A Brief History of the House of Windsor

by Michael Paterson

  After the war, King George and Queen Mary continued living in the modest surroundings of York Cottage, but were struck by tragedy in 1919 when their youngest son Prince John, who suffered from epilepsy, died at the age of thirteen after a short illness. He had not been seen by the general public for some time, and lived in seclusion on the estate. His death caused both his parents tremendous grief.

  It was in the immediate post-war years, dominated as they were by a powerful Labour movement, a potentially hostile working class and a wider context of worldwide revolution, that the concept of a more accessible, less remote monarchy took root. The general fear of revolution came afterward to be seen as unfounded. Though there were riots in some British cities (in Glasgow armoured cars had had to be used to suppress public disorder), there was never any serious threat of the overthrow of the State, or real desire for it. George was, like anyone brought up ‘in the purple’, more at home with the aristocracy and gentry than with the broader mass of his people. Nevertheless he knew that the survival of the constitutional system was vital to the stability and happiness of the British people, and that the best way to ensure this was by making the monarchy as conciliatory toward all parties as possible. No matter with whom he was dealing – and the years would bring confrontation between the British government and some implacable opponents, such as the Irish leader Éamon de Valera or the Indian Mahatma Gandhi – the king would always work on the assumption that some common ground or interest could be found, and that this was probably a mutual desire for peaceful solution. He also acknowledged that there could be no future for a monarchy that was remote, and which could not be seen to be earning its keep. Since the times were bringing new men to power – and Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, the illegitimate son of a farmhand, was the personification of this – he would endeavour to treat them respectfully, to find common ground and to work with them. When the General Strike began in May 1926 and Lord Durham, a wealthy mine-owner, condemned the strikers as ‘revolutionaries’, George famously snapped at him: ‘Try living on their wages before you judge them!’

  His determination to make the royal family less aloof was a well-judged measure, eliminating opportunities for public resentment and earning British royalty a goodwill it has never since lost. How did he do this? With more public appearances, including attending events like the FA Cup, a working-class occasion not previously linked with royalty. By voluntarily halving the Civil List, once the Depression began, and by obliging his sons to do the same. He also did it by speaking directly to his subjects through wireless. He did so for the first time in April 1924 when opening the Empire Exhibition in London. Several years later, at Christmas 1932, following a suggestion by Sir John Reith of the BBC, he made a speech by radio to the peoples of the British Empire. Nothing like this had ever before been possible – Queen Victoria had only been able to send simultaneous telegrams to her overseas territories. George was gifted with a beautiful, resonant speaking voice. Heard via wireless sets across the world, it conveyed precisely the right image of pleasant, paternal sympathy. The broadcast proved so popular that he and his descendants have done the same thing almost every year since. Interestingly, not one of them has wished to do so. The three sovereigns involved – George V, George VI and the present queen – have all hated the ordeal of speaking on radio or television, and have only done so because they knew their subjects wanted to hear them. The broadcasts have been of crucial value in familiarizing the public with their activities and personalities, and have greatly helped the image of the monarchy.

  Sometimes the populism of the royal family was expressed in everyday gestures, unknown to the public until the appearance, years later, of diaries and memoirs. One of his cousins asked George, as head of the family, whether he felt it would be all right for her to travel by bus. His reply was typical, reflecting the length of the shadow that continued to fall over everything that was done in the royal house: ‘What would Grandmama have thought?’ However, he conceded that she was ‘quite old enough to travel by bus’ if she chose to. He then asked her: ‘Do you strap-hang?’ It was often these simple, taken-for-granted things that monarchs found most intriguing, or even envied, in their subjects. When Queen Mary was a very old lady, at the beginning of the 1950s, she was asked if there was anything she regretted not having done. She thought for a moment and then confessed that she had always had the desire ‘to climb over a fence’.

  In the meantime there were even more pressing difficulties. Ireland remained an open wound, and three of its provinces remained largely hostile to British rule. When the war ended, the public there voted overwhelmingly for Sinn Féin, the party that advocated breach with the Crown. In rural Ireland officials and policemen were murdered with such frequency that troops had to be sent in to keep order. Continuing attacks led to draconian responses and the deployment of an auxiliary force (nicknamed the Black and Tans for their mismatched uniforms) that gained a swift and well-deserved reputation for brutality. Their methods, in a situation that was admittedly unwinnable and deeply provoking, included retaliatory murder. Politicians sanctioned this – Churchill was one who thought it effective – but the king was horrified that such things were being done in his name, and complained to the prime minister. When a solution was arrived at after negotiations in London – Ulster, with its Protestant majority, would remain in the United Kingdom while the remaining twenty-six counties would form a free state that would be part of the British Empire but not the kingdom – he travelled to Ireland to open Ulster’s new parliament.

  By the end of the war the mood in most of Ireland was implacable. Sinn Féin won overwhelmingly in the General Election of 1918. There was now open, armed rebellion against the Crown once again. Though this time no one seized a large public building, there was gunfire on the streets of Dublin, and in the countryside maintaining law and order was often impossible.

  George made use of a ceremonial occasion, the opening of the new Stormont Parliament in Ulster on 21 June 1921. This was usually a matter of the sovereign presiding and reading a speech that had been written for him. On this occasion the king had been advised by General Smuts of South Africa that he could give a speech of his own, aimed at the whole population of Ireland. The speech was created for him by Smuts himself, Arthur Balfour, and a civil servant named Edward Grigg. The king went on to deliver sentences that have been quoted ever since: ‘I appeal to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and forget and to join in making for the land they love a new era of peace, contentment and goodwill.’

  This was unlikely. Both historical resentment and recent animosity were too deep-rooted. Irish nationalists saw the opportunity to end seven hundred years of English domination and they would not let it pass. Though the speech was well received it affected neither the determination of Sinn Féin and its allies to end the British connection, nor the determination of loyalists to resist separation, nor the fury of the newspaper-reading British public at terrorist atrocities. The British people were supportive of the tough and uncompromising measures being taken by their government. King George’s speech had been a brave – but also a constitutionally dangerous – attempt to intervene in the political process.

  In the General Election of January 1924 (there had been one the previous December, but no government had been formed), the Conservatives gained the most votes but the issue turned on support for the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin. Because there was not sufficient confidence in him, the king summoned instead the leader of the less successful Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald, who became the first-ever Labour prime minister. MacDonald had lived in poverty for much of his early life and was the first Premier to come from such a background. The press made much of his unfamiliarity with protocol, but he found the king not only anxious to put him at ease but pleased to have his service and willing to help him. (‘He impressed me very much. He wishes to do the right thing,’ said George.) Labour cabinet ministers were suddenly
being invited to Buckingham Palace or Windsor, and taking part in occasions at which, a generation earlier, people of their views or background would not have been seen. Some of their supporters derived a certain smug pleasure from seeing them now walking the corridors of power, while others were irritated at the sight of them, dressed – and behaving – like members of the upper classes. MacDonald himself was criticized by members of his party for wearing both Privy Council uniform and a tailcoat, as well as for appearing in photographs dressed in tweeds at the prime ministerial country house, Chequers, for all the world like an aristocrat.

  The General Strike of 4–13 May 1926 looms large in British social history. It was prompted by a proposal to reduce working men’s wages in keeping with a time of economic downturn. Miners – traditionally the most militant of workers – led the walkout and caused fuel shortages throughout the country. Printers, transport workers and a host of others followed. Though much of the public sympathized with them, large sections of the middle class stepped in to take over their jobs – driving buses and delivery-vans – to keep the country running. Sailors were even brought into Fleet Street to operate the printing-presses and keep newspapers going. Though there was naturally animosity, and class antagonism, there was no real upheaval – no echo of revolution – as some had feared. A team of strikers even played football against their natural opponents, the police. When the Strike collapsed after nine days, George was able to record his pride in the moderation of all classes of his subjects: ‘Our old country can well be proud of itself. It shows what a wonderful people we are.’

  He himself could not always avoid becoming embroiled in constitutional issues. The onset of the Depression had sent shock-waves through the world, and in 1931 British banks were in imminent danger of collapse. The Labour government could find no viable solutions and its leader, MacDonald, together with his cabinet offered to resign. Informed opinion both inside and outside Parliament favoured Baldwin, perhaps leading a Conservative–Liberal alliance, as successor. King George, after meeting the party leaders, decided however to invite MacDonald to resume power at once as head of a ‘National Government’ assembled from three parties. MacDonald accepted, without consulting his supporters. Labour was split over the issue. MacDonald lost considerable popularity and the king was blamed for interference. The government was, however, to last until 1945, albeit under changing leadership.

  The empire over which the king presided reached its territorial zenith in the early 1930s, though its actual heyday had been in the jingoistic 1890s. It was becoming increasingly difficult, in spite of the common cause shown in the war, to keep it a united, or seemingly united, community. The Dominions were now bent on following their own paths. ‘The British Empire has advanced to a new conception of autonomy and freedom, to the idea of a system of British nations, each freely ordering its own individual life, but bound together in unity by allegiance to one Crown and cooperating in all that concerns the common weal.’ Though it was not the king but his son Bertie who said these words, in a speech given in 1927, they sum up one of the most profound and significant changes during the reign of George V. In the same way that the Colonies would seek autonomy in the wake of the Second World War, so the Dominions were seeking to separate from dependency on the mother country in the wake of the First. These territories – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, joined by the new Irish Free State – were serving notice that they now considered themselves mature enough to run their own affairs.

  Among other things, they wished to decide for themselves who their Governor-General – the de facto head of state, representing the sovereign – would be, rather than having individuals imposed on them by the British government. This attitude, which was outlined in the speech above and formalized by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, restructured the British Empire. From now on, although the House of Windsor would continue to provide a ceremonial head, the Dominions would insist on seeing themselves as equal partners in a voluntary enterprise and not as subject nations, or settlement plantations, or ‘cadet branches’ of the imperial family. The king and his government could do nothing to prevent this trend, even had they wanted to, and their only option was to accept the changes and sound enthusiastic about them. As with so much about the British constitutional structure, the outward forms remained the same – the king continued to be ruler of these territories, but only by the invitation of their peoples. Behind a seemingly changeless façade, significant change was taking place.

  The Empire Exhibition at Wembley Stadium in April 1924 was a massive public spectacle – remembered all their lives by those who attended it – and a celebration of the continuing vigour of ‘Greater Britain’, the association of lands ruled by the King Emperor. There were funfair rides and ice-cream stands, but more importantly there were glimpses of life in places considered to be far-flung: mock-ups of Burmese temples and New Zealand sheep farms, of Canadian ranches and Indian palaces. It naturally instilled a sense of patriotism (Sir Edward Elgar conducted his composition ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at the opening ceremony, though by that time he was sick of hearing it and did so on this occasion only at the direct request of the king) and of permanence. For while it was possible that, sometime in the future, the colonies might gain their independence, it was self-evident that the large, white-populated settlements – Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and Newfoundland – were equal partners in the community. Surely they would have – could have – no reason to leave an alliance to which they belonged as a matter of free choice? The recent war, in which these countries had all taken part even if their own safety and interests were not directly under threat, had proved the soundness of the imperial idea.

  It is important to remember that in thus asserting their individuality and their right to go their own way, the Dominions nevertheless chose to retain close links with the Crown, and that King George therefore became sovereign, by invitation, of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The relationship between these countries and the British throne was thus strengthened rather than weakened. When in due course non-white colonies gained independence from Britain, many of them followed the precedent of remaining in the Commonwealth. The king seemed, throughout his reign, to do nothing but concede to the demands of others, yet by being flexible enough to accommodate the forces of change he was able to preserve most of the appearance, and some of the substance, of what had been. The Commonwealth is George V’s monument – this new chapter in the history of the English-speaking world began under his patronage. It was by accepting with good grace what he could not alter that he made possible the successful community of nations it is today.

  George did not enjoy sound health. He continued to be affected by the fall from his horse in France, an event that apparently aged him prematurely. In 1928 he suffered a chest abcess that was acutely painful, and afflicted him for almost a year. A heavy smoker, with all that this implies, he suffered from pleurisy, pulmonary disease and septicaemia. His later life was spent in alternating periods of pain and boredom, and he was obliged to take long rests, including recuperation at the seaside town of Bognor (which was then renamed Bognor Regis). His most famous saying, apparently in response to the cheerful suggestion that he would soon be returning there for further rest – ‘Bugger Bognor!’ – is probably a fabrication, or may have been his reaction when the town asked to restyle itself ‘Bognor Regis’. It was an utterance entirely in keeping with his temper and his vocabulary.

  He became ill in the winter of 1935, courteously saying to the members of the Privy Council during a meeting: ‘Gentlemen, I am so sorry for keeping you all waiting like that. I am unable to concentrate.’ In January 1936, at Sandringham, he took to his bed with a cold, and rapidly weakened. There was time to summon his family, the prime minister, and other important people, to his bedside, and to issue one of the most well-known health bulletins in history: ‘The king’s life is moving peacefully to its close.’ Drifting in and out of consciou
sness, he produced suitably dignified official last words: ‘How is the empire?’ To which his secretary replied, with equal dignity: ‘All is well, sir, with the empire.’ It has been confirmed, however, that his actual last words were a good deal more ungracious: ‘God damn you,’ he muttered at a nurse who was giving him a sedative.

  His personal physician, Lord Dawson, admitted in his diaries – which were not seen until decades afterward – that he had deliberately shortened the life of the monarch, by administering an injection of morphine and cocaine that was strong enough to kill him. The reasons he gave for this action were that the king would have lost coherence and dignity had he lingered. It was also likely that a lengthy death-watch by the bed of a comatose, unconscious man would have been more distressing for his family, who had apparently agreed to the shortening of his life because it would offer him relief from further pain. Most surprising of all, Dawson claimed that with a quicker death the news could be conveyed to Fleet Street in time to be announced in the morning edition of The Times rather than the early editions of the evening papers. His wife had already telephoned the offices of the newspaper and asked them to ‘hold the front page’.