His personality was reserved and unassuming, and yet he was monarch over the largest empire
the world has ever seen.
When the war came he saw his duty as the face of determination for his people.
King George V.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War Bio special episode about George V, King of
the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India.
George was born June 3, 1865, during the 64 year reign of his grandmother, Queen Victoria.
George Frederick Ernest Albert was the second son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, the
future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.
In 1871, he and his older brother Albert Victor, whom the family called Eddy, were entrusted
to the care of the tutor Reverend John Neale Dalton, who would form a lifelong friendship
with both boys.
There does seem to be a certain lack in their education, though, as neither ever learned
a foreign language, unusual for a monarch at the time, and misspellings, poor grammar,
and syntax errors appeared in George’s correspondence and journals for his whole life.
George, as the second son of the Prince of Wales, was not in direct line for succession,
so almost from the moment of his birth, it had been decided that he would make a career
in the navy.
George was 12 years old when he joined the Royal Navy, together with Eddy.
At first, his training was confined to England, but from 1879 to 1882, he traveled to Gibraltar,
the Balearic Islands, Palermo, Madeira, Barbados, Martinique, Jamaica, Bermuda, Ireland, Montevideo,
Buenos Aires, the Falklands, Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Ceylon,
Egypt, Palestine, and Greece.
En route, he and his brother each acquired three tattoos, including a red and blue dragon
on their arms.
Yep, the king with the dragon tattoo.
Soon after, Eddy went to Cambridge; George continued in the navy.
George was actually quite a capable young commander, first of Torpedo Boat 79 in home
waters, and then of the HMS Thrush, based in Halifax, in 1891.
The following year, Eddy came down with influenza and died, the day before his 28th birthday
and a month before his marriage.
George was now in direct line of succession to the throne, and his naval career was suddenly
over.
Created a Duke, he had some official duties, though the most important role of an heir
to an hereditary monarchy was to marry and reproduce.
Queen Victoria sidestepped the possible lengthy process of finding a mate for George by strongly
suggesting that he marry Eddy’s former fiancée, Mary, the Princess of Teck.
Princess Mary was the granddaughter of the Duke of Wurttemberg.
Now, he had married a Countess, but according to succession laws she was viewed as non-royal,
so the marriage was morganatic.
Despite this, George married her - she was also his second cousin once removed - June
6, 1893.
The couple moved into York Cottage.
Thing is, his mother Alexandra and her three daughters were not welcoming to Mary.
Much of the court also looked down on Mary because of her “common” blood.
So Mary withdrew into herself and the two lived a quiet life in the country, more like
the upper middle class than royalty.
Queen Victoria died in 1901 and Edward VII succeeded her as king.
George, now the Prince of Wales and direct heir to the throne, spent much of the next
decade touring the empire.
He was particularly troubled by the casual racism he saw in India and for the rest of
his life took an active interest in Indian affairs.
As King he would return to Indian for a Durbar - a king’s court of formal and informal
meetings with his subjects, and during the first few months of the war, he allowed the
Royal Pavilion at Brighton to be converted into a hospital for wounded Indian troops.
In fact, his somewhat egalitarian attitude was one of the first things George brought
to his reign when Edward died in 1911 and George became King George V.
For example, he refused to make the traditional Accession Declaration until the anti-Catholic
rhetoric that had been part of it since 1689 was removed.
As King, George continued to enjoy his favorite pastimes of stamp collecting and hunting.
Many courtiers were irked that he did not continue most of the grand social events of
his father.
On August 4th, 1914, on the advice of his ministers, George V declared war on Germany.
Crowds outside Buckingham Palace cheered.
George’s reserved social life was fairly well suited to the demands of war, though
his ministers implored him to show more optimism.
He responded that, “we sailors never smile while on duty.”
He never minded being thought glum, and remarked of his wartime activities, “I do things
because they are my duty, not as propaganda.”
He deplored many of the methods of modern war, calling zeppelin raids on Britain simple
murder.
As for German submarines sinking merchant vessels, he said, “It is disgusting that
naval officers could do such things.”
He really believed that Britain should retain the moral high ground and when British ships
flew the flag of the neutral US to avoid attack, said that he’d rather sink under his own
colors.
He also, perhaps because of his own German heritage, tried to protect his subjects of
German extraction or bearing German names.
Despite his efforts, Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg was forced to resign as First
Sea Lord by public opinion about his Austrian and German background.
Lord Haldane, who had actually formed and organized the British Expeditionary Force,
the Territorial Army, and the General Staff was also forced to resign because of comments
he’d made in 1912 about Germany being his “spiritual home”, since attending University
there four decades earlier.
George’s efforts might have been more successful had he done more on separating the British
monarchy from German relations at war with it.
He was opposed to removing the Kaiser and his family as honorary commanders of the British
units they were actively engaged in fighting against, and pretty much everyone was shocked
when he said Prince Albert of Schleswig-Holstein was not really fighting on the side of the
Germans since he had only been put in charge of a camp of British prisoners.
So there were plenty of people who questioned his loyalty to Britain.
George was offended by such questions.
When H.G. Wells called his court “alien and uninspiring”, George said “I may be
uninspiring, but I’ll be damned if I’m alien.”
In 1917, George changed the name of is family from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, which it
remains today.
In response, the Kaiser said that he was going to attend the opera, “The Merry Wives of
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha”, which is pretty funny.
Funnier than the Kaiser usually was, actually.
The King’s relatives also got Anglicized names.
Louis of Battenberg became Louis Mountbatten, for example.
Over the course of the war, George would make 450 visits to his troops, 300 to hospitals,
and over 200 to munitions factories.
He personally awarded over 50,000 decorations.
His family would serve as well; his son, the future King Edward VIII, in the army, and
his son, the future King George VI, in the navy.
His health began to be negatively affected by all the travel, and he even broke his pelvis
after being thrown from a horse during an inspection in France in 1915.
By 1918, his suffering took a noticeable physical toll.
Still, apart from his public appearances, his role in the decision making and planning
of the war was very limited.
He actually saw himself as a constitutional monarch more as a mediator, and he did express
his opinions regularly to the Prime Ministers of the day.
Asquith valued his advice, like removing John French as Commander in Chief; Lloyd George
mostly ignored it.
He was very much opposed to offensives away from the western front.
East Africa, Salonika, Gallipoli, and Mesopotamia were for him distractions.
He was quite happy when his old friend Sir Douglas Haig succeeded French as commander,
and he stood by Haig throughout the war.
When peace came, he was overjoyed, and he and Queen Mary waved to the crowds from the
balcony at Buckingham Palace night after night.
He never forgave his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, for the war, and thought he should be tried
for his role in the outbreak of hostilities.
And the postwar years didn’t bring George much peace.
He was horrified by the carnage in Ireland, the Civil Lists were reduced, which brought
on a financial crisis for the royal family, the Commonwealth was formed, on and on.
Life kept rolling.
All of that is well beyond the scope of this channel, though.
King George V took to his bed January 15, 1936.
On the 20th, seeing that he was near death, his doctor, Lord Dawson, without consulting
the royal family, gave him a lethal dosage of morphine and cocaine just before midnight.
This was so his death would be reported in the morning edition of the Times, and not
the “less appropriate... evening journals.”
His legacy is simple; unlike most of the other monarchies of Europe postwar, his survived.
His simple tastes and lifestyle were much more relatable to his subjects than the extravagance
of his father, and King George V saw the role of king as a duty, and his role in a constitutional
monarchy as a private voice of advice to his ministers and as a quiet face of determination
to his people.
We want to thank Schuyler Ingram and Elbert Pham for helping with the research for the
episode.
If you want to learn more about another monarch leading his country through WW1, you can click
right here to watch our episode about Belgium King Albert I.
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See you next time.