Books: The British Virtues

KING GEORGE THE FIFTH. HIS LIFE AND REIGN (570 pp.)—Harold Nicolson—Doubleday ($7.50).

When the little prince was born, in 1865, his grandmama Victoria wanted his first name to be Frederick, but she gave in to his parents’ preference for George Frederick Ernest Albert. “If the dear child grows up good and wise,” wrote Queen Victoria, “I shall not mind what his name is.”

George grew up to be a good King who ruled wisely over his subjects (without governing them) during some of the most searching times the thousand-year-old British monarchy had ever faced. Crowns and dynasties went down all round him. Among the victims were his own cousins “Willy” (Kaiser Wilhelm II), “Nicky” (Czar Nicholas II) and King Alfonso of Spain. But with George V as its dutiful symbol, the British monarchy came through the quarter-century stronger than ever.

In his lifetime George V’s character lay hidden behind a formidable beard and the equally protective barrier of royal protocol. In his new biography, Harold Nicolson looks behind beard and protocol to reveal a sovereign who took an active part in the making of history and a man who worked at the job of being King with all the conscientiousness his grandmama could have wished. Nicolson’s biography is an authorized one, and his charter has restricted him to the official side of the King’s life. But his success in extracting pure gold from the dull metal of constitutional politics amounts to literary alchemy. His book is both the story of a man and the history of a period.

Advice from Grandmama. George lived half his life in the shadow of his imperial grandmother; he was 35 when she died in 1901. He did not start his training for kingship until his elder brother’s death in 1892 made him heir apparent. But Queen Victoria kept a careful eye on him, supervised the planning of his education, his choice of a career (the Royal Navy), wrote him Polonius-like advice: “Beware of flatterers, too great love of amusement, of races & betting & playing high . . .”

George needed all his training in dutifulness to face his first political crisis, the curbing of the House of Lords, which met him almost as soon as he took the throne after the death of his father, Edward VII, in 1910. When the Lords balked at abolishing their veto powers to please the Liberals, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith told the King exactly what he must do: threaten to pack the Lords with 500 new peers. Inwardly kicking and bucking, George V did exactly as he was told—as the British constitutional system seemed to demand. And the House of Lords gave in.

To a few discreet intimates and to his diary, George V sometimes confided his personal feelings about the drift of the times. He bitterly opposed recognition of Soviet Russia, a government he held responsible for the “abominable murder” of Cousin Nicky, the Czar. In 1917 there was a fluttering of republicanism, and H. G. Wells declared it unthinkable that Britain should struggle longer under “an alien and uninspiring Court.” George was incensed. “I may be uninspiring,” he thundered to a visitor, “but I’ll be damned if I’m alien.”

He noted fretfully in his diary, after a 20-minute, opening-of-Parliament speech, that the crown “gave me an awful headache.” After Ireland got dominion status, he observed, in the tone of an Alice-in-Wonderland monarch: “It is a bore having to change one’s title, but I suppose it is inevitable.”

Cheers in the Streets. His reward for a lifetime of doing his job well came in the Silver Jubilee celebration of 1935, the year before he died. Drawn by four greys with postilions, the King and his Queen drove around the poorer quarters of London, through Battersea, Kennington and Lambeth, Limehouse and Whitechapel. Everywhere, his subjects turned out to applaud and cheer.

“I’d no idea they felt like that about me,” George said. Students of British history were also surprised. How could the King, “possessing no demagogic graces,” inspire so deep an enthusiasm? Biographer Nicolson supplies the answer: “King George represented and enhanced those domestic and public virtues that [his subjects] regarded as specifically British . . . faith, duty, honesty, courage, common sense, decency and truth.”