The provided text comprises biographical sketches of several prominent members of the British royal family, primarily focusing on the lives and reigns of King George V, King Edward VIII, and King George VI. Each biography details their childhoods, education, marriages, and significant events during their respective reigns, including the impact of major historical events such as World War I and the Abdication Crisis. The texts also explore the personal relationships and challenges faced by each individual, offering insight into their characters and their roles within the monarchy.

The British Monarchy in the 20th Century: A Study Guide

Short Answer Quiz

1. What was the significance of the Parliament Act of 1911 during George V’s reign, and how did it affect the power of the House of Lords?
2. Describe the circumstances surrounding the Abdication Crisis of 1936, focusing on the key players and the reasons for Edward VIII’s departure.
3. Explain how the First World War impacted the British royal family and led to a change in the family’s name.
4. What was the Balfour Declaration of 1926, and how did it redefine the relationship between Britain and its Dominions?
5. What was the importance of George V’s radio address in 1932?
6. How did George VI’s relationship with Prime Minister Winston Churchill develop, particularly during World War II?
7. What role did George VI and Queen Elizabeth play in maintaining morale during the Blitz?
8. Briefly describe the significance of the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935 during the reign of George V?
9. How did the rise of Nazi Germany impact Edward VIII, both before and after his abdication?
10. How was Elizabeth II’s upbringing different from previous monarchs in terms of her access to the outside world and normal childhood experiences?

Answer Key

1. The Parliament Act of 1911 significantly limited the House of Lords’ power by preventing it from vetoing financial bills passed by the House of Commons. This act was a major constitutional reform and established the supremacy of the elected House of Commons in financial matters.
2. The Abdication Crisis was caused by Edward VIII’s desire to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorced American woman, which was deemed unacceptable by the British government and the Church of England. Faced with opposition, Edward abdicated, and his younger brother, Albert, became King George VI.
3. The First World War led the royal family to change their name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor due to anti-German sentiment in Britain, which was heightened by German aggression in the war, especially when their bomber planes used in attacks were called Gotha Bombers.
4. The Balfour Declaration of 1926 acknowledged the growing independence of Britain’s former colonies by recognizing the Dominions as autonomous communities within the British Commonwealth, equal in status and united by a common allegiance to the Crown.
5. George V’s 1932 Christmas Day radio address was the first time a British monarch directly addressed the entire nation over the radio. This allowed the monarch to connect directly with the people, offering comfort during the Great Depression.
6. George VI and Winston Churchill developed a close relationship based on mutual respect and their shared interest in the navy, which was especially important during World War II. Churchill helped George to understand the importance of his role, and they met weekly.
7. George VI and Queen Elizabeth maintained public morale during the Blitz through their regular public visits to bombed-out areas and hospitals. Their visible presence and support helped to encourage national resolve and unity.
8. The Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935 offered limited concessions to Indian nationalists, while ensuring British control of India, reflecting the growing pressure for Indian independence, but without relinquishing control to India completely.
9. Edward VIII was known to have had sympathies for the Nazi regime. After his abdication, he and Wallis Simpson visited Germany and met with Hitler, which caused great controversy. During World War II, he was suspected of colluding with the Nazis, further tarnishing his reputation.
10. Elizabeth II’s upbringing, though still privileged, involved a greater emphasis on time with her family and inclusion in broader social settings compared to previous monarchs. Her parents emphasized kindness, order, and good manners over religious devotion, giving her an upbringing different from that of her predecessors.

Essay Questions

1. Analyze the role of the monarchy in Britain during the reigns of George V and George VI, considering their relationships with the government, their influence on political decisions, and their contributions to national unity and morale, particularly during times of crisis.
2. Compare and contrast the reigns of Edward VIII, George VI, and Elizabeth II, examining how their individual personalities, leadership styles, and challenges shaped the trajectory of the British monarchy in the 20th century.
3. Discuss the major transformations in the relationship between Britain and its empire/commonwealth during the first half of the 20th century. Consider the changing status of Dominions, the rise of Indian nationalism, and the impact of World War II on British imperial power.
4. Evaluate the impact of social change on the British monarchy in the 20th century. Consider how evolving attitudes towards gender, divorce, class, and family life shaped the role and expectations of monarchs and the public’s perceptions of them.
5. Explore the role of technology and media in shaping the British monarchy’s relationship with the public in the 20th century. How did radio, newsreels, television and other forms of mass media alter public perceptions of the monarchy and their function?

Glossary of Key Terms

• Abdication: The formal act of relinquishing the throne or royal power.
• Appeasement: A policy of making concessions to an aggressor in order to avoid conflict; often associated with Britain’s policy towards Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
• Blitz: The German bombing campaign against Britain during World War II, particularly the sustained bombing of London.
• Bolsheviks: A faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party that became a communist party, leading the October Revolution of 1917.
• British Raj: The British rule in India from 1757 to 1947; refers to the period and the system of governance.
• Civil List: The annual payments made from the British government to the monarch and members of the royal family for official duties and expenses.
• Commonwealth of Nations: A voluntary political association of countries, most of which were formerly part of the British Empire, acknowledging the British monarch as a symbolic head.
• Corvette: A small, maneuverable warship, often used for escort duties.
• Dreadnought: A type of battleship with powerful, long-range guns, representing a major naval technological development.
• Dominions: Self-governing territories within the British Empire that had their own parliaments, but were still linked to the British crown, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
• Home Rule: A political movement advocating for self-government within a larger political entity, particularly in the context of Ireland’s relationship with Britain.
• Imperial Conference: A periodic meeting of the heads of government of the British Empire and later the Commonwealth, to discuss common issues.
• Jingoistic: Characterized by extreme patriotism, often expressed through aggressive or belligerent foreign policy.
• Morganatic Marriage: A marriage in which the spouse of royal or noble birth does not attain the same rank or privileges as their partner.
• Nazi: A member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, led by Adolf Hitler; associated with fascism and extreme racism.
• Operation Willi: A Nazi plan to kidnap the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the summer of 1940, and try to use Edward to re-establish him as the king of England.
• Philatelic: Related to the study or collection of postage stamps.
• Redbreast-class gunboat: A type of small, lightly-armed warship of the late 19th and early 20th centuries used by the British Royal Navy.
• Royal Navy: The naval forces of the United Kingdom, historically the most powerful navy in the world.
• Statute of Westminster (1931): A statute passed by the British Parliament that granted legislative independence to the Dominions of the British Commonwealth, further recognizing their autonomy.
• Suffragettes: Members of a movement advocating for women’s right to vote, particularly in Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Treaty of Versailles: A peace treaty signed at the end of World War I, which imposed harsh terms on Germany and redrew the political boundaries of Europe.
• Ulster Unionists: A political group in Northern Ireland who advocate for the region’s continued union with the United Kingdom.
• Vice-Admiral: A senior naval rank, typically in command of a fleet or major naval base.

British Monarchs: From George V to Elizabeth II

Okay, here is a detailed briefing document based on the provided sources, focusing on the main themes and important ideas/facts, with quotes included where relevant:

Briefing Document: The Reigns of George V, Edward VIII, George VI, and Elizabeth II

Introduction

This document provides a comprehensive overview of the reigns of King George V, King Edward VIII, King George VI, and Queen Elizabeth II, as detailed in the provided text. It aims to highlight the major events, challenges, and themes that characterized each monarch’s time on the throne, including the interconnections and transitions between their reigns.

I. King George V (1910-1936)

• Early Life & Naval Career:Born June 3, 1865, as the third in line to the throne.
• Not a particularly gifted student, but more capable than his elder brother.
• Joined the Royal Navy in 1877 and spent three years traveling the world on HMS Bacchante, visiting the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, South America, South Africa, China, Japan, and Australia.
• Continued his naval training under his uncle, Prince Alfred, in Malta, eventually commanding several ships.
• His naval career ended abruptly following the death of his older brother Albert Victor, which made him second in line to the throne.
• Duke of York & Heir Presumptive:Became Duke of York in 1892 after his brother’s death, a title often held by those second in line to the throne.
• Married Mary of Teck in 1893.
• His role became more ceremonial, involving travel and public engagements to prepare for his eventual reign.
• Accession & Pre-War Britain:Became Prince of Wales and heir to the throne upon the death of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, and his father becoming King Edward VII in 1901.
• Edward VII’s reign was relatively brief and marked by health issues, accelerating George’s path to the throne.
• Navigated a delicate political landscape with the rise of the Labour Party.
• The First World War & Political Issues:Navigated the constitutional crisis around the Parliament Act of 1911, accepting limitations to the power of the House of Lords.
• Ireland continued to be a major problem, facing unrest and calls for independence.
• The First World War broke out in 1914 and George “wished to see the First World War ended as quickly as possible.”
• The war saw the British royal family change their name from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor, due to anti-German sentiment.
• Post-War Years & Empire:Dealt with the aftermath of the war and the growing revolutions across Europe.
• He helped to establish a “conservative political landscape.”
• Oversaw the establishment of the Irish Free State following the Irish War of Independence.
• Presided over the 1926 Imperial Conference and the Balfour Declaration, establishing the Commonwealth of Nations.
• Faced growing calls for Indian independence.
• The Great Depression & Domestic Politics:Experienced a hung parliament in 1923, leading to the first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald.
• Urged moderation during the 1926 General Strike.
• Played a role in navigating the economic crisis of the Great Depression, reducing the civil list.
• Character & Legacy:He was a “diminutive, retiring figure,” who was “hard-working, dutiful and moderate.”
• Prefers stamp collecting and hunting in his leisure time
• He was a popular monarch by the end of his reign and became the first monarch to broadcast a Christmas message on radio in 1932. The speech was written by Rudyard Kipling. “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.”
• Was wary of the rise of Nazism in Germany and expressed concern to the German ambassador in 1934.
• His lengthy reign was overshadowed by the controversial reign of his son, Edward VIII.
• “George provided simple, uncontroversial leadership as King of Britain during a tumultuous period of British and European history.”
• His reign was bookended by those of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II.
• He “set the template for the modern monarchy,” followed by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II.

II. King Edward VIII (1936 – Abdicated)

• Early Life & Military Service:Born June 23, 1894, as the eldest son of Prince George, Duke of York.
• Known as “David” to his family.
• Raised as a future king, with a relatively limited intellectual development.
• Served in the Grenadier Guards during World War I, largely in chaperoned roles, but he found that he “enjoyed the camaraderie.”
• His military experience was not viewed as authentic due to his royal status.
• Prince of Wales:Became Prince of Wales in 1910 upon his father’s ascension to the throne.
• Engaged in a busy social life during the 1920s and had numerous affairs with married women, causing concern among government officials.
• His relationship with Winifred Dudley Ward lasted until 1934.
• His “quasi-egalitarian manners and habits” were viewed disapprovingly by members of the royal family and government.
• He was viewed as someone “who might try to exercise too much political independence.”
• The Wallis Simpson Affair & Abdication:Met Wallis Simpson in the early 1930s, an American divorcee, becoming besotted with her by 1934.
• His relationship with Simpson became a source of major concern as she was twice-divorced and still married when their relationship began.
• King George V and members of the government were “not impressed” by Simpson.
• Became King Edward VIII in 1936 after the death of his father.
• Showed little interest in affairs of state.
• The government and the royal family were strongly opposed to his marriage to Simpson, threatening a constitutional crisis.
• Edward chose to abdicate in December 1936 rather than give up Simpson, making him the shortest reigning monarch since the late fifteenth century.
• His abdication speech was “dignified and statesmanlike.”
• Duke of Windsor & Nazi Sympathies:Became Duke of Windsor after his abdication.
• Married Wallis Simpson in France in 1937.
• Visited Germany in 1937, meeting with Nazi leaders including Adolf Hitler, and expressed sympathy for fascism.
• His visit to Germany aroused considerable controversy and created suspicions about his political views.
• During the Second World War, was suspected of leaking information to Germany and being involved in plots to return to the throne.
• He and his wife accepted an offer to stay with Ricardo Espirito Santo who was suspected of having links with the Nazis.
• It is believed that he promoted the idea that the Nazis should “bomb Britain into peace.”
• Appointed Governor of the Bahamas in 1940, where he was viewed as a “liability.”
• The FBI monitored his activities while he was in the Bahamas.
• Legacy:His reign is defined by his abdication and his controversial relationship with Wallis Simpson and the Nazis.
• He was viewed as someone “who liked to arouse controversy”.
• He “forever tarnished himself as the possible traitor king.”

III. King George VI (1936-1952)

• Early Life & Military Service:Born Albert Frederick Arthur George on December 14, 1895, the second son of Prince George, Duke of York.
• He was called “Bertie” by his family.
• Initially fourth in line to the throne, later became second in line after his brother’s ascension.
• Had a strict upbringing, struggled with a stutter, and was forced to write with his right hand despite being left-handed.
• Served in the Royal Navy during World War I, participating in the Battle of Jutland.
• Later transferred to the Royal Air Force and became the first member of the royal family to hold a pilot’s licence.
• Duke of York:Invested as Duke of York in 1920.
• He eventually met and then married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923.
• He toured Australia and New Zealand in the mid 1920s.
• His stutter became a major problem and it impacted his ability to communicate during a public speech. He then sought help to manage it.
• Accession & Pre-War Challenges:Reluctantly became king after his brother Edward’s abdication.
• Took the regnal name George VI to establish continuity with his father.
• He was a “reluctant king”
• “His style of rule was modest and undramatic”
• His reign began at a time of political instability in Europe with the rise of Nazism and Fascism.
• He initially supported Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement toward Germany.
• The Second World War:Addressed the nation on radio upon Britain’s declaration of war in 1939. “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.”
• Developed a close relationship with Winston Churchill as Prime Minister during the war.
• Churchill “made him feel useful.”
• He and his wife, Elizabeth, stayed in London during the Blitz, regularly visiting bombed areas to console the victims.
• He created the George Cross and George Medal to honor acts of bravery by both soldiers and civilians.
• He travelled extensively to different war fronts.
• He proposed that the Allies should focus on the Southern Front in Italy before opening one in France.
• Post-War Years:Oversaw the transition from the British Empire to the British Commonwealth.
• Granted Indian independence in 1947 and abolished the title of Emperor of India in 1948.
• He carefully managed the development of the Commonwealth.
• Character & Legacy:“He offered a steady hand and humility at the helm of state.”
• Overcame his stutter with the help of Lionel Logue and by the start of the war he was able to deliver speeches without difficulty.
• “He should be remembered as a modest and humble, but effective king.”
• His reign was overshadowed by health issues that resulted from chronic smoking, leading to his death at the age of just 56.

IV. Queen Elizabeth II (1952-2022)

• Early Life:Born April 21, 1926, as Elizabeth Alexandra Mary.
• She was named for women who were consorts not those in power.
• Her parents were the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth)
• Her birth was welcomed with excitement, but she was not initially viewed as an heir to the throne.
• She had “an idyllic childhood” with her sister Margaret.
• Was referred to as “Lilibet” in her childhood.
• Her parents emphasised good manners, kindness, consideration and order over religious devotion.
• She had a toy house built for her in the grounds of Windsor Castle.
• The Abdication Crisis & Heiress Presumptive:Her childhood changed dramatically after her uncle’s abdication, when her father became King George VI.
• Elizabeth became the heir presumptive to the throne and “she seemed determined to go through it all without making any fuss.”
• Joined the Girl Guides.
• She met and was impressed by her cousin, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark at a young age.
• World War II & Growing Responsibility:Gave her first public speech on the wireless during Children’s Hour in 1940. “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.”
• Served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the latter part of the war.
• Began to assert her independence in subtle ways.
• She was viewed in a childlike manner by both the media and the royal establishment.
• Marriage & Transition:Married Prince Philip in 1947.
• Became Queen upon the death of her father in 1952 while in Kenya. “Her old granny and subject, must be the first to kiss her hand.”
• Her accession was a significant shift in the role of the British monarch from the head of an empire to the head of the Commonwealth.
• Her coronation in 1953 was televised, a break from precedent.
• Reign & Challenges:She initially had a difficult time adjusting to being a Queen, being viewed as both “too young and too inexperienced”.
• Developed a strong partnership with her husband, Prince Philip.
• The Commonwealth experienced a period of rapid transition with the decolonisation of Africa.
• There were concerns surrounding Prince Philip’s activities in the 1950s.
• Character and LegacyQueen Elizabeth was someone who “grew to appreciate the art and artistry of fashion.”
• She remained deeply religious throughout her life and considered her position as Head of the Church very seriously.
• She is regarded as a “stiff upper lip” who was dutiful and straight-forward.
• She was a powerful role model for young women.

Conclusion

The reigns of these four monarchs spanned a tumultuous period of British and world history, marked by immense social, political, and economic changes. George V laid the foundation for the modern monarchy, navigating through World War I and the decline of the old order. Edward VIII’s brief reign was defined by the abdication crisis, which had a lasting impact on the British monarchy. George VI guided the country through World War II and the dismantling of the Empire. Queen Elizabeth II oversaw the transition of the British monarchy to the head of the Commonwealth. Each monarch faced unique challenges and made significant contributions that shaped the monarchy and nation.

The Windsors: Four Reigns

FAQ: King George V, King Edward VIII, King George VI, and Queen Elizabeth II

• How did King George V’s upbringing and early experiences shape his later life and reign? George V, initially third in line to the throne, had a strict upbringing typical of the era, with limited contact with his parents and a focus on a traditional education. His naval service from a young age, including a three-year world voyage on HMS Bacchante, instilled in him a sense of duty and a global perspective, and it influenced his decision to continue his naval career as a commander of various ships. The expectation that his brother would succeed to the throne was upended by his brother’s death in 1892, making George, the Duke of York, next in line. This change forced him out of active naval service and into more ceremonial roles. George was a reluctant king, but he embraced duty, a defining characteristic of his reign.
• What was the nature of King George V’s relationship with his sons, particularly Edward VIII? George V had a complex relationship with his sons, particularly with Edward VIII. He was a strict and often distant father. While he valued duty, Edward was seen as problematic due to his unconventional lifestyle, numerous affairs, and perceived lack of seriousness regarding his future role. George was concerned about Edward’s relationship with Wallis Simpson and advised his son to end the liaison, but this advice was ignored. This issue would prove critical in the succession following George V’s death. George seemed to favor his second son, Albert, and expressed hopes that the line would come through him if Edward did not marry and have children.
• Why did Edward VIII abdicate, and what were the consequences of his actions? Edward VIII abdicated because of his determination to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American. This relationship was deemed unacceptable by the British government, the Church of England, and most of the public due to moral and religious grounds. Edward’s abdication resulted in a constitutional crisis, and it brought his younger brother Albert to the throne, who took the regnal name George VI. Edward’s abdication was also significant because it was followed by years of controversy regarding his possible involvement with Nazi Germany during World War II. The abdication also had long-lasting effects on the royal family, and caused them to distance themselves from Edward and Wallis.
• What were the major challenges faced by King George VI during his reign? King George VI faced numerous significant challenges during his reign. He ascended to the throne unexpectedly after his brother’s abdication and had to adjust to the role quickly, an action for which he was underprepared. He led Britain through World War II, and was a vital source of strength for the nation, sharing his leadership duties with Winston Churchill. He oversaw Britain’s transition from empire to commonwealth, granting India its independence. He also struggled with his stutter in public which, while largely overcome with the help of Lionel Logue, posed issues at various moments of his reign. He was a modest king, but his ability to connect with the public despite his speech impediment allowed him to be seen as a relatable figure to the public during times of great distress.
• How did World War II impact the roles of King George VI and Princess Elizabeth? World War II significantly impacted the roles of both King George VI and Princess Elizabeth. King George VI became a symbol of national resistance and fortitude during the Blitz and throughout the war, and he made regular visits to bombed areas and military bases to support his people. Princess Elizabeth, still young, also began taking on more public responsibilities. She gave her first public speech on the radio at the age of 14, offering comfort to displaced children, and she later served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. Their actions during the war helped strengthen the monarchy’s connection to the people.
• What were the key elements of Queen Elizabeth II’s upbringing that shaped her as a monarch? Queen Elizabeth II had a unique upbringing compared to many previous monarchs. She had a close, loving family, and while she was raised in a fairly insulated environment, her parents placed a heavy emphasis on the importance of public service, kindness, consideration, order and good manners. Her early exposure to the realities of war, such as the Blitz and wartime activities, instilled in her a deep sense of duty, which would be evident in her later years as a monarch. Her experiences as a Girl Guide, although with a special troupe, instilled a sense of community and egalitarianism in her. Her early public engagements, such as her radio speech and her work with the Auxiliary Territorial Service, prepared her for a life of public service.
• How did the end of empire and the rise of the Commonwealth influence Queen Elizabeth II’s role as monarch? Queen Elizabeth II’s reign marked a significant transition from empire to commonwealth. Her title was changed from “Queen of the United Kingdom and the British Empire” to “Queen of the United Kingdom, Head of the Commonwealth,” reflecting Britain’s reduced global power and the growing autonomy of its former colonies. This transition meant that her role evolved to be more of a unifying figurehead of independent nations within the Commonwealth rather than a ruler of a vast empire. She made numerous trips to various commonwealth nations and showed support for their right to self-governance as long as they remained a part of the greater Commonwealth, a decision which was both prudent and pragmatic.
• How did Queen Elizabeth II balance tradition and modernity during her reign? Queen Elizabeth II navigated a complex path of maintaining tradition while embracing some aspects of modernity. Her coronation was the first to be televised, bringing the royal family into the homes of millions. Throughout her reign, she maintained the formality and symbolism of the monarchy while also engaging in more accessible and modern forms of communication with the public. She navigated these transitions with a careful awareness of her duties to the crown while also remaining relevant to her modern audience. She understood that an overly conservative approach would make her irrelevant, and an overly modern approach could reduce her symbolic authority, and the approach which she took kept her relevant for the duration of her reign.

The House of Windsor: A Royal Family History

Okay, here’s the detailed timeline and cast of characters based on the provided text:

Timeline of Main Events

• 1837: Queen Victoria ascends to the British throne.
• January 1864: Prince Albert Victor is born to Albert Edward and Alexandra of Denmark.
• June 3, 1865: George V is born at Marlborough House, London.
• 1871: John Neale Dalton becomes tutor to George and his brother Albert Victor.
• 1877: George and Albert Victor join the Royal Navy.
• 1879-1882: George, Albert Victor and Dalton embark on a three-year voyage on the HMS Bacchante.
• 1881: George and Albert Victor meet Emperor Meiji in Japan.
• 1882: George is stationed in Malta under his uncle, Prince Alfred.
• 1886: Prince Alfred becomes Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.
• 1889: Prince Albert Victor’s name is linked to a male brothel in London.
• 1890: George commands HMS Thrush.
• 1891: George takes command of the HMS Melampus.
• January 1892: Albert Victor dies, and George becomes the Duke of York.
• 1893: George marries Mary of Teck.
• 1894: George attends the funeral of Tsar Alexander III in Russia.
• June 23, 1894: Edward VIII is born to George, Duke of York and Mary of Teck.
• December 14, 1895: Albert (George VI) is born to George, Duke of York and Mary of Teck.
• January 1901: Queen Victoria dies; George’s father becomes King Edward VII, and George becomes Prince of Wales and heir designate.
• May 1910: Edward VII dies; George V becomes King of Britain, and Edward VIII becomes Prince of Wales
• 1911: George V is present at the Delhi Durbar in India
• August 1911: The Parliament Act of 1911 is passed, with George V giving his assent.
• July 1914: Edward VIII is commissioned into the Grenadier Guards
• August 1914: Albert has an appendectomy.
• 1914-1918: World War I; Prince Edward serves as an officer.
• 1916: Edward VIII visits the Middle East
• May/June 1916: Albert participates in the Battle of Jutland.
• July 1917: The House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha is renamed the House of Windsor.
• 1918: Albert becomes the first member of the British Royal Family to obtain a pilot’s license and serves in the RAF.
• 1919: Prince John dies of epilepsy.
• 1919: Albert engages in an affair with Sheila Chisholm
• 1919-1921: The Irish War of Independence.
• 1920: Albert is created Duke of York.
• 1920: Albert meets Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon
• May 1921: Partition of Ireland creates Northern Ireland.
• Summer 1921: Albert proposes to Elizabeth, but she turns him down
• June 1921: George V visits Belfast
• 1922: Albert again proposes to Elizabeth who accepts
• April 26, 1923: Albert marries Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon
• 1923: The first Labour government is formed under Ramsay MacDonald.
• 1926: The General Strike occurs in Britain.
• April 21, 1926: Princess Elizabeth is born to Albert, Duke of York and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon
• 1926: The Imperial Conference; the Balfour Declaration establishes the Commonwealth of Nations.
• Late 1920’s: Albert begins to undergo treatment with Lionel Logue for his stammer.
• 1929: The Wall Street Crash initiates the Great Depression.
• 1931: The Statute of Westminster grants legislative independence to Commonwealth nations.
• 1931: The Civil List is drastically reduced.
• Early 1930’s: Edward meets Wallis Simpson.
• 1932: George V gives his first Royal Christmas Speech on the radio.
• 1934: Edward ends his affair with Freda Dudley Ward and others; Edward’s relationship with Wallis Simpson intensifies
• 1934: George V expresses concern to the German ambassador about the Nazis.
• 1935: The Metropolitan Police Special Branch begins monitoring Wallis Simpson’s movements
• 1935: George V’s health begins to seriously deteriorate
• January 20, 1936: King George V dies. Edward VIII becomes king.
• October 1936: Baldwin advises Edward VIII on his relationship with Wallis Simpson.
• October 27, 1936: Wallis Simpson obtains her divorce.
• November 16, 1936: Edward VIII admits he intends to marry Wallis Simpson.
• December 2, 1936: News of Edward VIII’s affair breaks to the nation.
• December 10, 1936: Edward VIII abdicates the throne.
• December 11, 1936: Albert becomes King George VI.
• December 13, 1936: Edward is named Duke of Windsor.
• June 3, 1937: Edward and Wallis marry in France.
• Autumn 1937: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor tour Germany.
• March 1938: The Anschluss takes place.
• September 1938: The Munich Conference takes place.
• 1939: George VI and Elizabeth visit the United States.
• September 1, 1939: Germany invades Poland.
• September 3, 1939: Britain declares war on Germany. George VI addresses the nation.
• May 1940: Churchill becomes Prime Minister and forms a government of national unity.
• May 1940: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor leave Paris after the invasion of France.
• Summer 1940: Operation Willi fails and the Duke and Duchess move to Portugal.
• September 1940: The Blitz begins on Britain. The George Cross and George Medal are created.
• 1940-1945: The Duke of Windsor serves as Governor of the Bahamas.
• 1941: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor are monitored by the FBI in the USA.
• June 1944: D-Day landings commence
• 1944: George VI visits France, the Low Countries, and Italy
• May 8, 1945: Victory in Europe (VE) Day is celebrated.
• 1947: India is granted independence.
• 1948: The title of Emperor of India is abolished.
• 1949: The London Declaration.
• 1951: George VI has his left lung surgically removed after developing lung cancer.
• February 6, 1952: King George VI dies, Elizabeth II becomes Queen.
• June 2, 1953: Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation takes place.
• 1957: Prince Phillip made a Prince of the United Kingdom.
• February 19, 1960: Prince Andrew is born.
• March 10, 1964: Prince Edward is born.

Cast of Characters

• Queen Victoria: Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India, ruling from 1837 until her death in 1901. Grandmother to George V.
• Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII): Eldest son of Queen Victoria, known for his frivolous and unruly behavior. Father of George V. Reigned from 1901-1910.
• Alexandra of Denmark: Wife of Albert Edward and mother of George V.
• Albert Victor: Eldest son of Albert Edward and Alexandra, originally second in line to the throne. Died in 1892.
• John Neale Dalton: Clergyman and tutor to Princes George and Albert Victor.
• Prince Alfred: Uncle of George V, serving in the British Mediterranean Fleet.
• Emperor Meiji: Emperor of Japan, met by George and Albert Victor during their voyage.
• Tsar Alexander III: Tsar of Russia. George V attends his funeral in 1894
• Tsar Nicholas II: Tsar of Russia, cousin of George V, murdered during the Russian Revolution.
• Mary of Teck: Wife of George V and mother of Edward VIII and George VI
• George V: King of the United Kingdom and Emperor of India. Reigned from 1910-1936.
• Edward VIII: Eldest son of George V, abdicated the throne in 1936. Also known as David within the family
• Albert (George VI): Second son of George V, became King after Edward’s abdication. Reigned from 1936-1952.
• Mary of Teck (Queen Mary): Wife of King George V and mother of Edward VIII and George VI.
• Sheila Chisholm (Lady Loughborough): Australian socialite who was married to Lord Loughborough. Had an affair with Albert (George VI).
• Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon: Wife of George VI and mother of Queen Elizabeth II.
• Louis Greig: Scottish Naval Surgeon who served as Albert’s equerry at Cambridge.
• Lionel Logue: A speech therapist who assisted George VI with his stammer.
• Stanley Baldwin: Prime Minister of the UK, largely opposed to Edward VIII’s marriage to Wallis Simpson.
• Ernest Aldrich Simpson: American businessman and Wallis Simpson’s second husband.
• Wallis Simpson: American socialite and divorcee, married Edward VIII after his abdication.
• Bertrand Edward Dawson: Physician to George V who controversially hastened his death.
• Arthur Balfour: Former Prime Minister and chairman of the 1926 Imperial Conference.
• Mahatma Gandhi: Leader of the Indian independence movement.
• Ramsay MacDonald: First Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
• Leopold von Hoesch: German ambassador to Britain.
• Rudyard Kipling: Author who wrote George V’s first Royal Christmas Speech.
• Adolf Hitler: Leader of the Nazi Party in Germany.
• Winifred (Freda) Dudley Ward: Married woman who had an affair with Edward VIII.
• Lady Furness: A mistress of Edward VIII.
• Archduke Franz Ferdinand: Heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, whose assassination sparked World War I.
• William Dudley Ward: Husband of Winifred Dudley Ward
• Earl Winfield Spencer Jnr.: Wallis Simpson’s first husband.
• Joachim von Ribbentrop: German foreign minister.
• Hermann Goering: Prominent member of the Nazi Party.
• Joseph Goebbels: Nazi propaganda minister
• Walter Schellenberg: SS official in charge of Operation Willi
• Ricardo Espirito Santo: Portuguese banker with ties to Germany and who housed Edward and Wallis in Lisbon.
• Winston Churchill: Prime Minister of the UK during World War II, Initially opposed to George VI becoming king.
• Prince Henry: Younger brother of George VI.
• Prince George: Younger brother of George VI.
• Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark: Wife of Prince George.
• Elizabeth II: Queen of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth from 1952 until her death in 2022
• Clara Knight: Elizabeth’s nanny.
• Ruby and Margaret MacDonald: Elizabeth’s nurses.
• Marion Crawford (“Crawfie”): Governess to Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.
• Prince Phillip: Prince of Greece and Denmark and Elizabeth II’s husband.
• Stuart Archer: Bomb disposal expert awarded the George Cross.
• John Bridge: Bomb disposal expert awarded the George Cross.
• Margaret Irene Anderson: Australian staff nurse awarded the George Medal.
• Charity Bick: Teenager awarded the George Medal
• Prince Andrew: Third child of Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.
• Prince Edward: Fourth child of Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.
• Princess Anne: Second child and only daughter of Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

This comprehensive timeline and character list should provide a clear overview of the key events and figures involved in the sources you provided. Let me know if you have any other questions!

King George V: A Life

King George V was born on June 3, 1865, at Marlborough House in London [1]. He was the third in line to the throne after his father, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, and his older brother, Prince Albert Victor [1]. George was not expected to become king, but his brother’s unexpected death from the Russian flu in 1892 made George the second in line to the throne [2, 3].

Early Life and Education:

• George was raised by nannies and household staff in various royal palaces [1].
• He and his elder brother were educated together [1].
• Their primary tutor was John Neale Dalton, who focused their education on Protestant texts, Greek and Roman classics, and the humanities [1].
• George was a more able student than his brother, and he developed a lifelong rapport with Dalton [4].
• At the age of twelve, George joined the British Navy with his brother and embarked on a three-year voyage on the HMS Bacchante, visiting various places around the world [4].
• Following his return to England, George continued his career in the Royal Navy, while his brother went to Trinity College [4].

Naval Career:

• George continued his naval training under his uncle, Prince Alfred [2].
• He commanded several ships, including the HMS Thrush and HMS Melampus [2].
• His naval career ended when he became second in line to the throne after his brother’s death [2].

Marriage and Family:

• George married Mary of Teck in 1893, who was originally intended to marry his elder brother [3].
• They had six children: Edward, Albert, Mary, Henry, George, and John [3].
• George was a strict disciplinarian as a parent, and he and Mary were criticized for not recognizing the abusive behavior of their children’s nannies [3].

Duke of York and Prince of Wales:

• After his brother’s death, George became the Duke of York in 1892 [5].
• His role as Duke was largely ceremonial, designed to expose the British people to the future king [5].
• He became the Prince of Wales in 1901 when his father became King Edward VII [5].
• George and his wife took on a string of responsibilities, including a world tour, and became well-known to the people of Britain and the Empire [6].

Accession and Coronation:

• George became King George V in 1910 after his father’s death [6].
• His coronation took place at Westminster Abbey in 1911 and was attended by many European royals [6].

Political Challenges:

• George’s reign began with a political crisis over the People’s Budget [7].
• He was involved in the constitutional reform of the House of Lords with the Parliament Act of 1911 [8].
• He visited Ireland in 1911, but faced tensions with nationalists and socialists who desired complete independence from Britain [9].

World War I:

• During World War I, George had a significant role, including visiting the trenches in France [10].
• He changed the name of the royal house from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor in 1917 due to anti-German sentiment [10].
• His sons, Edward and Albert, also served in the war [10].
• George’s visits to the troops were intended to help cement the idea that the war was everyone’s conflict, not just the lot of the average conscript [10].
• George also met with General Henry Rawlinson to discuss possibly replacing General Douglas Haig, though the change never occurred [11].

Post-War Era:

• George faced the challenges of post-war revolutions and the Irish War of Independence [12].
• He played a significant role in establishing peace in Ireland, resulting in the division of the island [13].
• George presided over the Imperial Conference of 1926 which led to the Balfour Declaration, recognizing the independence of the Dominions in the Commonwealth [14].
• He was Emperor of India and visited Delhi in 1911. He faced growing calls for Indian independence throughout his reign, and oversaw the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935, which sought to ensure British control [14].

Domestic Politics and the Great Depression:

• George was wary of the Labour Party’s rise in British politics [15].
• He was initially concerned about the possibility of a Labour government in 1923, but he allowed it to form and did not intervene publicly in the politics of the day [15].
• During the 1926 general strike, he urged a moderate approach [15].
• He helped manage the economic crisis of the Great Depression, including reducing the civil list [16].

Later Life and Death:

• George became the first monarch to address the nation via radio on Christmas Day 1932 [17].
• He was concerned about the rise of the Nazis and was wary of the rhetoric coming out of Germany [17, 18].
• He suffered from respiratory problems and other ailments in his later years [18].
• He died on January 20, 1936, at Sandringham House [19].

Legacy:

• King George V is often viewed as one of Britain’s most under-appreciated monarchs [20].
• He provided simple, uncontroversial leadership during a tumultuous period [20].
• He is seen as having set the template for the modern monarchy [20].

Personal Interests:

• George was a stamp collector and served as honorary vice-president of the Royal Philatelic Society [16].
• He enjoyed hunting and a quiet life at York Cottage in Sandringham [5, 16].

King George V’s reign was marked by significant political and social changes, including World War I, the rise of socialism, and the Great Depression. He navigated these challenges with a sense of duty and was widely admired by the British people [20]. His legacy is one of a hard-working, dutiful, and moderate monarch who set the template for the modern monarchy [20].

Edward VIII: A Controversial Reign

King Edward VIII was born on June 23, 1894, at White Lodge in Richmond Park, Surrey [1]. His father was George, the eldest son of Edward, Prince of Wales, who was the son and heir of Queen Victoria [1]. Edward was the eldest of six children born to George and Mary of Teck [2]. He was known as David to his family [2].

Early Life and Education:

• Edward was raised as a future king, though it was not expected he would ascend the throne for many decades [2].
• His parents were aloof, and Edward felt unloved, which may have contributed to his desire to avoid having children [2].
• He was known for his easy charm but was not considered intellectually gifted [2].
• He was educated at home, then attended naval college at Osborne and the Royal Naval College [2].
• Edward’s training was similar to his father’s, but he was not trained to be a scholar and had a limited intellectual worldview [2, 3].
• He was made the Prince of Wales when his father became King in 1910 [3].
• He briefly attended the University of Oxford, but was not a diligent student [3].

World War I:

• Edward served in the Grenadier Guards but was kept out of harm’s way [3, 4].
• His wartime experiences improved morale [4].
• The royal family name was changed from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor in 1917 due to anti-German sentiment [4, 5].

Interwar Period:

• Edward was not in a rush to marry and became a regular at London nightclubs [5].
• He had an affair with Winifred Dudley Ward, which caused concern within the government and royal circles [5].
• His easy manner with ordinary people was viewed with disapproval [6].
• There was growing concern that Edward might try to exercise too much political independence when he became king [6].

Relationship with Wallis Simpson:

• In the early 1930s, Edward met Wallis Simpson, an American socialite who was married to Ernest Simpson [6].
• By 1934 or 1935, Edward was determined to marry Wallis, who had a dominating influence over him [7].
• His parents were not impressed with Wallis, and Special Branch police were assigned to monitor the couple [7].
• The fact that Wallis was a divorcee was considered unacceptable for a future King [7].

Accession and Abdication:

• Edward became King Edward VIII in 1936 after his father’s death [7].
• He showed little interest in affairs of state, preferring to socialize [8].
• The issue of his relationship with Wallis became a major concern for the government [8].
• Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin advised Edward to have Wallis avoid finalizing her divorce and absent herself from Britain [9].
• Edward admitted his intention to marry Wallis, leading to a constitutional crisis [9].
• The government and dominion states were against the idea of a twice-divorced queen [10].
• Edward chose to abdicate rather than give up his relationship with Wallis [10].
• His reign lasted only 327 days, the shortest of any English monarch since the late fifteenth century [10].

Duke of Windsor:

• After abdicating, Edward was given the title of Duke of Windsor [11].
• He married Wallis Simpson in France in 1937; no members of the royal family attended [11].
• The royal family distanced themselves from Edward and Wallis [11].
• Edward’s brother, King George VI, refused to grant Wallis the title of ‘Her Royal Highness’ [11].

Controversies and Nazi Sympathies:

• Edward and Wallis visited Germany in 1937, meeting with Nazi leaders including Adolf Hitler [12].
• The purpose of the visit was to see how Germany had overcome its economic woes and to avoid further spread of communism [13].
• Edward’s visit to Germany demonstrated a lack of judgment [14].
• He was suspected of supporting Germany’s aggressive foreign policy [14].
• The minutes of a meeting between Hitler and Edward were destroyed, fueling further speculation [14].
• During World War II, Edward was accused of leaking information to Berlin that facilitated the German assault on Belgium [15].
• While in Portugal, Edward promoted the idea that the Nazis should “bomb Britain into peace” [16].
• In a telegram he sent to a Portuguese banker with connections to the Nazi party, he asked to be updated on developments that might lead to him being re-installed as King after a German victory [17].

Later Life:

• Edward was appointed Governor of the Bahamas by Winston Churchill to keep him away from Europe during the war [17].
• Edward and Wallis were monitored by the FBI during their visit to the United States in 1941 [18].
• He sought to re-enter British public life after the war [19].
• Edward and Wallis lived a relatively rich life in Paris [11, 19].
• He authored a memoir called A King’s Story [19].
• He and Wallis became a celebrity couple and socialized with politicians and celebrities [20].
• Edward died on May 28, 1972, in Paris [20].
• His body was buried at the royal mausoleum at Frogmore [21].
• Wallis Simpson died in 1986 and was buried next to him [21].

Legacy:

• King Edward VIII is viewed as one of the most controversial figures in modern British public life [21].
• He is known for his abdication, his relationship with Wallis Simpson, and his Nazi sympathies [22].
• His actions tarnished his reputation and led to his being viewed as a possible traitor king [22].

King Edward VIII’s reign was brief and marked by scandal. His decision to abdicate rather than give up his relationship with Wallis Simpson, combined with his later associations with the Nazis, have made him a controversial and often criticized figure in British history.

King George VI: A Life

King George VI, born Albert Frederick Arthur George on December 14, 1895, at York Cottage on the Sandringham Estate, was the second son of Prince George, Duke of York, and a grandson of Queen Victoria [1]. He was known to his family as “Bertie” [2].

Early Life and Education:

• Bertie was not expected to become king, as his older brother, Edward, was the heir to the throne [1, 2].
• He was raised in a separate household from his parents, which was typical for royal families at the time [2].
• He was educated by tutors in traditional subjects [2].
• His parents were distant figures, and his father was a strict disciplinarian.
• He suffered from a stutter and was forced to write with his right hand, even though he was left-handed, which contributed to his low confidence [2].
• He was sent to the Royal Naval College at Osborne at age 14, but he was not a strong student and struggled with physical ailments [2].
• He came bottom of his class at Osborne [2].

Naval Career:

• He progressed through the Royal Navy, joining the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth [3].
• He undertook training tours in the Atlantic [3].
• He was posted to HMS Collingwood as a midshipman in 1913 [3].

World War I:

• He served in the Royal Navy during World War I [3].
• He was mentioned in dispatches for his role in the Battle of Jutland [4].

Post-War Life:

• He began studying at Cambridge University in 1919, focusing on history [5].
• He was tutored by Reginald Laurence and Dennis Robertson [5].
• He was drawn into royal duties in the early 1920s, visiting factories and mines [5].
• He was given more freedom than previous royals to choose his own marriage partner [5].

Marriage and Family:

• He married Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923 [5].
• They had two daughters, Elizabeth (the future Queen Elizabeth II) and Margaret [5, 6].
• He was a warm and modern father, unlike his own father [7].
• The family lived at White Lodge in Richmond Park, and then in a more modest home in Piccadilly [7].

Overcoming His Stutter:

• He began working with Lionel Logue, a speech therapist, in 1926, to overcome his stutter [7].
• Logue’s methods were very successful and by 1927, his speech had already improved significantly [7].

Duke of York:

• He became known for his philanthropy, founding the Industrial Welfare Society [7].
• He also established the Duke of York’s Camps, a precursor to the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, through which boys from different backgrounds would compete in a range of events [7].
• He was known as ‘the Foreman’ due to his interest in labor issues [7].

Accession to the Throne:

• He reluctantly became King George VI in December 1936, after his brother, Edward VIII, abdicated [8, 9].
• He took the regnal name George VI in honor of his father [9].
• He was a reluctant king and was upset by the circumstances that led to his ascension [9].

Reign as King:

• His style of rule was modest and undramatic [9].
• He fulfilled the role of monarch well, representing the royal establishment [9].
• He was a conservative, but not staunchly so, and was well-suited to overseeing the modernization of the country [9].
• He faced the challenge of the rise of extremist politics and the threat of war [10].

World War II:

• He supported the government’s policy of appeasement initially [11].
• He offered to write to Hitler to try and prevent war [11].
• He addressed the nation upon Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939 [12].
• He developed a close relationship with Prime Minister Winston Churchill [13].
• He and Queen Elizabeth remained in London during the Blitz [14].
• He and the Queen visited sites of bombing raids and military bases to offer support [15].
• He made some contributions to Allied strategy, proposing a focus on the Southern Front in Italy [16].
• He delivered a rousing broadcast on D-Day [16].

Post-War Era:

• He oversaw the dismantling of the British Empire and the transition to the Commonwealth [16, 17].
• He supported the independence of India, although the title of Emperor of India was abolished in 1948 [17].

Health and Death:

• His health deteriorated in the late 1940s due to his lifelong chain smoking [17].
• He suffered from circulatory problems, including Buerger’s Disease, and developed lung cancer [17].
• He had his left lung surgically removed in 1951 [17].
• He died in his sleep on February 6, 1952, at Sandringham, at 56 years old [18].

Legacy:

• He is remembered as a modest, humble, and effective king [6, 18].
• He led Britain through a consequential period of history, including World War II and the transition from Empire to Commonwealth [18].
• He overcame his personal limitations and won the respect of the British people [6].
• He developed a close working relationship with Churchill [6].
• His reign was cut short due to his premature death [6].

King George VI was a reluctant king who rose to the occasion and provided steady leadership during a tumultuous period. He is remembered for his courage, his dedication to his country, and his role in leading Britain through World War II.

Queen Elizabeth II: A Life of Service and Reign

Queen Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra Mary on April 21, 1926, in London, was the first child of Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon [1]. Her birth was happily welcomed, but few imagined that she would one day be Queen [1, 2].

Early Life and Education

• Elizabeth was named after her mother, her paternal great-grandmother Queen Alexandra, and her grandmother Queen Mary [1].
• She was known to her family as “Lilibet” [3].
• Her early life was spent with nannies and a governess, which was typical for royal children at the time, but her parents also prioritized daily quality time with her [2].
• She had a close relationship with her sister Margaret, and they were affectionately known as “us four” with their parents [4].
• She spent time at Sandringham, Balmoral, and Glamis Castle with her grandparents [3].
• She enjoyed outdoor activities and had a love for animals, particularly horses and dogs [4]. She received her first pony at the age of four [4].
• Her family did not think she would become Queen, so her education was not as rigorous as it might have been [5].
• She and her sister were educated at home, with a focus on English literature, history, and some French [5, 6].
• She was also taught piano, voice, and dance [6].
• She was not permitted to attend school, for fear of media attention and for other issues related to her status [5].
• Queen Mary also took Elizabeth on regular outings to museums, galleries, and historic sites [6].
• She learned domestic arts, cooking and keeping house at a child-sized playhouse [6, 7].

Transition to Heir Presumptive

• Elizabeth’s life changed when her grandfather, King George V, died in 1936 [7].
• Her uncle, Edward VIII, became king but abdicated, making her father King George VI [8].
• Elizabeth became the heir presumptive to the throne [8].
• She was ten years old when her father became king [8, 9].

World War II

• During World War II, she was moved to Windsor Castle for safety [10].
• In 1940, at age 14, she gave her first public speech on the radio, offering comfort to children displaced by the war [11].
• She was eager to contribute to the war effort [12].
• She joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in 1945, training as a driver and mechanic [12].
• Her service in the ATS was viewed as good propaganda and morale booster [12].
• Her time in the ATS was the first time she had tested herself against people of the same age [12].

Relationship with Prince Philip

• She first met Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark in 1939 at the Royal Naval College [13].
• They began a correspondence and Philip visited the royal family during the war [14].
• Philip’s uncle, Louis Mountbatten, was keen to encourage a relationship between Elizabeth and Philip [10, 14, 15].
• They fell in love, but her parents had reservations about Philip [14, 15].
• They became engaged in 1946, with the wedding delayed until after her 21st birthday [16].

Marriage and Family

• She married Philip Mountbatten on November 20, 1947, at Westminster Abbey [17].
• Philip renounced his German surname and his Greek and Danish titles to become the Duke of Edinburgh [17].
• She had four children: Prince Charles (1948), Princess Anne (1950), Prince Andrew (1960), and Prince Edward (1964) [17, 18].
• She made efforts to spend time with her children, although sometimes gave priority to being at her husband’s side during the early years of her marriage [17, 19].
• She initially allowed her children to attend senior school with ordinary people, unlike her own upbringing [18].

Accession to the Throne

• She became Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 at the age of 25, after her father’s death [20, 21].
• She was in Kenya when her father died [21].
• She chose to use her own name as her regnal name [22].

Reign as Queen

• Her coronation was on June 2, 1953, and was the first to be broadcast on television [22, 23].
• She was the head of the Commonwealth and of her other realms and territories, rather than the head of an empire [22].
• Her central challenge was balancing her personal and family life with her duties as monarch [23].
• She rarely expressed her opinions, for fear of sparking a constitutional crisis [23].
• She was endlessly diplomatic and tried to serve the people of her nation to the best of her ability [23, 24].
• She worked with fourteen Prime Ministers during her reign [25].
• She made efforts to modernize the monarchy [23, 26].
• She introduced the Royal Walkabout to be more accessible to the public [26].
• She became a fashion icon throughout her reign [16, 27].

Challenges and Controversies

• The monarchy faced challenges including public scrutiny of its cost to taxpayers and scandals within the royal family [23].
• Her sister Margaret’s relationship with a divorced man caused controversy [28].
• Her husband, Philip, struggled to adjust to his supporting role and the press speculated about his behavior [18, 28].
• Her children’s marriages fell apart in 1992, which she called her Annus Horribilis, and Windsor Castle was damaged by fire [29].
• She faced criticism for her initial response to Princess Diana’s death in 1997, but her public approval rebounded [29, 30].
• She faced criticism for her handling of her children’s personal struggles [28].
• She faced further scandal involving Prince Andrew’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein [31].
• She was criticized for her wealth and the royal finances [31, 32].
• She stripped Prince Andrew of his military titles and royal duties [31].

Personal Life and Interests

• She had a love of dogs, especially Corgis, and horses [4, 33].
• She enjoyed riding and watching horse racing [33].
• She was a dedicated Christian and took her position as the head of the Church of England seriously [23, 24, 34].
• She was known for her courage, kindness, strength, sense of humor, and ability to make people feel at ease [33].
• She valued continuity and tradition [35].
• She always put duty above her personal needs [33].

Later Years

• She celebrated her Silver Jubilee in 1977 and her Diamond Jubilee in 2012 [24, 26].
• In 2002, she inherited approximately £70,000,000 from the Queen Mother’s estate [32].
• She remained popular and respected, both in the UK and internationally [31].
• She continued to perform her duties as Queen even in her final years [33].
• She often provided comfort and stability to her people and encouraged international friendship on equal terms [35, 36].

Death and Legacy

• She died at Balmoral on September 8, 2022, at the age of 96 [36].
• Her state funeral was held on September 19, 2022, and she was laid to rest at Windsor Castle [36].
• Her reign witnessed a complete redefinition of both monarchy and empire [35].
• She is remembered for her dedication to service, her resilience, and her role as a symbol of stability and continuity during a time of great change [35].
• She is viewed as having embodied British history and the end of colonialism [35, 36].

Queen Elizabeth II’s reign was the longest of any British monarch. She navigated numerous challenges and adapted the monarchy to the modern era, becoming a respected figure around the world. Her commitment to duty and her enduring presence were a constant in a changing world, and she is considered one of Britain’s most significant monarchs [37, 38].

British Monarchy: From George V to Charles III

The British Royal Family has undergone significant changes and faced numerous challenges throughout the reigns of the monarchs discussed in the sources. Here’s an overview of key aspects of the Royal Family, drawing from the provided texts:

King George V (1865-1936)

• Born on June 3, 1865, as the third in line to the throne [1]. He became second in line after his older brother’s death [2, 3].
• He was not expected to become king [2].
• He was a naval officer before becoming king [2, 4].
• He married Mary of Teck after his brother’s death, a union described as relatively happy [3]. They had six children: Edward, Albert (later George VI), Mary, Henry, George, and John [3, 5, 6].
• His reign was marked by the First World War, which led to the royal house changing its name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor [7, 8].
• He faced political crises, including the People’s Budget and the constitutional reform of the House of Lords [9].
• He dealt with the growing movement for Irish independence [10].
• He also dealt with growing calls for Indian independence, though he visited India in 1911 [11].
• He was a strict disciplinarian [3].
• He was considered a modest character who preferred a quiet life [12].
• He died on January 20, 1936 [13, 14].

King Edward VIII (1894-1972)

• Born on June 23, 1894, the eldest son of George V, and was known as David within the family [5, 15].
• He was raised as a future king [5].
• He was known for his easy charm, but his intellect was not considered prodigious [5].
• He had a complicated love life and was involved with married women [8, 16, 17].
• His relationship with Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee, led to a constitutional crisis [16, 17].
• He abdicated in 1936 after less than a year on the throne, rather than give up his relationship with Simpson [17-19].
• After his abdication, he was made the Duke of Windsor [20].
• He visited Nazi Germany in 1937 and met with Adolf Hitler, which caused considerable controversy [17, 21-23].
• He was seen by many as a traitor due to his Nazi sympathies [17].
• He lived in Paris after his abdication, sometimes schemed to re-enter British public life [24].
• He died on May 28, 1972, in Paris [25].

King George VI (1895-1952)

• Born Albert Frederick Arthur George on December 14, 1895, and known as Bertie within the family [6].
• He was not expected to become king [2, 6, 14].
• He had a stutter which he worked to overcome [26, 27].
• He was a naval officer [26].
• He married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923 [28, 29]. They had two daughters, Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) and Margaret [29].
• He became king after his brother Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936 [19].
• He was a reluctant king, but he became a symbol of stability during World War II [19].
• He was a modest and humble ruler [19, 30].
• He worked closely with Winston Churchill during WWII [19].
• He oversaw the transition from empire to commonwealth [30].
• His health declined due to smoking, and he died in 1952 [14, 31].

Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022)

• Born on April 21, 1926, in London [30].
• Her father was King George VI [30].
• She was not expected to become queen, but became heir presumptive after her uncle’s abdication [30, 32].
• Her early life was spent with nannies and governesses, and she had a close relationship with her sister Margaret [32-34].
• She was educated at home, with focus on English literature and history [35].
• She served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during World War II [36].
• She married Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark (later the Duke of Edinburgh) in 1947 [37].
• She had four children: Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward [3, 37, 38].
• She became Queen in 1952 at the age of 25 [31].
• She was the head of the Commonwealth [39].
• Her coronation was televised [39, 40].
• Her reign was marked by both tradition and modernization of the monarchy [40].
• She was known for her sense of duty and diplomatic skills [40].
• She faced family scandals, criticisms of the monarchy’s cost, and numerous political and social changes [40-44].
• She also experienced public scrutiny due to her children’s failed marriages [43].
• She was a fashion icon, who enjoyed horses and dogs, and was known for her kind manner [45].
• She was a devoted Christian [45].
• She was viewed as a strong leader who valued continuity and tradition [46].
• She died on September 8, 2022, and was succeeded by her son, Charles III [47].

King Charles III (1948-)

• Born in 1948, the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II [37, 38].
• He had a challenging relationship with his parents [42].
• He married Princess Diana, and later Camilla Parker-Bowles, now Queen Consort [47, 48].
• He became King in 2022, the oldest person to become monarch of Britain [47].
• He plans for a slimmed down monarchy and wants to champion environmentalism [47].

Key themes across the Royal Family:

• Duty and Service: A strong emphasis on duty and service to the country and the Commonwealth has been a constant across generations, particularly with George VI and Elizabeth II [15, 19, 49, 50].
• Marriage and Succession: Marriages and succession have been sources of both stability and crisis for the Royal Family [3, 8, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 28, 29, 51].
• Adaptation and Modernization: The monarchy has had to adapt to changing social norms and public expectations [39, 40, 52, 53].
• Public Scrutiny: The Royal Family has been subjected to increasing public scrutiny and media attention [41-44].
• Balance of Tradition and Change: The monarchs have had to balance the traditions of the monarchy with the demands of a changing world [15, 19, 30, 46].
• Personal vs. Public Life: The tension between personal lives and public duties is a recurrent theme, causing many issues for members of the royal family, particularly Edward VIII, and Elizabeth II [38, 40, 41, 45, 47].

This overview highlights the key aspects of the Royal Family as presented in the sources, demonstrating the challenges and changes they have faced while maintaining their symbolic roles within British society.

The Original Text

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!

By Amjad Izhar
Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
https://amjadizhar.blog

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