depended on the pas-
sive support of the Liberals, which was
withdrawn after little more than nine
months. The Tories won the ensuing
election in a landslide after playing up
the threat that Labour could be pene-
trated by the Soviets and making much
of the “Zinoviev Letter.” This purport-
edly came from Grigory Zinoviev, the
head of the Communist International
(and shot twelve years later as Stalin’s
great purge began), urging the British
Communist Party to foment sedition
and, more damagingly, claiming that
the recognition of Soviet Russia by the
Labour government would radicalize
the British working class.
Throughout Ridley’s richly enter-
taining book we’re reminded of King
George’s mundane personality and
conventional outlook, not least his ob-
session with correct dress, a subject on
which he continually berated his eldest
son, among others. As Nicolson put
it, George was a man who always pre-
ferred the fashion before last, and when
others had moved on he continued to
wear frock coats, buttoned boots rather
than shoes, and trousers creased at the
sides. He welcomed the postwar return
of formal levee dress of white breeches
and silk stockings at court, though he
relented and permitted Labour minis-
ters to wear evening dress. And yet with
all his stiff conventionality, George was
also blessed with basic decency and the
sheer common sense that ought to be
the cardinal Tory virtue but that some-
times, as at present, goes missing.
His decency was exemplified by
his anger when it was proposed that
captured U- boat crews should sufferSET CHANGE
Within the church they opened a train station:
waiting room, altar lamps, icons, and booths.
The crowded choirs buzz like a cauldron,
and female cashiers with mouths like fake rubies.
Restrooms and frescoes. The Christmas star
turned to ash like Mary dressed in black.
You open the altar gates like doors—
exit and walk down the first platform.And there, trains and wind before rain. The light
from candles guttering like voices at a banquet.
We cluster around the car. And blowing a whistle,
a proletarian prophet in a red service cap.
Within the school they opened a hotel:
someone gets ready to sleep with somebody.
Wet stalactites pulsate from the ceiling,
high school girls crave cotton candy
and, twisting the channels of intertwined arms,
master the essence of the natural sciences.Within the castle they opened a hospital:
there chivalry rambles in shabby pajamas
as if beaten by fire or plucked from a stake,
and they prepare a diagnosis like planning a murder.
Because at night in each of the dimly lit towers
chivalry’s treated for shame. With hammer and nails.Within the circus they opened a factory:
there a proud people fly over the lathes
in gaudy clown makeup from ear to ear.Within the sky they opened a prison.
Within the body they opened darkness.
Within the spirit they opened bedlam.—Yuri Andrukhovych
(translated from the Ukrainian
by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin)Wheatcroft 40 42 _fix.indd 41 3 / 9 / 22 6 : 51 PM