George V, the king of England from 1910 to 1936, was not a brilliant man. Margot Asquith, wife of his first prime minister, described him as a “dunderhead.” He did not make for great company. On fine mornings, George would sometimes ride out from Buckingham Palace across Hyde Park to call on the house of his aide-de-camp Bryan Godfrey-Faussett. The Godfrey-Faussett family so dreaded the tedium of these royal visits that they would draw lots to see who had to greet him. Sometimes they hid upstairs, pretending to be out, while the king paced around the grounds below, peering irately through the windows. He and his consort, Queen Mary, were famously uninspired conversationalists. Max Beerbohm composed a cheeky poem about court life: “The King is duller than the Queen … the Queen is duller than the King.”
All this has represented rather a challenge for George’s biographers. John Gore, who published the first of two official lives in 1941, tactfully but tellingly described the king as “frank, simple, honest and good — too good perhaps to be interesting.” Biographer Harold Nicolson was more caustic, saying George was “a stupid old bore” whose personal life revolved around his twin obsessions of pheasant shooting and philately. For years, Nicolson complained, the king “did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.”
Jane Ridley, a professor of modern history at the University of Buckingham and the author of “George V: Never a Dull Moment,” a richly detailed and diverting new assessment of his life and reign, thinks that the “boring” label is unfair. She concedes that the king’s stiffness and cultivated sang-froid create barriers to understanding him. “The biographer,” she admits, “searches George’s writings in vain for an inner life.” But, Ridley continues, there was more going on beneath the gruff Saxe-Coburg exterior than met at first glance. Indeed, she calls him “one of the most successful monarchs in British history.”
Does Ridley deliver on this bold claim? George V’s quarter-century reign was certainly not dull. He acceded to the throne with his country in the middle of a parliamentary constitutional crisis and on the brink of a world war. He died on the brink of another, even more terrible world war and on the eve of another constitutional crisis — this one a family matter: the determination of his eldest son and heir, Edward (known to the family as David), the Prince of Wales, to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, a match deemed unacceptable to the Anglican Church, which David, as monarch, would oversee as supreme head. George ruled a kingdom rocked by revolution and civil war in Ireland, a general strike, and the economic slump of the 1930s. It was not an easy time to be a European crowned head. The early decades of the 20th century saw royal thrones topple from Portugal to Greece, often violently. Russian Czar Nicholas II, George’s cousin, whom he physically resembled to an astonishing degree, was not just deposed by his people but brutally murdered along with the rest of his family. Perhaps under the circumstances there were worse choices for a king than being boring.
There was never much likelihood of burning torches and pitchforks outside Buckingham Palace, of course. The threat to George’s throne was subtler. At the time of his coronation, Britain was not yet a mass democracy. Millions of working-class men, and all women, were still excluded from the vote. But between 1918 and 1928, the franchise was extended to adults of both sexes. George’s grandmother Queen Victoria had ruled a country largely governed by its landed aristocracy. Could the British monarchy carve out a suitable new role for itself in this age of populism? Or would it come to be seen by the people as a pointless, costly anachronism?
Ridley argues, persuasively, that George responded to the challenge with energy and imagination. He accelerated the process begun by his grandfather Prince Albert the century before of transforming the royal family into a model of respectable domesticity. George’s father, Edward VII, had enjoyed a colorful but dissolute, champagne-fueled existence amid a fast set of plutocrats and married mistresses. George rarely entertained for pleasure, went to bed at 10 p.m. and loudly declared that he had no interest in anyone’s wife but his own. He embraced the idea of his ordinariness — “You have found me an ordinary man, haven’t you?” he once asked the first Labour Party prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald. It’s debatable how ordinary we can call a man who was the beneficiary of a tax-free annual salary worth $129 million today and who once shot 12 Indian tigers in four days. But his attitudes and prejudices were those of a typical, if stodgy, middle-aged patriarch of his time. He liked the countryside, children and pets. He disliked modern art (“awful”), soft collars on men’s shirts and anything vaguely progressive in women’s fashion. At garden parties, the king would make loud comments about female guests who had the temerity to appear with lipstick or bobbed hair until his mortified wife told him to be quiet.
Under George V, Ridley explains, the British monarchy was nationalized. Out went the traditional marriages to European, mostly German, cousins. In came alliances with blue-blooded English and Scottish families. Royal weddings became noisy public celebrations rather than private affairs. As the crown lost political power, it embraced pomp and ceremony instead — more uniforms and carriage horses to please the crowds, more visits to meet the masses, especially at times of crisis and disaster. George literally rebranded his family during World War I when the surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha seemed too embarrassingly Teutonic. He emerged from the war as head of the altogether cozier-sounding House of Windsor. George began the tradition of broadcasting to nation and empire at Christmas in 1932, with the royal voice now entering every subject’s home, rich or poor, in intimacy and friendship. By the time of his silver jubilee in 1935, the position of this reimagined British monarchy was securer than it had ever been. The Archbishop of Canterbury congratulated the king on raising the Crown to a hitherto unknown height of national prestige and reverence.
“What is the use,” George responded grimly, “when I know my son is going to let it down?” On the brink of his death he predicted, with striking accuracy, that within a year of acceding to the throne, David, as King Edward VIII, would be forced to abdicate in scandal. His one consolation in his final declining months was the knowledge that David’s younger brother “Bertie,” the Duke of York, a man much closer in temperament to his father, would be there to pick up the crown when it fell. And after Bertie there was his granddaughter, young Princess Elizabeth.
Alan Allport is a professor of history at Syracuse University. His most recent book is “Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941.”
George V
Never a Dull Moment
By Jane Ridley
Harper. 559 pp. $35
