The man known to history as King George V
was born on the 3rd of June 1865 at Marlborough House in Westminster, London. His father was Albert Edward, Prince of Wales,
the eldest son of Queen Victoria of Britain, ruler of the British Empire since her accession
in 1837. As her eldest male child Albert Edward was
the heir presumptive to the throne, though George’s father frequently clashed with
the queen as a result of the perception of him as a frivolous, unruly royal heir. George’s mother was Alexandra of Denmark, a scion of the royal house of
Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg who had married Albert Edward in 1863. George was not their first child. In January 1864, just months after their wedding,
Prince Albert Victor had been born, making him the second in line to the throne. When George was born the next year he became
the third in line to the throne, after his father and his slightly older brother. In addition, Albert Edward and Alexandra had
four further children, three daughters named Louise, Victoria and Maud, and a son called
Alexander John who was born prematurely in 1871 and who died just 24 hours later. As a child of the royal family, George was
largely raised by a series of nannies and various household staff across the royal palaces at Windsor, Westminster,
Sandringham and elsewhere. This was typical of the age and George would
have had protracted periods of little contact with his parents. He and his elder brother Albert were of a
close enough age that they were educated together. Their primary tutor from 1871 onwards, charged
with overseeing their education, though not handling it exclusively, was John Neale Dalton,
a Church of England clergyman who had previously served as a private chaplain to George’s
grandmother, Queen Victoria. Indeed, it was the queen who recommended Dalton,
believing that the boys’ father was neglecting their education. He provided them with a varied curriculum
over the next decade, much of it focused on Protestant texts such as The Book of Common
Prayer, but also the Greek and Roman classics, the humanities being prized above the sciences
in the late Victorian educational curriculum. George was not an especially gifted student,
but he was doubtlessly the more able of the pair, Albert being prone to laziness and an
obtuse attitude towards their tutor. Conversely, George and Dalton would develop
a rapport which developed into a life-long acquaintance. When George was just twelve years of age,
his father decided that he and Albert would benefit from joining the British Navy and
exploring the world. They were enrolled in the Royal Navy in 1877
and, in 1879, after some initial seafaring training, the two young princes were sent
off, with Dalton as their tutor in toe, on board the HMS Bacchante, a newly-built corvette
of the Royal Navy. The ship was one of a new class of torpedo
carriage ships and Queen Victoria was much concerned that her two grandsons would be lost at sea, but their father,
a stern disciplinarian, stated that they needed to see the world. To convince his mother of the sturdiness of
the vessel the Bacchante was ordered to sail into a gale-force storm near Britain in 1879. When it emerged unscathed Victoria agreed
to let her two grandsons embark on the journey. The two boys and Dalton spent the next three
years voyaging on the Bacchante, which had been tasked with patrolling the world’s sea lanes at a time when
the Royal Navy effectively policed the world’s oceans. In total they travelled over 40,000 miles,
visiting the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, South America, South Africa, China, Japan
and Australia. In Japan they were amongst the first British
royals to have direct experience of the rapid modernisation of Japanese society in recent
years. They also met Emperor Meiji while there in
1881. The boys were even present in South Africa
for some of the First Boer War. Accounts of their adventures were later collected
together and published in 1886 as The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship Bacchante, 1879 to
82. Life at sea seems to have suited George and
following his return to England it was determined that he would continue on as a commander in
the Royal Navy, whereas Albert, as the second in line to the throne, was sent off to Trinity
College, Cambridge to continue the education he had apparently had little taste for under
Dalton’s tutelage. Conversely, George was sent to Malta, where
his uncle, Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second eldest son, was serving as a senior
figure of the British Mediterranean Fleet, becoming a Vice-Admiral in
1882 and Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet in 1886. Under his uncle George continued his training
as a naval commander throughout the mid-1880s. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, George
had reached an age and level of experience that resulted in him being made a commander
of several ships in the Royal Navy. One was the HMS Thrush, a Redbreast-class
gunboat which he took command of in 1890 during a tour of the Western Atlantic, largely operating
between Nova Scotia in north-eastern Canada and the British colony of Bermuda further
to the south near the Caribbean. Shortly thereafter he was placed in charge
of the newly commissioned HMS Melampus, an Apollo-class cruiser which he was given command
of in 1891, but it would be his last active command, as events in Britain in the early
1890s would change the future course of his life. George lived through his childhood and early
adult years in the expectation that his father would succeed his aging grandmother one day
as king, and then, after a presumably shorter reign than Victoria, Albert Edward would himself
die and be succeeded by George’s elder brother, Albert Victor. It was assumed that George would not become
king, but many people might have wished that he was second in line. His elder brother, Albert, was a problematic
heir, with questions having been repeatedly raised about his sexuality at a time when
homosexuality was still illegal in Britain and would have created problems had it become
known that the second in line to the throne was gay. In 1889 his name was raised by the Metropolitan
Police in London following an investigation into a male brothel on Cleveland Street in
the city, though his involvement here was never conclusively proven. There were also questions about Albert’s
psychological well-being, issues which have led to outlandish claims that Albert could
have been the infamous Jack the Ripper. Yet in the early 1890s he seemed to be destined
to become king one day and there was even talk of his being appointed as Viceroy of
Ireland. But mother nature had other plans. Between 1889 and 1892 a pandemic known as
the Russian or Asiatic Flu swept westwards from Asia into Europe. Albert fell prey to it and died on the 14th
of January 1892 just shy of his 28th birthday. Now, all of a sudden, George became second
in line to the throne. Provided he did not die before his father
he would one day become King of Britain and Emperor of India. Albert’s premature death also had a significant
bearing on George’s personal life. At the time that he fell ill in December 1891
Albert had been scheduled to marry Mary of Teck, the daughter of Count
Francis von Hohenstein, Duke of Teck, one of the most senior figures in the German aristocracy. Although George had grown close to his cousin,
Princess Marie of Edinburgh, who herself would one day become Queen of Romania, the decision
of who he should marry was now largely taken out of his hands and it was decided that he
should marry Mary of Teck, his older brother’s intended bride. The pair were wed at St James’s Palace on
the 6th of July 1893 in what by all accounts became a relatively happy union despite its
arranged nature. Children soon followed, with Edward born a
year later in the summer of 1894, Albert late in 1895, Mary in 1897, Henry in 1900, George
in 1902 and John in 1905. All except John, who unfortunately developed
severe epilepsy and passed away in 1919 when he was just thirteen years old, would live
long lives. As parents, George and Mary were not easy
to define. George was a very strict disciplinarian, like
his own father. This was not unusual by the standards of the
late nineteenth century, but George appears to have instilled significant fear in his
children, while he and Mary have also been otherwise criticised for failing to notice
that a string of nannies that cared for the children in their earlier years were often
emotionally and physically abusive towards them. However, on some occasions their children
expressed affection for their parents in their later years and when George and Mary had to
undertake a world tour for eight months in 1901 they were said to be deeply upset at
being separated from the children for such an extended period of time. Overall, it was a complicated relationship
between the pair and their children. George had become Duke of York in 1892 following
the death of his older brother, a title which had been borne for centuries by many figures
who were second in line to the throne of England and then Britain. His new position meant that he had to quit
active service with the Royal Navy of any kind which might endanger his well-being. As such, following his marriage to Mary in
1893 much of their roles as Duke and Duchess were ceremonial and designed to expose the
British people as much as possible to the man who would one day, perhaps many years
from then, rule Britain and its empire. Thus, social engagements and photo opportunities
became the order of the day, though unlike his father George was not an avid party-goer
and generally preferred a quiet life at York Cottage in Sandringham to hobnobbing with
British high society. Some of his formal duties involved travel
overseas, notably when George joined his parents to attend the funeral of their cousin, Tsar
Alexander III of Russia, in St Petersburg in 1894. There he spent considerable time in the presence
of his cousin, the new Tsar Nicholas II, whose rule would become entangled in many ways with
George’s years later. George’s time as Duke of York eventually
came to an end in January 1901 following the death of his grandmother, Queen Victoria,
after a reign of 63 and a half years. With her passing, which signalled the end
of an age in British and indeed European history, George’s father, Albert Edward succeeded
as King Edward VII of Britain and Emperor of India. He was already 59 years of age at the time
of his accession and his health was deteriorating owing to a chronic smoking habit and years
of excess of all kinds. He would spend much of his relatively brief
reign dealing with bronchitis, as well as a form of skin cancer which attacked his nose,
and even memory loss. It was consequently expected that George,
who had become the Prince of Wales and heir designate in 1901, would succeed his father
before too long. Nevertheless, Edward survived throughout the
1900s as George and Mary took on a string of ever growing responsibilities, notably
a world tour in 1901 in which they visited the furthest flung reaches of the British
Empire. There were several important aspects to this,
notably his opening of the first session of the Australian Commonwealth Parliament and
a visit to South Africa during the Second Boer War. Further visits to India and other parts of
the empire followed in the course of the 1900s. Thus, by the time George’s father died on
the 6th of May 1910, the subjects of the empire as well as Britain itself were familiar with
the man who now ascended as their new king. He was 44 years of age at the time. George’s coronation as King George V of
Britain and Emperor of India, along with the coronation of his wife Mary as Queen consort,
took place at Westminster Abbey in London on the 22nd of June 1911. It was attended by an enormous number of the
royal families and monarchs of Europe, including, for instance, members of the German imperial
family, numerous other German princes and princesses, representatives of the Tsar of
Bulgaria, the Romanian royal family, the Archduke Karl of Austria representing Emperor Franz
Joseph and even the Crown Prince of the Ottoman Empire as a stand-in for the Sultan. Within a few years many of these imperial
and royal houses would be shattered by the impact of the First World War and although
few could have even guessed at it in the summer of 1911 this would be one of the last times
when the many royal lines of old Europe would congregate in one place for such an event. In tandem the Festival of Empire was held
at the Crystal Palace in London to celebrate George’s coronation. At this the Crystal Palace, which had first
been built to house the first Great Exposition in 1851, became home to a myriad array of
scenes designed to showcase the might of the British Empire at its height. In all 300 buildings replicating elements
of other buildings from across the empire were reconstructed inside the Crystal Palace. But, even as the coronation plans were underway
there was a political crisis also raging in Britain, one which involved the new king in
a surprising departure from the general belief by the early twentieth century that the monarch’s
role was simply to rubber-stamp what parliament decided upon. At the heart of the matter was the People’s
Budget which the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, had first attempted
to introduce in April 1909. The budget was very progressive for its time,
with Lloyd George stating that it was effectively a wartime budget, with the enemy being poverty
and squalor in Britain’s working class and industrial communities. As such it proposed large tax increases to
pay for a revolutionary system of welfare measures and investment in public services. Much of this was political, with the Liberals
believing that the best way to stall the rise of the Labour Party, who were perceived as
dangerous radicals in the 1900s, was to introduce the welfare reforms which
would prevent traditional Liberal voters from switching to Labour. Yet the People’s Budget provoked a furious
response and the Conservative-dominated House of Lords refused to ratify the passage of
the budget. Traditionally the Lords was
seen as a rubber-stamping body, one which was not supposed to block legislation which had passed through parliament
and so the impasse over the People’s Budget had provoked a constitutional crisis in the
last months of the reign of Edward VII. By the time George ascended the throne, the
budget had been allowed to pass through the Lords without a vote, ending the immediate
crisis, but the new king was immediately faced with calls for constitutional reform of the
House of Lords to ensure a development like this never occurred again. Within days of his accession George was being
petitioned by the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith about various methods of constitutional
reform which would prevent another impasse of the kind which had recently been seen. This was particularly necessary as British
parliamentary politics in the early 1910s was balanced on a knife-edge, with the Ulster
Unionists and the Irish Parliamentary Party often holding the balance of power between
the Liberals and the Conservatives. One proposal which was floated was that George
would agree to the creation of a large number of new Liberal peers who would turn the political
balance in the House of Lords in favour of the Liberals and their allies. George was not entirely favourable to the
idea of politicising the creation of noble titles in this way and in
any event the Conservatives were more inclined to make concessions when they learned of this plan. As a result, a compromise was reached in the
shape of the Parliament Act of 1911. The Act contained two provisions. Firstly, it stated that the House of Lords
could not veto bills relating to the budget and other financial issues henceforth once
they had passed through the House of Commons, while in return the Conservatives received
an unofficial promise that their majority in the House of Lords would not be overcome
by packing it with newly created Liberal peers. George gave his assent to the Act in August
1911 in what is one of the most significant reforms of the constitutional relationship
of the upper and lower houses of parliament to each other in modern British history. Whatever government was going to control the
political realm in Britain, one of their primary problems, whether Conservative, Liberal or
socialist, was going to be Ireland. Ireland had long been a thorn in the side
of the empire. As England had expanded its political control
across the Atlantic Archipelago in the late medieval and early modern periods it had managed
to bring Wales and Scotland under British control to a large extent and unite these
disparate realms under a unified, Protestant British state. But Ireland had always been problematic. Successive waves of conquest and colonisation
between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries had succeeded in creating an English, Protestant
landholding class here, but the bulk of the population remained Irish and Roman Catholic
and broadly opposed to British rule, a problem compounded by the existence of a Scottish,
Presbyterian majority in the north of the island who in turn were opposed to the Catholics
further to the south. By George’s time politicians in England
were determined to bring about some solution to the endless unrest in Ireland by granting
some form of self-determination to the island and if needs be by separating the northern
counties from the southern ones. But the political environment was highly fractious
there by the early 1910s. As a consequence the decision was taken that
George should quickly visit Ireland following his accession, the better to reinforce the
ties between the monarchy and the crown’s subjects in Ireland. George and Mary arrived to Dun Laoghaire near
Dublin, a port which was then called Kingstown, on the 8th of July 1911, just over two weeks
after his coronation in London. The entourage was considerable and eight carriages
were needed to bring the king and queen to Dublin Castle where they resided while in
Ireland. Visits to the Phoenix Park on the western
outskirts of the city and Leopardstown race track followed, as well as more charitable
endeavours such as a visit to the Coombe hospital in Dublin. Much effort was made to shroud the royal visit
in a celebratory atmosphere, but there were tensions brewing underneath. Many of Dublin Corporation’s politicians
were nationalists and socialists who favoured complete independence for Ireland from Britain
and refused to participate in the events around the royal visit, while the king and queen’s
visit to Cork, the republican-dominated city in the south of the country, was undertaken
in a very tense atmosphere where it was clear the new monarch was not welcome. This aside, George and Mary’s route through
Dublin was often lined by people cheering them and when he left Ireland five days later
the king might well have imagined that with the right policies the island could still
be reconciled to British rule. He would learn in time that this was certainly
not the case. Ireland and all other parts of the empire
were drawn increasingly towards conflict in the first years of George’s reign. For some time Europe’s great powers had
been increasingly antagonistic towards one another. The Empire of Austria-Hungary, for example,
were rivals of the Russian Empire for control over the Balkans where the Ottoman Empire,
the dominant regional power for many centuries, was in terminal decline. The French Republic had old grievances against
the German Empire from the conquest of its eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine during
the Franco-Prussian War at the start of the 1870s. And Britain had its own growing rivalry with
Germany, the newly emergent continental power. Yet few saw a war of the kind which erupted
in the summer of 1914 coming. In the end it was a regional crisis caused by the assassination of the
heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Ferdinand, by a Serb nationalist,
in the streets of Sarajevo which cast the continent into war. By the start of August the British, French
and Russians were at war with the Germans, Austrians and Turks. As monarch, it fell to George to oversee the
council which decided that Britain would declare war on Germany in response to developments
across the continent. He referred to these events in his diary later
that day as a, quote, “terrible catastrophe,” but like many others he was naively of the
view that the First World War would be a quick affair. Instead it dragged on for over four years
of bloody trench warfare in northern France and elsewhere. The monarchy was somewhat compromised by the
outbreak of the war owing to the close relations which existed between Europe’s major royal
families by the early twentieth century. Nearly all of the royal houses were intermarried
and George, Wilhelm II, the Kaiser of Germany, and Nicholas II, the Tsar of Russia, were
all first cousins. Moreover, the king’s paternal grandfather,
Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, had been Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a
prominent German royal line. George and his family members still bore this
title in 1914. Additionally, his wife Mary, although she
had been born in England, was the daughter of Count Francis von Hohenstein, the Duke
of Teck within the German aristocracy. All of this created the rather embarrassing
impression when the war broke out that the royal family were more German than English
when their bloodlines were examined. And certain sections of the British press
hammered away at this point endlessly. Thus, in July 1917, George caved to public
pressure and issued a royal proclamation which changed the name of the royal house from the
House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor, a place long associated with the
royal family owing to the construction of Windsor Castle as a royal residence all the
way back in the days of William the Conqueror in the eleventh century, who ironically enough
was a continental foreigner who conquered England. Beyond the concerns over the connections between
the royal family and Germany, George and his family had a significant role to play in the
conflict. Hundreds of members of the Royal Household
and Staff were enlisted in the war effort. For instance, the woodcutters from the Windsor
Castle estate were sent to France as trench sappers. George himself first visited the trenches
of north-west France in November 1914, the first of five such visits during the war,
while Queen Mary joined him in 1917. Back in Britain, the king and queen spent
much of the mid-1910s visiting hospitals, nurses’ stations and clearing houses to
meet with wounded and discharged soldiers and sailors. George’s two eldest sons, Edward and Albert,
were also old enough to be involved in the armed forces during the war. Edward served in France and was awarded the
Military Cross, while Albert served in the Royal Navy and was mentioned in dispatches
for his role in the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the foremost naval engagement of the war between
the British and the German navies. While care was taken to ensure that the heir
and his younger brother were not placed at the coalface of the conflict, the fact that
the king’s sons were on active duty during the war aided in cementing the idea that the
war was everyone’s conflict, not just the lot of the average conscript. One of George’s visits to France was to
acknowledge the intensification of the conflict there. For two years the Germans had been pressing
towards Paris from Belgium and for two years the French and British, along with extensive
detachments of Commonwealth soldiers from Canada, South Africa, India, Australia and
elsewhere had pushed back. Then in the summer of 1916 the British and
French launched the Somme Offensive against the German lines. The first day of the offensive, the 1st of July 1916, led to the
greatest number of casualties experienced by the British army in history
in one day. Over 19,000 soldiers were killed and a further
38,000 were wounded or otherwise rendered unable to fight. Plans were quickly put in place for George
to cross to France and on the 10th of August 1916, with the fighting still raging, he visited
troops at Ypres and proceeded further down the British lines along the Somme. Curiously, he also met with General Henry
Rawlinson, the commander of the British Second Army, with whom the king conversed about the
news of efforts within the military to have General Douglas Haig, the commander of the
British forces in France, replaced. Yet this never materialised. Haig remained in overall control of the British
Expeditionary Force, while the slaughter at the Somme continued, eventually resulting
in the deaths of approximately 300,000 troops. Yet the stalemate in the war was not broken and two more years of trench
warfare in north-eastern France would follow. While there was no change in military leadership
in 1916, there was a change in the government back home in Britain. At the outset of the war in 1914 the Liberal
Party, led by Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister, had a tenuous hold on power in Britain. To gain increased political stability during
wartime, a unity government was formed with the Conservatives being granted numerous important
ministries and the Labour Party, which was still viewed as a dangerous socialist movement
by many in Britain, even being invited to join the government. However, by late 1916 Asquith’s coalition
was increasingly unpopular at home and facing growing opposition over its prosecution of
the war, notably the costliness in lives and resources of the Somme Offensive, which had
promised much and delivered little. He was eventually ousted from power in December
1916 when the Secretary of State for War, David Lloyd George, formed a new unity coalition
and became Prime Minister. By the early twentieth century the king had
little say in these matters and accepted Lloyd George as the new Prime Minister, but it would
be a tense relationship between the pair at times in the years that followed, with the
conservative George often at loggerheads with the radical Welsh Prime Minister over policy
in France, Ireland and elsewhere. Moreover, recent studies have revealed the
extent to which George involved himself in the politics of the British army in France
and how this often saw him and Lloyd George intriguing against each other, as Lloyd George
was convinced Haig should not be continued as the head of the British forces in France
and instead sought to strengthen the position of the French general and Supreme Allied Commander
in France, Ferdinand Foch, at Haig’s expense. Such actions aside, both George and Lloyd
George’s efforts to intervene in the military handling of the war were both rendered largely
null and void when the United States joined the war on the side of Britain and France
in April 1917, thus making German defeat in the long-run an all-but certainty. Lloyd George and the king also clashed over another problematic matter
which arose internationally in 1917. This concerned events in
Russia, where a revolution had been initiated to overthrow the government of George’s cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, in
February. This was a relatively conservative revolution
at first and there was the possibility of the Russian royal family being able to abscond
from Russia and seek asylum elsewhere in Europe. At first George was anxious to offer Nicholas
the option of resettling, at least temporarily, in Britain. But Lloyd George was vehemently opposed, believing
that the presence of the Russian imperial family in Britain could act as a lightning
rod for socialist and revolutionary elements within Britain who were looking at Russia
and considering whether an overthrow of the political system in Britain might also be
possible, while there were also concerns that the presence of the deposed Tsar in England
could entangle Britain in Russia’s domestic politics at a time when
Russia was still theoretically its ally in the war, although admittedly Russian resistance to the German advance all along
the Eastern Front was collapsing in the spring and summer of 1917. In the end the king came to agree with Lloyd
George’s viewpoint, although the British secret services nevertheless prepared a plan
for how to rescue Nicholas and his family from Russia, one which was never put into
action. In the end a more radical second revolution
struck Russia in October 1917, bringing the Bolshevik Communists to power. The Tsar and his family were murdered on the
orders of the new government in Russia in the summer of 1918. The final years of the war also witnessed
an intensification of the Suffragist Movement in Britain. The Suffragettes had been campaigning for
a decade and a half in Britain in order for women to be given the right to vote in political
elections, a right which was still denied women and indeed many men if they did not
meet certain qualifying criteria. The Suffragists had effectively engaged in
a campaign of political pressure and limited violence over the years to fight for their
cause. Indeed George had been present at the Epsom
Derby on the 4th of June 1913 when a Suffragette, Emily Davison, ran out in front of the racing
horses and attempted to catch hold of the king’s own contender in the race, Anmer. The horse struck Davison as she attempted
to grab the reigns and she died from her injuries four days later, becoming a Suffragette martyr
in the process. For his part George had been more concerned
for the horse and jockey in the aftermath of the incident, though in his defence he
did not know the full extent of Davison’s condition at the time. Now, nearly five years later, the king found himself giving the royal
assent to the Representation of the People Act in February 1918, a bill
which gave women of 30 years and over the right to vote, while also extending the male
franchise to nearly eight million poorer Britons. The Act was a sign of how the First World
War and the contribution of the British people to the war effort forced
the political establishment to accelerate much needed political reforms such as those the Suffragettes had campaigned
for over many years. The Representation of the People Act was passed
as the stalemate in the war on the continent was coming to an end. With the United States having joined the fight
on the side of Britain and France and with the economies of Germany and Austria-Hungary
beginning to collapse under the pressure of four years of war, the strategic situation
changed in the summer and autumn of 1918. It was over by November 1918, not owing to
complete military victory, but because the governments in both Berlin and Vienna had
fallen to domestic revolutions. Lloyd George led the British delegation to
France in the summer of 1919 which negotiated the terms of the post-war settlement. The resulting Treaty of Versailles with Germany
forced the German government to accept the blame for causing the war, stripped the country
of all its colonies and a sizeable proportion of its territory in Europe and imposed huge
war reparations payments on the German people for decades to come. It was a punitive peace settlement, one which
was matched by the hubris which the British and French governments displayed in carving
up the Middle East and the defeated nations’ African colonies between them. Lloyd George sent a letter to the king on
the 5th of August 1919 informing him that he believed the treaty was, quote, “worthy
of the heroism and endurance displayed by your Majesty’s forces by sea, land and air,
and by all classes of Your Majesty’s subjects who worked at home during the five years of
grievous struggle.” And there was a great degree of truth to the
Prime Minister’s letter, but nevertheless the treaty had sown into it the seeds of another
war many years later. The cessation of the conflict in November
1918 did not bring any respite to Europe. Indeed the next five years were even deadlier
for the continent. This was partly owing to the collapse of the
old political order and numerous revolutions and civil wars in countries like Russia, Germany
and Turkey. Yet much of it was also owing to disease outbreaks
at a time when the continent’s people were weakened owing to years of rationing and want. The disease which swept across Europe in 1918
and into 1919 is known as the Spanish Flu, even though it originated in the United States. By early 1920 it had infected over half a
billion people and is estimated to have killed somewhere between 20 and 50 million people,
though reliable statistics for Asia and Africa are not available. The royal family was not immune to it and
indeed such were the ravages of disease outbreaks on the Windsors in recent decades, notably
the death of George’s older brother, Albert Victor, in 1892, that they were anxious to
avoid contagion. Consequently, the royal court fled from London,
but by then it was too late for the king to avoid the Spanish Flu. Just two months after it first surfaced in
the US, George was struck by it in May 1918. He made a full recovery, though, something
which cannot be said of many others. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, also
contracted it and nearly died. While the Spanish Flu had largely passed the
king and his immediate family by in 1918, the revolutions which followed the end of
the First World War would have a more enduring impact. These sprung up all across the continent,
generally in the countries which were defeated during the war such as Germany, the Ottoman
Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the latter of which was fragmenting into several
smaller states by the time the armistice was declared in November 1918. However, it was not confined to these and
some of the revolutions elsewhere impacted directly on the monarchy. Such was the case with the 11th September
1922 Revolution which occurred in Greece as a spill-over from the Turkish Revolution. Here senior officers within the Greek army
and navy initiated a coup against the reigning government of King Constantine, George V’s
cousin. He was quickly replaced by his son who became
George II of Greece, but not without a severe backlash against the royals in the Mediterranean
nation. Such was the danger implicit in this that
George V had to send ships of the Royal Navy to the Mediterranean nation to rescue his
cousins, Prince Andrew and Princess Alice, the paternal grandparents of the present king
of Britain, Charles III, from Greece. More broadly George was sceptical about the
revolutions which subsumed Europe at this time, viewing most as dangerously revolutionary
and socialist, developments which George as a conservative British monarch was deeply
opposed to. One of these revolutions was closer to home
than all others. While Britain itself avoided conflict in the
aftermath of the war, it could not prevent unrest across the Irish Sea in Ireland. In the decade since George had visited the
country, just days after his coronation in England, Ireland’s political problems had
mounted. At the outset of the war in 1914 the Irish
Parliamentary Party, the country’s largest single political party at Westminster, had
made an agreement with the government in England. It would convince Irish men to sign up to
the war effort and head for the trenches of France and in return the British government
would grant Home Rule to Ireland, whereby an Irish parliament would be established in
Dublin, one which would rule many aspects of Ireland, albeit still as part of the British
Empire. However, the war years saw this consensus
fall apart. On Easter week in 1916 a coalition of nationalist
revolutionaries had led a botched military revolt against British rule, seizing large
parts of Dublin. This was soon crushed, but in its aftermath
support for the Irish Parliamentary Party collapsed and was replaced with support for
a new political movement, Sinn Fein. These won a landslide in nearly all the Irish
constituencies outside of Ulster in the 1918 general election and promptly refused to take
their seats in Westminster, instead convening their own parliament in Dublin. It was the beginning of the
Irish War of Independence. The War of Independence was fought in Ireland
between 1919 and 1921. It was a bitter, bloody affair with the Irish
engaging in guerrilla warfare and the British government relying on army irregulars called
the Black and Tans to fight the conflict. The latter were soon engaging in acts of atrocity
and heavy-handed violence against the civilian population. For his part, while he was opposed to Irish independence, George was
appalled by the escalating violence in Ireland and the tactics being
employed by the Black and Tans. He censured Lloyd George on several occasions
for what was occurring and was a major driving force within England in finding a solution
to the conflict. In the summer of 1921, a part of that solution
was dividing Ireland so that the Scottish Presbyterians in the northern counties could
have their own country that would remain closely tied to Britain. Six counties there were partitioned from the
south in May 1921, bringing Northern Ireland into existence. George visited Belfast in June to address
the opening sitting of the new, Unionist-dominated parliament there. His speech is believed today to have been
significant in preventing a war between the Unionists of the north and the Republicans
of the south in the months that followed. Instead, a truce was agreed with the Republicans
a few weeks later and the south of Ireland was effectively granted partial independence
from Britain, while the north remained part of the empire, although a bitter civil war
was fought in the south over the terms of independence between 1922 and 1923 and the country remained tied to
Britain in some particulars until the mid-1930s. George’s role in establishing the peace
in the early 1920s was quite substantial. Ireland was not the only issue confronting
Britain’s empire in the 1920s. The number of nations which had formed part
of the empire, but which were now largely autonomous, nations like South Africa, Australia
and New Zealand, had been growing for some time. But the constitutional arrangement for these
‘Dominions’ was still largely unclear. Were they still part of the empire, wholly
autonomous or partially subject to Britain in terms of their foreign policy and certain
trade matters? These issues came to a head at the Imperial
Conference held in London in 1926, which was presided over by George and chaired by the
former Prime Minister between 1902 and 1905, Arthur Balfour. Here an agreement was reached that the ‘Dominions’
constituted a ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ which were each equal to each other in their
common allegiance to the crown. Thus, under the terms of what has become known as the Balfour Declaration
the growing independence of Britain’s former colonies was acknowledged,
but a new Commonwealth centred on the monarchy and the rule of George V as head of state
of the Commonwealth was put down in law. Five years later the Statute of Westminster of 1931 would grant further
legislative independence to the Commonwealth nations. While these measures largely resolved the
issues inherent in the status of the Dominions, there was still a major policy issue in the
1920s concerning the core element of Britain’s Empire: India or the British Raj, as the great
conglomeration of territory covering not just India but also modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh. George was emperor of India and indeed had
visited Delhi in 1911 where he became the only British ruler of India to attend a Delhi
Durbar or Court to be proclaimed as Emperor in person. Yet despite his efforts to make himself physically
present in India on occasion, George faced growing calls for Indian independence throughout
his reign, particularly the non-violent opposition led by Mahatma Gandhi. The responses during George’s reign were
two bills, the Government of India Act of 1919 and the Government of India Act of 1935. Both sought to ensure British control of India
for some time to come by offering moderate Indian nationalists a range of concessions,
while also trying to take account of the varied religious and social tapestry that was the
Raj. None of it was enough, though, and while George
was not the last British Emperor of India, it was largely during his
reign that the Independence Movement gained sufficient traction to lead to independence in the mid-1940s. George’s attitudes towards domestic British
politics in the 1920s were a delicate balancing act between his role as a figurehead within
the government and his own rather conservative political views. He, like many others in Britain, was wary
of the emergence of the Labour Party as a major political movement. It created some dismay then for the king and large sections of the British
political establishment when the general election of December 1923
resulted in a hung parliament, neither Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives, Herbert Asquith’s
Liberals nor Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour securing a majority. In the days that followed it emerged that
the only government which was feasible was a minority Labour administration which would
be supported on a case by case basis by the Liberals. Thus, MacDonald became Prime Minister and
Labour formed a government for the first time. There were genuine concerns at the time that
George, whose constitutional roles involved officially appointing new governments, would
try to block the formation of the new Labour regime. Yet he didn’t. Whatever his personal politics might have
been, George knew that he was not supposed to intervene publicly in the politics of the
day. Yet there is also evidence that George’s
personal politics might have been shifting at this time. The minority government soon collapsed and
the Conservatives returned to power in late 1924, yet when a general strike broke out
across the UK in 1926 over pay and working conditions in Britain’s mines and other
sectors of the economy, it was George who urged a moderate approach on the Conservative
Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, stating that Baldwin needed to put himself in the shoes
of the average working man when negotiating with the strike managers. While Britain’s politics were difficult
in the mid-1920s any issues encountered were tempered by the fact that the global economy
was booming during these years. Yet all this came to an end in the autumn
of 1929 with the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Great Depression. At the time of the Wall Street Crash MacDonald
had just led Labour back into government in remarkably bad timing. His administration faced a huge crisis, with
over 1.5 million people out of work across Britain by the start of the spring of 1930,
a situation which deteriorated further over the next year and a half as the value of the
pound sterling and its ties to the Gold Standard looked increasingly precarious. By August 1931 it was impossible for MacDonald
to get any budgets or policies through and so George urged the Labour leader to call
an election and form a government of national unity. It was wise advice. A National Government, containing Labour,
Conservative and Liberal ministers was formed in October 1931 and the British political
establishment worked together to move through the crisis created by the Great Depression,
whereas other nations ended up with increasingly fractious and extreme politics. George also facilitated the MacDonald governments
to manage the economic crisis in other ways. The civil list, which was effectively a list
of individuals to whom the British government paid money in the form of honorary pensions,
as well as royal subventions, was drastically reduced in 1931 and the king and the royal
family decided not to accept an annual payment of £50,000 due to them in recognition of
the economic situation. That money was sent back into the exchequer
and used for welfare payments and to help create jobs during the crisis. These and other measures ensured that George
was an increasingly popular monarch by the early 1930s. This was perhaps at odds with his own personality. By nature he was a rather diminutive, retiring figure, one whose favoured
pastimes were stamp-collecting and hunting. Back in 1893 George had been made honorary
vice-president of the Royal Philatelic Society, the most significant stamp-collecting society
in the world. George served in that role until he became
king and his contributions to the Society’s collection were considerable. For instance, in 1904 he purchased a rare
Mauritius two pence blue stamp for £1,450, a record for a single stamp purchase at that
time. George ultimately contributed significantly
to the Royal Philatelic Collection, which is valued at approximately £100 million today. Elsewhere, George became the first monarch
to take advantage of the new mass communications medium of radio to reach out to his subjects. On Christmas day 1932 he became the first
king or queen to address the entire nation in this way. George had resisted the idea of doing so for
many years, believing radio was for entertainment rather than an extension of the political
realm, but in the 1930s, as the crisis deepened across the country and other politicians such
as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the then governor of New York, began using radio to communicate
with their constituents, George relented and gave the first Royal Christmas Speech in 1932. The king’s speech was scripted by Rudyard
Kipling, the great author of Kim and The Jungle Book, whose knowledge of the British Empire
and British India in particular qualified him for writing a speech which was broadcast
to all of George’s subjects, not just in Britain, but in the Raj and the Commonwealth
nations as well. The speech sought to offer some comfort in
the context of the tumultuous years Britons and citizens of the empire alike had just
lived through: “It may be that our future may lay upon us more than one stern test. Our past will have taught us how to meet it
unshaken. For the present, the work to which we are
all equally bound is to arrive at a reasoned tranquillity within our borders; to regain
prosperity without self-seeking; and to carry with us those whom the burden of past years
has disheartened or overborne.” George’s speech was a major success and
the tradition has continued almost interrupted ever since. While Britain ultimately managed to pull itself
out of the Great Depression in the mid-1930s via the mainstream political parties forming
a unity government and acting in unison with each other, the same was not true for other
nations. In Germany in particular the massive economic
crisis provided the basis for the rise of extremist politics and ultimately the ascent
to power early in 1933 of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. George was wary of the rise of the German
fascists from the beginning, as were many within the political establishment in Britain,
but few had as prescient a view of what might occur as did the king. In a meeting with the German ambassador to
Britain, Leopold von Hoesch, in 1934 the king expressed concern about the jingoistic rhetoric
emanating from Berlin, where the Nazis were already making noises about remilitarising
in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles and their desire to build a Greater Germany
by reclaiming the territory they had lost in 1918 and much more besides in Central and
Eastern Europe. Von Hoesch, who was a career diplomat and
not a Nazi ideologue, did not necessarily disagree. The following year a more aggressive Nazi
programme of remilitarisation was commenced with, but George would not live to see the
war between Britain and Germany which so concerned him in his last years. George V suffered for much of his adult life
from respiratory problems, a hereditary condition in the family which was exacerbated by his
chain smoking. By the time he was in his late fifties, in the 1920s, he was suffering
from severe bronchitis, and his ability to travel extensively was
limited, though doctors did recommend a visit to the Mediterranean in 1925 hoping that the
warmer climate would lead to an improvement in his condition. It didn’t and further suggestions that he should do the same in later
years were vociferously rejected by George. Instead he accepted a certain level of ill
health which only continued to get worse as he entered his sixties, leaving London and
the royal palaces in the Home Counties only to spend time in the seaside resort of Bognor
in Sussex. Into the 1930s things only got worse and by
the middle of the decade his respiratory problems had deteriorated to incorporate several other
ailments, including breathing problems, a lack of energy, regular colds and blood issues. It was clear that he did not have long left
to live. George’s imminent death was complicated
to a very great extent by his relationship with his eldest son and heir. Edward, Prince of Wales,
had always been problematic. He did not display a strong character and George was reluctant to pass
too many responsibilities to him even as his own health deteriorated
from the mid-1920s onwards. Most worrying was Edward’s love life. He had not married and produced an heir, but
engaged in a string of short-lived romances. And when one finally seemed to stick in the
mid-1930s it was highly problematic. The subject of Edward’s attentions was Wallis
Simpson, an American divorcee who was still married to her second husband, Ernest Aldrich
Simpson, an American with extensive business affairs in Britain. Edward and Wallis had entered into an affair in the mid-1930s, but it
was considered unacceptable to the Conservative Party leader, Stanley
Baldwin, and viewed with great dubiousness by George V who repeatedly advised his son
to end the liaison and marry a more acceptable woman, one who would not have been divorced
and was British or European. The issues inherent in Edward and Wallis’s
affair were still hanging over the succession as George’s health declined dramatically
in the course of 1935. By the summer of 1935 the king was regularly
receiving oxygen in order to continue breathing properly. Things got worse in the months that followed
and on the 15th of January 1936 he retreated to his bed at Sandringham House in Norfolk
outside London. He spent the next five days here, with his
situation deteriorating precipitously. By the 18th he was slipping in and out of
consciousness and was in a confused state whenever he pulled himself back to the point
of being able to converse with those surrounding his death bed. It was clear that he was suffering by this
point and his royal physician, Bertrand Edward Dawson, was faced with a difficult decision. At approximately 11pm on the night of the
20th of January 1936 he effectively decided to speed along the king’s death, administering
a large dose of morphine and cocaine sometime afterwards. Nothing could have been done to save the king’s
life and the decision most likely spared George several further days of agony, though Dawson’s
decision has been controversial ever since owing to the fact that he did not consult
with George’s family before taking this action. Subsequent events are well-known. A protracted royal funeral followed, with
George eventually being laid to rest at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on the
28th of January. Edward succeeded his father as King Edward
VIII of Britain. However, he was steadfast in his determination
to marry Wallis Simpson, who was now in the process of finalising her second divorce from
Ernest Simpson. This created a major problem. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and other
members of the royal family including Edward’s younger brother, Albert, were convinced that
the British public would not stand for their king marrying a multiple divorcee from America,
while it would clearly emerge in the process that the new king had begun seeing Wallis
while she was still married. A constitutional crisis brewed in the months
that followed as Edward refused to budge from his position. When he was eventually
confronted by the government and the royal family, he agreed to abdicate the throne and married Simpson. His younger brother Albert succeeded the childless
Edward in December 1936, taking the regnal name George VI. Thus, less than twelve months after George
V’s death the Abdication Crisis resulted in his younger son succeeding his older son. George V was in many ways one of Britain’s
least well-known monarchs, despite spending a quarter of a century on the throne. Perhaps this was because his reign was largely
book-ended by the even lengthier and more substantial reigns of his grandmother, Queen
Victoria, who ruled for much of the nineteenth century, and his granddaughter, Elizabeth
II, whose reign marked the transition from the post-war period through to the twenty-first
century. Compared with these, George’s period on
the throne seems misleadingly brief and static. Moreover, today he is broadly overshadowed
in the public imagination by other political figures of his time, notably David Lloyd George,
who dominated the country’s politics during the First World War, and then the rise of
Winston Churchill during the interwar period. Furthermore, George was a modest character
who preferred stamp collecting and spending time with family to courting controversy. A man whose interests lay in stamps cannot
hope to vie with the Russian civil war and the rise of the Nazis in the pages of history
books detailing the interwar period of European history. Finally, George’s lengthy reign was in many
ways overshadowed immediately by the short, controversial reign of his elder son and the
Abdication Crisis. Yet to suggest that because George’s reign
was in many ways rather banal for its time that it was without merit would be to do it
and the man a disservice. George provided simple, uncontroversial leadership
as King of Britain during a tumultuous period of British and European history. From the outset he was a man who disliked
violence and wished to see the First World War ended as quickly as possible. In the aftermath of it he
approached the revolutions which Europe was inundated with in the late 1910s as something which needed to be overcome
while maintaining a conservative political landscape. And in the 1920s and 1930s he largely stayed
out of the way and let the politicians get on with dealing with a changing Britain and
a troublesome Europe, which was effectively the role of the monarch by this time. George was hard-working, dutiful and moderate. In many ways he set the template for the modern
monarchy, one which was followed in all major specifics by his son, King George VI, and
his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II. As such, while George V was in some ways an
unremarkable monarch, he was also widely admired and liked by the British people by the time
his considerable reign came to an end in the mid-1930s. What do you think of King George V? Was he one of Britain’s most under-appreciated
monarchs? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching. The man known to history as King Edward VIII
of the United Kingdom and Emperor of India was born on the 23rd of June 1894 at White
Lodge, Richmond Park in Surrey, England. His father was George, the eldest son of Edward,
Prince of Wales, the son and heir of Queen Victoria of Britain. As Victoria was into her mid-seventies by
the time young Edward was born in 1894, it was clear that her son, the future Edward
VII, Prince of Wales, and Edward’s grandfather, would soon succeed her. That would place the young Edward as second
in line to the throne when it occurred, which it soon did when Victoria died in January
1901. Young Edward’s mother was Mary of Teck,
the daughter of the Duke of Teck, a senior German. Between them George and Mary had six children,
five boys and one girl. Edward was the eldest, but nearly as consequential
as the years went by was the next eldest child, a boy named Albert after his great-grandfather,
Victoria’s long deceased husband over who’s death she had never fully recovered. Edward’s full name was Edward Albert Christian
George Andrew Patrick David and during his youth he was always referred to within the
family as David. Edward was raised from his very youngest years
as a future king. He would, no doubt, not ascend to the throne
for several decades, but accidental deaths and illnesses had created a situation where
a person in line to the throne in the way Edward was could sometimes ascend at a very
young age. His parents were aloof and somewhat gruff
in their parenting methods, but it was not a wholly unhappy household, though Edward
grew to become wary of his father’s angry outbursts about relatively unimportant issues. He later stated in his memoirs that he felt
unloved and his childhood experiences seem to have inculcated in him a desire to avoid
having children in later life, which he never would. More broadly, Edward became known for having
an easy charm in his younger years, which allowed him to mix freely with members of
different classes, though his intellect was hardly prodigious. In these younger years he and his siblings
were largely educated at home at York Cottage at Sandringham and at Frogmore near Windsor
Castle. As he entered his teenage years Prince Edward
was sent to the naval college at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. From there he progressed through to the Royal
Naval College and then on to serve on HMS Britannia. This was a virtually identical training to
that which his father had undertaken in his younger years and which indeed has remained
a staple of royal princes ever since. Despite being an heir to the throne, Edward
was not overly protected and experienced some bullying in his youth in the navy. Otherwise, his upbringing was somewhat limited. He was not trained to develop his mind or
become a significant scholar in the same way in which his forebears in the seventeenth
or eighteenth centuries might have been. As a result he grew up with an intellectually
limited worldview. This limited intellectual development was
all the more concerning when in May 1910, with the death of his grandfather, his father
became King and so Edward became heir to the throne at the age of fifteen. According to tradition, he was soon given
the title of Prince of Wales and despite still being a teenager was quickly drawn into public
life. The occasional appearances at public events
were interspersed throughout the early 1910s with studies at the University of Oxford which
his father had decided Edward should attend. However, Edward proved an indifferent student
and when turmoil struck Europe towards the end of his time there he
was glad of the distraction. In the summer of 1914 war descended across
Europe. It had been brewing for decades as the rise
of a united Germany in the 1870s had destabilised the balance of power in Central Europe and
created a major rival to Britain. Other issues such as rivalry for colonial
possessions in Africa and fervent nationalist sentiment in the Balkans, where the Empire
of Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire were rivals to secure control over the collapsing
Ottoman Empire, had compounded matters. In the end it was a regional crisis here in
the summer of 1914, the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, by a Serb nationalist, which lit the match that ignited the war. In the final days of July and the first week
of August Britain, France and Russia went to war with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. The major front for the British for the duration
of what soon became known as the First World War was in northern France where the British
and French were soon bogged down in attritional trench warfare with the Germans. As part of the effort by the royal family
to show solidarity with the millions of British men who were now being conscripted into the
military and sent to fight in France, Prince Edward and others were assigned to serve as
officers in the army. Edward was commissioned into the Grenadier
Guards in the last days of July 1914 and took to military service very well, finding that
he enjoyed the camaraderie in ways which his studies had not fulfilled him. However, his wartime experience can hardly
be said to have been authentic. Neither Edward, nor any other senior members
of the royal family or major noble lines could be placed in harm’s way, where they might
be captured or killed. As such for much of the next four years he
was effectively chaperoned by his fellow soldiers in roles across northern France. Some of these were tokenistic, such as when
he was sent as a sort of royal ambassador to meet with French generals, but when he
appeared to inspect British army camps on the Western Front it is understood to have
genuinely improved morale on the front. Here was a prince and a member of the royal
family actively showing up to do his own military service. Indeed, on one or two occasions, despite the
extensive precautions taken, Edward did find himself in danger during the war, notably
when his chauffeur was killed by exploding artillery and his car crashed in northern
France. Moreover, his range of activities extended
beyond France, with a visit to the Middle East in 1916 to meet and greet Britain’s
Australian and New Zealander allies. The war was significant in one other way which
would have a small implication for Edward and his family for decades to come. At the outset of the conflict the royal family
was known as the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. This had been established in 1901 following
the succession of King Edward VII, bringing the House of Hanover which had ruled Britain
for nearly two centuries to an end. However, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
name, which was assigned on account of the extensive links between the British royal
family and many of the most senior royal lines within Germany, became problematic in the
context of the First World War. It reminded far too many people that the royals
had extensive amounts of German blood and indeed George V was the first cousin of the
German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. In particular when the Germans began dropping
bombs on London in 1917 from planes named Gotha Bombers it was clear it was no longer
tenable to retain the royal title. Consequently in July 1917 the royal house’s
name was changed to that of the House of Windsor, a name adopted owing
primarily to the long-standing associations between the English crown and Windsor Castle to the west of London. The war was eventually won in November 1918
and so this name change had little consequence thereafter in practical terms, but the new
Windsor name would become associated intimately with Edward in due course. The end of the war opened up the issue of
Edward marrying and fathering an heir to secure the line of succession. However, Edward’s father, unlike most other
previous monarchs, was open to allowing Edward to decide his marital affairs for himself,
and the British public were more keen by the late 1910s and 1920s that some form of mutual
affection should play a part in the selection of a future queen by the Prince. Edward was not in any rush either. Rather as the bloodshed of the 1910s gave
way to the economic boom and social excesses of the 1920s Edward became a regular attender
at London nightclubs and dance-halls, where an entourage attached themselves to the future
king. He also began an affair with Winifred Dudley
Ward, who was already married with two small children to William Dudley Ward, the grandson
of Lord Esher in the British nobility. Eventually Ward divorced her husband and the
affair became extremely serious in the 1920s, although Edward did also see several other
women intermittently throughout these years. However, the relationship with Ward would
never result in marriage, even after she divorced her first husband, and it was eventually ended
by Edward in 1934. This penchant for the high life and Edward’s
complicated love life had created concerns within the government and amongst the royals
themselves during the 1920s. Compounding this was what was perceived as
Edward’s quasi-egalitarian manners and habits. During his time in military service during
the war the Prince had become used to trying to find common ground with the rank and file
soldiers and he continued his efforts to do so during royal visits abroad to Canada and
other regions in the 1920s. His easy manner with ordinary people would
be viewed positively in a member of the royal family today, but in the interwar period, nearly a century ago the
royals, senior politicians and the nobles of the realm looked at this
disapprovingly. Moreover, many looked at Edward as a monarch
who might try to exercise too much political independence when he became king, rather than
a figure who would carry out the ceremonial duties of being monarch, which was effectively
what the monarchy had been in England since the early eighteenth century. Thus, already by the late 1920s there was
growing concern about the Prince’s behaviour and attitudes within senior political circles,
ones which were no doubt expressed in private when King George developed a serious illness
which lasted for several months in 1928 and 1929. He recovered and would reign for several more
years, but there were worrying signs of a clash between his successor and the political
realm in years to come. In the early 1930s Edward met the woman who
would determine the course of the remainder of his life. Wallis Simpson was an American socialite from
Pennsylvania who was born as Bessie Wallis Warfield. Two years Edward’s junior, she had grown
up in Baltimore and she and her mother had been supported by wealthy extended family
members after her father died during her youth. In 1916 she had married Earl Winfield Spencer
Jnr., an American air-force pilot. It was a fractious marriage and while it lasted
over a decade, long before they eventually divorced in 1927 the pair had spent extended
periods of time apart. The following year Wallis married Ernest Simpson,
an American by birth who had developed extended business connections in Britain. As a result of his business dealings the Simpsons
were largely living in England by the early 1930s, where Wallis was moving in high society
circles. Much of their social ascent was a mirage,
though, and Ernest Simpson’s business affairs had run into serious trouble following the
Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed. This undoubtedly placed some strain on his
and Wallis’s marriage in the early 1930s around the time that she was first introduced
to Prince Edward. 1934 was a pivotal year in the development
of the relationship between the Prince and Wallis Simpson. That year he decided to end his sporadic affairs
with Freda Dudley Ward and other mistresses such as Lady Furness. Curiously enough his fascination with Mrs.
Simpson seems to have derived from her being the more dominant individual
within the relationship. Edward maintained a childlike personality
throughout his adult life and Simpson, as so many reports of the mid-1930s would assert,
seemed to have the Prince completely under her thumb. For his part, Edward was clearly besotted
by her and it seems evident that by 1934 or 1935 he had determined to marry her and for
Simpson to become queen consort one day. There were early signs that this would not
prove possible, though. When Edward introduced his American lover
to his father and mother they were not impressed and indeed there were even Special Branch
police assigned to monitor the couple’s movements from 1935 onwards. There were two major issues at hand, the first
being the fact that Simpson was a divorcee and on religious and moral grounds it would
be disapproved of for the future King of England to marry such a woman and for her to become
queen. Simpson’s American background and reports
that she had excessive influence over Edward were also paramount in the minds of worried
observers in the mid-1930s. The question of who would become queen consort
became a pressing one before too long. On the 20th of January 1936, at seventy years
of age, King George V died and Edward was proclaimed as King Edward VIII the following
day. At first there were positive signs. George V had been an ill man for many years
and his chronic respiratory problems had often taken from his ability to serve as monarch. Moreover, he was perceived in the public eye
as an antiquated figure, one who belonged more to the world of the late nineteenth century
than the new emerging world of the interwar period. This public enthusiasm for a new monarch after
a long reign ends was not an entirely unusual feature of British political life, but in
Edward’s case it would prove unfounded. The new king seems to have given almost no
thought to how he would reign when he succeeded his father. Nevertheless, it quickly became clear that
Edward was the polar opposite of his father in as much as he had very little interest
in the actual affairs of state. Ministers would present him with documents
and state papers which he would give almost no attention to. Rather he seemed to be content to carry on
his life much as he had before, including maintaining an active social schedule in London. Within weeks many at Westminster and elsewhere
were troubled by what they saw. Edward’s distracted nature was all the more
worrying because when George V died it was a moment of some considerable difficulty in
world politics. The legacy of the First World War was immense. In Eastern Europe the Russian Revolution had
broken out in 1917 and resulted after many years of civil war in the emergence of the
Soviet Union as a major world power, one which was ideologically opposed to nations like
Britain. In the Far East, the Empire of Japan was ascendant
as the dominant power there, and several years earlier in 1931 had begun aggressively expanding
on the Asian mainland by conquering the Chinese province of Manchuria. In Western Europe Spain was about to descend into a vicious civil war
after years of instability, whilst elsewhere on the continent fascist
regimes and authoritarian governments had seized power in countries like Italy, Austria
and Hungary. Compounding the growth of extremist politics
was the economic crisis which began in 1929 with the Wall Street Crash and which resulted
in years of profound economic depression in the early 1930s. In this landscape Britain was a bastion of
relative stability. Edward’s job as king would be to try to
maintain this and Britain’s empire in India and Africa.
However, of all the problems which were confronting Europe, none was as great as that posed by
Germany. The country had been left demoralised and
destabilised by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles which had been imposed on the country
by Britain and France in 1919. This reassigned large amounts of formerly
German territory to its neighbours and imposed huge financial reparations on the country,
while also heavily restricting the size of its military. Nevertheless, after several years of crisis
in the late 1910s and early 1920s the German republic had entered a period of relative
stability in the mid-1920s and was the cultural centre of the continent. But the economic crisis of the late 1920s
and early 1930s hit Germany particularly badly. As it did, an extremist party, the National
Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, managed to claim power
early in 1933 after years of electoral gains. They soon turned Germany into a one-party
dictatorship and in the twelve months prior to Edward’s accession had begun aggressively
rearming in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles. One might have expected that Edward’s reign
would be characterised by opposition to Nazi aggression, but events were quickly to ensure
that the reign was brief and Edward was soon cosying up to the Germans in ways which have
cast a shadow over his entire life ever since. Edward was known to sympathise with elements
of the Nazi regime in Germany, an issue which would create untold controversy before too
long, but the more pressing issue in the first months of his reign was that of his relationship
with Mrs. Simpson. At first it was not clear how much difficulty
this would create, but when the foreign newspapers began covering the new king’s holiday on
a yacht on the Mediterranean with Simpson shortly into his reign, unease began to emerge
amongst government ministers in London. When it then became clear that Wallis Simpson
was in the latter stages of finalising the divorce from her second husband, the government
of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had to begin to take a stance on matters. Baldwin was not naturally
inclined to be interventionist on matters of this kind. He was often seen to be a vacillating Prime
Minister, who delayed making major decisions to an excessive degree. Additionally, he personally liked Edward and
was not overly enthusiastic about interceding with him on the matter of his possible marriage. He prevaricated for as long as possible, but
eventually he requested to see the king on the 20th of October 1936, possibly on account
of having learned some days beforehand of Wallis’s intentions to finally divorce her
long suffering husband. When they met on the 20th of October Baldwin
informed the king that an embargo on press reports of the new monarch which was legally
enforced at the time following a new coronation, was about to expire. Once it was, it would become impossible to
prevent the newspapers and the wider public speculating massively on the king’s relationship
with Mrs. Simpson and whether he intended to marry her after she divorced. Accordingly, he advised the king that Wallis
should avoid finalising her divorce in the immediate term and absent herself from Britain
for some time until the matter could be more thoroughly debated by all the relevant parties. The king fobbed Baldwin off, arguing that
Wallis’s marital status was a private matter, when clearly her divorce would have profound
implications for British public life if she then went on to marry the king. Things spiralled from there. A week later, on the 27th of October, Wallis
obtained her divorce, though she would not be free to marry again for over six months
given the laws at the time. A week later Edward, who had not yet been
crowned as plans were still being made for his coronation, opened a new parliament. Unbeknownst to him the government had already
contacted his brother, the Duke of York, with a view to preparing him for the possibility
of succeeding his brother if the issue of the divorce led to him having to abdicate. Baldwin met with the king again on the 16th
of November. At this audience Edward admitted to a senior
member of the government for the first time that he intended to marry Wallis the following
summer once it became legally possible to do so. By that time Baldwin’s government had begun
canvassing opinions from both within Britain and the dominion states which were still ruled
as part of the British Empire. These indicated that there would be strong
hostility to the idea of a monarch taking as his queen a woman who was twice divorced,
primarily on religious and moral grounds. Baldwin was also aware that organisations
such as the Church of England would be especially hostile within Britain itself. However, Baldwin was provided with a curious
way out by Edward, who asserted that if the government was determined to prevent him from
marrying Wallis, he would abdicate rather than spurn her. He had informed his immediate family members
of the same by the end of the 18th of November. Thereafter two weeks of inaction largely followed,
during which the major development was the emergence of a proposal that a morganatic
marriage could be entered into between Edward and Wallis, whereby she would become his wife,
but not the queen consort. This, however, would have required a parliamentary
decree and would open the monarchy up to extensive debate in parliament, a development which
nobody welcomed either within the government or in the royal family. The conclusion to the growing constitutional
crisis was swift when it came. Baldwin began consulting the cabinet and the
secretaries of the dominions in the last days of November and by early December it was clear
that nobody was in favour of Edward continuing as king, if he married Wallis. Moreover, press silence was crumbling by then
and discussion of the matter was becoming widespread. On the 3rd of December Wallis temporarily
left for France to avoid overt press speculation. Yet this did little to allay Baldwin’s government
who were now insisting that Edward needed to abdicate the throne if he was set on marrying
Simpson. This is duly what Edward did a week later,
signing the official instrument on the 10th of December, despite being encouraged by several
individuals such as Winston Churchill to fight for his rights as king. King Edward VIII abdicated his position as
monarch on the 11th of December 1936. At 327 days it was the shortest reign of any
English monarch since the late fifteenth century. Edward’s speech to the nation, in which
he declared that he was renouncing his crown of his own volition in order to marry the
woman he loved, and had not been coerced into his actions by the government, was something
of a high point for Edward, one which was perceived as being dignified and statesmanlike. The years that followed would not see a repetition
of such behaviour. There remained the final issue of what title
the former king and his soon-to-be wife would bear. On the 13th of December 1936, the same day
that Edward officially announced his abdication, his brother and successor proposed that Edward
and Wallis would henceforth carry the titles of Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the royal
family name which had been adopted back in 1917. In tandem the duke and duchess were given
extensive financial privileges and a lavish salary and estates. However, the royal family now began a process
of cutting off the former king and his new wife. As late as the 1940s other members of the
family and the king himself continued to refer to Wallis coldly as simply Mrs Simpson. This was despite the fact that Edward and
she had married at the Château de Candé near Tours in France on the 3rd of June 1937. The nuptuals were not attended by any of the royal family and other than
a note of congratulations from Baldwin’s government were largely ignored
on an official level in Britain. Moreover, it was in France where they would
spend much of their lives from that time, generally living either in Paris or a country
retreat. The rest of the royal family were delighted
by this exile and the general tenor in Britain was that everyone wished to forget the brief
kingship of Edward in 1936 and the constitutional crisis which it had aroused. Edward and Wallis settled in Paris and began
leading a relatively rich lifestyle based on the funds which Edward had been paid to
relinquish his ownership of several royal residences in England as part of the abdication
agreement. During this time he rang his brother, the
new king, every few days, often imploring George VI that his wife should be allowed
to have the title ‘Her Royal Highness’ in recognition of her position as the wife
of a former king of Britain. However, this was refused, the concern in
London being that Wallis would continue to use such a title at some future date even
if she divorced Edward. Meanwhile the newlyweds continued to enjoy
Paris life, but they appeared to have harboured the view at this stage that this was a temporary
exile. They soon received messages from England which
put them straight concerning this notion, making it clear that it would be in everyone’s
best interest if they stayed in Paris and away from Britain. As the extent of the rebuff he was now suffering
dawned on Edward, he began concocting ways to carve out a new place in the public life
of Europe. While many individuals might have wished to
retreat from the public eye as quickly as possible and attempt to lead a quieter life
for some time, given the bruising experience of Edward’s brief kingship, he and Wallis
quickly entered into the most controversial episode of the former king’s life. As we have seen, the early 1930s had witnessed
the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to power in Germany. Now, shortly after his abdication, Edward
accepted an offer to visit Germany. This must be viewed in context. Many individuals visited Germany in the mid-1930s
as they wished to see exactly what was taking place there and how the Nazis had so rapidly
overhauled the country and pulled it out of the economic crisis of the early 1930s. For instance, the former British Prime Minister,
David Lloyd George, who had been the head of state in Britain from 1916 to 1922, had visited the country in late
1936 as the constitutional crisis concerning Edward was playing out at
home. In assessing any of these visits it is important
to remember that many British people in the mid-1930s viewed Hitler as an important bulwark
against the development of a Communist state in Germany and secondly that individuals like
Lloyd George did not know when they decided to visit Germany the horrors which the Nazis
would unleash across Europe a few short years later. The offer to visit Germany was extended to
Edward in the late summer of 1937 from Dr Robert Ley, the head of the German Labour
Front, an organisation which had been set up by the Nazis in Germany to replace the
trade unions and stymie any socialist agitation in the country. The offer was extended from this body as figures
like Edward and Lloyd George the year beforehand were being invited to the country principally
to view how Germany had overcome its economic woes and was running its factories through
bodies like the Labour Front. Edward accepted, seemingly based on a desire
to rejuvenate his profile in the aftermath of his kingship. A tour of the United States was also planned
and he seems to have developed the idea that he could act as an individual who might foster
new ideas about how to avoid political conflicts across the western world like those which
had engulfed Spain and cast it into civil war. Essentially Edward wanted to visit Germany
to see how the further spread of Communism and radical socialism could be avoided. Thus, by the early autumn of 1937 he had accepted
the offer, and news of the impending visit was relayed to the British ambassador in Berlin,
George Ogilivie-Forbes.
The tour commenced on the morning of the 11th of October when the Windsors
arrived at Friedrichstrasse station in Berlin. Despite being billed as a private tour, rather
than a royal visit, the couple were met at the station not just by Robert Ley, but by
Joachim von Ribbentrop as well, who was soon to be appointed as the German Foreign Minister
and still held the title of German Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The trip thereafter lasted for twelve days
down to the 23rd of October. Much of it consisted, as Lloyd George’s
had the previous year, of visits to German factories and various government installations. These went from the mundane, such as a tour
of a lightbulb factory, to the sinister, notably a trip to a newly built concentration camp,
which the Windsors were admittedly deceived as to its true purpose. Other visits included ones to Hitler Youth
academies and factories belonging to major German companies like Krupps. The dominant theme throughout was to present
an image of efficient German industry, with well-run factories, a nation that had returned
to work after the economic difficulties of the early 1930s, and happy and enthusiastic
workers. There were also considerable efforts made
to highlight Britain’s cultural closeness to Germany, with the two nations’ national
anthems being played whenever Edward and Wallis arrived at a factory or academy. The goal throughout was to impress on the
couple that Germany was a model for how to prevent the spread of radical socialism on
the continent and that the Nazis were natural allies of the British. Throughout their visit the Windsors met with
several of the most senior members of the Nazi regime. For instance, on their first evening in Berlin
the couple were brought to dinner at Horcher’s, a popular haunt of the Nazi senior leadership
in the capital, by von Ribbentrop, along with the German architect, and later Minister of
Armaments, Albert Speer, and the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, and his wife,
Magda. More controversially Edward and Wallis met
Hermann Goering, the head of the newly formed German air-force and Hitler’s second-in-command,
at his hunting estate outside Berlin on the 14th of October. This included a meeting in Goering’s study
where the Nazi minister had a map of Central Europe on the wall, one which depicted Austria
as forming part of a Nazi-controlled Greater Germany. Despite the implication that Germany intended
to take over an independent neighbour before long, Edward did not raise any objections. When this was combined with news of the duke
and duchess visiting armaments factories where German tanks, armoured vehicles and submarines
were clearly being constructed, and Edward’s offering of the Nazi salute to many officials
during the trip it is not difficult to see how concerns arose surrounding it and endured
thereafter. If the impression conveyed to contemporaries
and to posterity by the Windsors’ near two week stay in Germany were not bad enough,
it culminated with a personal meeting between Hitler and Edward on the 22nd of October. This occurred at the Berghof, the Nazi leader’s
Alpine retreat on the southern border between Germany and Austria. There are varying accounts of the meeting
and the subsequent conversation after Wallis joined them later on. For instance, some suggest it was a rather
insignificant meeting, with social niceties expressed, some vague feelings of amity between
the German and British nations swapped and compliments exchanged, followed by tea. Others, though, have claimed that Edward indicated
his active support for Germany’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy and Hitler’s desire
to acquire lands in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. There certainly is no suggestion that the
former king attempted to discourage German expansionism. Finally, when the meeting had concluded, the
former king and the German chancellor departed by giving each other the Nazi salute. Unsurprisingly, the issue of what may or may
not have been discussed in Germany during the Windsors’ visit, especially during Edward’s
meetings with Hitler, Goering and others, have aroused considerable controversy. Some have suggested that discussion veered
into talk of Edward facilitating an alliance between Germany and Britain, as Germany expanded
on the continent and prevented a further rise of Communism. These theories have been fuelled by the fact
that the minutes of the meeting between Hitler and Edward on the 22nd of
October were subsequently destroyed. What did they contain that warranted their
destruction? Other evidence is open to interpretation. For instance, on the final night of their
tour the Windsors were entertained in Munich by Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s long-standing private
secretary, and his wife Ilse. At one point Rudolf and Edward disappeared for about an hour, leaving
behind their interpreters and all other staff. An hour later they were found upstairs. Rudolf was allegedly showing Edward his collection
of model ships, but was he really, or was something more sinister being discussed? While there is extensive disagreement amongst historians about the trip,
what has been universally accepted by biographers of Edward and historians
of the royals in the mid-twentieth century is that it demonstrated a startling lack of
judgement on the former king’s part, one which has forever shrouded his life in ignominy. And it didn’t just end when the Windsors
departed from Germany on the 23rd of October 1937. As we will see, fresh rumours and concerns
abounded during the Second World War, ones which Edward and Wallis did nothing to dispel. Following their trip to Germany, Edward and
Wallis returned to Paris where they rented a mansion on the Boulevard Suchet, in which
they lived in the late 1930s. As they were settling there the Germans were
intensifying their aggression on the world stage. Already during their visit to Germany in 1937
Hitler had been applying ever greater pressure on Austria to force it into a political union
with Berlin. The Anschluss creating a Greater Germany was
finally achieved in March 1938 in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Within weeks Hitler was pressing the case
for the annexation of the Sudetenland, a part of western Czechoslovakia with a largely ethnic
German population. At a conference in Munich in September 1938
Britain and France caved in to Hitler’s demands, but insisted that any further Nazi
attempts at expansion at the expense of Germany’s neighbours would result in war. Hitler called that bluff in the spring of
1939 when he annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia and the city of Memel in the Baltic States
region. However, when German tanks rolled over the
border into Poland at the very beginning of September 1939, appeasement could no longer
be allowed. Britain and France declared war two days later
as the Second World War commenced. For the former king and his wife in France
they, like everyone else in the country, must have assumed a German invasion would come
soon. However, as the autumn turned into winter
and then 1940 dawned with Poland long conquered by the Germans and no westward campaign having
occurred, many began to talk of a phoney war. The spring robbed Europe of such hopes. In April 1940 the Nazis invaded Denmark and
tactically occupied the key cities and towns of Norway. Just weeks later an invasion of the Low Countries
and France was initiated. This action aroused fresh concerns about Edward
who was accused by some British diplomats of having leaked information to Berlin which
had facilitated the German assault on Belgium. The accusation was especially damning when
the British Expeditionary Force to France became trapped at the town of Dunkirk in late
May as a result of the unexpected success of the German two-pronged assault of Belgium
and north-east France. Only a daring amphibious rescue operation
prevented hundreds of thousands of British troops from either being obliterated or captured. The French, though, were not so lucky and
on the 14th of June 1940 Paris was occupied by the Nazis. The city, and France in general, would remain
under German control for the next four years. Notwithstanding their earlier friendliness
towards the Nazis, the duke and duchess were the targets of a conspiracy by Hitler and
the Nazi paramilitary organisation, the SS, in the summer of 1940. The goal of what was codenamed Operation Willi
was to kidnap the Windsors who had left Paris when France was invaded in May 1940, heading
south to Biarritz and then journeying over the border into Spain, with the ultimate goal
of reaching Portugal. Operation Willi was conceived while they were
travelling through Spain, which under the fascist dictatorship of General Francisco
Franco was friendly towards Hitler’s government. The idea was that the Duke would be kidnapped,
brought to Germany and then his alleged pro-German inclinations would be fostered with a view
to re-establishing him as King of England following the German defeat of Britain in
the war. By the time plans were at an advanced stage
the Windsors had already crossed into Portugal and were living in Lisbon by the first days
of July 1940. At this juncture a new plan was settled on,
whereby Edward would be tricked into crossing back into Spain and detained there, but even
Walter Schellenberg, the SS official who was placed in charge of the operation and who
subsequently became the head of Nazi foreign intelligence, later conceded that the plan
was ludicrous. Operation Willi was never brought to fruition,
but the arrival of the Windsors in Lisbon and the ever-present lack of tact displayed
by Edward and Wallis on their arrival there opened them up to further charges of engaging
in traitorous activity, ones which like their visit to Germany in 1937 have created long-lasting
suspicions which have never been entirely resolved. The Windsors had apparently elected to make
their way to Spain and Portugal in May 1940 owing to anxieties about their diminished
status in Britain and certain tax burdens which would fall on them if they returned
home. Back in Britain this failure to return to
England looked very bad and the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, looked at it
particularly disapprovingly. Matters only became more suspicious when the
Windsors arrived in Portugal and promptly accepted an offer to stay in the home of Ricardo
Espirito Santo, a Portuguese banker who had extensive business connections in Germany
and who was suspected of having sufficient contacts with Hitler and the Nazis that MI6,
the British intelligence service, had opened a file on him. Perhaps Edward and Wallis were unaware of
this, but it seems unlikely and in accepting the offer to stay with Santo the former king
was either involved in talks with Santo or else was acting in an incredibly irresponsible
manner, one which almost guaranteed that his loyalty would be questioned. Yet there was worse still. Recent research has revealed that while he
was in Portugal Edward promoted the idea through Ricardo Espirito Santo that the Nazis should,
quote, “bomb Britain into peace.” Edward here was apparently proposing that
the Nazis should adopt a strategy of aerial bombing over England and London in particular
in order to force the British government into surrendering without the necessity of a land
invasion. This was effectively the strategy which the
Germans adopted in the summer of 1940, leading to the Blitz of London and England for the
next year. This recent study has highlighted how Edward
had proposed the Blitz while in Portugal and that the same advice was then conveyed to
the Nazi government in Berlin by the German ambassador in Lisbon. It is possible that Edward viewed this as
the lesser of two evils compared to a land invasion, but there is still absolutely no
denying that coming from a member of the royal family this advice constituted treason of
the highest kind. In the months that followed tens of thousands
of bombs were dropped on Britain, leading to approximately 40,000 civilian deaths. In September and October 1940 alone, London
was bombed almost every single night. Edward seemingly advocated that Berlin should
adopt this strategy in order to force the country into surrendering and to make him
King of Britain again in the aftermath of the capitulation. Edward’s possible duplicity while in Lisbon
did not end along with his brief sojourn in Portugal. As soon as he and Wallis arrived there Churchill
had taken steps to remove Edward from continental Europe, while also avoiding bringing him back
to Britain. He could not have the Duke residing on the
continent and possibly falling into Nazi hands. The possibility that he would collude with
the Nazis and potentially work out a deal to be made King of England once again was
now too great. At the same time Edward’s actions in fleeing
to Portugal and in visiting Germany back in 1937 made him a liability if he were to be
brought back to England. Accordingly, Churchill had a statement sent
to Lisbon that Edward had been appointed as the new Governor of the Bahamas, the British
island colony north of Cuba. Edward eventually accepted the position and
he and Wallis departed from Portugal on the steamship, the Excalibur, on the 1st of August
1940. However, two weeks after leaving Portugal,
Edward engaged in possibly his most incriminating behaviour yet. On the 15th of August he sent a telegram to
Espirito Santo, his and Wallis’s Portuguese host, asking him to send word as soon as he
needed to act. When this document was made public in 1957
Edward dismissed the significance of it, but here would seem to be evidence that Edward
wanted to be updated by a known German agent of any developments which might lead to him
returning to Europe to be installed as a puppet king of England if Germany defeated Britain
in the war. Suspicions about Edward and his wife’s actions over the past several years
were still considerable enough that when the couple decided to visit
the United States from the Bahamas in the spring of 1941 they were monitored by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation at the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was acting on information
supplied by a German monk living in the US who claimed to have information that Wallis
Simpson had been the lover of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, back
in 1936 when he had served as the Nazi ambassador to Britain. Suspicions were also aroused by a different
English informant who claimed that Edward had made an arrangement with Hermann Goering
that if the war ended in German victory Goering would then attempt to overthrow Hitler and
subsequently install Edward as King of England. How much of any of this was based on solid
information and how much was just the wild imaginings of FBI informants is very difficult
to know, but it is indicative of the concern which attached itself to Edward and Wallis
during the war years that they were shadowed by FBI agents during this first visit to Florida
from the Bahamas in 1941 and again on several further occasions after the US entered the
war in December 1941. We may never be able to disentangle fact from
fiction when it comes to Edward’s dealings with the Nazis, but we can be sure of one
thing: any plot which he might have been engaged in did not materialise. Instead Edward and Wallis spent the period
from the autumn of 1940 through to the end of the war in 1945 largely ensconced in the
Bahamas, a region which Edward dismissively referred to as a ‘third-rate colony’. He was contemptuous of the natives, whom he
viewed as racially inferior to their colonial overlords and as a consequence might have
been the worst individual imaginable to have been charged with quietening serious riots
over low wages across the islands which occurred in the summer of 1942. However, Edward handled these diplomatically
and as governor of the island introduced a policy of poor relief and public works to
try to both develop the islands and assuage ill will against crown rule. Nevertheless, he and Wallis were eager to
leave what they considered to be a colonial backwater to which they had been banished
and in mid-March 1945, months before the war ended, the former king resigned his commission
as governor of the island archipelago. While Edward and Wallis spent their time in
the Bahamas and being trailed in the US by FBI agents, the war effort began to turn against
the Germans. Hitler had decided to suspend efforts to conquer
Britain late in 1940 and instead turned his attention towards the Soviet Union. A massive invasion, the largest in the history
of warfare, was initiated in the summer of 1941. That winter the German Third Reich reached
its greatest extent as German troops reached Moscow and Leningrad. But they failed to take the cities and by
1942 Russian resistance had turned the war into stalemate on the Eastern Front. Thereafter Germany’s position collapsed
gradually, as resources ran out, the US entry into the war late in 1941 began to have an
impact and the infinitely superior manpower of the Soviet Union became the deciding factor
on the eastern front. By the summer of 1943 the Russians were pushing
the Germans back towards Poland and Ukraine and the Western Allies successfully opened
a new front in southern Italy. By the time the Western Front was opened in
the summer of 1944 by the Western Allies in France it was really a matter of who would
reach Berlin first, the Soviets from the east or the British and Americans from the west. In the end it was the Russians, with the Western
Allies occupying western and southern Germany. The war came to an end in early May 1945 days
after Hitler killed himself in Berlin. In the immediate aftermath of the war, despite
the many unanswered questions which still hung over Edward’s conduct both in the years
leading up to the war and during it, he was not overtly criticised within the British
press. Nevertheless, there was a clear desire for
both he and Wallis to resume the arrangement which had been in place in the late 1930s. They would return to France and live there,
rather than in Britain where their presence could be problematic. However, even when they had settled again
in Paris, as Europe was being rebuilt, another issue arose which allowed Edward to begin
scheming once again. His brother, King George VI, was suffering
ill health at a relatively young age owing to his chronic smoking. The possibility of his having to step aside
or dying was already acute by the mid-1940s. From afar Edward engaged in a correspondence
with individuals in England in which he suggested that he could return to Britain and potentially
serve as regent for his young niece, Princess Elizabeth, whom he claimed would otherwise
fall under the influence of her Mountbatten in-laws. The scheme never came to anything and George
would in any event live on until 1952, by which time Elizabeth was
well into her mid-twenties, but it is indicative of the ceaselessly ambitious conniving of Edward that even after the ignominy
which followed him in the aftermath of the war had developed, he continued to assess
ways of re-entering British public life. Notably, he did not attend Elizabeth’s coronation,
but watched it on television from Paris. It was, though, to be the last of his forays
in this regard. When Elizabeth did succeed and began a long
and prosperous reign in 1952 her uncle and his wife resigned themselves to life in Paris. There they became a sort of curious celebrity
couple, the former King of Britain and his American wife who had done so much to unsettle
Britain’s politics before the war. They hobnobbed with British expats in the
city and engaged in France’s post-war café society. Meanwhile Edward supplemented the extensive
income they had and financial perks which persisted from the arrangement reached with
the British government in the late 1930s, by engaging in illegal currency trading. He also took up his pen to author A King’s
Story, a memoir which was published in 1951 and set out his opposition to the species
of liberal politics which were dominating the post-war world in Western Europe and North
America. It was also the first book by a former or
indeed sitting king of England to have been published since 1688. Furthermore as the early 1950s turned into
the mid-to-late-1950s they began to visit the United States more frequently, socialising
with politicians and celebrities and even visiting the White House during the presidency
of Dwight Eisenhower. As such, they became a celebrity couple of
sorts, albeit a curious one, but one which seemed to pose no further danger to the stability
of public life back home in Britain. Wallis and Edward’s relationship remained
something of a mystery to many who commentated on it in the post-war period. Several who had spent time with them during
the 1950s noted that they seemed very distant from one another, rarely addressing things
to the other directly. It was a strange dynamic for a couple whose
relationship had apparently been so intense twenty years earlier that Edward was willing
to give up the crown for her. For a while in the mid-1960s they returned
to Britain and spent a considerable amount of time there attending various royal events
which occurred from 1965 onwards, notably the funeral of Princess Marina of Kent, who
was Edward’s sister-in-law through her marriage to his brother, who somewhat confusingly was
also known as George, the same name as his brother, the king, who had adopted George
as his regnal name, but had been christened Albert. Edward, like Marina, was not far away from
the grave himself. By now in his early seventies he was facing
a mounting number of health problems, most related to his chronic smoking. In between attending events in Britain in
the mid-1960s he regularly flew to America to attend doctors there and had a number of
different surgical procedures carried out, notably to relieve his coronary problems. Eventually the Prince’s lifetime smoking
habit caught up with him. In the early 1970s throat cancer was diagnosed. It was inoperable and terminal. By this time he and Wallis had re-ensconced
themselves in Paris, but though the former king did not have long left to live he was
able to receive a visit from his niece, Queen Elizabeth II, who fortuitously was on a state
visit to France right around that time. Edward died on the 28th of May 1972 in Paris. His body was quickly removed to England where
it lay in state at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, rather than at Westminster
Hall. Somewhat surprisingly, a large percentage
of the British public filed by in the days that followed to pay their last respects to
the king who had briefly ruled three and a half decades earlier. The funeral service was held on the 5th of
June in the presence of Queen Elizabeth, the royal family and Wallis Simpson. Thereafter he was buried at the royal mausoleum
at Frogmore. This was perhaps surprising as there had been
considerable speculation over the years as to where in Britain, if at all, Edward would
be buried. In death, as in life, the former king was
a subject of political intrigue. Edward’s widow did not have a good life
after his passing. Wallis continued to live in France and was
financially supported by her late husband’s estate and an allowance from Queen Elizabeth. But her health was declining and by the late
1970s she was developing advanced dementia. She was also increasingly frail and prone
to falling over, resulting in her breaking her hip twice, while from 1980 onwards she
lost the ability to speak. Thus, her later years were
spent largely housebound and with her mental faculties
sharply deteriorating. To compound matters she was being taken advantage
of by her French lawyer, Suzanne Blum, who assumed power of attorney for the increasingly
incapacitated Wallis. Blum used her position to exploit Simpson
financially. Eventually, Wallis died in Paris on the 24th
of April 1986 at 89 years of age. Her funeral was held a few days later at St
George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Her marriage to Edward, which had faced so
many difficulties and aroused many different controversies, had survived the distance despite
these adversities and she was interred next to him near Windsor Castle. King Edward VIII was one of the most controversial
figures in modern British public life. In 1936 he ascended to the throne of Britain
and as Emperor of India when he was still a bachelor in his early forties. However, while unmarried and without an heir
he was still an individual who had a varied love life. And that was the problem. Not only was the new king known for his extensive
social life as Prince of Wales in the 1920s and 1930s, but he was also a figure of widespread
gossip on account of his numerous dalliances with married women. One of these was problematic from the start
of his brief reign. By 1934 Edward had become besotted with Wallis
Simpson, an American who had already divorced once and who would need to do so again in
order to marry Edward. When it became clear that that is exactly
what the pair intended it became a matter of national controversy. It has been widely debated ever since whether
the issue of Simpson being a multiple divorcee was the real reason for Edward being forced
to abdicate at the end of 1936, or if he was simply unpopular within political and social
circles and Simpson was used as a means to force him out in favour of
the much more respectable George VI. Whatever the reason, the end product was the
same. Edward abdicated, making him the shortest
reigning monarch in nearly five centuries. Had matters rested there we might look on
Edward today as a sympathetic character, one who had the crown stolen from him owing to
antiquated views on religion and marital morality which pertained in the 1930s. But what followed tarnished his reputation
irreparably. In the autumn of 1937 Edward, who had always
harboured sympathies towards the Nazi regime which had emerged in Germany in 1933, undertook
a tour of the country, one in which he met with such odious characters as Hermann Goering,
Joseph Goebbels and finally Adolf Hitler himself. There is no doubt Edward was in favour of
fascism as a bulwark against socialism in Europe. What conspiracies might have been plotted
in 1937 is unclear, but we do know that in 1940, when the Nazis quickly conquered France,
Edward and Wallis’s adopted home, the couple were involved with Nazi agents across Western
Europe in the months that followed. Was Edward plotting to return as King of Britain
in a Nazi-dominated Europe? We cannot be sure, but what is perfectly clear
is that in acting in the way in which he did and opening himself up to the aspersions which
he did, Edward forever tarnished himself as the possible traitor king. What do you think of King Edward VIII? Do you think he was conspiring as blatantly
with Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi Party as many believed or was he simply somebody
who liked to arouse controversy? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching. The man known to history as King George VI
of Britain was born as Albert Frederick Arthur George on the 14th of December 1895 at York
Cottage on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, England. His father was Prince George, Duke of York,
a grandson of Queen Victoria, who at the time of Albert’s birth was nearing the end of
her sixth decade on the throne of Britain. She was also the first Empress of India and
ruled the vast British overseas empire, on which it was said the sun never set. Until shortly before Albert’s birth, Prince
George had been out of the direct line of succession to the throne. Once Victoria died, George’s father, Albert,
Prince of Wales, would become king. But it had been assumed until the early 1890s
that George’s older brother, Albert Victor, as Victoria’s eldest male heir, would ascend
to the throne in due course. However, Albert Victor died prematurely in
1892, ensuring that the future George VI’s father became second in line to the throne
from 1892 onwards. Thus, Albert was born in 1895 into a household
which would someday most likely constitute Britain’s immediate royal family with his
father as king and his mother as queen consort. However, Albert was not his father’s heir. An older brother, Edward, had been born in
the summer of 1894, a year and a half before Albert and Edward was third in line to the
throne. Consequently, from the moment he was born
in the winter of 1895, Albert was the fourth in line to the throne of Britain, though he
would only succeed to that position should something ever happen to displace his older
brother Edward. As we shall see, something did occur. Albert’s mother was Mary of Teck, a member
of the German royal house of Teck which held extensive estates in the unified German Empire. Albert was her and George’s second child
after Edward. Four more children would follow, Mary in 1897,
Henry in 1900, George in 1902 and John in 1905, though John suffered from severe epilepsy
from which he would die in 1919 when only 13 years of age. Albert, who quickly became known to his family
as ‘Bertie’, the same name given to his grandfather, was baptised at St Mary Magdalene
Church in Sandringham just a few weeks after he was born. Thereafter he was largely reared in a separate
household to his parents, an entirely normal practice amongst the royal families of Europe
in the nineteenth century. This continued through his early childhood
years, during which Albert, Edward and their growing brood of siblings were chaperoned
between royal palaces and cottages, taught by tutors in the standard subjects of the
Victorian educational curriculum, which in those days still involved learning Latin and
had a strong focus on the classics of ancient Greek and Roman literature. Albert’s parents were distant figures, who
some historians and observers have since deemed to have been neglectful. This is too harsh an assessment and if they
seemed to be cold parents it was in line with the conventions of the time. Albert’s father was also a strict disciplinarian. It was perhaps on account of the traumatic
elements of his youth that he began to suffer from a stutter in his younger years, one which
would continue to plague him into adulthood, though as we will see, he largely triumphed
over it in his thirties, well before he became king. When he was just 14 years old, Albert was
sent to the Royal Naval College at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, a training school for
royals and sons of the British aristocracy to train as officer cadets. This followed a well-established tradition
and Albert’s father had also been sent to join the British Royal Navy when he was barely
a teenager. Albert, it must be said, was not a great student
of any kind. He came bottom of his class in the cadets’
final exam at Osborne, while he was physically not predisposed to seafaring, having suffered
from stomach issues as a youth. His confidence was also low in his younger
years, in part owing to his stutter and also because of having been forced to learn to
write with his right hand, even though he was left-handed. Although it seems nonsensical to the modern
mind, this was a common feature of schooling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. It was also while he was at Osborne that his
grandfather, King Edward VII, died. With this his father ascended the throne as
King George V and Albert’s older brother Edward became the Prince of Wales and heir
to the throne. Albert was now second in line to the throne,
though something unexpected would need to befall Edward for him to ever become king. Meanwhile, in the early 1910s he continued
to progress through the Royal Navy, joining the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth after
his sojourn at Osborne and then taking in several training tours in 1912 and 1913, voyages
which saw him traversing much of the Atlantic in the Caribbean and off the seaboard of North
America. In late 1913 he was finally posted to the
HMS Collingwood as a midshipman. Albert was still struggling to find his sea
legs, an occupational hazard for a mariner, as diplomatic tensions were building in Europe
in 1914. For decades the continent’s great powers
had been engaged in ongoing rivalries for regional power in Europe and for possession
of colonies overseas in Africa and southern Asia. Russia and Britain, for instance, had been
rivals for a time in Central Asia where they both had interests in countries like Afghanistan. The French and the Italians both had interests
in North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Since the 1890s Germany, which had emerged
as a major power on the continent following unification in 1871, began trying to build
its own overseas empire. Armed alliances had even developed, with Britain,
France and Russia forming the Triple Entente and Germany having a long-standing alliance
with the Empire of Austria-Hungary. Yet despite these rivalries, a major conflict
had been avoided for many years. As a result, when diplomatic tensions began
brewing between Austria-Hungary, Russia and Serbia in the Balkans in July 1914 many believed
that this crisis, like many before it, would pass quickly. It did not, and in the final days of July tensions escalated rapidly,
leading to a succession of declarations of war. By early August nearly every country in Europe
had committed to one side or another as Britain, France and Russia went to war with Germany,
Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The First World War had commenced. In the early stages of it, Albert was fighting
another kind of conflict, one with his appendix. In late August a medical evaluation determined
that he needed to have his operated upon and when his ship made port in the Scottish city
of Aberdeen it was removed. After a sufficient period
of rest and convalescence he returned to service on
board the HMS Collingwood. The ship spent most of the war stationed in
the North Sea patrolling the vast waters between Britain north to Iceland and east towards
Norway. While Britain was the pre-eminent naval power
of the day and had been so for two centuries, the Germans had spent an enormous amount of
money building a sizeable navy in the ten or so years leading up to the war. Accordingly there was an expectation that
major naval engagements would occur in the North Atlantic before long, but in the end
the war at sea was very limited by comparison with the carnage occurring in the trenches
of the Western Front in France. Therefore Albert spent much of late 1914,
all of 1915 and into early 1916 on board the Collingwood undertaking gunnery drills and
patrols in the waters north of Scotland, but seeing little active engagement with the enemy. Albert was present for the largest naval clash
between Britain and Germany during the war. The Battle of Jutland took place over the
course of the 31st of May and the 1st of June 1916 in the waters off the coast of western
Denmark and north-western Germany as both sides sought to score a tactical breakthrough
at sea which might turn the course of the war. The British had the greater number of ships,
with just over 150 vessels, 28 of them being the Dreadnought battleships, the foremost
military vessel of the day, supplemented by nearly eighty destroyer class ships. The German armada was just under a hundred
ships, with just 16 Dreadnoughts. Over 60% of its vessels were torpedo boats
and the German attack would rely on these scoring a number of hits before they ran out
of torpedoes in order for the Germans to emerge out of the clash victorious. In the ensuing naval melee Albert served as
a junior officer aboard the HMS Collingwood. He performed well during the battle and was
mentioned as such in the dispatches, but the battle was a mixed affair overall. As the British and German fleets engaged with
each other across a large stretch of sea, the Germans ultimately scored more hits, sinking
14 ships while only losing 11, while the British also lost a disproportionately higher number
of destroyers and larger battleships and over twice as many mariners. As such, the Germans statistically won the
Battle of Jutland, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, one in which the Germans lost vital naval
resources. In its aftermath Berlin decided to prioritise
submarine warfare and there would be no second major naval clash of this kind again during
the First World War. Albert would spend much of the war away from
active service, in large part owing to renewed ill health. Early in 1917 he began suffering from a duodenal
ulcer and he would eventually have to have this operated on early that winter. When he returned to duty it was as part of
the burgeoning RAF, the Royal Air Force, which was formed on the 1st of April 1918 as the
first independent air force operated by any nation anywhere in the world, a sign of how
air warfare had become a central component of military conflict in the course of the
war, where at its outset planes had been used almost exclusively for reconnaissance missions. As a result of this decision, Albert became
the first member of the British royal family to hold a pilot’s licence, while in October
1918 he would fly over the English Channel after being posted to France. The newly created RAF only had a limited role
to play in the war in the end, though. By the summer of 1918 the trajectory of the
war was clear. The entry of the United States into the conflict
on the side of Britain and France the previous year had brought an insurmountable amount of resources to bear against
Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans. In the end, before victory was won on the
field of battle, political unrest across Central Europe brought about the collapse of the German
and Austro-Hungarian empires, bringing the war to an end in November 1918. In the aftermath of the war Bertie returned
to land and civilian life. He began studying at Cambridge University
in the autumn of 1919. He was 23 years of age commencing his time
in college, but this was not unusual in the post-war years when many freshman students
were young men heading towards their mid-twenties who had spent their late teens and early twenties
in the trenches in France. He began attending Trinity College there alongside
his brother, Prince Henry, who was four years his junior. Albert chose to study history primarily and
was tutored by Reginald Laurence, the editor of the Cambridge Modern History and an expert
on both ecclesiastical history and the French Revolution, though the most substantial scholar
to teach Albert at this time was Dennis Robertson, an economic historian and close colleague
of John Maynard Keynes, the founder of the Keynesian economic theory. At Cambridge Louis Greig, who Albert had none
since his days at Osborne a decade earlier, was employed as Bertie’s equerry or royal
assistant. They developed a keen friendship over their
shared interest in tennis and the pair would later play together at the Championships at
Wimbledon. Albert’s time at Cambridge, though, was
cut short after just three terms as he was increasingly drawn into becoming a working
royal in the early 1920s, spending much of his time from 1920 onwards visiting industrial
factories and mines across England as the monarchy sought to establish closer ties to
the working classes in Britain at a time when radical socialism was on the front foot across
Europe. Because he was the second son of the king
and at a time when premature death was beginning to decline dramatically, it was expected in
the 1910s and 1920s that Albert would never be King of Britain. Therefore he was given something of a free
hand to choose his own marriage partner, a relatively novel development for a monarch’s
child. Had he been born in the nineteenth century,
for instance, a marriage to a daughter of one of Europe’s royal households would most
likely have been arranged. Nevertheless, when Albert began an affair in 1919 with Sheila Chisholm
it aroused consternation in the royal establishment. This Australian ‘it-girl’ of the 1910s
was already married to Francis St Clair-Erskine, Lord Loughborough. Bertie met Sheila after his older brother
Edward began seeing Chisholm’s best friend, Freda Dudley Ward. The relationship dragged on for almost a year
before King George, exasperated by the situation instructed Bertie to leave this, quote, “already
married Australian”. Albert was not happy with doing so, but obeyed
his father’s command. His brother’s unwillingness to abide by
a similar injunction from the king over a decade later would have striking consequences
for both Edward and Albert in the long run. In the shorter term Albert was compensated
for ending his affair with Lady Loughborough by being invested with the title of Duke of
York in 1920, one of the most historically significant peerages in British history and
one which had been vacant since his father abandoned the title upon becoming king in
1910. Bertie’s attentions were soon drawn elsewhere
in his quest for a marriage partner. Shortly after ending his relationship with Lady Loughborough, he met
Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon at an engagement. They had known each other as children, but
had not crossed paths in several years. By the time they met again Elizabeth was just
entering her twenties and Albert, by then in his mid-twenties, was evidently smitten. He proposed in 1921, but Elizabeth turned
down his offer, fearful that entering the royal family and the public gaze that came
with it would result in her being stifled and unable to express her true self in years
to come. Bertie, though, would not take no for an answer
and was determined to woo her. A second marriage proposal came following
Albert’s sister Mary’s wedding to the heir to the Viscount Lascelles in February 1922, at which Elizabeth
had acted as a bridesmaid. She again said no, but further months of courtship
evidently swayed her and in January 1923, despite her reservations about entering the
royal establishment, she said yes to Albert on his third time of asking. The wedding was swiftly organised and the
couple were married at Westminster Abbey in London on the 26th of April 1923. Thereafter they proceeded on their honeymoon,
at the start of which Elizabeth contracted whooping cough in what she later called a
thoroughly unromantic development. Despite this inauspicious beginning, the marriage
was to be a notably happy one by the standards of many royal unions and Albert and Elizabeth
had a genuine affection for one another. It was in many ways the first modern royal
marriage in British history. While the honeymoon might have been interrupted
by a bout of whooping cough, there was inevitably a longer diplomatic tour to be undertaken
by the couple following their marriage. It was typical for newlywed senior royals
at this time to tour the British Empire so that in an age before television the people
of India, Canada and many other parts of Britain’s dominions could have an opportunity to see
the new member of the royal family. This commenced with a visit to Northern Ireland
in July 1924, no doubt in an effort to reassure the Unionist community there of crown support
for their continued presence within the United Kingdom following the establishment of the
Irish Free State on the rest of the island during the early 1920s. A tour of Britain’s colonies in Africa followed,
taking in Kenya, Uganda and Sudan, as well as Aden in the south of the Arabian Peninsula,
though the Duke and Duchess of York avoided Egypt where the British Governor-General,
Sir Lee Stack, had just been assassinated on the streets of Cairo in November 1924. They returned to England for a time thereafter
in order for Elizabeth to give birth to their first child in 1926, a daughter named Elizabeth
after her mother. She was the first of their two children, with
another girl named Margaret following in 1930. As soon as Elizabeth was born in 1926 and
her mother had recovered, the Duke and Duchess resumed their tour of Britain’s overseas
colonies. In 1927 they headed west across the Atlantic. They first visited Jamaica, where Albert notably
played a doubles tennis match alongside Bertrand Clark, an all-round sporting figure who had
competed internationally in golf, tennis and cricket. In 1924 Clark had become the first black athlete
to compete at the Wimbledon tennis Championships in London, a tournament which Albert had himself
competed at in 1926, partnering his friend and mentor Louis Greig, the Scottish naval surgeon who had served as
his equerry at Cambridge, in the men’s doubles event. Admittedly they were soundly beaten in the
first round but Albert remains the only British royal to have competed at the Championships,
having done so when the Championships were still an amateur event. Albert’s decision to play alongside Clark
in Jamaica the following year was seen as an inclusive decision which embraced the wider
Jamaican population. It was probably simply more in line with Albert’s
personality that he innocently decided to play a game of tennis and wasn’t considering
the political overtones of doing so at all. Thereafter, he and Elizabeth proceeded onwards
to the Pacific Ocean, visiting Fiji, New Zealand and Australia, before returning to Britain
after taking in many of the empire’s countries in the mid-1920s. While in Australia Albert oversaw the formal
opening of the newly built Parliament House in the capital city, Canberra. He delivered a speech during this event, one
which was well delivered. This would not have been possible just a year
or two earlier. Bertie’s stutter had not retreated with
the passage of the years and by the mid-1920s had become a problem. When he had given the closing speech at the
British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in October 1925, the ceremony had been an endurance test
for both Albert and his listeners, with the Duke struggling to deliver his lines. In its aftermath he determined to do something
to confront the stutter which had plagued him since his youth. Thus, although the acclaimed film The King’s
Speech, depicts Albert as having employed him much later in the lead up to and opening
stages of the Second World War, it was actually in 1926 that Bertie first began working with
Lionel Logue, an Australian former stage actor turned speech and language therapist. Logue’s methods were unusual by the standards
of the 1920s and he was considered a quack by many in the medical community, but his
regimen of daily vocal exercises and conscious relaxing of the throat muscles proved enormously
successful in Albert’s case. Already when he had opened the Parliament
House in Canberra in 1927 the Duke’s speech was much improved and his voice did not falter
on that occasion. He continued to work with Logue intermittently
over the next twenty years and in 1937, at the time of his coronation, he honoured the
Australian by making him a Member of the Royal Victorian Order, with promotion to the rank
of Commander in 1944. More broadly, Albert grew into himself in
the 1920s. He was a changed man following his marriage
and after becoming a father and unlike his own father and grandfather his parenting style
was a warm, modern one, rather than being a cold, distant presence in his daughters’
lives. The family originally lived at White Lodge
in Richmond Park in London, but they moved to a more modest home in Piccadilly in 1926. During these years the Duke and Duchess became
known for their philanthropy. Bertie, for instance, founded the Industrial
Welfare Society through which he met with trade unionists and other leaders of industrial
workers to try to gain a greater understanding of the material existences of Britain’s
workers and how their lot could be improved at a time when industrial communities in much
of England and Scotland still suffered from striking deprivation. Bertie became known as ‘the Foreman’ to
his family, such was his interest in labour issues. He also established the Duke of York’s Camps
through which boys from working class communities and public schools competed in a wide range
of events. These were a forerunner of the Duke of Edinburgh
Awards latterly established by his son-in-law. Albert took a great personal interest in them
and attended the camps every year in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s except for
1934 when he was ill. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Albert and
Elizabeth must surely have believed that their lives would continue on the same trajectory
as they had been on since their marriage. They would continue to play prominent roles
in representing the royal family as Duke and Duchess of York, but the assumption was there
that Bertie’s older brother Edward would eventually marry, become king, produce an
heir and the royal line would continue through his family. However, by the early 1930s it was imperative
for Edward to marry at some point, as he neared his fortieth year. It was worrying for both the king and the
government to discover in the course of the mid-1930s that Edward’s attentions had actually
landed on Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee who had come to England following her marriage
in 1928 to Ernest Aldrich Simpson, an American businessman with extensive dealings in England. Edward and she had first met in 1932 and gradually
entered into an extra-marital affair. By 1935 when King George
sanctioned the Metropolitan Police Special Branch to begin monitoring Simpson’s movements, the relationship between
her and the heir to the throne had become a matter of considerable concern to the royal
family and the Conservative Party Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, when he entered government
that summer. Although news of the affair had not become
public knowledge at that time, it was widely believed that if it did it would become a
cause of major scandal, both because Simpson was a divorcee at a time when divorce still
carried considerable social stigma and also because Edward and she were romantically involved
while Wallis was still married to her second husband. The affair would soon change the course of
Albert’s life. Albert’s father, King George V, died on
the 20th of January 1936, in large part owing to a lung condition exacerbated by lifelong
chain smoking, underlying medical conditions and habits which were shared by his sons and
which plagued their later lives as well. He had been considerably ill since the mid-1920s,
but by 1935 matters were very poor indeed. In his final months he had expressed his hopes
that if Edward continued with his relationship with Simpson that they would not have children
and that the way would soon be clear for Albert to succeed to the throne one day. That would come sooner rather than later. Although Edward immediately ascended to the
throne as King Edward VIII following his father’s death in January 1936, there were discussions
taking place immediately within Baldwin’s government about what course should be followed
if Edward insisted on marrying Simpson. As Edward did not have any children, Albert
was necessarily part of these discussions from their inception, as he was next in line
to the throne. It was clear that if Edward were forced to
abdicate, Albert would almost certainly succeed him, although there were
rumours in the mid-to-late 1930s that the government was considering the possibility of one of Albert’s two younger
brothers, Prince Henry and Prince George, as possible candidates to succeed Edward if
the crisis deepened. George, it was held at the time, was viewed
in particular as a possible king, as he and his wife, Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark,
had become parents to a son, Prince Edward, in October 1935 and thus he would have a male
heir already if he became king. However, there is no evidence to suggest that
the idea of Henry or George succeeding Edward was ever seriously entertained by Baldwin’s
government and the plan from the very start of the Abdication Crisis was for Albert to
succeed his brother if Edward ended up renouncing his throne. Edward’s coronation was planned for the
12th of May 1937. He would not remain as king for long enough
for it to be held though. The first months of his reign saw a growing
standoff with Baldwin concerning his relationship with Wallis Simpson. Edward was seemingly determined to marry her
and for her part Wallis was taking steps to divorce her second husband in advance of marrying
Edward. She had informed friends that she expected
to be crowned as queen the day that Edward was crowned as king. This would not be the case. Baldwin was utterly opposed to Edward’s
proposed marriage and in the autumn of 1936 began liaising extensively with the wider
royal family, particularly Bertie, who was reluctantly acclimatising himself to the reality
of succeeding his brother within a matter of weeks, a development which he had no desire
to see occurring. News of the affair eventually broke and it
was made known to the nation in the newspapers on the 2nd of December 1936. Thereafter, despite efforts by some senior
members of parliament such as Winston Churchill to support Edward’s right to marry whom
he pleased, it became abundantly clear that parliament sided with Baldwin’s approach. Pressured into making a swift decision, Edward agreed to abdicate rather
than end his relationship with Simpson. He did so on the 11th of December, upon which
Albert succeeded as King of Britain and Emperor of India, taking the regnal name George VI
in honour of his father. He was a reluctant king and later revealed
that when he had to visit his mother and tell her the news of the abdication and his assumption
of the throne, he wept. George rose to the position of king well. His style of rule was modest and undramatic,
in stark contrast to the controversy and drama which had surrounded Edward as Prince of Wales
and during his brief time as king. Over the next fifteen or so years he would
fulfil the role of monarch and its constitutional remit very well, rarely exceeding the role
which the monarchy was largely confined to by the middle of the twentieth century, which
was to represent the royal establishment well and act in a ceremonial capacity. Nevertheless, this was still an important
function, particularly so when Britain entered a period of extreme hardship from the autumn
of 1939 onwards. Moreover, George’s modest and unassuming
personality was a good foil to the larger than life character of Winston Churchill as
Prime Minister when war would come just a few years into his reign. Politically George was conservative in his
views, but not staunchly so and was well-suited to overseeing the gradual modernisation of
the country both socially and culturally. George had come to power at a time when the
political map of Europe was in flux. Following the end of the First World War in
1918, the continent had experienced five years of brutal revolutions and civil wars in regions
like Russia, Turkey, Poland, Ireland and Germany. But eventually in 1923 and 1924 the chaos
subsided and several years of major economic growth and prosperity had followed. This was checked by the Wall Street Crash
in the autumn of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed. As renewed political turmoil arose across
Europe many countries turned to more extreme politics. In Central Europe, in particular, far-right
nationalist and fascist parties had emerged to claim power in countries like Austria,
Hungary and above all Germany where the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler seized power early in
1933. Conversely, Eastern Europe was dominated by
the totalitarian Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin. Those few countries which retained a democratic
governmental system were threatened by the vying forces of fascism and communism and
shortly before George succeeded to the throne a bitter civil war had broken out in Spain
between these left and right-wing political forces. The task before Britain in the first years
of George’s reign was to navigate this difficult political environment, preventing the rise
of both the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley and excessive social unrest
wrought by the political left. And George’s task in acting as head of state
at this time was not helped by Edward and Wallis’s decision to undertake an unofficial
tour of Nazi Germany in the autumn of 1937, one in which Edward clearly displayed his
appreciation of German National Socialism. When George became king, Britain was at a
crossroads in terms of how to approach the German threat. It could begin rearming rapidly in order to
deter Germany from further aggression or try to appease Hitler and the Nazis by granting
them concessions, principally in the shape of reversals of some of the more punitive
aspects of the Treaty of Versailles which had brought the First World War to an end. George was in many ways a favourer of appeasement,
but the principle architect of this approach was Neville Chamberlain who succeeded Baldwin
in May 1937 when he stood down as Prime Minister. Chamberlain continued a policy of slow rearmament,
while also allowing Germany to re-emerge as the major power in Central Europe. Thus, few objections were raised when the
Anschluss, the union of Germany and Austria into a Greater Germany, was undertaken by
the Nazis in March 1938 in direct violation of the peace treaties which had brought the
war to an end. George supported Chamberlain in this approach,
but in doing so he was actually following the constitutional remit of the monarchy by
the 1930s, which was to support the government of the day and its decisions, regardless of
whether or not those same policies ran contrary to the monarch’s own views. In one instance, and a particularly significant
one at that, George did directly associate himself with Chamberlain’s policy. Following the annexation of Austria in the
spring of 1938 the Nazis had turned their attention to the Sudetenland, the German-speaking
region of western Czechoslovakia, making claims to this territory. Eventually a diplomatic conference was convened
to be held in Munich in September 1938. In the lead up to it George offered to write
directly to Hitler to try to appeal to him as one ex-serviceman to another to try to
prevent war. This was well-intended, though considerably
naïve in retrospect. When Chamberlain reached an agreement with
Hitler at Munich to allow Germany to annex the Sudetenland in return for a promise of
no further aggressive actions or claims on its neighbours’ territory, George sent him
a message requesting him to visit Buckingham Palace immediately on his return to England
so that the king could express his immense congratulations on what he perceived to be
a major diplomatic victory. The appearance of the monarch and the Prime
Minister on the balcony of Buckingham Palace together when Chamberlain arrived in England
was a striking statement about their combined belief in the success of appeasement. But they would soon realise how misguided
their faith in the agreement reached at Munich was. In the summer of 1939, despite the troubled
political headwinds in Europe, George and Elizabeth headed across the Atlantic Ocean
and visited the United States. The tour of the US was
undertaken on the invitation of Present Franklin D. Roosevelt. Occurring between the 7th and 12th of June,
it has a significance as being the first time that a British monarch had ever visited the
country. No British monarch had agreed to do so since
the US, which had been born out of Britain’s colonies in North America, had declared its
independence in 1776 and even prior to this no monarch had visited the colonies since
their establishment in the early seventeenth century. The tour took in much of the East Coast, with
visits to Washington D.C. and New York as well as Mount Vernon, the
home of George Washington in Virginia. The state visit was an important one in making
the British royals visible to the American public and was conceived of by Roosevelt as
a way of generating support in the US for providing aid to Britain in the event of war
breaking out. It was a shrewd diplomatic move, one which
did not see US sentiment in favour of intervening in the Second World War when it initially
broke out, but which helped Roosevelt to persuade Congress to provide financial and material
support to Britain in the early stages of the war. Close ties between Britain and the US would
soon be needed, as Chamberlain’s efforts at appeasement were proven to have been in
vain by the time George and Elizabeth toured the US in the summer of 1939. No sooner had the dust settled on the Munich
Agreement and the Sudetenland been annexed into a greater Germany, than Hitler and the
other senior members of the Nazi regime began turning their attentions towards further land
grabs. The winter of 1938 was relatively calm, but
the following March the Munich accords were torn up as German troops entered Czechoslovakia and occupied the country
which became a protectorate of Nazi Germany. Just days later the city of Memel on the Baltic
Sea coast was annexed after being threatened with an aerial bombardment by the German foreign
minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. By now Britain and France had begun to accelerate
the speed of their rearmament in preparation for the inevitable conflict, but they were
far behind where they needed to be. The Nazis were aware of this and consequently
accelerated their own march to war. In the summer of 1939 their attentions turned
to Poland, making diplomatic claims to Polish territory which Germany had been forced to
cede in 1919 as part of the Treaty of Versailles which brought the First World War to an end. Finally, in late August 1939 a false flag
operation was run to make Poland seem like the aggressor in Eastern Europe. On the 1st of September 1939 Germany declared
war on its eastern neighbour and invaded Poland. Two days later, in response to this aggression,
Britain and France went to war with the Nazis. The Second World War had commenced. As the King of Britain and Emperor of India
the task fell to George on the 3rd of September 1939 to address the nation upon Britain’s
declaration of war on Germany earlier that day. At 6pm that evening he delivered his speech,
broadcast over the radio. While Winston Churchill’s addresses to the
nation during the war usually garner greater attention, George’s on Britain’s entry
into the war was also galvanising. In it he stated, “In this grave hour, perhaps
the most fateful in our history, I send to all my peoples, both at home and over seas,
this message with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross
your threshold and speak to you myself. For the second time in the lives of most of
us we are at war. Over and over again we have tried to find
a peaceful way out of the differences between ourselves and those who are now our enemies. But it has been in vain…If one and all be
resolutely faithful today, ready for whatever service or sacrifice it may demand, with God’s
help we shall prevail.” George’s maiden speech to the nation during
the conflict was delivered without any trace of the stutter which had plagued him for much
of his youth. Although the award-winning film The King’s
Speech contains many aspects of George’s story which are historically accurate, his
challenges concerning his stutter were primarily faced and overcome with the assistance of
Lionel Logue in the mid-to-late 1920s, though George did periodically consult with Logue
over the years including during the Second World War. Nevertheless, the film is inaccurate in suggesting
that the king only began to confront his stutter in the period immediately before the war. With the onset of the war there was a growing
problem in the heart of government. Neville Chamberlain remained as Prime Minister
and retained the support of the bulk of the Conservative Party. However, there was a rebellious faction amongst the Tories and many in Britain
felt that Chamberlain’s position was untenable
given that he had championed the policy of appeasing Germany after he became Prime Minister in 1937. Matters came to a head in early May 1940 during
the so-called Norway Debate in the House of Commons, which began concerning British efforts
to open a front in Northern Norway following the country’s occupation by the Nazis, but
which soon morphed into a wider debate on Chamberlain’s management of the war. It became clear that he could not remain on
as Prime Minister, but there was a debate as to who should succeed him, with some favouring
Winston Churchill, a long-standing Conservative critic of the Nazis and appeasement and others
supporting the candidature of Lord Halifax, an ally of Chamberlain’s who was not entirely
opposed to negotiating peace terms with Germany. George was initially in support of Halifax,
holding a grudge against Churchill over his support for Edward and opposition to George
becoming king back in the early winter of 1936. However, as events unfolded in the early summer
of 1940 it became clear that Churchill was the candidate who could command cross-party
support in parliament and on the 10th of May 1940 George asked Churchill to form a new
government. The case was urgent, as the Germans had invaded
Belgium and the Netherlands that morning heading towards France. A cross-party coalition government conceived
on the widest basis was soon established. Though he opposed Churchill’s ascent as
Prime Minister initially, once he occupied 10 Downing Street, the relationship between
George and Winston became one of the closest between any British monarch and Prime Minister
in modern history. The exigencies of the war ensured that they
had to meet regularly and they soon bonded over their common interest in the Navy, Churchill
having served as First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War while George was
at sea in the North Atlantic. Things grew from there. By the late autumn of 1940 their formal meetings
had been replaced by informal lunches between king and prime minister every Tuesday, ones
which would often last for several hours and in which Churchill related the actions of
government, while George explained what he felt the mood of the nation was based on his
extensive meetings with the public, which were taking place on an almost daily basis. We know of the considerable friendship which
developed between the pair in the course of the war owing to George having recorded them
regularly in his diary. It was not always smooth sailing, notably
in the spring of 1944 when Churchill had to convince the king that he could not take part
in the D-Day landings, not even on board the warships at the rear once the beachheads had
been secured, but generally the relationship was a successful one, in large part because
Churchill encouraged George, a naturally shy and retiring man, that he had a considerable
public role to play in the war. He made him feel useful. A sign of their affinity for one another would
be seen many years later, when Churchill was delivered the news of George’s passing at
10 Downing Street, he was said to have laid aside his papers and stated, “Bad news,
the worst”, and descended into a deep gloom for several days. George’s close relationship with Churchill
was in many ways forged in the dark days of the autumn of 1940. Following the Nazi invasion and rapid conquest
of the Low Countries and France in the summer of 1940 the Blitz, a bombing campaign of Britain
initiated by the Nazis, combined with a naval blockade of Britain in the North Atlantic,
commenced. The Blitz began on the 7th of September with
the goal of bringing Britain to negotiate peace terms without the Nazis having to launch
a land invasion of Britain. London was the prime target from the beginning,
but George and Elizabeth took the decision to remain in the capital. It was a hazardous decision. Over 1,000 people alone were killed in the
city on the first night of the bombing campaign and on the 13th of September the king and
queen were very nearly killed when several bombs landed on Buckingham Palace. More broadly, the royal family underwent the
same rationing that was imposed on the entire British public during the war years and the
sense of shared struggle galvanised the nation and won George and Elizabeth the admiration
of the British people even as the Blitz dragged on for eight long months through to May 1941. By the time it ended over 40,000 British civilians
were killed and two million homes had been damaged or destroyed, the majority of the
damage being inflicted on London. The worst of the Blitz and the naval blockade
ended in the spring of 1941. This was entirely owing to the general drift
of the conflict. Between the summer of 1940 after the swift
fall of France, Britain and the North Atlantic became the crucible of the war. The king needed to be visible during this,
Britain’s darkest hour in the conflict. However, from the summer of 1941 onwards the
focus of matters shifted as Hitler and the Nazis abandoned their designs on forcing Britain
to surrender and instead turned their attentions eastwards to the Soviet Union, undertaking
the largest land invasion in military history. Thereafter the Eastern Front became the focus
of the war in Europe, while after the entry of the United States into the conflict in
December 1941 Britain, the US and the Commonwealth nations turned their attentions to gaining
victory in the North Africa campaign against the Italians and the German expeditionary
force which had been dispatched there. They finally emerged victorious in the spring
of 1943, after which a Southern Front was opened in Italy by the Western Allies. Twelve months later, in the summer of 1944,
a Western Front was established with the D-Day landings and the invasion of France. From that point onwards, the course of the
war and the result seemed destined to be one of Allied victory. In September 1940, in the aftermath of the
evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in northern France earlier that
summer, and the commencement of the Blitz and the Battle of the North Atlantic, George
championed the creation of two new awards which would be bestowed by the crown. The George Cross and the George Medal were
both created in September 1940. Unlike the Victoria Cross, which had been
established during the long reign of George’s great-grandmother, and other military honours,
the George Cross and George Medal were to be awarded to anyone who was deemed to have
conducted themselves with gallantry and bravery, be they civilians or soldiers. In the context of the Blitz, when ordinary
Londoners, and in particular fire-fighters and police, were effectively the front line
soldiers in the war against Germany, such awards were deemed necessary by the king. The George Cross would become the civilian
equivalent of the Victoria Cross, the highest military award of its kind. In announcing the creation of the new honour,
the king stated that, quote, “I have decided to create, at once, a new mark of honour for
men and women in all walks of civilian life. I propose to give my name to this new distinction,
which will consist of the George Cross, which will rank next to the Victoria Cross, and
the George Medal for wider distribution.” It was to be awarded for “acts of the greatest
heroism or of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger.” Over the course of the war George would personally
present the awards to dozens of soldiers and civilians. Those who were honoured included the likes
of Stuart Archer, a bomb-diffusing expert who had diffused over 200 bombs that had landed
undetonated in England by September 1941. John Bridge was another medal of the Cross
for his role in defusing dozens of bombs which landed in urban centres across England. The George Medal was granted in similar cases,
often to members of the Commonwealth nations. For instance, Margaret Irene Anderson, an
Australian staff nurse on board the Empire Star, was awarded the Medal for her gallantry
during the evacuation of Singapore in the face of the Japanese onslaught in 1942. Back home, Charity Bick was awarded the George
Medal by the king. She had lied about her age at just 14 in order
to be accepted into the Air Raid Precautions unit in 1939. During an air raid on West Bromwich by the
Germans the following August she delivered messages on her bicycle to a nearby RAF control
room and helped her father put out an incendiary bomb that fell on the roof of a shop. In awarding these honours to individuals like
Archer, Bridge, Anderson and Bick, George galvanised public sentiment to continue the
struggle against Germany during the dark days of late 1940 and early 1941 when Britain stood
largely alone against the Nazi threat. George and Elizabeth contributed to the war
cause in other ways. From 1940 onwards the king and the queen consort
were regular visitors to hospitals and various fronts in England and further afield. From the summer of 1940 onwards they regularly
visited sites of extensive bombing raids to console the victims’ relatives and to meet
the wounded. Often these duties were divided up, with George
heading for military bases and Elizabeth touring London’s hospitals and those in the other
major cities. One might look at these as merely symbolic
gestures, but symbolic gestures at a time of civilian endurance were what was needed
at the time and the king and queen earned plaudits for their very visible public presence
throughout the Blitz and the remainder of the war. As the focus of the conflict shifted away
from Britain in 1941 and the Western Allies began taking the offensive on several fronts,
George often left England, heading to the front lines in North Africa and the island
fortress of Malta in 1943 and visiting France, the Low Countries and Italy in 1944 after
the Southern and Western Fronts had been opened. By 1944 the war was entering its final stages
as Germany found itself being advanced on from the east by the Soviets and from the
south and west by the Western Allies. George did not play an entirely silent role
in these affairs. He made some contributions towards Allied
strategy, notably in 1943 when he proposed that the Allies should forego opening a new
front in France in favour of pushing resources into the Southern Front in Italy, a strategy
which Churchill was considerably in favour of and sent along to the military chiefs of
staff. In the end, though, George saw the logic of
opening a front in northern France and on the evening of the D-Day landings he delivered
a rousing broadcast in which he recalled the grim position Britain had been in four years
earlier, before stating that, quote, “once more a supreme test has to be faced. This time, the challenge is not to fight to
survive but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause.” That eventual victory would take another eleven
months to secure, but in the end as Soviet troops closed on central Berlin and British,
American, Canadian and other Allied soldiers fanned out across Germany, Hitler killed himself
and the Nazis surrendered on the 8th of May 1945. That VE or Victory in Europe Day, George and
the rest of the royal family appeared on the balconies of Buckingham Palace to celebrate
with the British public the end of the near six year long struggle. With victory in the war George’s role shifted
from being Britain’s war leader to overseeing the rapid dismantling of its empire. Promises had been made during the war to many
interested parties concerning increased autonomy as the reward for helping Britain in its struggle
against Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. In particular, the Cripps Mission of 1942
to India had promised the Indian National Congress leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi that
India would be allowed to hold elections and have greater self-determination in the aftermath
of the conflict if it committed fully to aiding Britain in its hour of need. Now the debt fell due. In 1947 India was granted its independence
and the British Raj was divided up, so that the Muslim-majority areas in the north-west
and north-east became the new state of Pakistan, though the province of East Bengal would later
become the independent nation of Bangladesh. George briefly remained as Emperor of India
even after independence, but the title was abolished entirely in 1948, though India and
Pakistan would remain as members of the British Commonwealth. Thus, in the second half of the 1940s, George
was overseeing the first steps of the post-war transition from the Empire to Commonwealth,
including the 1949 London Declaration which was pursuant from India’s declaration of
itself as a republic and the removal of George as head of state of that Commonwealth nation. George was cautiously in favour of this move,
provided India remained a Commonwealth nation, though the episode did see the Republic of
Ireland leave the Commonwealth entirely. The further dismantling of Britain’s empire
would gather pace in the 1950s, particularly from 1957 onwards when the
first wave of decolonisation spread across Africa. By the mid-1960s Britain would relinquish
much of its control of its territories in regions like Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and Rhodesia,
many of which new nations in turn became members of the Commonwealth. But George would not live to see this. His health was deteriorating already in the
late 1940s, though he was only just after entering his fifties. Like his father before him, his lifelong chain
smoking had taken its toll on his health, as had the stresses of the war years. Moreover, by the late 1940s he was suffering
from several circulatory problems including Buerger’s Disease, which leads to clotting
of small and medium arteries and which is also exacerbated by smoking. By 1949 matters were serious and a planned
tour of some of the Commonwealth nations had to be cancelled, while for a time it was feared
that George would have to have one of his legs amputated. Unsurprisingly, by this time his eldest daughter
and the heir presumptive to the throne, Elizabeth, who was only 23 years of age, was carrying
out more and more royal duties by the end of the decade. Matters did not improve into the 1950s. In 1951 George had to have
his left lung surgically removed after he developed lung cancer. He was limited in his physical movements from
that point onwards, although the king attempted to remain active, insisting on accompanying
his daughter and her husband, Prince Philip, to London Airport on the 31st of January 1952
when they left for a tour of much of the empire. It was the last time he would see his daughter
and heir. George died in his sleep a week later on the
6th of February 1952 from a coronary thrombosis at Sandringham where he was born. He was just 56 years of age. Owing to his premature death, Elizabeth succeeded
to the throne of Britain at just 25 years of age and as she lived to be 96 years herself
her reign would be the longest in British history. News of George’s death was released immediately
and the mechanisms for the holding of a state funeral were put in place. His body lay in state at Westminster from
the 11th of February onwards so that the British public could pay their respects to the wartime
king. His funeral was held on the 15th like those
of so many British monarchs at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Afterwards his remains were interred in the
royal vault, though they only remained here until 1969, at which time George was reinterred
in the George VI Memorial Chapel. His remains lie there today with those of
his wife, Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who lived until 2002, outliving her husband by
half a century, and those of his daughter, the recently deceased Queen Elizabeth II and
her husband the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip. George VI led Britain through one of the most
consequential periods in world history and arguably the most significant in Britain’s
long imperial story. For much of 1940 and 1941 the country was
the only major power standing against Nazi Germany and the fascist threat. In that dark moment the country needed leadership. It is generally understood to have come from
Winston Churchill, but there was also George and Elizabeth as his queen consort who acted
as figureheads in the struggle against the Blitz and the blockade of Britain by Germany. He rose extremely well to that occasion. Moreover, it came from a man who was never
supposed to become king, his older brother’s love life and to a certain extent his difficult
personality having combined to ensure that his reign was a short one and Edward had to
abdicate in favour of George in December 1936. When he did become King of Britain, George
cannot be said to have been a philosopher king or a particularly forceful personality,
but he offered a steady hand and humility at the helm of state which was fitting for
the time period in which he became monarch. Overcoming his own personal limitations, he
won the respect of the British people throughout the war, developed a close relationship with
Churchill and managed the transition from empire to commonwealth well in the aftermath
of the conflict. Tragically, his physical decline ensured that
his reign was cut short and that his last years were spent in considerable pain. He should be remembered as a modest and humble,
but effective king. What do you think of King George VI? Was it a good thing that he became King of
England and that Edward abdicated the throne in 1936? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching. The woman known to history as Elizabeth Windsor,
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, was born in London on the 21st of April, 1926. Her father was Prince Albert of York, known
to his family and close friends as “Bertie”. Her mother was Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon for whom
Elizabeth was the first born child. She was given the name of Elizabeth Alexandra
Mary, but despite the fact that her regnal name was “Elizabeth II,” she was not named
for the iconic Queen Elizabeth I. Instead she was named for her mother, for her paternal
great-grandmother Queen Alexandra, and for her grandmother Queen Mary. Elizabeth II was named for women who were
consorts rather than those in whom authority was vested, and few imagined that she would
grow up to do much more than marry, have children, and enjoy a life of quiet aristocratic privilege. The first child of the Duke and Duchess of
York, Elizabeth’s birth was happily welcomed, but the family had little expectation of the
grand status which would one day be hers. Her father, Prince Albert of York, was not
the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne of Britain, but rather was the second son
of King George V, who had been King of Britain and Emperor of India since 1910. Bertie’s older brother, Prince Edward, who
was called “David” within the family, was next in line to inherit the throne. David was not yet married, but he was just
thirty-two, only eighteen months older than Bertie. He had not married by the time Elizabeth was
born, but most people were of the opinion that the Prince of Wales still had plenty
of time to marry, have children and secure the royal line in this way. Thus, few people would have imagined when
she was born in the spring of 1926 that Princess Elizabeth of York would one day be Queen. Even though she was the third grandchild of
King George V and Queen Mary, Elizabeth’s birth was accompanied by great excitement,
as she was theoretically the third in line to the throne. For most of the day, a crowd of reporters
and well-wishers stood outside the house at 17 Bruton Street, where the Duchess of York
had given birth, hoping for a glimpse of the members of the royal family coming and going
to meet the newborn princess. King George V and Queen Mary were among the
first to pay a visit to 17 Bruton Street that very day, eager to meet their first granddaughter. The queen pronounced her a, quote, “little
darling with a lovely complexion and pretty, fair hair,” while the King was equally taken
with his newest grandchild. Elizabeth became a great favourite, not only
with the British newspapers and magazines who christened her, “Princess Betty,”
but also with the senior members of the royal family. The Duke and Duchess of York were periodically
busy with royal duties and functions and Elizabeth therefore spent a sizeable proportion of her
childhood being cared for by her nannies and governess, a typical scenario for royal children
in times gone by. However, her parents also placed great importance
on their family life and made sure that they had daily quality time with their daughter
for at least an hour every morning, and every evening between tea-time and bedtime. Neither did Elizabeth lack any family for
company when her parents were away. She either stayed with the King and Queen
at Sandringham or Balmoral, or with her maternal grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore,
at Glamis Castle in Scotland, or at their London house at 17 Bruton St. where she had
been born. While Bertie and Elizabeth were away on a
royal tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1927, they missed their daughter’s first
word. The princess’ nanny, Clara Knight, reportedly
helped her learn to pronounce the word “Mummy,” although amusingly, Elizabeth used the title
on multiple individuals before her mother’s return. The Duke and Duchess of York were openly overjoyed
at being reunited with their daughter, if not a little dismayed at how much she had
grown and changed in the months that they had been away. Still, they knew she was well-cared for in
their absence, and it was generally not the practice for small children to accompany royals
during extended travel. Elizabeth’s uncle David also showed her
much affection. He visited her often during her childhood,
bringing her gifts and chatting amusedly with his little niece. King George V doted on her and would willingly
play any part in her games. On one occasion, one of the King’s equerries
or attendants was shocked to find the King on his hands and knees pretending to be a
horse, and allowing the two-year-old Princess to lead him around by his beard! Elizabeth called him “Grandpa England,” which amused him greatly,
as did his granddaughter’s inability to pronounce her own name as a toddler. “Lilibet” was the best she could do, and
the King made sure that the nickname stuck. Lilibet had what many observers and historians
characterize as an idyllic childhood. Soon after her birth, the Duke and Duchess
of York moved into a house at 145 Piccadilly in London. Elizabeth spent most of her days with her nanny, Mrs. Knight, and
her nurses, Ruby MacDonald, and her sister Margaret MacDonald, whom Elizabeth
called “Bobo.” She enjoyed regular and daily quality time
with her parents, who believed in the importance of a close, warm, and fun-filled family life. Elizabeth’s favourite activities were playing
with her toy ponies and working in the garden with her father. Her love of the outdoors became apparent very
early on, while she also shared a love of animals with other members of the family,
particularly horses and dogs. Bertie had no less than eight pet dogs during
Elizabeth’s childhood, including three Corgis, which famously became the queen’s favourite
breed, ones she kept several of down to her last years. Elizabeth’s grandfather, George V, shared
her love of horses, and gifted her with her first pony for her fourth birthday, a Shetland
named Peggy. Elizabeth began taking riding lessons the
following year, eventually proving to be an impressively adept equestrienne and as incurably
horse-mad as most of the royal family. Lilibet, who loved to be outdoors getting
dirty, once remarked that she hoped she might marry a farmer, so that she might spend every
day outdoors with horses and dogs. During the summer of 1930, Elizabeth, Duchess
of York, gave birth to her second daughter and last child at her family’s ancestral
home at Glamis Castle in Scotland. She and Bertie named the infant princess Margaret
Rose. Lilibet was delighted with her baby sister. She wrote to a relative that at first, she
thought that Margaret was some kind of “wonderful dolly,” only to discover that she was alive! The next few years were relaxed and happy
ones for the family. Bertie and Elizabeth referred to their family
affectionately as “us four”, a surprisingly close relationship for a royal family unit. Bertie’s relationship with his own parents,
by way of contrast, had been comparatively cold and distant and Elizabeth might be said
to have been the first monarch raised in a relatively modern manner. In 1931, the King gifted the Yorks with Royal
Lodge in Windsor Great Park. After extensive renovation and redecoration,
the family used the house as a weekend retreat. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon became particularly attached
to the Royal Lodge, and it remained her primary residence for fifty years following her husband’s
passing in 1952. The Yorks had some of their happiest times
together as a family at Royal Lodge in the early-to-mid 1930s. For Elizabeth and Margaret, the days usually
began with chatter and hijinks in their parents’ bedroom before breakfast. The girls would spend the bulk of the day
either playing outdoors or in the nursery with Ruby, Bobo, and Mrs. Knight, whom they
called “Alla,” or attending to their lessons with their governess, Marion Crawford, whom
they called “Crawfie.” There would usually be more family fun time
in the late afternoon or early evening, between teatime and bedtime. Bertie, Elizabeth, and their daughters became
beloved by the British press and the public quite early on. They seemed to project an almost bourgeois
domestic contentment that ordinary people admired, and with which they could identify. This national perception of their family’s
character as loving, stable, and relatable would come to be exceptionally important later
on, when Bertie was called upon to ascend to the throne. Like so many siblings who are close in age,
Elizabeth and Margaret developed very different personalities. Elizabeth was reserved, conscientious, and
dutiful. Adults who met her were impressed by her quiet
dignity and composure from a young age. She was efficient and tidy, carefully arranging
her shoes outside the nursery door and lining up all of her toy ponies in a neat row each
night before bed. That being said, she also had a sense of humor
and fun that were no doubt enhanced by having her sister Margaret as a nursery companion. Whereas Elizabeth was reserved, Margaret was
openly affectionate. While her sister was practical and dutiful,
Margaret was romantic, imaginative, and often mischievous. There were the inevitable struggles between
them as young children. Margaret had a tendency to bite when she was
incensed with Elizabeth, who, equally incensed, would hit her back. Elizabeth expressed annoyance that Margaret
seemed always to want whatever she wanted. Margaret was also given to teasing, which
aggravated Elizabeth, who had a short temper when they were children. But at the same time, she
was enormously protective of her younger sister, conscientious about keeping talk of unpleasant or frightening
things to a minimum in front of her, and mindful to include Margaret as much as possible. Their relationship would eventually be complicated
and strained by the family’s proximity to the crown, but nonetheless, throughout their
lives, the two sisters remained close and loving confidantes. Compared to the royal court, where the monarch
was head of the Church, the York household was a much more secular space. For most of her life, Queen Elizabeth II cherished
a deep religious faith and took her position as the head of the Church very seriously. But during her childhood, her parents placed
far more emphasis on kindness, consideration, order, and good manners than on religious
devotion. Holidays meant large family gatherings and
Elizabeth and Margaret enjoyed summers in Scotland, and Christmases
and Easters at Sandringham, in Norfolk. They received a weekly allowance of one shilling
each and Elizabeth saved most of hers throughout the year to buy Christmas presents for her
family. Small gifts rather than extravagant ones were
preferred and the royal family still observes this tradition of simple gift-giving today
even after Elizabeth’s passing. Even in her later years the Queen enjoyed
the “white elephant” or “gag” gifts most of all. A recent biography noted a bit of whimsy that
sat on a corner of the Queen’s bathtub – a crowned rubber duck, a gift from one of her
grandchildren. During childhood Christmases at Sandringham,
Elizabeth and Margaret often received books, dolls, toy horses, and sweets. Elizabeth kept a careful list of gifts she
had received and who had given them to her, making sure to send a thank-you note to each
one. She also carefully smoothed out and saved
the wrapping paper to be re-used later, as wrapping paper was something of a luxury item
in 1930s Britain. Marion Crawford, or Crawfie as she was known,
Elizabeth and Margaret’s governess, seemed to think that the two girls lived isolated
and lonely lives. She later wrote of her concern that the princesses
did not have the opportunity to see or experience nearly enough of the real world. She wanted to take them on many more excursions
than were permitted: to ride “the tube,” or the London subway, to play in a public
park, to meet and mix with ordinary children. However, such excursions were difficult to
undertake due to the media attention that might ensue. The York princesses were simply too recognizable
to the London public. It is interesting that Crawfie did not reflect
on the fact that Elizabeth and Margaret actually did spend time with quote-unquote, “ordinary”
people all the time. In fact, they spent the bulk of their time
with Ruby, Bobo, Mrs. Knight, and Crawfie herself, all of whom came from working-class
backgrounds. In light of this, it seems doubtful that the
girls could have failed to absorb something of their sensibilities, values, and beliefs. It had been Mrs. Knight who had taught Elizabeth
to save her used wrapping paper, to be conscious of waste and ostentation. It was to Bobo and Crawfie that Elizabeth
would constantly turn, either to share her joys or her worries. Some observers and historians disagree with
Marion Crawford’s perception of the princesses as lonely and isolated. While they concede that the girls generally
did not get many opportunities to meet ordinary children, they point out that they were permitted
to play with plenty of children from “their own set.” This included the children of extended family
members and children of the aristocracy. And while Crawfie’s descriptions of the
princesses portrayed them as mostly down-to-earth, other writers have emphasized that Elizabeth
and Margaret were ultimately never in doubt of their status. They were, after all, curtsied to by almost
everyone after their father became King. And, as many children do when they believe
they can get away with it, they sometimes did not hesitate to remind their playmates
of their right to get their own way. As close-knit as the family was, their social
dynamics could be as complex as those of any other family. Margaret’s outgoing and affectionate nature
resulted in a close relationship with her parents that Elizabeth might have envied. Additionally, as the elder
daughter, the expectations of Elizabeth were higher, and became increasingly so as the family’s proximity to the throne
shifted in the ensuing years. On the other hand, Elizabeth had a stronger
affinity with other members of the royal family as a child, including her grandparents, King
George V and Queen Mary, than Margaret did. The sensible and pragmatic Queen Mary felt
a special kinship to her eldest granddaughter, whose personality and outlook on life strongly
resembled her own. Members of the family were often impatient
with Margaret, seeing her as having a “difficult character,” distrusting her conspicuous
high-spiritedness, her frankness, and her passion. Reserved, neat, practical, and dignified, Elizabeth had more in common
with her grandparents. Despite the difficult dynamics that seemed
to afflict all families, Elizabeth and Margaret had a relatively happy
childhood, and a surprisingly quiet, slow, and predictable one considering their status as royals. The fact that Elizabeth, nor those around
here, ever expected her to be the Queen of Britain is evident from the approach to her
education. With Crawfie, she and Margaret studied English
literature and history. In subsequent years, they received regular
lessons from a French instructor, but this was largely the extent of their formal academic
training in their earlier years. King George V was opposed to the idea of the
princesses attending school and his sons David and Bertie agreed. They believed there were too many public relations
pitfalls involved. For example, which school should they choose and how could they avoid
offending other educational institutions? How could the princesses pursue a normal education while being constantly
singled out and scrutinized? Additionally, Bertie remembered his own awkward
and painful experiences of being bullied at school, of being pressured to succeed, and
he was eager to give his daughters an easier, more carefree childhood and to keep them sheltered
as long as possible. Although one can readily understand his protective
impulse, Bertie almost certainly underestimated his daughters. Even as young girls, they were far more confident
and self-possessed than Bertie had been at their age, and both might have benefitted
greatly from being able to attend school and receive a more varied and challenging education. There was at the time, however, a significant amount of social pressure
not to educate aristocratic women to be scholars or intellectuals. One did not want to be labeled a “bluestocking,”
a derogatory term for an educated woman who ought to prefer a more traditional female
role. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was initially in favour
of sending the girls to school, but ultimately came to agree with the other senior royals. After all, she herself had also been educated
at home by a governess. Throughout each week, the princesses attended
to their lessons daily but usually did not study for more than two or three hours. Additionally, the Duke and Duchess of York
often thought little of interrupting schoolroom activities in favour of family fun time, a
habit that worried the princesses’ governess. Crawfie privately believed that Elizabeth and Margaret should have
a more rigorous education, but her position in service to the royal family
did not permit her to criticize Bertie and Elizabeth’s approach to educating their
children. Crawfie managed to discreetly bring the matter
to the attention of Queen Mary, who heartily agreed that her granddaughters should have
the most varied education possible, even if under informal circumstances. Queen Mary began to take the girls on regular
outings herself to museums, galleries, and historic sites. In addition to their studies in the schoolroom,
Elizabeth and Margaret received piano, voice, and dance lessons. The naturally charismatic Margaret proved
to be especially talented in the performative arts. She was a natural mimic with a facility for
accents, had a lovely singing voice, and a hilarious knack for comic timing. Famed writer and performer Noel Coward once
observed that had Princess Margaret been permitted to pursue a career in the theatre, she undoubtedly
would have been an enormous success. Elizabeth could play piano decently enough,
but she was far less interested in the arts than Margaret. Interestingly, the sisters also got the chance
to learn and practice domestic arts. They had a child-sized cottage playhouse on
the grounds of their weekend retreat at Royal Lodge, a gift to the princesses from the people
of Wales. Everything was in miniature, but the little
house was stocked with every convenience including hot running water and modern appliances, and
even a wireless set. The girls loved their cottage, and the British
public was charmed by descriptions of the York princesses learning to cook and keep
house, a down-to-earth and inspiring image of royalty in Depression-era Britain. In January 1936, when Elizabeth was nine years
old, her seemingly idyllic and carefree childhood came to an end when her grandfather King George
V died. Elizabeth was deeply saddened by his loss,
but, as Crawfie later wrote admiringly, “she seemed determined to go through it all without
making any fuss.” On the day of George V’s funeral, while
watching the King’s body being loaded onto a train at Paddington Station, Elizabeth stood
silently while dozens in the crowd openly wept. The year following the King’s death was
a strange one for Elizabeth and Margaret and for their parents. There had been fewer and fewer visits from
Uncle David in the last few years, and now they stopped altogether, now
that he had automatically ascended to the throne as King Edward VIII. Edward’s conduct, both before and after
he became King, was troubling to most members of the royal and parliamentary establishment. Such matters were almost certainly never discussed
in front of Elizabeth, but she could probably sense the tension within her own family. Most of the new king’s romantic entanglements
in recent years tended to be with married or divorced women, which complicated his new
status as head of the Church of England. Divorce was largely forbidden by the Church,
except in very select cases of neglect, abuse, or infidelity. Even in these cases, couples were still encouraged
to try to “work it out,” or “come to some arrangement.” Because Edward was destined to become the
head of the Church, which frowned to such an extent on divorce, his relationships in
the past had been controversial. But Edward’s most recent relationship and
the one which he was still involved in when he became king in January 1936, with Mrs.
Wallis Simpson, an American socialite and divorcee who was still married to her second
husband while having an affair with Edward, was scandalous by the standards of the time. Nevertheless, Edward was determined to marry
her, but most members of the British political establishment were overwhelmingly opposed. Ultimately, Edward VIII would choose to abdicate
rather than give up his relationship with Mrs. Simpson. On the 7th of December 1936, the king summoned
Bertie to his house at Fort Belvedere and delivered the news that he had decided to
abdicate the throne. Although Albert was aware that this was a
possibility for some time, he was still devastated by the news. “I’m quite unprepared for it,” he later
confided to his wife. “David’s been trained all his life. I’m only a naval officer, it’s the only
thing I know about.” Though she was deeply worried for her husband
and family, Elizabeth tried to comfort him. “We must take what is coming to us and make
the best of it” she said. It is eminently clear that her eldest daughter
inherited her legendarily “stiff upper lip” from her family. Less than a week after the abdication, when
Bertie returned home from the Accession Council, Elizabeth and Margaret curtsied to their father
for the first time. Their darling “Papa” was now the King. Margaret asked her older sister: “Does this
mean that you will be the Queen one day?” Elizabeth replied gravely and quietly: “Yes,
I suppose it does.” “Poor you,” Margaret said in commiseration. Elizabeth was now her father’s heir-presumptive. The family had to leave their home at 145
Piccadilly, though admittedly they were moving into the plusher surroundings of Buckingham
Palace, the main royal palace in London. Bertie’s transition to being King George
VI, the regnal name he adopted to establish continuity from his father, George V’s reign,
was stressful for the whole family. Bertie and Elizabeth now had
far greater responsibilities and worries, and it became much more difficult for the family to find time to be together. Part of the problem was simply the sheer size
of Buckingham Palace. “People here need bicycles,” ten-year-old
Lilibet observed when they first moved in of those who had to travel between different
parts of the palace grounds. Indeed, it was a substantially long walk from
one end of the palace to the other, and the new King and Queen, with their dramatically
increased duties, had far less time to spend with their daughters in the nursery. They tried to compensate by spending as many
full weekends and holidays as possible at Royal Lodge, where they could play games,
picnic, and ride horses together as a family. But now that he was King, Bertie’s work
never really stopped. Even on the weekends, he only had a few hours
to spend with his family before he inevitably had to get back to his daily “red box”
of state papers. The immensity of Buckingham Palace made adjusting
to their new home difficult in other ways as well. The kitchens were about a half hour’s walk
from the rooms where the royal family actually dined, so the food was constantly served cold. Many rooms were chilly and damp, some with
cracked walls. Some pieces of furniture were a hundred years
old or more and the palace had an aggravatingly persistent rodent infestation. Crawfie was distinctly underwhelmed, not only
by the condition of the palace but also its lack of warmth. “Life in a palace resembles camping in a
museum,” she later wrote. There was also now a good deal less privacy
for the family, who were shadowed constantly by detectives and bodyguards. Such is the lot of being a member of the royal
family, no matter how attractive a prospect it might look from the outside. On the 12th of May 1937, Elizabeth attended
her parents’ coronation at Westminster Abbey and received her first intimation of what
lay in store for her as Queen one day. She sat with her sister
Margaret and her grandmother Queen Mary and watched the proceedings, at first, with fascination. Mindful of her position as his heir presumptive,
Bertie tasked his eldest daughter with writing a detailed account of the coronation, which
today rests in the royal archives. Elizabeth was impressed by the beauty, majesty,
and seeming magic of the service, and she observed that the Abbey itself seemed suspended
in “a haze of wonder.” As the coronation ritual stretched on and
on, however, she became impatient. “The service got rather boring as it was
all prayers,” she later wrote. Anxious to know when it would be over, she
quietly flipped through her program. She then discreetly nudged Queen Mary and
pointed out the word “finis”, meaning ‘the end’ in Latin, on the last page of
her program, and she and her grandmother smiled conspiratorially at one another. The following year, Elizabeth began to attend private classes at Eton
College with the Vice-Provost, Sir Henry Martin. In order to prepare her for her future role
as Queen, she studied constitutional law and the history of the monarchy. Martin emphasized strongly that the secret
of a successful monarchy is adaptability. He pointed to the ongoing collapse of ancient
royal houses, and asserted that the British monarchy had largely forestalled a similar
fate by drawing back the curtain of mystery, allowing themselves to become more accessible
to the public, and by being receptive to public opinion. This contrasted with France where an aloof
and largely uncaring royal establishment in the eighteenth century had been brought to
a shuddering and ultimately bloody end with the French Revolution. By way of contrast Elizabeth’s grandfather,
King George V, cognizant of the anti-German sentiment among the people during the First
World War years, changed the royal family’s name by proclamation in
1917, from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. While this did nothing to erase the King’s
heritage, or make people forget the fact that Kaiser Wilhelm was, in fact, his first cousin,
it was a powerful statement of King George V’s identity as a British king, a leader
and defender of his people. Another key aspect of Sir Henry Martin’s
instruction was his emphasis on the importance of broadcasting, which, since the reign of
George V, has remained one of the primary means the royal family uses to connect with
the public, from radio in George’s time to television speeches, interviews and in-depth
documentary films in more recent decades. When their father ascended the throne, Elizabeth
and Margaret were still very young, and because of their dramatic status change, they were
now destined to live their lives in an even more rarified atmosphere than the one into
which they had been born. There was concern within the family that,
in consequence, the girls might become even more isolated. Bertie’s younger sister Princess Mary, who
was honorary president of the Girl Guides, suggested they might like to join a guide
troupe. There were, of course, major issues with this
proposal, similar to the ones that had prevented the princesses from attending school. How could their security be ensured without
restricting their experience? Would they be accepted in
a cooperative, egalitarian group like the Girl Guides, in light of who they were? Would any accommodations to the princesses
be viewed as preferential treatment? Finally, it was decided that a special troupe
would be formed consisting of relatives and the daughters of the aristocracy. Margaret, who was not yet old enough for the
Girl Guides, was admitted to the troupe as a “Brownie.” Twenty girls roughly Elizabeth’s age met
regularly at Buckingham Palace beginning in 1937. They went on treks and explorations within
the palace’s extensive grounds, earned merit badges, and cooked sausages over an open fire. In later years Elizabeth would speak warmly
and nostalgically of her experience as a Girl Guide and she continued to
support the organization and its values throughout her long reign. During the summer of 1939, the King and Queen,
accompanied by their daughters, paid a visit to the Royal Naval College. It was there that Elizabeth met Prince Philip
of Greece and Denmark for the first time. Philip was her distant
cousin and also a descendant of Queen Victoria. He had been named “Best Cadet” during
his first year at Dartmouth. He was outgoing, funny, and already rather
sophisticated at eighteen years old. He received the King and Queen warmly and
played with Elizabeth and Margaret during their visit. Elizabeth admired his confidence and handsomeness
a great deal, but she was just thirteen and still had her braces on. It would be quite a few years before Philip
would come to see her as a young woman rather than a child. Philip’s uncle and closest male mentor,
Louis Mountbatten, Bertie’s cousin, was especially eager to encourage ongoing interactions
between his nephew and the future Queen, seemingly anxious to have some influence over the next
generation of royals. Throughout 1938 and 1939, London began to
transform in anticipation of a potential war with Germany as the Nazis became ever more
aggressive in their pursuit of land in Central Europe, annexing Austria
first, then the Sudetenland and finally Czechoslovakia. Anti-aircraft batteries were installed, bomb
shelters were constructed, and gas masks were issued to tense and dismayed citizens. When war was finally declared in September
1939, Elizabeth and Margaret began to listen as closely to the wireless as the rest of
the British public, hoping for good news. Crawfie read them the newspapers daily, but
she made efforts to edit out whatever she believed to be too shocking. Elizabeth, in turn, tried to shield Margaret
from news and information about the war that she thought would upset her. Elizabeth was encouraged to try to continue
as normal, but she was as eager to contribute to the war effort and “do her bit” in
the unfolding crisis as were many young people of her generation. She and Margaret organized weekly sewing parties
in their schoolroom during the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1940 to produce goods for
the war effort. The King and Queen insisted that they and
their daughters should follow the rationing requirements, although they still enjoyed
the privileges of having game from their own estate and fresh produce from the gardens. During the autumn of 1940, the princesses
were secretly sent to live at Windsor Castle for the duration of the war, since it was
the most well-defended royal residence. This was in keeping with government policy
which saw London emptied of the vast majority of its children and elderly people during
the Blitz, the bombing campaign by the Germans between the autumn of 1940 and the early summer
of 1941. Bertie and Elizabeth made an effort to spend
as many weekends as possible at Windsor, but because they remained at Buckingham Palace
for most of the week, it was a worrisome and confining adjustment for two young girls. There were blackout curtains at every window,
lights were kept as low as possible, and a small group of carefully-chosen soldiers stood
guard, ready to take the princesses to an undisclosed safe house should an attack occur. The British media, as anxious as the government
to protect the princesses, made no effort to uncover or expose their whereabouts. Newspapers reported only that they were safe
and staying at an undisclosed location “somewhere in the country.” For five years, Elizabeth and Margaret tried
to carry on as normal, attending to their lessons daily, but there were now all kinds
of new and frightening realities to confront, including preparation for air raids. They tried to distract themselves by exploring
the castle and playing hide and seek. The staff tried to keep them as occupied as
possible and treated them kindly. They invited the princesses to tea parties
with cakes and biscuits baked by the mothers and sisters of the guards, and the King’s
librarian took them down to the underground vaults of Windsor Castle to see the Crown
Jewels. Knowing the Nazis’ reputation for plundering
cities like Vienna and Paris that they had conquered, these historic treasures had been
hidden from potential invaders along with innumerable other important artifacts and
pieces of art from British museums and galleries. The British newspapers praised the fortitude
of the princesses in their isolated life, noting that they obeyed rationing, kept their
gas masks clean and near at hand, and planted a “victory garden” in which they grew
fresh vegetables for themselves. The Blitz began across southern England during
the summer of 1940. Like the rest of the people of London who
found it near impossible to sleep during the bombings, Elizabeth and Margaret tried to
stay calm during air raids. They would hurry down into the dungeons of
Windsor Castle and try to distract themselves by reading, singing, or telling stories. By the end of the war, the Germans had dropped
no less than three hundred bombs around the great park of Windsor Castle, just a small
fraction of the tens of thousands of bombs which rained down across England during the
conflict. On the thirteenth of October
1940, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth gave her first public speech on the wireless during Children’s Hour on the BBC, in which she offered
comfort and encouragement to all of the children displaced by the War. The future queen stated, “We know, every
one of us, that in the end all will be well; for God will care for us and give us victory
and peace. And when peace comes, remember it will be
for us, the children of today to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place. My sister is by my side and we are both going
to say goodnight to you. Come on, Margaret.” Then came Margaret’s higher and unmistakable
younger tone: “Goodnight children.” The broadcast was an international sensation,
particularly in North America where many British evacuees were sheltering. Hundreds of schools and churches throughout
the United States and Canada installed wireless technology just to hear the Princess’ speech,
and the BBC received numerous requests to repeat the broadcast. London may have been devastated by the Blitz,
but Hitler had utterly failed to weaken British morale, and he then foolishly began to turn
his attention to Russia believing that Britain would soon decide to negotiate peace terms
with the Nazis. He was wrong. It was during the last few years of World
War II that Elizabeth came of age and began to assert her independence. This assertion was more subtle in Elizabeth
than in other young women. She was, overall, dutiful and eager to please
her parents, but she nonetheless had her own convictions and a will of her own. Bertie and Elizabeth were not keen to see
their daughter grow up too quickly. Above all, they wanted to forestall the moment
when their family, “us four,” would be separated. From a public relations standpoint, both the
royal establishment and the media continued to treat and portray Elizabeth as a child. Even at aged 16 or 17, Elizabeth might still
be dressed in an outfit that matched Margaret’s, who was over four years younger. Elizabeth also continued to live in the nursery
wing and complete her lessons daily with Crawfie. It was not until her eighteenth birthday that
she was finally given her own suite of rooms outside of the nursery. In anticipation of her future role as Queen,
she was also made a councilor of state. Her parents began to give her more royal duties,
including giving speeches at public functions and serving in charitable organizations. However, for Elizabeth, this was not enough. Having come of age in the midst of a calamitous
war, she was, like many members of her generation, highly practical. She and Margaret had covertly and longingly
watched debutante balls as children, but much as she had looked forward to a more traditional
entry to adulthood, the current crisis was so much more important. Like others who grew up during the war, she
was a strong believer in fairness and collective responsibility and she yearned to play a greater
part in the War effort. “I ought to do as other girls of my age
do,” she said. Many of her young aristocratic cousins were
already doing their bit for the country, fighting in the field, caring for the sick and wounded
in hospitals, and working in transportation or logistics for the war effort. Elizabeth wanted to play her part also. So, when she turned 16 in April 1942, she
promptly signed on at the Labour Exchange, but was not offered work. It is unclear why. Her status may well have
been seen as a potentially problematic distraction, but the King’s influence may also have played a part. Finally, a month before her nineteenth birthday,
Elizabeth was permitted to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch
of the British Army. Elizabeth’s service in the ATS was viewed
by many as highly effective propaganda and a morale booster for the British, but the
princess’ experience of service was very different. “It was the only time I had been able to
test myself against people of the same age,” she said later. In March of 1945, Elizabeth began training
as a driver and a mechanic. She worked hard and eventually became adept
at the job, able to disassemble and reassemble an engine quickly and successfully. And yet, like her Girl Guide troupe, a certain
amount of authentic experience remained out of her reach. Quote-unquote “normal” interactions were
made extraordinarily difficult simply because of who she was. Moreover, Bertie only finally allowed his
daughter to enlist, when he knew that the war would be over in mere weeks, with victory
assured when the German campaign in the east against the Soviet Union had failed and new
fronts were opened in southern and western Europe. Elizabeth was not the sort to confront or
fight, but she had a quiet determination to assert her independence and to be her own
person. This is most apparent in her choice to marry
Prince Philip, which was probably the first decision she ever made without consulting
her parents. While Elizabeth remained at Windsor Castle
throughout the war, Philip’s naval service took him to the Mediterranean and the Pacific. He continued to write to Elizabeth and visited
the royal family several times throughout the duration of the war, when he was on leave. Elizabeth seemed to fall more and more in
love with him each time he visited. While Philip was flattered by the young princess’
attention, he still mostly saw her as a child. Yet, he was very fond of her, as he was fond
of her whole family. Bertie, Elizabeth and their daughters had
a closeness that was very attractive to Philip, who had spent much of his childhood lonely
and separated from his own family. He was invited to spend Christmas with the
Windsors in 1943 and Elizabeth bustled excitedly around the nursery. “You know who’s coming this Christmas,
don’t you Crawfie?” she asked happily. After another stay at the palace during the
summer of 1944, Philip appeared to change his mind about Elizabeth. The two were very different people, but that
was perhaps, part of the attraction. He was sophisticated, opinionated, and often
painfully irreverent, whereas she was innocent and demure. But she was also unfailingly faithful, dependable,
and honest as few people in his life had been. And Elizabeth may have found Philip’s tendency
towards plain-speaking refreshing. He certainly said and did things that Elizabeth
could not, but perhaps sometimes wished to. Following Philip’s visit, his uncle, Lord
Mountbatten, known affectionately to the royal family as “Dickie,” promptly broached
the subject of Philip’s marriage to Elizabeth with the King and Queen. Bertie and Elizabeth initially had numerous
reservations about Philip, particularly regarding his temperament, his reputed way with women,
his rebelliousness, and his family’s partial German heritage. Additionally, they believed that Elizabeth,
at eighteen, was still too young to be betrothed. Lord Mountbatten subsequently approached other
courtiers and politicians to advocate for his nephew’s suit. Elizabeth did not display any outward resentment that her parents were lukewarm
about her relationship with Philip, but neither did she hide her
feelings from her family or household. Crawfie later wrote that the princess kept
a picture of Prince Philip displayed in her sitting room. When Crawfie inquired whether it was wise
to do so, as anyone who saw it might begin to gossip and speculate, Elizabeth realized
her governess was right and put the picture away, replacing it instead with a photograph
of the Prince with a thick and unruly beard. “There!” she said satisfied. “I defy anyone to recognize who that is!” Victory in Europe Day on the 8th of May 1945
saw greater crowds in the streets of London than anyone had ever seen before. Multitudes stood outside Buckingham Palace
cheering and calling for the royal family to emerge onto the balcony. “We want the King!” they chanted. Elizabeth stood with her parents, Margaret,
and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, proudly wearing her ATS uniform and waving to the
cheering crowds. That evening, in a burst of high spirits,
the royal family went out on to the streets of London to join the dancing and celebrating
that seemed to be going on everywhere. Elizabeth and Margaret repeated their outing
together the next night as well. “We walked for simply miles,” Elizabeth
wrote in her diary, “through Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly, Pall Mall.” The two sisters, who had grown up so sheltered, joined their fellows before
the gates of Buckingham Palace after midnight, to cheer for their
parents the King and Queen, who waved from the balcony. The evidence everywhere in London of the ravages
of war was as heartbreaking to Elizabeth and Margaret as to the rest of the city. And yet, they walked, cheered, sang, and danced with other young Londoners
who, like the princesses, had shed their childhood in a time of war. Such was the sense of unification among the
Second World War generation when what seemed then like the greatest struggle in history,
came to an end. By 1946, with the war over and England returning to some form of normality,
Elizabeth had established a more adult routine. Each morning she was awakened by Bobo, now
the Princess’ dresser rather than her nanny, who helped her get ready for the day. She attended to her correspondence and her
obligations to her various charities, and attended royal council meetings. She now had her own independent household
in Buckingham Palace, including her own receiving rooms for palace business, two ladies-in-waiting,
a footman, and a housemaid. She was also finally permitted to choose her
own clothes and decided what fashions she preferred. The Depression and the War had had their impact
on fashion. Rationing meant that each person was limited
to one outfit per year. And the struggles of the times made ostentatious
dress seem vulgar and disrespectful. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had taken care to dress
her daughters respectably, but simply, and the public admired that she often “made
over” some of her own garments to clothe the girls. Therefore, when Lilibet came
of age, she unsurprisingly showed little interest in high fashion, and seemed to prefer an elegant, but modest and
traditional look. Besides, she was a countrywoman at heart,
and was much more comfortable in clothes that were functional. It is therefore ironic that, as Queen, she
would ultimately prove to be an international fashion icon. The unique outfits created by her personal
staff were designed to be as distinctive and memorable as possible. Throughout her tenure as Queen, she grew to
appreciate the art and artistry of fashion and loved the bright colours and occasionally
avant-garde ensembles that were chosen for her. These amazing outfits certainly made it difficult
to lose the Queen in a crowd! During a visit to Balmoral during the summer
of 1946, Philip proposed to Elizabeth and she accepted. Her father, the King, however, insisted they
wait until after Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday, the following spring, to announce
the engagement. Some historians speculate that this may have
been a strategy to try and keep them apart long enough for one or both of them to lose
interest. Perhaps Bertie was simply reluctant to let
his beloved Lilibet go just yet. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth took their
daughters with them on a state visit to South Africa in the spring of 1947. During this Elizabeth was
warmly and enthusiastically received by the crowds who came out to greet the royal family. The 21st of April 1947 was Elizabeth’s twenty-first
birthday. It was declared a national holiday and a great
ball was held in her honour at Capetown. Earlier that afternoon, she gave an historic
speech which was broadcast all over the empire, composed by Sir Alan Lascelles. When Elizabeth first read it, tears reportedly
filled her eyes: “I declare before you all that my whole
life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service, and the service of
our great imperial family to which we all belong. But I shall not have the strength to carry
out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do. I know that your support will be unfailingly
given. God help me to make good my vow, and God bless
all of you who are willing to share in it.” The royal family returned to London early
in the summer of 1947. Elizabeth and Philip’s several months of
separation had seemingly had no impact on their determination to marry. In the weeks following her return, she was
often seen out and about with Philip, in the passenger seat of his black MG sports car. On the 8th of July, they
announced their engagement. The prospect of having a full-blown and public
royal wedding was something of a public relations gamble during the immediate post-war period. On the one hand, it might bolster British
morale at a time when rationing was still in force and the economy was still recovering
from the long war effort. But conversely, the expense of a royal wedding
could be perceived as totally out of touch with the difficult economic situation confronting
the country. In the end, the British public seemed excited
at the prospect of a royal wedding. Numerous ordinary citizens and well-wishers
donated their clothing ration coupons to help produce the bride’s wedding dress, which
was designed by Norman Hartnell in ivory satin with a fifteen-foot train, with the white
roses of York painstakingly stitched in pearls. Prior to their wedding, Philip renounced his
German surname and his Greek and Danish titles, becoming simply Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. King George VI then admitted Philip into the
Order of the Garter, reserved for the closest and most trusted companions to the sovereign,
and conferred on him the title of “His Royal Highness, Duke of Edinburgh.” On the 20th of November 1947, Elizabeth and
Philip were finally married with great celebration at Westminster Abbey. From all over the world, the couple received
over ten thousand congratulatory telegrams and nearly three thousand wedding gifts. Two thousand people attended a public reception
just to see the couple’s wedding gifts displayed. The next few years were happy and contented
ones for Elizabeth and Philip. The King gifted them with the royal residence
of Clarence House next to St. James’ Palace, and the newlyweds spent time renovating and
improving it for themselves and their growing family. On the fourteenth of November 1948, just six
days before their first wedding anniversary, Elizabeth gave birth to her first child, Prince
Charles. The following year, on the fifteenth of August,
she and Philip were blessed again, this time with a daughter, Princess Anne. Beginning in 1948, Philip was stationed in
Malta, and despite the birth of two children and her royal duties and responsibilities,
Elizabeth tended to give priority to being at her husband’s side during the early years
of her marriage, even if her children remained in England. Charles took his first steps without either
of his parents there to witness the milestone, just as Elizabeth had spoken her first word
with only Mrs. Knight, Bobo, and Ruby to tell the tale. Elizabeth made efforts to spend at least an
hour with her children every morning and at least another hour between bath time and bedtime. When they did not accompany their parents
abroad, Charles and Anne were left in the care of their nannies at Clarence House, or
stayed with their grandparents, the King and Queen, when they went to Sandringham. While some have criticized Queen Elizabeth
for this approach to motherhood, it is worth noting that her own mother and father had
parented Elizabeth and Margaret in much the same way, and still considered themselves
a close family. In 1950, Marion Crawford published The Little
Princesses to the shock and dismay of the entire royal family. Crawfie had remained one of Lilibet’s closest
confidantes, even after her retirement as governess in 1947. Ms. Crawford had approached Queen Elizabeth
for permission to publish the memoir, and the Queen had refused, horrified by the notion. The publication went ahead regardless and
became an immediate best-seller, netting over £75,000. The Windsors felt utterly betrayed. They severed all ties with Ms. Crawford and
never communicated with her again. From then on, the royal family would refer
to anyone who wrote a royal memoir as “doing a Crawfie.” By the standards of the modern “tell-all”
memoir, The Little Princesses is an overwhelmingly idealized, sentimental, and flattering portrait
of two children Marion Crawford obviously loved dearly following her long years working
with them. But in 1950, it seemed to be a gross and vulgar
violation of the royal family’s privacy and a betrayal of the trust they had placed
in their children’s beloved governess. Since then, the royal family has had many
more people who have worked closely with them “do a Crawfie,” and sharing human and
relatable details about the royal family has become increasingly less objectionable over
time. The royal family themselves have done so several
times since the 1970s. Queen Elizabeth permitted the creation of
two family documentaries, allowing camera crews and production staff into royal residences. Several biographies of Queen Elizabeth and
Prince Philip were published during their lifetimes, particularly so from the 1990s
onwards. By 1951, it became clear that Elizabeth and
Philip’s rather carefree days as a married couple would be coming to an end sooner than
expected. The health of King George VI was precarious. He had contracted lung cancer after years
of chronic smoking, forcing his doctors to remove one of his lungs and he suffered from
various associated ailments. Elizabeth and Philip had to take on far more
royal duties during the king’s illness, and finally, Philip was forced to give up
his naval career. In October, they departed for a royal tour
of the United States and Canada on the King’s behalf. And in January of 1952, they undertook another
major tour, the first stop on which was Kenya. Bertie saw his daughter and son-in-law off
at the airport. It was the last time he would see Elizabeth. King George VI, known to his family as Bertie,
died quietly in his sleep a week later. It was dawn in Nyeri, Kenya, and Elizabeth
was up early, watching the sunrise at a lookout point at the famed Treetops Hotel. Speaking years later to a biographer, former
royal Equerry Mike Parker described a moment of peace and wonder that
morning when a magnificent eagle appeared and hovered above them. “I never thought about it until later,”
he said, “but that was roughly the time when the king died.” Elizabeth’s private secretary, Martin Chartres,
heard the news about the King’s death at a local hotel. He quickly telephoned Mike Parker at Sagana
Lodge where Elizabeth and Philip were staying, and asked him to inform the new Queen of what
had happened. Parker, who couldn’t bear to tell her, asked
Philip to speak to her instead. Philip took his wife into the garden to give
her the terrible news. Elizabeth appeared to pace up and down the
garden agitatedly, but when she came back inside, she was calm. She apologized to her staff for the lack of
notice but said they would have to leave as soon as possible. By the time Chartres arrived, her face was
flushed but she was otherwise composed, writing letters of apology for the abrupt end to the
tour and the necessity of cancelling multiple engagements. Before they departed, Chartres asked her what
regnal name she would choose. Sovereigns often choose a name that shows
continuity with the past or reverence for a certain line of rulers. Elizabeth preferred to keep things simpler. When asked what her regnal name would be,
she replied: “My own name, Elizabeth, of course. What else?” It was a fitting beginning
to the straight-forward, no nonsense reign of Queen Elizabeth II. When Elizabeth returned to London in February
1952, her grandmother, Queen Mary, promptly paid her a visit at Clarence House, insisting
that she, “her old granny and subject, must be the first to kiss her hand.” Elizabeth was shocked and deeply affected
by the reverence and it brought home the reality of her new position to her even more forcefully. The next morning, she addressed the accession
council at St. James’ Palace, affirming in her speech her desire to serve dutifully. When her father had been crowned King, he
had been hailed as both King and Emperor, but in the light of the ongoing collapse of
Britain’s colonial empire, his daughter was styled “Queen of the United Kingdom,
the Head of the Commonwealth, and Queen of her other realms and territories.” This distinction is not necessarily immediately
apparent, but it was an important one, signifying that the British monarch was no longer the
ruler of an empire, but an honorary Queen of individual dominions which would each have the right to decide their
own degree of affiliation and commitment to the Commonwealth. A little over a year later, on the 2nd of
June 1952, Elizabeth’s coronation was held in Westminster Abbey. In a notable break with precedent, it was
the first time that a coronation for a British sovereign had ever been broadcast live. Officials had reacted with horror in previous
decades to the notion of allowing full public consumption of such momentous
events in Westminster Abbey. A live broadcast had been suggested for the
coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1937, but the Archbishop of Canterbury
had hotly rejected the proposition, claiming that ordinary people could not be trusted
to show the proper reverence. The Archbishop was particularly disturbed
at the idea that people might be able listen to the sacred service while drinking in their
local pub – and with their hats on! The Duke of Edinburgh, who chaired the planning
committee, was strongly in favour of televising the coronation, making the monarch more accessible
to the people in a modern way. The committee finally agreed, but insisted
that the camera pan away from the ceremony during the anointing and communion. Elizabeth wore an exquisite ivory satin gown,
which, according to her instructions, was minutely embroidered with the floral emblems
of every country in the Commonwealth. After taking the coronation oath, she was
anointed, invested with regalia, and crowned to cheers of “God save the Queen!” The crowds outside the
abbey erupted in celebration and millions of people across Britain who were watching the event on television cheered
along with them. Thousands of households and businesses had
purchased or rented television sets just to see the coronation. From the point that she ascended the throne in 1952, the central
challenge of Queen Elizabeth’s life was to keep personal and family life
firmly compartmentalized from her life and duty as the monarch. Unfortunately, this proved to be an immensely
difficult goal to achieve and was no doubt the cause of great pain and regret to her
over the years, because her duty as Queen had to always come first. Because of her unique position, she could rarely express her opinions,
for fear of potentially sparking a constitutional crisis. She had to be endlessly diplomatic. During the decades following her accession,
the monarchy faced successive challenges including public interrogations of its cost to taxpayers
and questions about its real utility in the modern world. In addition, public fascination with scandals
within the personal lives of the royal family threatened to undermine their legitimacy. The late Queen was often praised for the manner
in which she approached these crises, with her first priority being her position as Head
of State, of the Church, and the Commonwealth. Others criticized her approach to her family’s
personal struggles, and asserted that she could have been a better mother to her children,
or a better sister to Margaret, even if that meant potentially compromising her duty as
Queen. After her sister’s coronation, Princess
Margaret was waiting for her carriage in front of the Abbey when a photographer noticed her
picking a piece of lint off a man’s jacket, that of her father’s equerry, Group Captain
Peter Townsend. Before long, speculation about their relationship
developed into a media frenzy. Elizabeth was reportedly sympathetic to her
sister’s situation, and wished for her to be happy. She had never liked taking sides, so she did
not initially encourage or discourage Margaret in her relationship with Townsend. Unfortunately, Townsend was divorced and his
wife was still living, and therefore, the Anglican Church would not consent to marry
them. Margaret moreover, was third in line to the
throne, and the shadow of the abdication still loomed large in the early post-war period. The royal family and those who worked most
closely with them asked the couple to delay a formal engagement, perhaps hoping that their
feelings for one another would wane. Sadly, they did not, and rather than forfeit
her title, her income, or be forced to live abroad, Margaret and Peter mutually called
off their engagement. Several years later, Princess Margaret married
the photographer, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, with whom she had two children, Sarah and
David. The couple divorced in 1976. Things were chilly not only between the Queen
and her sister in the early years of her reign, but seemingly between herself and her husband
also. Philip had not adjusted well to being the
husband of the Queen of England. Having to give up his naval career had been
a bitter disappointment and he found the endless round of royal duties – of ribbon-cutting,
handshaking, and speechmaking – extraordinarily tiresome. He was accustomed to a much more active life
and it was difficult for him to adjust to being a supporting act for the Queen. By 1957, American newspapers began to gossip
about Philip and the supposedly questionable company he kept at the Thursday Club, a men’s
lunch club featuring a who’s who of politics, finance, and the arts in Soho. Rumours of indiscreet behaviour by Philip
and those accompanying him on the 1957 royal tour began to spread also. The palace denied the rumours. Eventually Philip did manage to carve out
a niche for himself and settle into his royal duties. An endlessly curious and adventurous man,
he remained particularly interested in being a patron for science, technology, sports,
and education initiatives. In 1957, Elizabeth made him a “Prince”
of the United Kingdom through letters patent, to thank him for his service to the Crown
and the Commonwealth. He was not given the title of King Consort
or Prince Consort due to overwhelming political opposition. Elizabeth’s position as a female monarch
was by no means unprecedented but it was still a delicate one, especially in light of her
wedding vows to “love, honour, and obey” her husband, which was the still the conventional
wording in the middle of the twentieth century. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip eventually
developed into a cohesive and effective team, and she described him on multiple occasions
during their lifetimes as her “strength and stay.” The decades they faced together certainly
did call for both strength and stability. The royal couple welcomed two more children
in the next few years: Prince Andrew was born on the 19th of February 1960 and Prince Edward,
four years later on the 10th of March 1964. Prince Philip was firm in his insistence that
their children be permitted to go to senior school with ordinary young people. Charles, Andrew and Edward attended their
father’s alma mater, Gordonstoun in Scotland, and Anne attended Benenden School in Kent. They grew up nowhere near as sheltered as
their mother had, and as a result, grew into more worldly young adults than Elizabeth had
been when she first entered her adult years. There has been a great deal of disagreement
among observers and biographers about the Queen’s performance as a mother. Charles collaborated in a biographical publication
during the early 1990s which sometimes painted Elizabeth as cold and distant, and at other
times affectionate, but not enough inclined to interfere when she should. The impression was given that, as a result,
her children were all rather lost. Some biographers disagree with this perspective,
pointing out that Elizabeth, despite the rigors of her position, spent as much, if not more time with her children than
most of the aristocratic women of her acquaintance. Speaking to a royal biographer in the early
2000s, all that Prince Philip would say for the record was: “We did our best.” The 1960s saw the beginning of an unprecedented
increase in criticism and satire directed at the monarchy. Only a few years earlier, making fun of members
of parliament or the royal family in public would have been viewed as
shamefully disrespectful. But by the 60s, British comedians regularly
began to poke fun at their political elites, especially comedians with
republican or progressive leanings, and British newspapers were far less reticent about publishing items injurious
to their authority figures. In 1969, Prince Philip gave an interview on
American television lamenting the financial situation of the royal family. His references to the exorbitantly expensive
upkeep of palaces and yachts fell flat and were perceived as totally out of touch in
a Britain which still had not achieved a full economic recovery from the Second World War. Commentators began to look much more closely
at the royal family’s income from the Civil List payments, and the cost to the taxpayer. There was increased scrutiny of the fact that
the Queen paid no estate or income tax, and was not required to disclose any details about
her private fortune or finances. At the time, the Queen’s personal fortune
was probably not more than £12,000,000. Her personal fortune however grew much greater. She inherited approximately £70,000,000 from
the Queen Mother’s estate in 2002, but what her total net worth was is difficult to calculate
because many royal resources such as residences, artifacts, and regalia, actually belong to
the nation. In the early 1990s, Queen Elizabeth and Prince
Philip announced that they would begin paying taxes on their personal income. In the 1970s, the royal family began to work
with younger and more modern press officials, and new innovations were introduced to increase
public accessibility to the monarchy. The Royal Walkabout was first introduced in
the course of a royal visit to Australia, during which the Queen undertook a street
visit that was not on the official itinerary to meet people, shake hands with them, and
chat a little. The public responded warmly and positively
to the practice, and it became a permanent and regular event during royal visits all
over the world. In 1977, Queen Elizabeth marked twenty-five
years on the throne with her Silver Jubilee celebrations. The city of London hosted more than six thousand
street parties. The Queen’s popularity had remained consistently high despite greater
expectations of accountability from the public. The Queen made a very successful visit to Northern Ireland, which
was encouraging considering the region had been embroiled in sectarian
conflict since the late 1960s. But the Northern Ireland Troubles struck much
closer to home during the next few years, and was the first in a fairly rapid succession
of dangerous incidents that put the safety of the royal family and those who served them
at risk. In 1979, Lord Mountbatten and his grandson
were killed in a bombing in Ireland for which the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, claimed
responsibility. Similarly deadly attacks were carried out
on several of the Queen’s household cavalry and military musicians at Hyde Park in London,
in 1982. At the annual Trooping of the Colour ceremony
celebrating the Queen’s birthday in 1981, seventeen-year-old Marcus Sarjeant fired six
shots at the Queen, which thankfully, turned out to be blanks. Mounted sidesaddle on her horse Burmese, Elizabeth
was startled, but she recovered quickly enough to effectively soothe her horse and the public
admired her grace under pressure. Only months later, on a visit to Dunedin,
New Zealand, seventeen-year-old Christopher Lewis tried to shoot the Queen with a rifle
from the fifth floor of a building overlooking a parade in her honour. Thankfully, he missed. Both of these would-be assassins faced charges
and jail time. The security of Buckingham Palace itself was
called into question in July of 1982 when it was revealed that a man named Michael Fagan
had somehow managed, without any sort of special equipment or ability, to breach the palace’s
defenses, travel through the corridors unseen and then walk right into the Queen’s bedroom. Multiple and differing accounts of this event
exist, so exactly what happened is still somewhat unclear. But apparently, Fagan simply walked in and
opened the Queen’s curtains. Startled by the intruder, she reportedly pressed
the button next to her bed to summon her staff, but the bell was either broken or simply went
unheard. It seems she managed to slip out of the bedroom
while Fagan was looking around for a cigarette lighter. There was fascinated speculation that the
two might have even had a conversation, as some believed that Fagan had been in the Queen’s
bedroom for as long as ten minutes. Fagan however, speaking to several newspapers
years later, denied that they discussed anything, stating that the Queen had simply run out
of the room at the first opportunity. Such threats to her safety was a reality that
Queen Elizabeth had to face quite frequently throughout her life, but commendably, it did
not curb her willingness to remain accessible to the public. She continued to perform her royal duties
very much in the open. Protecting the Queen during her walkabouts,
for example, was ultimately very difficult, but Elizabeth refused to be intimidated. She was also determined to preserve a sphere
of privacy and comfort for herself and her family, and traditionally opposed measures
that threatened to violate it. Queen Elizabeth worked with no fewer than
fourteen Prime Ministers, but the Thatcher years were particularly interesting for her
from a political standpoint. Margaret Thatcher was not just Britain’s
first female Prime Minister, but she was also the first Elizabeth had worked with who was
her own age. One might imagine that this political relationship
would have been among the Queen’s most harmonious and successful, but multiple biographers and
historians believe that it was not. The Queen was far too devoted to constitutional
norms ever to break the confidentiality of her weekly meetings with Britain’s top elected
official, or to criticize a Prime Minister openly, which she never did. Historians speculate that the strongest division
between the two women may have emerged over Thatcher’s reluctance to
approve the recommendation of sanctions against South Africa to encourage abolition of apartheid, to which the Queen
was deeply committed. According to former Canadian Prime Minister,
Brian Mulroney, Queen Elizabeth was highly active “behind the scenes” in encouraging
international support for an end to the oppressive apartheid government in South Africa. Despite the numerous challenges she had hitherto
faced as both a mother and a Queen, these challenges reached something of a crescendo
during the 1990s. A new decade had brought increased criticism
of the younger members of the royal family and the Queen was increasingly satirized in
television programs. True to form, she attempted to fight fire
with fire by making another documentary film, “Elizabeth R,” for which she allowed cameras
to follow her about for nearly a year while she provided the commentary. The film premiered in 1992, the same year
which the Queen once dubbed in a famous speech at London’s Guildhall, her Annus Horribilis
or Horrible Year. The reasons for her lamenting 1992 are all
too well known. The marriages of three out of four of her
children fell apart in 1992 and a disastrous fire at Windsor Castle caused £60,000,000
in damages to her childhood home. In March of the following year, the Queen’s
former nanny Margaret “Bobo” MacDonald, her confidante and closest friend, passed
away at the age of eighty-nine. She had been by Elizabeth’s side for sixty-seven
years, continuing to serve as her dresser when the young princess moved out of her nursery. Elizabeth was deeply saddened by Bobo’s
passing. Yet another terrible blow struck the royal
family in 1997, when Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car crash in Paris. At the time of the accident, Elizabeth and
Philip were at Balmoral with Charles’ and Diana’s sons, William and Harry, to whom
they now had to explain the terrible reality of their mother’s death. The nation, and many more people around the
world, mourned Diana’s passing. She had been widely popular and much beloved
for her philanthropy and empathetic kindness, and an impromptu shrine consisting of thousands
of cards, flowers, and tokens of sympathy accumulated in front of Buckingham Palace
in the following days. The newspapers began to question why there
was no flag flying at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, why the Queen had not addressed the
nation, and why the royal family did not seem to be mourning Diana’s death with any visibility. There was a fundamental disconnect at work
here. What the public wanted was a show of emotion. What the Queen wanted was
to protect her devastated grandsons and allow them and the rest of the family to mourn privately. But because Diana’s separation from the
royal family had been so acrimonious, the Queen understood that something more was required
to validate the very genuine public mourning. Elizabeth acquiesced, returning to London
and giving a live broadcast the day before Diana’s funeral, expressing her admiration
for her daughter-in-law and the family’s grief at her passing. Public approval of the Queen reached its lowest
point in 1997, but soon rebounded significantly. Elizabeth confronted two more terrible losses
in 2002. In February, her sister Margaret passed away
at the age of seventy-one, and the Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, died just one month
later, at the impressive age of 101. Elizabeth was broken-hearted. As a family, she and Margaret and their mother
had lost Bertie far too soon, but the three women had remained an exceptionally close
family unit for half a century thereafter, one upon which the Queen had always relied
for advice and comfort during her many decades as sovereign. During the same year, the Queen celebrated
her Golden Jubilee and fifty years on the throne. Even as she mourned her mother and sister,
she re-affirmed the vow of service she had made half a century before: “I am driven
by my resolve to continue with the support of my family to serve the people of this great
nation of ours to the best of my ability, through the changing times ahead.” Indeed, times were certainly changing with
regard to what was acceptable within the royal family. In 2005, she gave her blessing for Prince
Charles to marry his longtime love, Camilla Parker-Bowles, who was subsequently made Duchess
of Cornwall. Because both Charles and Camilla were divorced,
the couple were married in a civil service and the Queen and Prince Philip did not attend
the ceremony, but they happily attended the reception. As sovereign, Elizabeth was mindful of her
position as head of the Church, but she understood that times truly had changed considerably
during her reign. Few people now expect that members of the
royal family should marry anyone other than whom they choose. In a move that speaks even more strongly about
letting go of the past, before she died, the Queen expressed her wish that the Duchess
be given the title of “Queen Consort” at Prince Charles’ coronation. This represents a major departure from the
traditional approach to marriage and divorce within the royal family, especially in light
of their longtime affair, and Camilla’s involvement in the breakdown of Charles and
Diana’s marriage. In 2012, the Queen reached the zenith of her
popularity, with incredible approval ratings approaching 90%. That year, she became the only British monarch
besides Queen Victoria to celebrate a Diamond Jubilee. And to a riotous reception, she opened the
Olympic Games in London with a very special James Bond-themed performance with Daniel
Craig, during which she hilariously appeared to parachute out of a plane into the Olympic
Stadium. The royal family has seen a re-emergence of
criticism and scrutiny during the last decade, some of it surrounding the
departure of Elizabeth’s grandson, Prince Harry, and his wife, Megan Markle, from their royal roles, their seeming
estrangement from the royal family, and the much-discussed exclusive interview they gave
to Oprah Winfrey in March of 2021. Public attention was also drawn to the royal
finances with the release of the Paradise Papers. In 2017, it was reported
that a sizeable proportion of the Queen’s wealth from the Duchy of Lancaster rests in offshore tax havens. Different estimates exist of what Her Majesty’s
net worth was, but it was generally reckoned to be between £500,000,000 and £600,000,000. Perhaps most troubling of all to royal supporters
and critics alike in more recent years are Prince Andrew’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein
and Ghislaine Maxwell, and the lawsuit for sexual assault launched against him by Virginia
Giuffre, which he settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. In January 2022, just months before her death,
the Queen stripped her son Prince Andrew of his military titles, as well as all royal
duties and patronages, none of which will be returned. In the announcement, it was added that Andrew
would face the lawsuit as a “private citizen,” without the support of his family. Despite the reoccurrence of scandal and criticism
for members of the royal family, which grieved the Queen in the last years of her life, she
remained highly popular both in the United Kingdom and abroad. People all over the world often wrote to her
to express their admiration, and to express sympathy for her various family dramas, an
example of public understanding which she appreciated. Even at the lowest point of her popularity
in 1997, she still had a 70-75% approval rating in the UK, as well as in the “Old Dominions”
of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. These are polling results that must be the
envy of elected politicians everywhere, and are quite impressive considering the length
of her tenure as Queen. In 2002, opinion was fairly unanimous among
the people of the UK and Britain’s old Dominions: they strongly agreed that the Queen had done
a good job as Head of State and Head of the Commonwealth, but a small majority did not
believe that the monarchy would long outlast her. That opinion has not changed much in the last
two decades, with many people remaining skeptical about the potential success or stability of
a monarch other than Queen Elizabeth. Inevitably, the most basic question most people
have about the Queen is simply: “What was she really like?” Philip said that his wife’s greatest virtue
was her tolerance. He described her as careful,
observant, disciplined, and highly moral, but rarely judgmental. Her Majesty’s dresser for nearly thirty
years, Angela Kelly, wrote of the Queen’s courage, kindness, strength, sense of humour
and sense of fun. She apparently had a notable talent for putting
people at ease, and was a master at helping those who were a little over-awed in her presence
to relax with a little pleasant small-talk. Being the fashion icon that she was, the Queen
grew to appreciate beautiful clothes as much as anyone, but she was always most comfortable
in riding clothes, practical outdoor shoes or boots, and one of her signature headscarves. The photographs and footage in which Elizabeth
appeared to be the most excited, animated, and happy, were when she was spending time
with her dogs and horses, riding, or watching horse-racing. From the late 1960s onwards, Elizabeth enjoyed
pursuing a career breeding and racing horses. She also loved spending time with her family,
which has continued to grow following her passing to eight grandchildren and twelve
great-grandchildren, but she experienced an increasingly solitary time towards the end
of her life, following the death of her husband Prince Philip in 2021, indeed one of the most
poignant images of the Queen in the last years of her reign was her sitting alone in mourning
for her dear husband Prince Philip, due to Covid restrictions that were in force at the
time, in the pews at St George’s Chapel in Windsor. Even though that was arguably the very worst
moment of her life, considering the esteem and affection she had for him, the Queen always
placed duty above her personal needs and unlike many of Britain’s politicians, she led by
example during the Covid pandemic. While in the last few years of her life, she
passed along the bulk of her royal duties to Charles, Camilla, her grandson William,
and his wife Catherine Middleton, Queen Elizabeth still cherished her position and duty as Head
of State and Head of the Commonwealth. She would never have abdicated. “It’s a job for life,” she once remarked. “It’s a question of maturing into something
that one’s got used to doing and accepting the fact that it’s your fate, because I
think continuity is very important.” Some political commentators today are quick
to dismiss the monarchy as outdated, needlessly sentimental, and a waste of resources. But others have argued that few if any elected
politicians could ever hope to exercise the level of “soft power” that was at the
core of the Queen’s influence. “Soft power” refers to the ability to
produce desired outcomes using gentle persuasion rather than compulsion or force. Elizabeth embodied British history. She provided a concrete link to her nation’s
past in the modern world. Further, the Commonwealth continues to play
an important role for those countries that choose to belong to it. The association provides access to numerous
resources for the further development and betterment of all member nations, and it is
through these international partnerships that the Queen was able to concentrate some of
her “soft power.” Commonwealth countries not only share resources
and strategies for development, but also cultural, political, and judicial sensibilities. The Commonwealth is one
type of tool for preserving international cooperation and friendship, and for the continued promotion of the rule
of law, democratic institutions, and both civil and human rights. Elizabeth’s reign witnessed
a complete redefinition of both monarchy and empire, and in a fascinating paradox, the monarchy became in many ways
more influential the more its actual power declined. The most popular members of the royal family in the twenty-first century
function as “super-ambassadors.” Politicians and diplomats who might refuse
to deal with elected British officials invariably jumped at the chance to meet the Queen, who
was called upon many times to encourage political accord by holding a royal event or visit. She left an immense legacy both to the British
people and to the wider world, guiding Britain through greater social, political, economic,
and technological change than perhaps any monarch in history. She also provided leadership,
comfort, perspective, stability and a willingness to make change – whatever her people required of her within
constitutional limits. But beyond this, Elizabeth was also a touchstone
of global decolonization. Countries and peoples with a painful history
of British occupation and colonization came to associate her with the gradual withdrawal
from empire, the end of oppression, the beginning of independence and self-governance, and the
beginning of international friendship on equal terms. It is worth noting that more than half of
Britain’s former colonies remain members of the Commonwealth today, and most of those
who chose to withdraw still maintain good relations with the UK and have largely favourable
approval ratings for the monarchy. All good things come to an end. When Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee
was celebrated in February 2022 it was done so with the awareness that it would almost
certainly be the last major anniversary of the queen’s accession all the way back in
1952, as by the time the event was held in 2022 she was 95 years of age. As a result, Elizabeth was largely confined
to balcony appearances at Buckingham Palace during the event. In the months that followed her health declined
precipitously, not least perhaps because of the loss of her soul mate and much loved husband
Prince Philip, at this time Prince Charles and other working royals were increasingly
called upon to fill in for her at events. As such, it was perhaps not surprising when
the news was released in early September 2022 that the queen was very ill at her favourite
residence, Balmoral in Scotland. In the end she died faster than many had expected,
though Charles and Anne were by her side when she passed on the afternoon of the 8th of
September at 96 years of age. Her state funeral was particularly long to
accommodate the long lines of people who wished to file by her body as it lay in state at
Westminster Abbey throughout mid-September. Finally, on the 19th of September, after a
private family ceremony, Queen Elizabeth II was laid to rest in the King George VI Memorial
Chapel at Windsor Castle next to her parents and husband. As is the custom with royal succession, Prince
Charles succeeded his mother immediately upon her death, becoming King Charles III. He was 73 when he succeeded to the throne
in September 2022, making him the oldest person to become monarch of Britain. In line with his mother’s wishes Charles’
second wife, Camilla, became his queen consort at his coronation at Westminster Abbey on
the 6th of May 2023. It was a remarkable occasion in the history
of modern Britain, as it was the first royal coronation in over seventy years and only
the sixth coronation in the last 200 years. So what kind of monarch will Charles be? His task is not as arduous as it once would
have been. If Elizabeth had only lived into her seventies
and Charles had become king in the late 1990s or early 2000s it would have been problematic,
given that he was, somewhat unfairly, depicted in many circles as the villain in the demise
of his marriage to Princess Diana and public opinion towards the Prince of Wales was very
low following Diana’s death in 1997. However, with the passage of time people have
warmed again to Charles and his coronation was warmly greeted. His style of kingship will be different to
that of his mother. He believes in a slimmed down monarchy and
will reduce the size of the royal establishment, while he will also try to champion causes
which are closer to his heart to a greater extent that Elizabeth did, notably his life-long
advocacy of environmentalism. Charles has been concerned with climate change
for decades and as such he ascended the throne at just the right moment to be able to champion
this cause. Whatever kind of king he is, it will be different
to his late mother. It will be a tough act to follow. What do you think of Queen Elizabeth II? Will she go down in history as one of Britain’s
most dutiful, respected and revered monarchs or was she a ‘silent’ Queen who was too
reluctant to voice her opinions on important affairs? Please let us know in the comment section
and in the meantime thank you very much for watching!
