George V (Penguin Monarchs) by David Cannadine

Author:David Cannadine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141976907
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

4

Revolution and Counter-Revolution

1918–1929

There was a clattering down of thrones in Europe, and the world was a little dazed with the sound and dust.

John Buchan, The King’s Grace1

The king’s relief and rejoicing at the victorious Armistice were widely shared throughout Britain and the empire: once again, the crowds cheered him and his family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, and on five successive days he drove with Queen Mary through the streets of London. But George V also knew that victory had been hard fought for and dearly bought, and although most of his reign was yet to come, the baleful shadows cast by the First World War would not lift while he remained on the throne. More than 900,000 men from the nation and the empire had been killed during the conflict, which made the period during which he reigned uniquely deadly and destructive: under no previous English or British monarch had so many of the sovereign’s subjects met violent ends. Hence the war memorials that would soon be constructed in towns and villages across the country and the empire; hence the unveiling of the Cenotaph in London and the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey; hence the laying of wreaths of Flanders poppies and the two minutes’ silence observed on Remembrance Day; and hence a new role for the king, in these solemn annual rituals, as the nation’s and the empire’s chief mourner. During the 1920s and the 1930s, Britain would be a bereaved and wounded country, and it would also be an impoverished and indebted country, owing millions of pounds to the United States – which, by 1918, had superseded the United Kingdom as the world’s foremost industrial and financial power. The king did not like Americans, finding them vulgar, brash, materialistic and overly assertive; but he may also grudgingly have recognized that the leadership of the English-speaking world was inexorably passing from his side of the Atlantic to theirs.

Amid such trauma and tragedy, transformation and dislocation, the king’s most ardent wish, like many of his subjects, was to return to the ‘normalcy’ which, at least in retrospect, had prevailed during the late Victorian era and the Edwardian belle époque before the lights had gone out in 1914. At Buckingham Palace and Windsor, court life was fully and rigidly resumed, governed by strict etiquette and protocol: the wearing of spectacles was still banned; ladies were presented wearing trains and feathers; and there were interminable conflicts over precedence and jurisdiction between the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward and the Master of the Horse. ‘The German War,’ Lord Hankey complained, ‘was a trifle compared with this.’2 Balmoral was reopened in 1919, and at Sandringham Queen Alexandra continued to live on an Edwardian scale of extravagance, accompanied by her unmarried daughter, Princess Victoria, and frequently visited by her sister, the dowager Russian empress, Marie (who had survived the Revolution), and her daughter, Queen Maud of Denmark (who returned every summer to her house on the estate). Only on Queen

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.