Kinlight · The British Royal Line

King George V

1865 – 1936 · Generation XXXV · King of the United Kingdom (r. 1910–1936) · House of Windsor

Portrait of King George V

George V, who led the monarchy through the First World War and gave the royal house its present name, was born at Marlborough House in London on 3 June 1865. He was the second son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, later Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and he grew up expecting a life at sea rather than a throne. In 1877, aged twelve, he and his elder brother, Albert Victor, joined the cadet training ship HMS Britannia, and from 1879 they spent three years on HMS Bacchante, visiting the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, Japan and the Mediterranean.

George made the navy his career, commanding a torpedo boat and, in 1891–1892, HMS Melampus. His future was overturned in January 1892, when Albert Victor died of pneumonia six weeks after his engagement to Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, known as May. George was now second in line to the throne. He was created Duke of York that May, and a year later he proposed to May himself. They married in the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, on 6 July 1893 and the marriage proved a lasting and affectionate one. They had five sons and a daughter and lived for many years at York Cottage, a modest house at Sandringham, where George shot game and built up what became the Royal Philatelic Collection.

After Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 he and May toured the empire, and in Australia he opened the first session of the new federal Parliament. He was created Prince of Wales that November. Unlike his father, who had been kept away from state papers, George was given wide access to them. He became king on 6 May 1910 and was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 22 June 1911. That December he and Queen Mary were presented at the Delhi Durbar as Emperor and Empress of India, and he remains the only emperor to have attended his own durbar.

His reign opened in crisis. The House of Lords had rejected the Liberal government’s “People’s Budget”, and in 1910 George reluctantly promised to create enough Liberal peers to overcome the Lords’ resistance if necessary. The threat was enough, and the Parliament Act 1911 took away most of the Lords’ power to veto legislation. In July 1914, hoping to avert civil war in Ireland over Home Rule, he brought the party leaders together at Buckingham Palace, but the conference failed, and within weeks Britain was at war with Germany.

The war set him against his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, and anti-German feeling ran high. On 17 July 1917 George changed the name of the royal house from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor, and his relatives gave up their German titles. When another cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, was overthrown that year, the British government offered the Russian imperial family asylum, but the letters of the King’s private secretary suggest that George himself turned against the idea, fearing unrest at home. The Tsar and his family were killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. George made more than 450 visits to troops and more than 300 to hospitals during the war, and on 11 November 1920 he unveiled the Cenotaph in Whitehall and walked behind the coffin of the Unknown Warrior to Westminster Abbey.

After the war he adapted the crown to a changed political world. In 1924 he appointed Ramsay MacDonald as Britain’s first Labour prime minister, and during the General Strike of 1926 he urged the government not to inflame matters. The Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster of 1931 recognised the dominions as equal, self-governing nations united by a common allegiance to the crown. In 1932 he made the first royal Christmas broadcast, which became an annual tradition. At his Silver Jubilee in 1935 the warmth of the crowds took him by surprise, and he said he could not understand it.

Heavy smoking and chronic bronchitis wore down his health, and a serious illness in 1928 left him permanently weakened. He died at Sandringham on 20 January 1936. The diary of his physician, Lord Dawson, made public in 1986, revealed that Dawson had hastened the end with injections of morphine and cocaine. George was buried in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward VIII.

Place in the family

  • King George V was a grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II.
  • King George V was the second of 5 children of King Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark recorded in this archive.
  • The archive records 37 of his descendants, across 5 generations.

Images

One of 53 people of House of Windsor (from 1917) in this archive. The present house — it renamed itself Windsor in 1917, setting aside the German title Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → Elizabeth Stuart → Sophia of Hanover → King George I → King George II → Frederick Prince of Wales → King George III → Edward Duke of Kent → Queen Victoria → King Edward VII → King George V.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

Siblings

Partners

  • Married Mary of Teck (1867 – 1953) in 1893 — 6 children together

Children

Life

  • 1865 — Born
  • 1893 — Married Mary of Teck
  • 1910 — George V becomes King and Emperor of India on the death of his father, Edward VII.
  • 1916 — David Lloyd George replaces Asquith as Prime Minister.
  • 1918 — Czar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra (both cousins of George V) and their royal family are shot in Ekaterinburg.
  • 1918 — Kaiser Wilhelm II (cousin of George V) abdicates as Germany faces defeat in World War I.
  • 1923 — Prince Albert (later George VI) marries Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon
  • 1928 — George V falls seriously ill with blood poisoning of the lung.
  • 1932 — George V makes the first annual Christmas broadcast on radio.
  • 1935 — George V celebrates his Silver Jubilee.
  • 1936 — Died
  • 1936 — George V dies at Sandringham.

Sources

  1. George V · Wikipedia
  2. George V (r. 1910–1936) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  3. George V · Westminster Abbey

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