by The Laird o’Thistle
April 16 2010
Shortly after their granddaughter celebrates her 84th birthday, now being in the 59th year of her reign, the 100th anniversary of the accession of King George V and Queen Mary is coming up on May 6. The image of the Queen’s “Grandpapa England” and his stately bejeweled wife (so stately that a nearsighted wedding guest once bowed to the towering cake, mistaking it for Queen Mary) has become fixed in the popular mind over the years, with occasional twists and turns like the revelation some years back that the King was essentially euthanized in 1936.
The memoirs of the Duke of Windsor include the story of the morning of his parents’ accession. As they got out of bed at Marlborough House, the young princes looked out the window and saw the royal standard at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. Their beloved grandfather, Edward VII, was dead. When they were then summoned by their parents to hear the news they reported that they already knew, and why. The new King George, a stickler for royal etiquette, immediately sent word that the standard was to be taken down at the palace, and raised forthwith at Marlborough House. The King was dead. Long live the King!
At a time when the great ongoing flux of the last century was beginning in earnest, the former sailor demonstrated considerable skill in piloting the monarchy through the wars and revolutions that knocked his cousins off their European thrones, and quietly but effectively began the process of transitioning his grandmother’s Empire into his granddaughter’s Commonwealth. (The Balfour Declaration, which was perhaps the key transitional point in the change from Empire to Commonwealth, was issued in November 1926, when the current Queen was six months old.) He oversaw the coming of Britain’s first “Socialist” (Labour) government and started off his reign facing a “hung parliament” situation, not unlike the one Elizabeth II may shortly face herself. While reviving and adapting picturesque rites and ceremonies, like the Royal Maundy service, George V also began the climb down toward lower key royal visits to the locales of the commonality… the famous newsreel of himself and Queen Mary riding a miniature train with children at the 1924 Wembley Exhibition being a delightful case in point. He came to be beloved and may have been the only one truly surprised at the outpouring of affection at the time of his Silver Jubilee in 1935.
Mistakes? Of course. The most glaring was probably the failure of nerve that caused King George to pull back from rescuing his cousin, Czar Nicholas II, and the other members of the Russian imperial family. (It has always seemed to me that it would have been very easy to ship the rescued Romanovs directly off to Canada, away from media and public notice, rather than having had to put them up in Britain where their presence could truly have been more troublesome.) And, yes, then there was George and Mary’s own dysfunctional family.
The failures of King George V and Queen Mary as parents are well known, and virtually legendary. He was a daunting gruff father, and she was an uptight and reserved mother, and their children were all damaged goods in differing degrees. That said, later on, the King was proved to be a fairly good judge of character, and recognized both the fecklessness of his eldest son and the underlying worth of his second son well before anyone else. He is said to have predicted that Edward VIII would ruin himself within a year, and he devoutly hoped that Bertie, and his beloved granddaughter, would succeed to the throne in turn.
Some of my favorite pictures of the young Princess Elizabeth show her as infant, toddler, and a young girl with her doting (for them) grandparents. A particular favorite is a picture of a perky young Elizabeth sitting between them in a carriage carrying them to Crathie Kirk at Balmoral, with the old King wearing his guid Scots’ bonnet.
While Elizabeth II was not yet quite ten years old when her grandfather died, her grandmother lived on to become one of the key formative influences on her life. After George V’s death, Queen Mary carried on as the “rock” of the monarchy, through the abdication crisis and the early years of George VI and Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The late Marion Crawford also made clear the direct influence of “Granny” on Princess Elizabeth, as she would regularly call around to whisk the two princesses off on educational excursions and seek regular updates on their school work. (The late Queen Mother reportedly regarded her mother-in-law’s educational expectations rather too rigorous.) And on the day the new Queen Elizabeth II returned in grief from Kenya to her capital, it was her “old Granny” (at age 84) who was the first to arrive at Clarence House to kiss her sovereign’s hand, the ultimate living link between Queen Victoria and her great-great-granddaughter. Even today, though more of her mother seems to be emerging in her face, there are times when one clearly sees the face of Queen Mary peering out through that of her beloved “Lilibet.”
Officially the centenary of the “Windsor” dynasty will not occur until 2017, about a year after Elizabeth II will – God-willing – have become the longest reigning monarch in the history of Great Britain. But in a very real sense, the centenary of the Windsors occurs on May 6, 2010, the day of the general election. For that day marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the current mode of the monarchy. The hopes and prayers of George V and Queen Mary for their successors have been fulfilled beyond imagining, and their influence remains very much alive and active in the person of the Queen. May she enjoy a very happy birthday, and many happy returns of the day!
Yours aye,
Ken Cuthbertson