42 The New York Reviewpunitive “differential treatment” from
other prisoners of war, his instinct for
fair play by his openness to a Labour
government, and that common sense
by his canny—and correct—suspicion
that the Zinoviev Letter was a forgery.
During the general strike of May 1926
in support of the miserably ill- paid
miners, the king was hawkish to begin
with but softened, criticizing “an un-
fortunate announcement” in Winston
Churchill’s hysterical British Gazette
that advised the armed forces to take
any action necessary against the strik-
ers, as well as a cruel attempt by the gov-
ernment to block strike pay. As Ridley
perceptively says, stuffy and absurdly
rigid though the king could be, he ac-
tually moved away from high society,
while the monarchy gained what Ross
McKibbin, the Australian- born Oxford
historian and author of Classes and
Cultures (1998), has called “a cultural
centrality to British life” and “became
more public, ceremonial, and glamor-
ous, but also more obviously domestic.”Over the winter of 1928–1929 the
king was gravely ill and seemed close
to death, while primitive remedies
were attempted by the inept Lord Daw-
son, his personal physician. The diag-
nosis that eluded him was doubtless
obstructive pulmonary disease, and
the cause was also clear: his smoking,
which shortened the lives of the present
queen’s father, grandfather, and great-
grandfather. But George recovered and
within months “smoked my first ciga-
rette which I enjoyed.” This was shortly
after the May 1929 election in which
Labour was returned to power though
still in a parliamentary minority.
In October the Wall Street collapse
set off the Great Depression, but Mac-
Donald was preoccupied with foreign
affairs, until the financial time bomb
at last exploded in the summer of 1931.
It had been ticking since Churchill, an
improbable and incompetent chancel-
lor of the exchequer, had returned to
the gold standard in 1925, and now a
run on the pound seemed to threaten
disaster. One courtier told the king that
“we are sitting on the top of a volcano”
and foresaw that “Your Majesty might
be asked to approve of a National Gov-
ernment”—a coalition of all parties.
Orthodox wisdom held that financial
confidence could only be restored by
severe cuts in public spending, begin-
ning with unemployment pay, although
the cause of the crisis—as of the 2008
crash—wasn’t the fecklessness of the
poor but the recklessness of the rich:
irresponsible lending by bankers.
When most of the Labour cabinet
refused to accept drastic cuts, Mac-
Donald told the king that he wanted
to resign, but George “said that he be-
lieved I was the only person who could
carry the country through.” MacDon-
ald, the son of a penniless unmarried
farm servant in the remote north of
Scotland, was unmistakably in awe of
royalty; in 1924, unlike his colleagues,
he had donned formal levee dress. For
his part, George liked MacDonald
more than any of his other prime min-
isters and, as Ridley acutely says, saw
him as a faithful Highland ghillie. In
all MacDonald offered his resignation
four times, and four times the king re-
fused. By August 26 a National Gov-
ernment, in name at least, had been
formed, made up of Conservatives and
Liberals as well as MacDonald and acouple of other ministers who had de-
serted the Labour Party. The run on
the pound nevertheless continued until
the guardians of financial rectitude fi-
nally gave up on September 21, when
England came off the gold standard,
which effectively devalued the pound
by a quarter and ended the panic.
Although Ridley says that “the ap-
pointment of the National Government
was the right thing to do in the circum-
stances,” that is not what the Labour
Party thought, then or since. George’s
“they ought to be given a chance” might
be seen as his way of helping Labour
become a democratic party of govern-
ment, but the view on the left was that
he had neutered Labour and drained it
of its radical impulse. Although damag-
ing Labour may not have been the king’s
conscious motive, that was certainly the
effect. An election was called in October
1931 with all the “Nationals” campaign-
ing together. Labour was routed, falling
from 288 seats in the Commons to 52,
and a Tory government in all but name
continued in office for nearly nine years,
until a far graver crisis in May 1940 saw a
truly national government formed.
For George there was a last huzzah,
his Silver Jubilee in 1935. In keeping
with Lascelles’s command, Nicolson
described this climax to the reign:
“The proletariat welcomed... a public
festival,” while for the populace as a
whole there was pridein the fact that, whereas the other
thrones had fallen, our own monar-
chy, unimpaired in dignity, had sur-
vived.... Reverence in the thought
that in the Crown we possessed a
symbol of patriotism, a focus of
unison, an emblem of continuity in
a rapidly dissolving world. Satisfac-
tion in feeling that the Sovereign
stood above all class animosities,
all political ambitions, all sectional
interests. Comfort in the realisa-
tion that here was a strong benev-
olent patriarch personifying the
highest standards of the race.Yes, Nicolson surely earned the knight-
hood that followed his book.On one sensitive subject Gore’s A
Personal Memoir was censored by
George VI: George V’s distant and diffi-
cult relations with his children. Nicolson
censored himself, treating the matter in
a cursory paragraph. The youngest son,
Prince John, was likely autistic and died
aged thirteen. Princess Mary married
Lord Lascelles, son of the Earl of Hare-
wood (they were the parents of the most
remarkable recent member of the larger
royal family, the late George Harewood,
a central figure in British musical and
especially operatic life), while the sec-
ond son, Bertie, Duke of York, married
another earl’s daughter, Lady Elizabeth
Bowes- Lyon, and the third, Henry,
Duke of Gloucester, married a daughter
of the Duke of Buccleuch.
More of a problem were the fourth
son, George, Duke of Kent, and the el-
dest, the Prince of Wales. (The family
had a habit of confusing nicknames: the
Prince of Wales who briefly became Ed-
ward VIII was “David,” and the Duke
of York who became King George VI
was “Bertie.”) Both ran wild, George
reputedly as a bisexual cocaine user—
what would today’s tabloids do with
that!—while David had a series of liai-
sons with married women, to his father’sdismay. “I am not interested in any wife
except my own,” said the uxorious King
George, a contrast to both his father and
his eldest son, and his last years were
clouded by David’s infatuation with
“that woman,” Wallis Simpson.
By early 1936 the king was more
gravely ill. The nation listened raptly
to regular bulletins on the BBC, until
the memorable words from Dawson on
the evening of January 20: “The king’s
life is drawing peacefully towards its
close.” Peacefully, but not unaided: in
order to ensure that his death would
be announced in The Times rather
than “the less suitable” evening papers,
Dawson “decided to determine the
end,” as he put it, and polished the king
off with shots of morphia and cocaine.
Dawson made his deadline and George
died punctually at five minutes to mid-
night, the full story only revealed half
a century later. Since he was in no pain
and had made no request to be sped on
his way, at least one lawyer has said that
this was legally murder.
Everyone knows the sequel. George
V was succeeded by King Edward
VIII, who reigned for 327 days be-
fore abdicating in order to marry Mrs.
Simpson. (As Queen Mary exclaimed,
“Really, this might be Rumania!”) The
following year he justified apprehen-
sions about him by meeting Hitler and
giving the Nazi salute. “The Yorks will
do it very well,” said Queen Mary, and
so King George VI and Queen Eliza-
beth did when war came.^2
This February George V’s grand-
daughter, the ninety- five- year- old Queen
Elizabeth II, marked her seventieth
anniversary on the throne, not only
the longest reign in English or British
history but almost the longest in Euro-
pean history.^3 But her Platinum Jubilee
coincides with the worst travails the
royal family has known since the Abdi-
cation, what with the lawsuit in Amer-
ica accusing the Duke of York of sexual
abuse in connection with his friendship
with Jeffrey Epstein, which he has
now settled out of court in humiliat-
ing fashion; Prince Harry and his wife,
Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of
Sussex, grumbling away in California;
and few people apart from the Prince
of Wales himself looking forward with
much enthusiasm to his becoming king.
On April 21, 1926, Chips Channon
woke to the sound of booming guns
announcing that the Duchess of York
had given birth to a daughter, to be
known as Elizabeth like her mother.
With eerie prescience at a time when
his friend the Prince of Wales was still
expected to marry and beget an heir,
he wrote, “I have a feeling the child
will be Queen of England. And,” he
added in words that could now sound
more than ominous, “perhaps the last
sovereign.” Q(^2) Queen Mary received perhaps the
best biography of all, by James Pope-
Hennessy in 1959, a wonderful pendant
to which appeared four years ago, The
Quest for Queen Mary, Pope- Hennessy’s
record of all his interviews with royalties
English and European while writing his
biography. See the review in these pages
by Alexander Waugh, June 7, 2018.
(^3) She has already passed the Austrian
emperor Franz Joseph’s sixty- eight
years, and in 2024 she can beat the rec-
ord of King Louis XIV, who inherited
the French throne at the age of four and
reigned for seventy- two years and 110
days.
Available from booksellers and http://www.nyrb.com
HANNAH ARENDT’S
FIRST BOOK IS BACK IN PRINT
Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish
Woman was Hannah Arendt’s first book,
largely completed when she went into
exile from Germany in 1933, though not
published until the 1950s.
It is the biography of a remarkable, com-
plicated, passionate woman, and an im-
portant figure in German romanticism.
“Rahel Varnhagen is best understood
as a laboratory in which Arendt
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Hannah Arendt sur vives only in the
pages of books.” —Adam Kirsch, Airmail
“In recounting Varnhagen’s life,
Arendt documents the paradoxes of
German Jews’ emancipation between
the breakdown of the Jewish ghetto
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emergence of the nineteenth-centur y
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What interested her was the evolu-
tion of Varnhagen’s psychology and,
especially, her Jewish identity.”
—Seyla Benhabib, The New York
Review of Books
“Arendt’s insight into the psychology
and the situation of pariah and par-
venu is essential.” —Kirkus Reviews
“This brilliant and original biography
offers a valuable picture of a crucial
era in the life of German Jewry.”
—Jewish Social Studies
“In reading Rahel Varnhagen one
soon realizes that only Hannah
Arendt could have written Rahel...
Arendt lived with Rahel Varnhagen’s
life long enough to see the unmistak-
able likeness between her own as
a Berlin Jew in the early twentieth
centur y and Rahel’s at the end
of the Enlightenment.”
—Vivian Gornick, The Nation
RAHEL VARNHAGEN
THE LIFE OF A JEWISH WOMAN
Hannah Arendt
Introduction by Barbara Hahn
Translated from the German by
Clara Winston and Richard Winston
Paperback • $18. 95
Also available as an e-book
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