GREAT BRITAIN: George V

The King is dead!

Throughout the week all England grew more and more tense and sad with the premonition of this thought. As though some primeval giant or very god lay dying, even Nature grew disturbed, then violent. Great storms lashed the continent of Europe from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. Gales and floods brought death to 149 men and women, most of whom went down on foundered merchant ships or perished in the many flooded areas of the Rhineland, Holland, Belgium, Ireland, Wales and England. Seldom has Death come more awesomely. The storm was worthy even of George V, King and Emperor, defender of the faith, who lay all week in his great bed at Buckingham Palace, silently and bravely fighting the bacilli of influenza and pleurisy.

Impressive and memorable was the tribute paid by His Majesty’s devoted subjects. They came in spontaneous crowds to stand, day after day and far into each night, outside the tall iron fence of Buckingham Palace. Most of the time a chill and dreary drizzle fell, alike upon the silent crowd and on the many twinkling limousines which hurried, one after another, up to the palace door. From these descended such personages as Her Majesty Queen Victoria Eugenie of Spain, Field Marshall Viscount Allenby, Her Grace the Duchess of Argyle, the Earl and Countess of Athlone,* Right Honorable Cabinet Ministers, and their excellencies, the ambassadors and ministers accredited to the Court St. James’s. Never did Fate mock at a more distinguished company in their impotency to stay with sympathy the progress of disease.

Where were the King’s sons? The youngest, Prince John, died in 1919 at the age of 14. The youngest who still lives, Prince George, a lieutenant on H. M. S. Durban, was reported from Bermuda to have received orders to dash for London, transferring in mid-ocean from the frail destroyer Durban to a swift and sturdier liner. Only the Duke of York, second son of His Majesty, was at the Royal bedside. The Duke of Gloucester and Edward of Wales—imminent King and Emperor—were on their “good will tour” (TIME. Sept. 17) of British Africa. Probably because of the vast distance between them and London (7,000 miles by boat and train), they were not recalled even when His Majesty’s temperature began to rise.

Several times each day the struggle between Death and Life was bulletined. Perhaps the world will not soon see again two doctors of such courtly and Victorian distinction as those who signed each bulletin thus:

Dawson of Penn

Physician in Ordinary

Stanley Hewett

Surgeon Apothecary

All England knew that Queen Victoria lived to the age of 80 in Sir Stanley Hewett’s care. The great Queen’s Grandson, George V, was but 63 last week. His death, thought Britons, would be a sad commentary on the wages of virtue and an upright life. Those Royal libertines, George I, George II and George IV, all died at the age of 67. That Royal part-time madman, George III (reigned 1760-1820; mad 1788-89 and 1811-20) lived to the prodigious age of 81—a year longer than Victoria herself. Surely the great Queen would have approved the language in which last week, the Victorian physicians of George V bulletined the approach to crisis thus: There is a slight extension of the mischief in the lung.

Inevitably the life of George V was poignantly recalled by his subjects in the sad waiting hours. He was a second son, a “sailor Prince,” and only the death of his elder brother, the Duke of Clarence, placed him in succession to the throne. While stationed at Malta, as a young midshipman, he was on terms of blameless intimacy with Mary Seymour, daughter of Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour. And, years afterwards, in 1910, it was libelously published that he had morga-natically married her, prior to the death of the Duke of Clarence. In 1911 the King, with great courage, and against the.advice of his councillors, downed this libel, once and for all, with a solemn public affirmation that he had never been married to anyone except Queen Mary.

The decisive acts of His Majesty as King and Emperor have naturally been enshrouded by the nonentity which a constitutional monarch must assume. Nonetheless it is positively known that Lord Kitchener and other British commanders during the War several times modified their plans in accordance with the advice of George V. Before the War at least one paramount decision was taken by the crowned head alone. The situation was that the House of Lords persisted in vetoing bills designed to reduce its power which were repeatedly passed by the Commons. The only way to break the Lords’ veto was for the King to appoint (or threaten to appoint) sufficient new Peers pledged to pass the bill to outnumber the Lords who were opposed. The Commons were legally impotent to force George V to take this step. A rash King, or a stubborn or a mad, might have stood against his Commons, and blocked progressive legislation for years. Wise King-Emperor George V decided to break the deadlock, did it by threatening the Lords, and has ever since risen steadily in the affection of his people.

That all parties except the minute Communist group have supported George V with increasing loyalty and devotion since the beginning of his reign in 1910 was never more evident than during the appalling British General Strike. Then if ever, British labor would have raised the cry: “Down with the Throne.”

Instead, as the sword of death hung like that of Damocles, last week, all Englishmen faced the future with the same confident thought: “Long live our King.”

* He is Queen Mary’s brother and Governor General of the Union of South Africa.