King George V of England

The eighth grandchild of Queen Victoria to be born and the second son of Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales and his wife Alexandra of Denmark, George wasn’t expected to be the next king of England after his grandmother and his dad as his older brother Prince Albert Victor was his dad’s heir until he died in January 1892 which saw him become 2^nd in line to the throne. A lot of his youth was spent in the Royal Navy which was something he enjoyed but that ended with the brother’s death who was also in the Royal Navy. When his mother objected his desire to marry Princess Marie of Edinburgh who would later become Romania’s last queen, George turned to his brother’s fiancée, Princess Victoria Mary of Teck who was called “May” in the family. Within a year of getting engaged and within 2 years since his brother died, Prince George married Mary of Teck at the Chapel Royal in London’s St James’ Palace. They had five sons and one daughter and two of his sons would become king. He was said to have been a strict father who ended up terrifying his own kids.

Shortly getting the Prince of Wales, George opened the Australian Parliament’s first session following the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia in May 1901. He also praised the bravery, loyalty, military values and obedience to duty of New Zealanders during a trip there. Throughout late 1905 and early 1906, he toured British India with with wife and he was actually appalled with the racial discrimination there. And that made him campaigned for greater involvement of Indians in the country’s government. Never expected to read that about someone who had to deal with Irish independence during his reign. He was also a guest at his sister Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg’s wedding to King Alfonso XIII of Spain and the coronation of his brother-in-law King Haakon VII of Norway (his wife was George’s sister Maud).

On 6 May 1910, his dad King Edward VII kicked the bucket and George became King George V. Not long after this, Victoria Mary shortened her name to Mary and she ruled alongside him as his queen consort, Queen Mary. He as crowned a year later in Westminster Abbey. His reign was full of political unrest like World War 1, which saw him change the Royal family’s name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the English sounding Windsor and had his family relinquish all of their German titles to keep the public support for the monarchy from falling. There was also the Russian Revolution that saw his Russian in-law cousins being ousted from power and once again to save the public image, he declined to let them move to Britain for their safety to save his family’s image. Those cousins were all shot in July 1918.

There was also one event he couldn’t really do much to save his public image from and that was the execution of most of the leaders of the Easter Rising as they wanted Ireland to be an independent republic out of British hands in 1916. This saw support for home rule evolve into support for Irish republicanism and that led to the Irish War of Independence in 1919 with a massacre in Dublin in November 1920 and a massive fire in Cork the following month. This ended in 1921 with the creation of a 26-county with dominion status (government at home but British monarch as head of state with a governor-general representing him) and Northern Ireland which was created as a protestant and unionist majority state within the United Kingdom. Even that led to another war called the Irish Civil War that lasted a year. King George V let his prime ministers deal with the affairs in Ireland but he did give a speech in Belfast on 22 June 1921 where he urged both Irish men and Irish women to “pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and forget” but that was more or less it really as he had to prepare his heir and spares for the throne as well as the rest of the United Kingdom and the British Empire. For the rest of his reign, he would hear about how politics in the Irish Free State, later Eire and now the Republic of Ireland was changing to limit the presence of the British crown in the government and set up systems that were Irish version of British systems but devoid of royalty.

Only one of George’s children didn’t get to outlive him and that was his son Prince John. John had epilepsy and he was sheltered from society as the British Royal Family didn’t want to be associated with anything that made them different mentally and neurologically. He spent a lot of his life at Sandringham House where he was minded by a governess. He died in his sleep following a severe seizure as a 13-year-old and was buried at St Mary Magdalene parish church in Sandringham.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom during George’s reign as he got to become a granddad to 9 grandchildren with the first being the future Queen Elizabeth II in Mayfair, London to his second born son Prince Albert, later King George VI. He also got to see the establishment of the British Broadcasting Corporation by Scottish broadcasting executive John Reith and he later became Lord Reith.

The First World War was not kind to King George V as October 1915 saw him being thrown by his horse at a troop review in France which didn’t help that he was a heavy smoker so any breathing issues before that were made worse by that tumble. He suffered from chronic bronchitis and after 3 years a private recupearative cruise in the Mediterranean, he developed further health problems. This time in the base of his right lung, and in his diaphragm. His health was already declining when his favourite sister Princess Victoria died and on the evening of 15 January 1936, he went to bed, complaining of a cold and after that, he started drifting in and out of conciousness. Close to death on 20 January, his physician injected the king with enough morphine and a substance that is now trafficked as an illegal substance to hasten his death so it would be possible for it to be announced in the morning edition in lieu of evening edition of The Times newspaper on 21 January 1936. Evening papers were considered informal and not appropriate for royal deaths and yet, his granddaughter Elizabeth’s death was announced at 6:30PM on 8^th September 2022 but attitudes changed by then. This was a secret it kept for many years.

King George V was succeeded by his eldest son Edward who became King Edward VIII but he abdicated later that year to marry a woman he wasn’t allowed to marry which saw his brother Prince Albert become King George VI. George V was buried at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on 28 January 1936.