George V & Mary of Teck – The Arranged Marriage That Saved the British Monarchy Documentary

George V & Mary of Teck – The Arranged Marriage That Saved the British Monarchy Documentary 

On the 14th of January 1892, Prince Albert Victor, the 28-year-old son of the Prince of Wales and second in line to the throne of the United Kingdom, died at Sandringham House in Norfolk. Albert Victor was a victim of the so-called Russian flu pandemic that killed an estimated 1 million people across Europe between 1889 and 1892.

 His death meant that his younger brother, George, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight and became the second in line to the throne. With George’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, already in her 70s, and his father, a man with his own growing list of health problems, contemporaries were aware that George could well end up becoming the Prince of Wales and then the king in short order.

 As concern over securing the line of succession grew, a plan was established within weeks of George’s brother’s death that he would marry Mary of Tech, a cousin who Albert Victor had proposed to just 6 weeks before he died. Now, the marriage plans were altered quickly to have George marry Mary. Their wedding took place at St.

 James’s Palace on the 6th of July, 1893. How did this arranged marriage that was so hastily cobbled together in response to Albert’s premature death fare? Did George and Mary love each other? Did they work well together as king and queen of what was still the world’s greatest imperial power when they rose to the throne in 1910? This is the story of King George V and Mary of Tech, the first monarchs of the House of Windsor.

The man known to history as King George V was born on the 3rd of June 1865 at Malbor House in Westminster, London. His father was Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Queen Victoria of Britain, ruler of the British Empire since her accession in 1837. As her eldest male child, Albert Edward was the heir presumptive to the throne, though George’s father frequently clashed with the queen as a result of the perception of him as a frivolous, unruly royal heir.

 George’s mother was Alexandra of Denmark, a scion of the royal house of Schllesvic Holstein Sderberg Luxburg, who had married Albert Edward in 1863. George was not their first child. In January 1864, just months after their wedding, Prince Albert Victor had been born, making him the second in line to the throne. When George was born the next year, he became the third in line to the throne after his father and his slightly older brother.

 In addition, Albert Edward and Alexandra had four further children, three daughters named Louise, Victoria, and Maud, and a son called Alexander John, who was born prematurely in 1871, and who died just 24 hours later. As a child of the royal family, George was largely raised by a series of nannies and various household staff across the royal palaces at Windsor, Westminster, Sandringham, and elsewhere.

This was typical of the age, and George would have had protracted periods of little contact with his parents. He and his elder brother, Albert, were of a close enough age that they were educated together. Their primary tutor from 1871 onwards, charged with overseeing their education, though not handling it exclusively, was John Neil Dalton, a Church of England clergyman who had previously served as a private chaplain to George’s grandmother, Queen Victoria.

Indeed, it was the Queen who recommended Dalton, believing that the boy’s father was neglecting their education. He provided them with a varied curriculum over the next decade. Much of it focused on Protestant texts such as the Book of Common Prayer, but also the Greek and Roman classics, the humanities being prized above the sciences in the late Victorian educational curriculum.

 George was not an especially gifted student, but he was doubtlessly the more able of the pair. Albert being prone to laziness and an obtuse attitude towards their tutor. Conversely, George and Dalton would develop a raor which developed into a lifelong acquaintance. When George was just 12 years of age, his father decided that he and Albert would benefit from joining the British Navy and exploring the world.

 They were enrolled in the Royal Navy in 1877. And in 1879, after some initial seafaring training, the two young princes were sent off with Dalton as their tutor in tow on board the HMS Beanti, a newly built corvette of the Royal Navy. The ship was one of a new class of torpedo carriage ships, and Queen Victoria was much concerned that her two grandsons would be lost at sea.

But their father, a stern disciplinarian, stated that they needed to see the world. To convince his mother of the sturdiness of the vessel, the Beccante was ordered to sail into a gale force storm near Britain in 1879 when it emerged unscathed. Victoria agreed to let her two grandsons embark on the journey.

 The two boys and Dalton spent the next three years voyaging on the Peanti, which had been tasked with patrolling the world’s sea lanes at a time when the Royal Navy effectively policed the world’s oceans. In total, they traveled over 40,000 miles, visiting the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, South America, South Africa, China, Japan, and Australia.

 In Japan, they were amongst the first British royals to have direct experience of the rapid modernization of Japanese society in recent years. They also met Emperor Magi while there in 1881. The boys were even present in South Africa for some of the first Boer war. Accounts of their adventures were later collected together and published in 1886 as the cruise of her majesty’s ship Beccante 1879 to 82.

Life at sea seems to have suited George, and following his return to England, it was determined that he would continue on as a commander in the Royal Navy. Whereas Albert, as the second in line to the throne, was sent off to Trinity College, Cambridge, to continue the education he had apparently had little taste for under Dalton’s tutilage.

Conversely, George was sent to Malta where his uncle, Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second eldest son, was serving as a senior figure of the British Mediterranean Fleet, becoming a vice admiral in 1882 and commanderin-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet in 1886. Under his uncle, George continued his training as a naval commander throughout the mid 1880s.

 In the late 1880s and early 1890s, George had reached an age and level of experience that resulted in him being made a commander of several ships in the Royal Navy. One was the HMS Thrush, a red breastclass gunboat which he took command of in 1890 during a tour of the western Atlantic, largely operating between Nova Scotia and northeastern Canada and the British colony of Bermuda, further to the south near the Caribbean.

 Shortly thereafter, he was placed in charge of the newly commissioned HMS Milampus, an Apollo class cruiser, which he was given command of in 1891. But it would be his last active command as events in Britain in the early 1890s would change the future course of his life. George lived through his childhood and early adult years in the expectation that his father would succeed his aging grandmother one day as king.

 And then after a presumably shorter reign than Victoria, Albert Edward would himself die and be succeeded by George’s elder brother, Albert Victor. It was assumed that George would not become king, that many people might have wished that he was second in line. His elder brother, Albert, was a problematic heir, with questions having been repeatedly raised about his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain and would have created problems had it become known that the second in line to the throne was gay. In 1889, his

name was raised by the Metropolitan Police in London following an investigation into a male brothel on Cleveland Street in the city. though his involvement here was never conclusively proven. There were also questions about Albert’s psychological well-being, issues which have led to outlandish claims that Albert could have been the infamous Jack the Ripper.

 Yet in the early 1890s, he seemed to be destined to become king one day, and there was even talk of his being appointed as viceroy of Ireland. But mother nature had other plans. Between 1889 and 1892, a pandemic known as the Russian or Asiatic flu swept westwards from Asia into Europe. Albert fell prey to it and died on the 14th of January 1892, just shy of his 28th birthday.

 Now all of a sudden George became second in line to the throne. Provided he did not die before his father, he would one day become king of Britain and emperor of India. Albert’s premature death also had a significant bearing on George’s personal life. At the time that he fell ill in December 1891, Albert had been scheduled to marry Mary of Tech, the daughter of Count Francis von Hoenstein, Duke of Tech, one of the most senior figures in the German aristocracy.

 Although George had grown close to his cousin, Princess Marie of Edinburgh, who herself would one day become queen of Romania, the decision of who he should marry, was now largely taken out of his hands, and it was decided that he should marry Mary of Tech, his older brother’s intended bride. The pair were wed at St. James’s Palace on the 6th of July 1893 in what by all accounts became a relatively happy union despite its arranged nature.

Children soon followed with Edward born a year later in the summer of 1894, Albert late in 1895, Mary in 1897, Henry in 1900, George in 1902, and John in 1905. All except John, who unfortunately developed severe epilepsy and passed away in 1919 when he was just 13 years old, would live long lives. As parents, George and Mary were not easy to define.

 George was a very strict disciplinarian like his own father. This was not unusual by the standards of the late 19th century. But George appears to have instilled significant fear in his children. While he and Mary have also been otherwise criticized for failing to notice that a string of nannies that cared for the children in their earlier years were often emotionally and physically abusive towards them.

However, on some occasions, their children expressed affection for their parents in their later years. And when George and Mary had to undertake a world tour for 8 months in 1901, they were said to be deeply upset at being separated from the children for such an extended period of time. Overall, it was a complicated relationship between the pair and their children.

George had become Duke of York in 1892 following the death of his older brother, a title which had been born for centuries by many figures who were second in line to the throne of England and then Britain. His new position meant that he had to quit active service with the Royal Navy of any kind which might endanger his well-being.

 As such, following his marriage to Mary in 1893, much of their roles as Duke and Duchess were ceremonial and designed to expose the British people as much as possible to the man who would one day, perhaps many years from then, rule Britain and its empire. Thus, social engagements and photo opportunities became the order of the day.

 Though unlike his father, George was not an avid partygoer and generally preferred a quiet life at York Cottage in Sandringham to hobnobbing with British high society. Some of his formal duties involved travel overseas, notably when George joined his parents to attend the funeral of their cousin Sar Alexander III of Russia in St. Petersburg in 1894.

There he spent considerable time in the presence of his cousin, the new Sar Nicholas II, whose rule would become entangled in many ways with George’s years later. George’s time as Duke of York eventually came to an end in January 1901 following the death of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, after a reign of 63 and a half years.

 With her passing, which signaled the end of an age in British and indeed European history, George’s father, Albert Edward, succeeded as King Edward IIIth of Britain and Emperor of India. He was already 59 years of age at the time of his accession and his health was deteriorating owing to a chronic smoking habit and years of excess of all kinds.

He would spend much of his relatively brief reign dealing with bronchitis as well as a form of skin cancer which attacked his nose and even memory loss. It was consequently expected that George, who had become the Prince of Wales and Air designate in 1901, would succeed his father before too long. Nevertheless, Edward survived throughout the 1900s as George and Mary took on a string of ever growing responsibilities, notably a world tour in 1901 in which they visited the furthest flung reaches of the British Empire. There were

several important aspects to this, notably his opening of the first session of the Australian Commonwealth Parliament and a visit to South Africa during the Second Bureau War. Further visits to India and other parts of the empire followed in the course of the 1900s. Thus, by the time George’s father died on the 6th of May, 1910, the subjects of the empire, as well as Britain itself, were familiar with the man who now ascended as their new king.

He was 44 years of age at the time. George’s coronation as King George V of Britain and Emperor of India along with the coronation of his wife Mary as Queen Consort took place at Westminster Abbey in London on the 22nd of June 1911. It was attended by an enormous number of the royal families and monarchs of Europe, including, for instance, members of the German imperial family, numerous other German princes and princesses, representatives of the Zar of Bulgaria, the Romanian royal family, the Arch Duke Carl of Austria representing Emperor

France Joseph, and even the crown prince of the Ottoman Empire as a standin for the Sultan. Within a few years, many of these imperial and royal houses would be shattered by the impact of the First World War. And although few could have even guessed at it in the summer of 1911, this would be one of the last times when the many royal lines of old Europe would congregate in one place for such an event.

 In tandem, the Festival of Empire was held at the Crystal Palace in London to celebrate George’s coronation. At this, the Crystal Palace, which had first been built to house the first great exposition in 1851, became home to a myriad array of scenes designed to showcase the might of the British Empire at its height. In all, 300 buildings replicating elements of other buildings from across the empire were reconstructed inside the Crystal Palace.

 But even as the coronation plans were underway, there was a political crisis also raging in Britain. One which involved the new king in a surprising departure from the general belief by the early 20th century that the monarch’s role was simply to rubber stamp what parliament decided upon. At the heart of the matter was the people’s budget which the liberal chancellor of the exjecker David Lloyd George had first attempted to introduce in April 1909.

 The budget was very progressive for its time with Lloyd George stating that it was effectively a wartime budget with the enemy being poverty and squalor in Britain’s workingass and industrial communities. As such, it proposed large tax increases to pay for a revolutionary system of welfare measures and investment in public services.

 Much of this was political with the Liberals believing that the best way to stall the rise of the Labor Party, who were perceived as dangerous radicals in the 1900s, was to introduce the welfare reforms which would prevent traditional liberal voters from switching to labor. Yet the people’s budget provoked a furious response and the conservative dominated House of Lords refused to ratify the passage of the budget.

Traditionally, the Lords was seen as a rubber stamping body, one which was not supposed to block legislation which had passed through Parliament. And so the umpass over the people’s budget had provoked a constitutional crisis in the last months of the reign of Edward IIIth. By the time George ascended the throne, the budget had been allowed to pass through the lords without a vote, ending the immediate crisis.

 But the new king was immediately faced with calls for constitutional reform of the House of Lords to ensure a development like this never occurred again. Within days of his accession, George was being petitioned by the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Aswith about various methods of constitutional reform which would prevent another pass of the kind which had recently been seen.

 This was particularly necessary as British Parliamentary politics in the early 1910s was balanced on a knife edge with the Ster Unionists and the Irish Parliamentary Party often holding the balance of power between the Liberals and the Conservatives. One proposal which was floated was that George would agree to the creation of a large number of new liberal peers who would turn the political balance in the House of Lords in favor of the liberals and their allies.

 George was not entirely favorable to the idea of politicizing the creation of noble titles in this way and in any event the conservatives were more inclined to make concessions when they learned of this plan. As a result, a compromise was reached in the shape of the Parliament Act of 1911. The act contained two provisions.

 Firstly, it stated that the House of Lords could not veto bills relating to the budget and other financial issues henceforth once they had passed through the House of Commons. While in return, the Conservatives received an unofficial promise that their majority in the House of Lords would not be overcome by packing it with newly created liberal peers.

 George gave his ascent to the act in August 1911 in what is one of the most significant reforms of the constitutional relationship of the upper and lower houses of Parliament to each other in modern British history. Whatever government was going to control the political realm in Britain, one of their primary problems, whether conservative, liberal, or socialist, was going to be Ireland.

 Ireland had long been a thorn in the side of the empire. As England had expanded its political control across the Atlantic archipelago in the late medieval and early modern periods, it had managed to bring Wales and Scotland under British control to a large extent and unite these disperate realms under a unified Protestant British state.

 But Ireland had always been problematic. Successive waves of conquest and colonization between the 12th and 17th centuries had succeeded in creating an English Protestant landholding class here. But the bulk of the population remained Irish and Roman Catholic and broadly opposed to British rule. A problem compounded by the existence of a Scottish Presbyterian majority in the north of the island who in turn were opposed to the Catholics further to the south.

 By George’s time, politicians in England were determined to bring about some solution to the endless unrest in Ireland by granting some form of self-determination to the island and if needs be by separating the northern counties from the southern ones. But the political environment was highly fractious there by the early 1910s.

 As a consequence, the decision was taken that George should quickly visit Ireland following his accession, the better to reinforce the ties between the monarchy and the crown subjects in Ireland. George and Mary arrived to Dunlier near Dublin, a port which was then called King’stown on the 8th of July 1911, just over 2 weeks after his coronation in London.

 The entourage was considerable and eight carriages were needed to bring the king and queen to Dublin Castle where they resided while in Ireland. Visits to the Phoenix Park on the western outskirts of the city and Leopardstown, a racetrack, followed, as well as more charitable endeavors, such as a visit to the Kum Hospital in Dublin.

 Much effort was made to shroud the royal visit in a celebratory atmosphere. But there were tensions brewing underneath. Many of Dublin Corporation’s politicians were nationalists and socialists who favored complete independence for Ireland from Britain and refused to participate in the events around the royal visit. While the king and queen’s visit to Cork, the Republican dominated city in the south of the country was undertaken in a very tense atmosphere where it was clear the new monarch was not welcome.

 This aside, George and Mary’s route through Dublin was often lined by people cheering them. And when he left Ireland 5 days later, the king might well have imagined that with the right policies, the island could still be reconciled to British rule. He would learn in time that this was certainly not the case. Ireland and all other parts of the empire were drawn increasingly towards conflict in the first years of George’s reign.

 For some time, Europe’s great powers had been increasingly antagonistic towards one another. The Empire of AustriaHungary, for example, were rivals of the Russian Empire for control over the Balkans, where the Ottoman Empire, the dominant regional power for many centuries, was in terminal decline. The French Republic had old grievances against the German Empire from the conquest of its eastern provinces of Alsace and Lraine during the FrancoRussian War at the start of the 1870s.

And Britain had its own growing rivalry with Germany, the newly emergent continental power. Yet few saw a war of the kind which erupted in the summer of 1914 coming. In the end, it was a regional crisis caused by the assassination of the heir to the Austrohungarian Empire, France Ferdinand, by a Serb nationalist in the streets of Sarvo, which cast the continent into war.

 By the start of August, the British, French, and Russians were at war with the Germans, Austrians, and Turks. As monarch, it fell to George to oversee the council which decided that Britain would declare war on Germany in response to developments across the continent. He referred to these events in his diary later that day as a quote terrible catastrophe.

 But like many others, he was naively of the view that the First World War would be a quick affair. Instead, it dragged on for over 4 years of bloody trench warfare in northern France and elsewhere. The monarchy was somewhat compromised by the outbreak of the war, owing to the close relations which existed between Europe’s major royal families.

 By the early 20th century, nearly all of the royal houses were intermarried, and George Bilhelm II, the Kaiser of Germany, and Nicholas II, the Zar of Russia, were all first cousins. Moreover, the king’s paternal grandfather, Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, had been Prince Albert of Sax Cobberg and Ga, a prominent German royal line.

 George and his family members still bore this title in 1914. Additionally, his wife Mary, although she had been born in England, was the daughter of Count Francis von Hoenstein, the Duke of Tech within the German aristocracy. All of this created the rather embarrassing impression when the war broke out that the royal family were more German than English when their bloodlines were examined.

 and certain sections of the British press hammered away at this point endlessly. Thus in July 1917, George caved to public pressure and issued a royal proclamation which changed the name of the royal house from the house of Sax Cobberg and Gota to the house of Windsor, a place long associated with the royal family owing to the construction of Windsor Castle as a royal residence all the way back in the days of William the Conqueror in the 11th century who ironically ly enough was a continental foreigner who conquered England.

Beyond the concerns over the connections between the royal family and Germany, George and his family had a significant role to play in the conflict. Hundreds of members of the royal household and staff were enlisted in the war effort. For instance, the wood cutters from the Windsor Castle estate were sent to France as trench sappers.

 George himself first visited the trenches of northwest France in November 1914, the first of five such visits during the war, while Queen Mary joined him in 1917. Back in Britain, the king and queen spent much of the mid 1910s visiting hospitals, nurses, stations, and clearing houses to meet with wounded and discharged soldiers and sailors.

George’s two eldest sons, Edward and Albert, were also old enough to be involved in the armed forces during the war. Edward served in France and was awarded the Military Cross, while Albert served in the Royal Navy and was mentioned in dispatches for his role in the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the foremost naval engagement of the war between the British and the German navies.

 While care was taken to ensure that the heir and his younger brother were not placed at the coldface of the conflict, the fact that the king’s sons were on active duty during the war aided in cementing the idea that the war was everyone’s conflict, not just the lot of the average conscript. One of George’s visits to France was to acknowledge the intensification of the conflict there.

 For 2 years, the Germans have been pressing towards Paris from Belgium. And for 2 years, the French and British, along with extensive detachments of Commonwealth soldiers from Canada, South Africa, India, Australia, and elsewhere, had pushed back. Then in the summer of 1916, the British and French launched the SOM offensive against the German lines.

 The first day of the offensive, the 1st of July 1916, led to the greatest number of casualties experienced by the British army in history. In one day, over 19,000 soldiers were killed and a further 38,000 were wounded or otherwise rendered unable to fight. Plans were quickly put in place for George to cross to France.

And on the 10th of August 1916, with the fighting still raging, he visited troops at EPR and proceeded further down the British lines along the SO. Curiously, he also met with General Henry Rollinsson, the commander of the British Second Army, with whom the king conversed about the news of efforts within the military to have General Douglas Hague, the commander of the British forces in France, replaced.

 Yet this never materialized. Hey remained in overall control of the British expeditionary force while the slaughter at the SO continued eventually resulting in the deaths of approximately 300,000 troops. Yet the stalemate in the war was not broken and two more years of trench warfare in northeastern France would follow.

While there was no change in military leadership in 1916, there was a change in the government back home in Britain. At the outset of the war in 1914, the Liberal Party led by Herbert Aswith as prime minister had a tenuous hold on power in Britain. To gain increased political stability during wartime, a unity government was formed with the Conservatives being granted numerous important ministries and the Labor Party, which was still viewed as a dangerous socialist movement by many in Britain, even being invited to join the

government. However, by late 1916, Asith’s coalition was increasingly unpopular at home and facing growing opposition over its prosecution of the war, notably the costliness in lives and resources of the Som offensive, which had promised much and delivered little. He was eventually ousted from power in December 1916 when the Secretary of State for War, David Lloyd George, formed a new unity coalition and became prime minister.

By the early 20th century, the king had little say in these matters and accepted Lloyd George as the new prime minister. But it would be a tense relationship between the pair at times in the years that followed with the conservative George often at loggerheads with the radical Welsh prime minister over policy in France, Ireland, and elsewhere.

Moreover, recent studies have revealed the extent to which George involved himself in the politics of the British army in France and how this often saw him and Lloyd George intriguing against each other as Lloyd George was convinced hey should not be continued as the head of the British forces in France and instead sought to strengthen the position of the French general and supreme allied commander in France Therdinand Foch. at Hag’s expense.

 Such actions aside, both George and Lloyd George’s efforts to intervene in the military handling of the war were both rendered largely null and void when the United States joined the war on the side of Britain and France in April 1917. Thus making German defeat in the long run an all but certainty. Lloyd George and the king also clashed over another problematic matter which arose internationally in 1917.

This concerned events in Russia where a revolution had been initiated to overthrow the government of Georgia’s cousin Sir Nicholas II in February. This was a relatively conservative revolution at first and there was the possibility of the Russian royal family being able to abscond from Russia and seek asylum elsewhere in Europe.

 At first, George was anxious to offer Nicholas the option of resettling at least temporarily in Britain. that Lloyd George was vehemently opposed, believing that the presence of the Russian imperial family in Britain could act as a lightning rod for socialist and revolutionary elements within Britain who were looking at Russia and considering whether an overthrow of the political system in Britain might also be possible.

 While there were also concerns that the presence of the deposed SAR in England could entangle Britain in Russia’s domestic politics at a time when Russia was still theoretically its ally in the war. Although admittedly Russian resistance to the German advance all along the Eastern front was collapsing in the spring and summer of 1917.

In the end, the king came to agree with Lloyd George’s viewpoint, although the British secret services nevertheless prepared a plan for how to rescue Nicholas and his family from Russia, one which was never put into action. In the end, a more radical second revolution struck Russia in October 1917, bringing the Bolevik communists to power.

 Zar and his family were murdered on the orders of the new government in Russia in the summer of 1918. The final years of the war also witnessed an intensification of the suffragist movement in Britain. The suffragettes had been campaigning for a decade and a half in Britain in order for women to be given the right to vote in political elections, a right which was still denied women and indeed many men if they did not meet certain qualifying criteria.

 The suffragists had effectively engaged in a campaign of political pressure and limited violence over the years to fight for their cause. Indeed, George had been present at the Epsom Derby on the 4th of June 1913 when a suffragette, Emily Davidson, ran out in front of the racing horses and attempted to catch hold of the king’s own contender in the race, Anma.

 The horse struck Davidson as she attempted to grab the reins, and she died from her injuries 4 days later, becoming a suffragette martr in the process. For his part, George had been more concerned for the horse and jockey in the aftermath of the incident, though in his defense, he did not know the full extent of Davidson’s condition at the time.

 Now nearly 5 years later, the king found himself giving the royal ascent to the representation of the people act in February 1918. A bill which gave women of 30 years and over the right to vote while also extending the male franchise to nearly 8 million poorer Britons. The act was a sign of how the first world war and the contribution of the British people to the war effort forced the political establishment to accelerate much needed political reforms such as those the suffragettes had campaigned for over many years.

The representation of the people act was passed as the stalemate in the war on the continent was coming to an end with the United States having joined the fight on the side of Britain and France and with the economies of Germany and AustriaHungary beginning to collapse under the pressure of four years of war.

The strategic situation changed in the summer and autumn of 1918. It was over by November 1918, not owing to complete military victory, but because the governments in both Berlin and Vienna had fallen to domestic revolutions. Ly George led the British delegation to France in the summer of 1919, which negotiated the terms of the postwar settlement.

 The resulting treaty of Versailles with Germany forced the German government to accept the blame for causing the war, stripped the country of all its colonies and a sizable proportion of its territory in Europe, and imposed huge war reparations payments on the German people for decades to come. It was a punitive peace settlement, one which was matched by the hubris which the British and French governments displayed in carving up the Middle East and the defeated nations African colonies between them.

 Lloyd George sent a letter to the king on the 5th of August 1919 informing him that he believed the treaty was quote worthy of the heroism and endurance displayed by your majesty’s forces by sea, land, and air. and by all classes of your majesty’s subjects who worked at home during the five years of grievous struggle and there was a great degree of truth to the prime minister’s letter but nevertheless the treaty had sewn into it the seeds of another war many years later the sessation of the conflict in November 1918 did not bring any respite

to Europe indeed the next 5 years were even deadlier for the continent. This was partly owing to the collapse of the old political order and numerous revolutions and civil wars in countries like Russia, Germany, and Turkey. Yet, much of it was also owing to disease outbreaks at a time when the continent’s people were weakened owing to years of rationing and want.

 The disease which swept across Europe in 1918 and into 1919 is known as the Spanish flu. Even though it originated in the United States, by early 1920 it had infected over half a billion people and it’s estimated to have killed somewhere between 20 and 50 million people. Though reliable statistics for Asia and Africa are not available.

 The royal family was not immune to it, and indeed such were the ravages of disease outbreaks on the Windsor in recent decades, notably the death of George’s older brother, Albert Victor, in 1892, that they were anxious to avoid contagion. Consequently, the royal court fled from London. But by then, it was too late for the king to avoid the Spanish flu.

 just 2 months after it first surfaced in the US. George was struck by it in May 1918. He made a full recovery though, something which cannot be said of many others. The prime minister, David Lloyd George, also contracted it and nearly died. While the Spanish flu had largely passed the king and his immediate family by in 1918, the revolutions which followed the end of the first world war would have a more enduring impact.

 These sprung up all across the continent, generally in the countries which were defeated during the war, such as Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and the Austrohungarian Empire, the latter of which was fragmenting into several smaller states by the time the armistice was declared in November 1918. However, it was not confined to these and some of the revolutions elsewhere impacted directly on the monarchy.

 Such was the case with the 11th of September 1922 revolution which occurred in Greece as a spillover from the Turkish revolution. Here, senior officers within the Greek army and navy initiated a coup against the reigning government of King Constantine, George V’s cousin. He was quickly replaced by his son who became George II of Greece, but not without a severe backlash against the royals in the Mediterranean nation.

 Such was the danger implicit in this that George V had to send ships of the Royal Navy to the Mediterranean nation to rescue his cousins Prince Andrew and Princess Alice, the paternal grandparents of the present king of Britain, Charles III, from Greece. More broadly, George was skeptical about the revolutions which subsumed Europe at this time, viewing most as dangerously revolutionary and socialist developments which George, as a conservative British monarch, was deeply opposed to.

One of these revolutions was closer to home than all others. While Britain itself avoided conflict in the aftermath of the war, it could not prevent unrest across the Irish Sea in Ireland. In the decade since George had visited the country, just days after his coronation in England, Ireland’s political problems had mounted.

 At the outset of the war in 1914, the Irish Parliamentary Party, the country’s largest single political party at Westminster, had made an agreement with the government in England. It would convince Irishmen to sign up to the war effort and head for the trenches of France. And in return, the British government would grant home rule to Ireland, whereby an Irish parliament would be established in Dublin, one which would rule many aspects of Ireland, albeit still as part of the British Empire.

 However, the war years saw this consensus fall apart. On Easter week in 1916, a coalition of nationalist revolutionaries had led a botched military revolt against British rule, seizing large parts of Dublin. This was soon crushed, but in its aftermath, support for the Irish Parliamentary Party collapsed and was replaced with support for a new political movement, Shinfane.

 These won a landslide in nearly all the Irish constituencies outside of Ster in the 1918 general election and promptly refused to take their seats in Westminster instead convening their own parliament in Dublin. It was the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. The War of Independence was fought in Ireland between 1919 and 1921.

It was a bitter, bloody affair with the Irish engaging in guerrilla warfare and the British government relying on army irregulars called the Black and Tans to fight the conflict. The latter were soon engaging in acts of atrocity and heavy-handed violence against the civilian population. For his part, while he was opposed to Irish independence, George was appalled by the escalating violence in Ireland and the tactics being employed by the Black and Tanss.

He sensured Lloyd George on several occasions for what was occurring and was a major driving force within England in finding a solution to the conflict. In the summer of 1921, a part of that solution was dividing Ireland so that the Scottish Presbyterians and the Northern counties could have their own country that would remain closely tied to Britain.

 Six counties there were partitioned from the south in May 1921, bringing Northern Ireland into existence. George visited Belfast in June to address the opening sitting of the new unionist dominated parliament there. His speech is believed today to have been significant in preventing a war between the Unionists of the North and the Republicans of the South in the months that followed.

Instead, a truce was agreed with the Republicans a few weeks later, and the south of Ireland was effectively granted partial independence from Britain, while the North remained part of the empire. Although a bitter civil war was fought in the South over the terms of independence between 1922 and 1923, and the country remained tied to Britain in some particulars until the mid 1930s.

Georgia’s role in establishing the peace in the early 1920s was quite substantial. Ireland was not the only issue confronting Britain’s empire in the 1920s. The number of nations which had formed part of the empire, but which were now largely autonomous nations like South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand had been growing for some time.

 But the constitutional arrangement for these dominions was still largely unclear. Were they still part of the empire, wholly autonomous or partially subject to Britain in terms of their foreign policy and certain trade matters? These issues came to a head at the imperial conference held in London in 1926 which was presided over by George and chaired by the former prime minister between 1902 and 1905 Arthur Balfur.

 Here an agreement was reached that the dominions constituted a commonwealth of nations which were each equal to each other in their common allegiance to the crown. Thus, under the terms of what has become known as the Balffor Declaration, the growing independence of Britain’s former colonies was acknowledged, but a new Commonwealth centered on the monarchy and the rule of George V as head of state of the Commonwealth was put down in law.

 5 years later, the Statute of Westminster of 1931 would grant further legislative independence to the Commonwealth nations. While these measures largely resolved the issues inherent in the status of the dominions, there was still a major policy issue in the 1920s concerning the core element of Britain’s empire, India or the British Raj as the great conglomeration of territory covering not just India but also modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh.

 George was emperor of India and indeed had visited Delhi in 1911 where he became the only British ruler of India to attend a Delhi Durba or court to be proclaimed as emperor in person. Yet despite his efforts to make himself physically present in India on occasion, George faced growing calls for Indian independence throughout his reign, particularly the nonviolent opposition led by Mahatma Gandhi.

 The responses during Georgia’s reign were two bills, the Government of India Act of 1919 and the Government of India Act of 1935. Both sought to ensure British control of India for some time to come by offering moderate Indian nationalists a range of concessions while also trying to take account of the varied religious and social tapestry that was the Raj.

 None of it was enough though and while George was not the last British emperor of India, it was largely during his reign that the independence movement gained sufficient traction to lead to independence in the mid 1940s. George’s attitudes towards domestic British politics in the 1920s were a delicate balancing act between his role as a figurehead within the government and his own rather conservative political views.

 He like many others in Britain was wary of the emergence of the Labour Party as a major political movement. It created some dismay then for the king and large sections of the British political establishment when the general election of December 1923 resulted in a hung parliament neither Stanley Baldwin’s conservatives Herbert Asquist’s liberals nor Ramsey Macdonald’s Labor securing a majority in the days that followed it emerged that the only government which was feasible was a minority labor administration.

which would be supported on a case-bycase basis by the Liberals. Thus, Macdonald became prime minister and Labour formed a government for the first time. There were genuine concerns at the time that George, whose constitutional roles involved officially appointing new governments, would try to block the formation of the new Labor regime.

 Yet, he didn’t. Whatever his personal politics might have been, George knew that he was not supposed to intervene publicly in the politics of the day. Yet, there is also evidence that George’s personal politics might have been shifting at this time. The minority government soon collapsed and the Conservatives returned to power in late 1924.

 Yet, when a general strike broke out across the UK in 1926 over pay and working conditions in Britain’s mines and other sectors of the economy, it was George who urged a moderate approach on the conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin, stating that Baldwin needed to put himself in the shoes of the average working man when negotiating with the strike managers.

While Britain’s politics were difficult in the mid 1920s, any issues encountered were tempered by the fact that the global economy was booming during these years. Yet, all this came to an end in the autumn of 1929 with the Wall Street crash and the ensuing Great Depression. At the time of the Wall Street crash, Macdonald had just led Labor back into government in remarkably bad timing.

 His administration faced a huge crisis with over 1 and a half million people out of work across Britain by the start of the spring of 1930. A situation which deteriorated further over the next year and a half as the value of the pound sterling and its ties to the gold standard looked increasingly precarious. By August 1931, it was impossible for Macdonald to get any budgets or policies through.

 And so George urged the Labour leader to call an election and form a government of national unity. It was wise advice. A national government containing Labor, Conservative and Liberal ministers was formed in October 1931 and the British political establishment worked together to move through the crisis created by the Great Depression.

 Whereas other nations ended up with increasingly fractious and extreme politics. George also facilitated the Macdonald governments to manage the economic crisis in other ways. The civil list, which was effectively a list of individuals to whom the British government paid money in the form of honorary pensions as well as royal subventions, was drastically reduced in 1931, and the king and the royal family decided not to accept an annual payment of £50,000 due to them in recognition of the economic situation.

That money was sent back into the exjecker and used for welfare payments and to help create jobs during the crisis. These and other measures ensured that George was an increasingly popular monarch by the early 1930s. This was perhaps at odds with his own personality. By nature, he was a rather dimminionative retiring figure, one whose favored pastimes were stamp collecting and hunting.

 Back in 1893, George had been made honorably vice president of the Royal Filotellic Society, the most significant stamp collecting society in the world. George served in that role until he became king, and his contributions to the society’s collection were considerable. For instance, in 1904, he purchased a rare Maitius 2 pence blue stamp for £1,450, a record for a single stamp purchase at that time.

 George ultimately contributed significantly to the royal filotellic collection, which is valued at approximately 100 million pounds today. Elsewhere, George became the first monarch to take advantage of the new mass communications medium of radio to reach out to his subjects. On Christmas Day 1932, he became the first king or queen to address the entire nation in this way.

 George had resisted the idea of doing so for many years, believing radio was for entertainment rather than an extension of the political realm. But in the 1930s, as the crisis deepened across the country and other politicians such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the then governor of New York, began using radio to communicate with their constituents.

 George relented and gave the first royal Christmas speech in 1932. The king’s speech was scripted by Radiard Kipling, the great author of Kim and the Jungle Book, whose knowledge of the British Empire and British India in particular, qualified him for writing a speech which was broadcast to all of Georgia’s subjects, not just in Britain, but in the Raj and the Commonwealth nations as well.

 The speech sought to offer some comfort in the context of the tumultuous years Britons and citizens of the empire alike had just lived through. It may be that our future may lay upon us more than one stern test. Our past will have taught us how to meet it unshaken. For the present, the work to which we are all equally bound is to arrive at a reasoned tranquility within our borders, to regain prosperity without self-seeking, and to carry with us those whom the burden of past years has disheartened or overborn.

 George’s speech was a major success, and the tradition has continued almost uninterrupted ever since. While Britain ultimately managed to pull itself out of the Great Depression in the mid 1930s via the mainstream political parties forming a unity government and acting in unison with each other.

 The same was not true for other nations. In Germany in particular, the massive economic crisis provided the basis for the rise of extremist politics and ultimately the ascent to power early in 1933 of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. George was wary of the rise of the German fascists from the beginning as were many within the political establishment in Britain.

 But few had as precient a view of what might occur as did the king. In a meeting with the German ambassador to Britain, Leopold von Hersh in 1934, the king expressed concern about the jingoistic rhetoric emanating from Berlin, where the Nazis were already making noises about remilitarizing in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles and their desire to build a greater Germany by reclaiming the territory they had lost in 1918, and much more besides in central and Eastern Europe.

 Von Hirs, who was a career diplomat and not a Nazi ideologue, did not necessarily disagree. The following year, a more aggressive Nazi program of remilitarization was commenced with, but George would not live to see the war between Britain and Germany, which so concerned him in his last years. George V suffered for much of his adult life from respiratory problems, a hereditary condition in the family which was exacerbated by his chain smoking.

 By the time he was in his late 50s in the 1920s, he was suffering from severe bronchitis and his ability to travel extensively was limited. Though doctors did recommend a visit to the Mediterranean in 1925, hoping that the warmer climate would lead to an improvement in his condition. It didn’t, and further suggestions that he should do the same in later years were viferously rejected by George.

 Instead, he accepted a certain level of ill health which only continued to get worse as he entered his 60s, leaving London and the royal palaces in the home counties only to spend time in the seaside resort of Bogna in Sussex. into the 1930s, things only got worse. And by the middle of the decade, his respiratory problems had deteriorated to incorporate several other ailments, including breathing problems, a lack of energy, regular colds, and blood issues.

It was clear that he did not have long left to live. George’s imminent death was complicated to a very great extent by his relationship with his eldest son and heir. Edward, Prince of Wales, had always been problematic. He did not display a strong character, and George was reluctant to pass too many responsibilities to him, even as his own health deteriorated from the mid 1920s onwards.

 Most worrying was Edward’s love life. He had not married and produced an heir, but engaged in a string of short-lived romances. And when one finally seemed to stick in the mid 1930s, it was highly problematic. The subject of Edward’s attentions was Wallace Simpson, an American divorcee who was still married to her second husband Ernest Aldrich Simpson, an American with extensive business affairs in Britain.

 Edward and Wallace had entered into an affair in the mid 1930s, but it was considered unacceptable to the Conservative Party leader Stanley Baldwin and viewed with great dubiousness by George V, who repeatedly advised his son to end the liaison and marry a more acceptable woman, one who would not have been divorced and was British or European.

 The issues inherent in Edward and Wallace’s affair were still hanging over the succession as George’s health declined dramatically in the course of 1935. By the summer of 1935, the king was regularly receiving oxygen in order to continue breathing properly. Things got worse in the months that followed and on the 15th of January 1936 he retreated to his bed at Sandringham House in Norolk outside London.

 He spent the next 5 days here with his situation deteriorating precipitously. By the 18th he was slipping in and out of consciousness and was in a confused state whenever he pulled himself back to the point of being able to converse with those surrounding his deathbed. It was clear that he was suffering by this point, and his royal physician, Bertrand Edward Dawson, was faced with a difficult decision. At approxima

tely 11 p.m. on the night of the 20th of January, 1936, he effectively decided to speed along the king’s death, administering a large dose of morphine and cocaine sometime afterwards. Nothing could have been done to save the king’s life, and the decision most likely spared George several further days of agony. Though Dorson’s decision has been controversial ever since, owing to the fact that he did not consult with George’s family before taking this action.

Subsequent events are well known. A protracted royal funeral followed with George eventually being laid to rest at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on the 28th of January. Edward succeeded his father as King Edward VIII of Britain. However, he was steadfast in his determination to marry Wallace Simpson, who was now in the process of finalizing her second divorce from Ernest Simpson.

 This created a major problem. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, and other members of the royal family, including Edward’s younger brother, Albert, were convinced that the British public would not stand for their king, marrying a multiple divorcee from America, while it would clearly emerge in the process that the new king had begun seeing Wallace while she was still married.

 A constitutional crisis brewed in the months that followed as Edward refused to budge from his position. When he was eventually confronted by the government and the royal family, he agreed to abdicate the throne and married Simpson. His younger brother Albert succeeded the childless Edward in December 1936, taking the regal name George V 6th.

Thus, less than 12 months after George V’s death, the abdication crisis resulted in his younger son succeeding his older son. George V was, in many ways one of Britain’s least well-known monarchs, despite spending a quarter of a century on the throne. Perhaps this was because his reign was largely bookended by the even lengthier and more substantial reigns of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, who ruled for much of the 19th century, and his granddaughter Elizabeth II, whose reign marked the transition from the post-war period through to the

21st century. Compared with these, George’s period on the throne seems misleadingly brief and static. Moreover, today he is broadly overshadowed in the public imagination by other political figures of his time, notably David Lloyd George, who dominated the country’s politics during the First World War and then the rise of Winston Churchill during the interwar period.

 Furthermore, George was a modest character who preferred stamp collecting and spending time with family to courting controversy. A man whose interests lay in stamps cannot hope to vi with the Russian Civil War and the rise of the Nazis in the pages of history books detailing the interwar period of European history.

 Finally, George’s lengthy reign was in many ways overshadowed immediately by the short controversial reign of his elder son and the abdication crisis. Yet to suggest that because George’s reign was in many ways rather bal for its time, that it was without merit would be to do it and the man a disservice. George provided simple, uncontroversial leadership as king of Britain during a tumultuous period of British and European history.

From the outset, he was a man who disliked violence and wished to see the First World War ended as quickly as possible. In the aftermath of it, he approached the revolutions which Europe was inundated with in the late 1910s as something which needed to be overcome while maintaining a conservative political landscape.

 And in the 1920s and 1930s, he largely stayed out of the way and let the politicians get on with dealing with a changing Britain and a troublesome Europe, which was effectively the role of the monarch by this time. George was hardworking, dutiful, and moderate. In many ways, he set the template for the modern monarchy, one which was followed in all major specifics by his son, King George V 6th, and his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II.

 As such, while George V was in some ways an unremarkable monarch, he was also widely admired and liked by the British people by the time his considerable reign came to an end in the mid 1930s. What do you think of King George V? Was he one of Britain’s most underappreciated monarchs? Please let us know in the comment section.

 And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching. George V’s death on the 20th of January 1936 is now viewed as quite controversial owing to his physician Bertrand Dawson’s actions. There is no denying nonetheless that George was critically ill and in severe pain or that his health had been in wider decline for a substantial proportion of his reign.

 Due to this, Queen Mary of Tech had been the focus of the royal family for many years. This was epitomized in the aftermath of the war in the way in which the creation of her famous dolls house absorbed the attention of writers, artists, and designers. Modeled on a traditional doll’s house, it contained over 1,500 individual pieces like miniature books and furniture produced by Britain’s leading cultural figures.

 The doll’s house was intended as a gift from the nation in recognition of Mary’s work as a nurse and medical patron in the hospitals of London and beyond during the First World War. None of this was false praise. Mary had played a key part in the royal family’s campaign to play a role in the war effort between 1914 and 1918 and more and more responsibility was passed on to her as George’s health declined in the 1920s.

Even after he died, she was a critical person in the abdication crisis that developed during the short reign of her son Edward VII in 1936. Mary was the glue that held the House of Windsor together in the first half of the 20th century. It is the 12th of December 1911. In Coronation Park in Delhi, an estimated half a million people have gathered to see the display of pageantry and power that is the Delhi Dharma.

 The event is being held to mark the accession of the king of Great Britain and Emperor of India, George V. The latter being a title only created by the British government in 1877. Standing by the King Emperor’s side is the new Queen of Great Britain and Empress of India. A woman who will help guide the British throne through numerous crises including two world wars and the eventual setting of the sun over Britain’s imperial era.

 Her name Mary of Tech, matriarch of the House of Windsor. The woman known to history as Mary of Tech, Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India was born on the 26th of May 1867 in Kensington Palace in London. She was born in the same room that Queen Victoria, the reigning monarch of Britain at the time, had been born in 48 years earlier.

Members of Europe’s royal families and leading aristocratic lineages had extremely long names by the 19th century. Mary’s full baptismal name was Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes. She went by the name Victoria Mary in her younger years and later Mary as queen though her family and friends knew her simply as May.

Mary’s father was Prince Francis Duke of Tech an aristocratic title deriving from the Sabia region of Germany. He was the son of Alexander Duke of Wutenberg. And so Mary was of strong German heritage despite her birth in London. This was something she shared with both sides of her family.

 The British royals were effectively a German lineage, albeit descended as well from the Welsh Tudtor, the Scottish Stewarts, and if one looked far enough back, the Anglo Norman kings of late medieval England. Mary’s mother was the Princess Mary Adelaide, a daughter of Prince Adulus, Duke of Cambridge. He was in turn the son of King George III, who had ruled Britain from 1760 to 1820.

Thus, little Mary, who was born at Kensington Palace in 1867, was a great granddaughter of King George III, an era definfining monarch in his own right. All of this meant that Mary was the first cousin of Queen Victoria, the ruler of Britain since 1837. Her parents had only married in 1866, and Mary was their first child.

 She would remain their only daughter, though three boys would follow in due course. These were Adulus Jr. after his maternal grandfather, born in 1868, Francis, born in 1870, and Alexander born in 1874. All four children would live into their adult years. Mary was born at a time when the world was changing at a rate that was unprecedented in human history.

 The scale of this change would have an impact on her life, as the world she was born into in 1867 was very different from the one she lived much of her long adult life in. Britain had already changed enormously in the century prior to her arrival into the world. The industrial revolution had begun almost exactly 100 years prior to her birth.

 It began to transform England from an agricultural rural society into a country of growing cities centered on factories and tenementss. In the 1830s, industrialists began connecting these cities with the new railway lines. In 1851, the great exhibition took place in the Crystal Palace in London, showcasing the ways in which new inventions were appearing that would transform the world and which demonstrated humanity’s growing mastery over science and nature.

By then, the industrial revolution was spreading speedily to countries like Belgium, Germany, France, and the United States. Soon the second industrial revolution would begin. Mary grew up as this was occurring and her childhood years would be lived against the backdrop of electrification being introduced.

 While innovations like the camera and the telegraph had become commonplace by the 1870s. Soon the first automobiles and radios would follow. When Mary was growing up in the 1870s, London was a city of gas and oil lamps and horses. By the time she was middle-aged, it was a metropolis where automobiles and electric street lighting prevailed.

 It was also an era of democratization. When Queen Victoria was born back in 1819, the United Kingdom was effectively a plutoaucracy where only men of a certain wealth or status were allowed to vote. In Mary’s lifetime, it would become a full democracy where all adults were allowed to vote. In tandem, the position of the royal family changed considerably in ways which would be central to how Mary lived her life.

On the surface, Mary’s childhood should have been one of privilege. She was a member of the royal family, albeit not of a line that was directly placed in the succession. There was no possibility that she or her brothers would succeed to the throne one day. This aside, they should have been afforded a comfortable upbringing on account of their status as cousins of the queen and also their father’s position as a leading German prince.

 The reality was quite different. Mary’s father had not come to England with a large income from his German estate. And even though Mary’s mother was given an annual parliamentary subsidy of £5,000, a sizable enough sum in Victorian times, they spent well beyond their means. In fairness to her parents, a lot of their financial difficulties were because they were simply expected to spend money on official ceremonies and gatherings and on maintaining a large household of staff at Kensington Palace and their other home at the White Lodge at

Windsor. The upshot of this for Mary was that her parents tried not to spend too much money on her education and upbringing. Her governness was an Alsatian woman named Helena Bricker who she became close to. Mary spent a large amount of time with her mother in her youth and acquired from her attendy towards charity and care for the poor.

When she was 16, Mary was sent to Florence in Italy and spent 18 months in the home of the Renaissance. Between her time there and her studies when she returned home, she learned to speak Italian, French, and German, and became interested in literature and art history. As she became a young woman, people at the court referred to her as shy and interested more in reading than royal ceremonies, but of a kind disposition.

As with any daughter of a royal or high aristocratic family in early modern times and into the 19th century, the issue of who Mary would marry arose from an early age. She was in a peculiar position as a cousin of Queen Victoria and a member of the wider royal family. It was assumed that she could not marry a commoner or below her station.

 At the same time, she was not highly enough placed within the royal family that her parents could hope to arrange a marriage with one of the leading heirs of Europe’s royal houses. It was therefore assumed that she would marry a second or third son of some minor royal house and would assume the position of a duchess or some other high aristocratic title in one European country or another.

However, her first cousin had other ideas. Queen Victoria was not as concerned about who her family member should or shouldn’t marry as many others were. And so she formed the idea for an unconventional match. Mary would marry Victoria’s own grandson, Albert Victor. He was the eldest son of Victoria’s heir, the future King Edward IIIth.

Albert Victor was a weward young man who had refused to marry, ignored royal protocol on several matters, and who had been involved in a controversy in 1889, where he was rumored to have visited a brothel for gay men on Cleveland Street in London. There have even been historians who try to claim that Albert Victor was actually Jack the Ripper, the notorious serial killer of late Victorian London.

None of these claims have ever been proven in any way. What is clear is that Victoria thought Mary might help her grandson to settle down and decided they would marry. It never happened though. Before the marriage went ahead, Albert Victor died in January 1892 of pneumonia brought on by the so-called Asian flu pandemic.

Observers at the time noted that Mary was deeply upset by Albert Victor’s death and the collapse of the marriage plans. In the end, her marriage to the second in line to the throne would go ahead anyway. It was just that the prince in question changed. With Albert Victor’s death, his younger brother, George Frederick, became the second in line.

 He was made Duke of York in May 1892 to signal his advanced position in the succession. Just over a year later on the 6th of July 1893, he and Mary were married at St. James’s Palace. The marriage began under inospicious circumstances. George had fallen in love with Julie Stoner, a daughter of one of his mother’s ladies in waiting, but it was made clear to him that a second in line to the throne.

 Marriage to a commoner was completely out of the question. Instead, George married Mary. This was not a bad development for Mary. George certainly had his flaws. However, he was also a man of duty and was devoted to his royal responsibilities. Their marriage was one of affection of a kind, though there was also a rather bizarre level of formality, even many years after they were married.

 Often George would write his appreciation for her in letters, to which she responded stating that it was wonderful to hear about this in writing. However, she added that she also wouldn’t mind if he simply told her in person that he valued her as his wife. They would have six children together.

 The eldest was a boy named Edward, the future King Edward VII. He was born in the summer of 1894, less than 12 months after their wedding. Another boy named Albert, the future King George V 6th, followed in December 1895. Their only daughter, Mary, was born in April 1897, followed by Henry in 1900 and George in 1902. A final son, John, was born in 1905.

As we will see, he suffered from poor health and would die just as he was entering his teenage years, whereas each of the other children lived into their adult years. Mary, George, and their young family lived between York Cottage on the Sandingham Royal estate and York House in London.

 Their parenting style was not exactly modern. George was a strict disciplinarian, a trait he had picked up from his own father. One observer at the time noted that George, who had served in the Royal Navy in his younger years, seemed to run his family like a Navy captain, trying to control a mutiny. While physically disciplining one’s children was not unusual during the Victorian period and in early 20th century Europe, what was slightly more peculiar is that physical discipline was also used by their household staff in a way which was considered unusual by that

time. George’s distant nature did not lend itself to a warm family environment. Mary was closer to her children and they often looked to her to temper their father’s brutish parenting style. There was a kind of closeness there at the same time. When they embarked on a tour of various parts of the British Empire in 1901, Mary and George were upset by the idea of leaving their children behind for such a protracted period of time.

 They were criticized in later years because of the demise of their youngest child. Prince John was born in 1905. He began to suffer from epilepsy when he was just a few years old. This meant that he was often kept away from public events and London society. He did not, for instance, attend his parents’ coronation in 1911. Instead, he lived at Sandringham even when the wider family were in London.

After 1913, he was almost never seen in public. This is because his condition was deteriorating and he died eventually in 1919 from his seizures as they became more and more severe. Mary and George could be criticized for trying to hide Jon away from the public, but what else were they to do? Epilepsy was not well understood at the time, and exposing Jon to public ceremonies might have worsened his condition.

 It seems unfair to blame them for not being able to better address something they didn’t fully understand. Mary’s life in the 1890s and 1900s was one of frequent travel. Her husband liked life at Sandringham and the country pursuits that accompanied it and he tried to spend time there as much as possible.

 Mary preferred the social life of London and so they split their time between the two places when in England. They often traveled abroad. As we have seen, they went on an extended tour of the empire in 1901. This involved travel to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They were only just back when Mary’s first cousin, Queen Victoria, finally died after what was at that time the longest monarchical reign in British and English history.

Victoria’s reign of nearly 64 years had eclipsed George III’s and the reign of Victoria has become synonymous with the height of the British Empire. She died on the 22nd of January 1901 at 81 years of age. With this, her son Edward succeeded her as King Edward IIIth. He was already 59 years of age by that time and had lived a hard life.

 That meant he was in poor health even as he finally became king after nearly six decades of being heir to the throne. What this meant is that George now became heir to the throne and could reasonably assume that he would be king before too long. He certainly would not be waiting around for the 59 years his father had been.

Mary would in turn soon become queen consort. Beyond this, their changed status as prince and princess of Wales meant that the amount of royal engagements increased as did their status during them. In 1905 they traveled to India the British Raj of which they would soon become emperor and empress.

 The following year they visited Madrid for the wedding of Princess Ena of Battenburg to King Alonso I 13th of Spain. King Edward IIIth lasted until 1910 despite his poor health. He had been in decline for several years at that point. illness brought on by his chronic smoking and poor lifestyle over many years.

 In his final years, he suffered from bronchitis, is believed to have weighed over 20 stone and had several heart attacks. He passed away on the 6th of May 1910 at 68 years of age. With this, Mary’s husband immediately became king as King George V of the United Kingdom and also emperor of India. Mary became Queen Consort of the UK and Empress of India.

 Although her first baptismal name was Victoria, she adopted the regal name Mary. Not only because she had gone by May instead of Mary to those who knew her for her entire life, but also out of deference to the legacy of her cousin, Queen Victoria. George and Mary’s coronation did not take place until the 22nd of June, 1911. It wasn’t entirely unusual for a large period of time to elapse between the accession of a new monarch and the coronation.

 The 14 months in George’s case was partly owing to the fact that Britain was mired in a constitutional crisis when he became king in the early summer of 1910. one brought about by the unprecedented decision of the House of Lords to block the people’s budget, a fiscal program designed to redistribute wealth in Britain and introduce labor and social reforms.

 Only when that was resolved could planning for the coronation go ahead. It was a spectacular event in many ways. The last royal coronation before the first world war and so the last time that many of the royal houses of Europe like the Hapsburgs, the Romanoffs and the Hohans were still rulers of their nations as they arrived in London for a British coronation.

Mary wore a cream colored coronation gown which bore emblems representing Britain’s empire like the Star of India and a rose, thistle and shamrock to symbolize England, Scotland and Ireland. It was also the last coronation in England in which a monarch and consort would be crowned as rulers of a united Ireland under British rule.

In a way, Mary and George had two coronations. As soon as the first one was over in England, the new king and queen intensified the planning for the second one. It would take place on the other side of the world in India. The Delhi Derba or court of Delhi as it was known was held in the capital of the British Raj, the city of Delhi.

 It was the third Delhi Derba. The first had been held back in 1877 to mark the occasion of Queen Victoria being given the title of Empress of India. She had not attended in person. A second Delhi Derba was held in 1903 to celebrate the accession of Edward 7th as emperor of India 2 years earlier. Again, Edward did not attend.

So when George and Mary sailed from Portsmouth on the 11th of November 1911 for India, they did so as the first king and queen who were going to attend a Delhi Derber in person. They arrived at Delhi 4 weeks later. The main event of the Delhi Dhaba was held on the 12th of December 1911 at Coronation Park in Delhi.

 The British Raj had been formed out of many principalities and sultenates over a period of more than a century and some of these indigenous lords retained a great status within British India. Therefore, the Derba was an opportunity for thousands of Indian aristocrats and officials to formally acknowledge George and Mary as the emperor and empress of India.

 The following day, Mary and her husband appeared at the balcony of the Red Fort in Day, the historic seat of the Mughal empress. There they waved to half a million people who had turned out to see their new rulers. After the Derba, Mary and George proceeded on to Nepal. The whole state visit to India was filmed and released afterwards as a motion picture named with Our King and Queen through India.

After returning home following the India trip and the Delhi Derba, Mary’s approach to being queen consort became more apparent to the British public. There were some differences that were noticed immediately. Edward IIIth and his consort, Queen Alexandra, had acted quite independently of one another. George and Mary quickly made it clear that they were a kind of team.

 Indeed, George looked to his wife for leadership on many issues. To put it plumply, Mary was more intelligent than her husband and was also a lot more informed on social issues. She also mixed better with the public and royal staff. Whereas George was at his most comfortable when engaging in his hobbies away from the limelight of London and the court.

Simply put, Mary was better suited to being queen than he was to being king, and he relied heavily on her. She pushed him to engage more with a wide range of social issues. The 19th century had been a time of appalling labor practices when children worked in factories, adult men were expected to work 70 or 80 hours a week, and urban poverty was endemic in some of the country’s larger cities.

 By the 1910s, a great amount of work had been done to reform these issues. But there were still communities in England in the very heart of the great British Empire that were steeped in poverty. Mary encouraged George to take an interest in these issues. When a national strike was entered into by coal miners across Britain in 1912, the king and queen visited the coal mines at Gloran in South Wales and other places.

On the other hand, Mary was not exactly receptive to the militant suffragist movement that was campaigning for women to be given the right to vote in British elections. In 1913, she and George were present at the Epsom Derby when a suffragette Emily Davidson ran out onto the track during the race in front of the king’s horse Amler.

 Davidson was killed after being knocked down by the speeding horses. Though it seems strange in retrospect, militant action like this turned many people against the suffragist movement at the time. Mary’s early years as queen were marked by crisis after crisis in the political affairs of Europe. Things had been tense for many years already.

 Colonial rivalry, for instance, was a constant source of friction between the European powers. And back in the winter of 1898, the British and French had nearly ended up at war with each other over the FODA incident in the Sudan in Africa. Increasingly though, the great rival was the German Empire, a power with which the British was locked in a naval arms race from the mid 1900s onwards.

 A strange development as Germany could never hope to eclipse the British Royal Navy. Yet, while there were many tensions between Britain and other countries, in the end, the thing which dragged the continent to war was a political assassination in the Balkans, which agitated the wider issue of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empire’s efforts to acquire influence there as the Ottoman Empire’s four centuries long rule over the southeastern corner of Europe collapsed.

 As this occurred, there was a cascade of declarations of war in late July and early August 1914. The First World War was a peculiar family affair. Mary, like the rest of the royal family, had a lot of German heritage. Now, Britain was at war with Germany. Indeed, her husband was the first cousin of Wilhelm II, Kaiser of the German Empire.

 He had the same relationship with Zar Nicholas II of Russia with whom the British were allied. There were many other royal links. Queen Marie of Romania, for instance, was another royal cousin and prior to Mary marrying George. There had been a proposal that Marie would do so. Romania finally entered the war on the British side in 1916.

These family affairs weighed heavily on the royals during the conflict that engulfed Europe in the mid 1910s. Mary believed that she had an important role to play in the war. In her diary in early August, just days after Britain had joined the conflict, she noted the need to contribute to various relief schemes like supporting the families of those young men who were now headed off to France to fight the Germans in the trenches and to support the hospitals that would soon be caring for the hundreds of thousands of sick and

wounded men. A lot of her activity early on centered on the Needlework Guild, renamed the Queen Mary Needlework Guild. Through her patronage, a small battalion of women set to work knitting various garments for charities and foundations like the Red Cross, the St. John Ambulance, and the National Relief Fund.

A visitor to St. James’s Palace in 1915 would have seen mounds of packages waiting to be sent out. She also coordinated her efforts with various groups to ensure that women were employed on the home front while the men headed off to war. This led to the formation of a very unusual alliance with the secretary of the women’s trade union league, Mary MacArthur.

 They developed a close almost friendly relationship as they coordinated their efforts in 1914 and 1915. This was highly unusual for the time. Trade unions were still viewed as dangerous instruments of socialism and the royals were universally supporters of the established political parties, the conservatives or tories and the liberals.

 Mary’s workload increased dramatically overall during the war years. The royal staff later suggested she attended roughly three times as many engagements as was typical in peace time. She also spearheaded the move to impose rationing and frugality amongst the royals. The royal family could not be seen to be continuing to live in luxury while ordinary British people eaked out an existence and sent their sons off to France to die.

 This was not out of the ordinary for Mary, who despite being a royal and now a queen consort, was known for avoiding extravagance. Mary’s service to the country was honored in an unusual way after the war. She was gifted a doll’s house by the nation. This wasn’t any doll’s house, though. The idea for this came from Princess Marie Louise Oshles Vikstein, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and a cousin of George and Mary.

 She was a few years younger than Mary and they had grown up together and remained friends in their adult years. Marie Louise believed Mary would enjoy an unusual decorative gift and that she should be honored for her admirable service during the war. She contacted a well-known architect, Sir Edward Lutch, and they began designing the doll’s house in 1921 with the help of a committee.

 When this is described as a doll’s house, it should be noted that it was much larger than the average doll’s house. It was built on the scale of 1 in to 1 ft. So the whole thing is over a meter and a half high, a meter wide, and 66 cm deep with rooms arranged over four floors resembling an Edwardian manor. Over the next 3 years, hundreds of trades people worked on it, and artists and writers were employed to add artistic flare to the whole endeavor.

 An extraordinary level of detail is found throughout. For instance, tiny little books found on a bookshelf opened up to reveal miniature bits of writing by writers commissioned for the project. Miniature portrait paintings were painted of the king and queen and hung on the walls of the main salon, and extremely precise miniature cutlery adorned a table in the dining room downstairs.

There was even a wine celler with miniature bottles of wine and brandy that if opened contained a tiny amount of alcohol in each. Queen Mary’s doll’s house was presented to her in 1924 and the following year it was installed as the centerpiece of its own room in Windsor Castle where it can be visited today. With the end of the war, some normality returned to royal life.

 At the same time, it was a tense period for royal families all over the continent. The Russian Revolution had seen the Romanoff dynasty there overthrown and violently murdered. The Hapsburgs who had created the Austrian state as their family patrimony had been overthrown and the Austrohungarian Empire had fragmented into several countries.

 The German imperial family was gone and the Kaiser was in exile in the Netherlands. Portugal had lost its monarchy in 1910 and Spain would follow suit in 1931. There seemed little chance that the constitutional monarchy would be overthrown in Britain. But there was a lot of unrest after the war as men who had fought in the trenches of France for years returned to a country with high unemployment and growing support for the labor movement as communist regimes emerged all across the continent.

 Faced with such a situation, the royals stepped up their efforts to engage with the British public in the 1920s. At Buckingham Palace, Mary’s husband decided to keep a chart that chronicled the family’s public engagements and work with the community. Mary was especially committed to this. She became a great patron of British hospitals in the 1920s and organizations which looked towards the welfare of children.

 The royal secretarial staff wrote about the new mission, which was to reform the monarchy so that the royals appeared as individuals who didn’t simply rule from on high at Buckingham Palace, but were committed to the betterment of the lives of the British people. To this end, Mary patronized a lot of projects which aimed to try and improve living standards within workingclass communities.

 Her and George’s efforts were not in vain. They have the unusual distinction that the monarchy was more popular at the end of the reign than it was at the beginning. Usually, it tended to work the other way around with a burst of excitement for a new monarch and royal family at the start of a reign and then a more nause attitude developing over time, especially if a king or queen ruled for many, many years.

Mary managed to oversee this work in the 1920s despite an often difficult family environment. By then their living children had all entered their adult years. In several instances there were no problems. The second eldest son, Albert, was reserved and beautiful. He married early and it was a good match with Lady Elizabeth Bose Lime.

 He also started working to overcome a speech impediment which dented his confidence and impacted on his royal duties. Similarly, their eldest daughter, Princess Mary, married in 1922 to Henry Lassel’s and was already a responsible member of the royal family by that time. She had for instance been the first member of the family to visit France after the armistice joined the first world war was agreed on the 11th of November 1918.

Just 9 days later, Princess Mary was in France to visit wounded British soldiers in the field hospitals near the Western Front. While she and Albert were causes for pride in their parents, there were issues with the other children. Henry didn’t marry and instead began an affair with Barl Markham, which began in Kenya in 1928 and continued back in London with alcohol soaked parties at the Groner Hotel.

George, Duke of Kent, also did not marry young and was rumored to have fathered an illegitimate child in the mid 1920s. But the gravest concern for the king and queen was their eldest child, the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, Edward. He did not marry as his 20ies and 30s came and went.

 The king’s relationship became fraught with Edward as a result. By all accounts, Mary disassociated herself from the problem and never spoke to Edward about his relationships or his failure to marry and produce an heir. Once the lean years of the war and the postwar years ended and a new era of prosperity began in the mid 1920s, Mary devoted a lot of her time and attention to becoming a patron of the arts.

 The queen had developed a great interest in art history in her youth after living for a while in the Florence and spending time in its great galleries and museums. She had also absorbed this interest from her mother. But unlike her mother, Mary had the financial firepower to be able to indulge this interest in a very serious way.

 As queen consort, she began building up the Royal Art Collection, a collection assembled over centuries, which is the largest private art collection anywhere in the world today. Mary acquired many pieces over the years. A lot of these were portraits of any kind of the royal family or some of the huge numbers of historical paintings that had been fashionable in the 19th century.

 It must be said that she didn’t have a fantastic eye. Mary preferred quantity and not quality. Few works she acquired could compare with the masterworks acquired by monarchs like King Charles I and his son King Charles II in the 17th century. It was the son of that duo, for example, who acquired hundreds of drawings and sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, one of the jewels of the royal collection to this day.

 Not everything Mary acquired were paintings. For instance, she had an interest in jade statues, many from China at a time when an interest in the Far East was abounding. The number of ornate fab eggs in the royal collection was also increased by Mary. A large proportion of what she acquired was themed around birds.

 Elsewhere, she simply acted to reorganize and consolidate the existing collection. Several predecessors had not displayed much interest in the royal collection, and it needed some working on to organize it properly. Mary’s husband was happy to leave her, even though Mary spent quite a lot of money on the work she acquired. He seems to have viewed her hobby as a parallel one to his interest in stamp collecting.

Perhaps someone should have pointed out to him that paintings by Europe’s master painters were generally a good deal more expensive than stamps. Mary’s prolific collecting habits have led to accusations in modern times that she stole a sizable amount of the material that she added to the royal collection and was in essence a kleptomaniac, a compulsive stealer.

 For instance, she was portrayed in one recent television series stealing objects from the houses of members of the British aristocracy when visiting their homes. There is actually a large kernel of truth to this. As we have seen, Mary was a compulsive collector of all kinds of objects. Furthermore, she was known on occasion when visiting the homes of others to cast her eye on a particular object and express her liking for it, indicating that she would like to be gifted it.

 This does seem to have been with a view to having her obliging host let her have it. But the idea that the Queen of Britain and Empress of India was often found rumaging through the drawers of her dinner host’s drawing room for objects to put in her purse is excessive. Mary was instead inclined to overly indulge a centuries old practice whereby the royal family were given gifts by members of the aristocracy or people looking to curry favor with them.

At the same time, these gifts were usually repaid in some way through various types of royal patronage. And in addition to this, it could be argued that where she acquired items for the royal collection that she was not actually trying to acquire them for herself. The royal collection is owned by the crown in trust for future generations.

 So, it was not as though Mary’s collecting habits were designed to benefit herself exclusively. There was arguably a different motive at work in Mary’s compulsive collecting habits. Perhaps she was trying to distract herself from her husband’s ailing health. In 1915, during the war, he fell from a horse while reviewing a division of troops in France.

 On top of this, he suffered from severe respiratory issues that were made worse by his chain smoking. By the 1920s, he was prematurely aged. His doctors prescribed rest and a healthier lifestyle to no avail. In 1928, he suffered a serious bout of illness, and he developed septasemia next to one of his lungs.

 From that point onwards, he was never in good health. George was often run down and energyless and confined to bed for extended periods of time. In the 1930s, Mary met this predicament with a stoic determination. She was self-controlled and didn’t reveal her emotions to anyone. In fact, her lack of emotion led many to question what she was bottling up.

 An aggravating factor in all of this was that Edward was clearly not developing the kind of maturity and character needed to become king if George died soon. Mary’s husband struggled on though. On the 6th of May 1935, he celebrated his silver jubilee a quarter of a century as monarch with Mary by his side. This was the first silver jubilee celebrated by a British monarch.

 The concept of a golden jubilee marking 50 years on the throne had been created back in the reign of George III and Victoria had celebrated the same 50-year mark in 1887. There was a clear reason why a silver jubilee was marked for George V. There was no possibility he would reach his 50th year. In his speech, he gave wholesome praise to Mary as his consort.

John St. Helander painted individual portraits of king and queen to mark the occasion. It was the last major act of the reign and of Mary’s time as queen consort. George died 8 months later on the 20th of January 1936. His physician gave him a lethal injection of a cocktail of drugs to speed his death as Mary’s husband was in a great deal of suffering, an action which has aroused some controversy over the years.

The death of Mary’s husband was followed by a year of crisis. In line with royal norms, her eldest son succeeded as King Edward VIII. Edward had always been a problematic heir to the throne. He was a playboy who spent money lavishly during the 1920s and 1930s and who socialized a lot.

 As we have seen in his younger years, he refused to marry and settle down, something which caused a rift between him and his father in particular. It was the duty of a prince of Wales and heir to the throne to marry and start a family to ensure the continuity of the royal line. In refusing to do so, Edward was neglecting one of his primary duties.

 He turned 40 years in 1934, by which time he should have married. To his mother and father’s constonation, it was becoming evident by then that Edward was determined to continue a relationship which he had begun with Wallace Simpson. She was an American socialite who had already been married and divorced once and who was still married to her second husband Ernie Simpson when she became involved with Edward.

 The affair was still ongoing when Edward ascended to the throne early in 1936. The new king’s refusal to end the affair led to the abdication crisis in the autumn of 1936. There were several things that were issues here that would not be concerns today. Notably, the fact that Wallace was a non- noble, and so this would constitute a morganetic marriage to a commoner if Edward went ahead and married Simpson.

 Her status as a divorcee and an American were also problematic and so Britain was plunged into the abdication crisis just months into the new reign. Mary’s attitude towards the developing crisis was complex. As she acclimatized to her new position as Queen Darajger, the former queen consort and widow of a deceased king, she remained a breast of the situation with Edward, receiving regular updates on what he was doing and what his next actions with regard to Simpson might be.

 She, like almost everyone else, was surprised during the spring and summer of 1936, as Edward did not end the relationship and dug his heels in. In the late summer, she was updated as photos were made available of Edward and Wallace holidaying in the Mediterranean in Greece and Yugoslavia. When Edward returned home, he met his mother for dinner at Buckingham Palace in September and 2 weeks later at a family gathering at Malbor House.

 She is understood to have not pressed him during those meetings about what he ultimately intended to do. Many people appear to have been urging Mary to intervene more directly with her son before news of the scandal was made public by the British newspapers. What is most peculiar is that Mary was in touch with members of the government cabinet trying to block Wallace’s divorce from her second husband.

 If she couldn’t divorce Ernest, then she could not marry Edward. Yet Mary didn’t raise these matters directly with Edward, pointing towards the distance between mother and son. The marriage issue became a full-blown crisis in November. It was only then that Mary intervened directly. She invited Edward for tea and implored him to consider his younger brother Albert’s situation.

 He had not been brought up as the heir and if the crisis resulted in Edward having to abdicate, Albert would suddenly be thrust into becoming king. In the end, that is exactly what happened. On the night of the 11th of December 1936, Edward abdicated in a BBC radio broadcast and Albert succeeded as King George V 6th.

 Edward went on to marry Wallace Simpson. The pair led a peculiar life thereafter, much of it in Paris and including a controversial visit to Nazi Germany in 1937. The abdication crisis meant that Mary could not adapt to life as Queen Daajger, the widow of a deceased king, immediately in 1936. It was only once Albert had become King George V 6th and the situation became more stable in 1937 that she was able to retire as it were.

 She continued her work with various artistic institutions. Though there was less pressure on her now that a new queen, her daughter-in-law, had taken up that position. As Queen Dger, she enjoyed attending the theater and various exhibitions and museums. She also became a frequent attendee at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London during the summers, a role she continued after the Second World War.

 In 1948, she presented the winners with their trophies. Mary had actually first established the ties between the royal family and the tournament at Wimbledon all the way back in 1906 when they attended as Prince and Princess of Wales. That link continues down to the present day. And since 2017, Catherine, Princess of Wales, has been the patron of the Lawn Tennis Association, which runs the championships at Wimbledon.

Beyond this, Mary’s first years as Queen Darger involved spending more time with her grandchildren and a near fatal car accident. In May 1939, when she was being driven through Putney in London with Lord Claude Hamilton and Lady Constants Mils Gascal, a truck that was carrying a large load of steel tubes overturned right next to the car Mary was in.

 The car was turned on its side and the Queen Dger eventually ended up being helped out using a ladder. It made national news and the papers got a lot of coverage out of the fact that Mary was overheard to say that she needed a cup of tea right after extricating herself from the crashed vehicle. Mary’s involvement with Wimbledon had a curious link to developments on the continent.

 In 1935, 1936, and 1937, the runner up each year in the men’s singles tournament was Gotfrieded von Cra, a German who won the French Open, another of the Grand Slam tennis tournaments, on two occasions, in 1934 and 1936. Von Creme might have been forced to play under the flag of Nazi Germany, and the regime exploited his successes in London and Paris to the greatest extent it could.

 But von Cra was no supporter of Nazism and refused to join the Nazi party, despite being pressured to do so. His appearance in the Wimbledon finals came in years when anxiety about his nation’s actions was growing in England. Mary was just as aware of this as anyone else. Like the rest of the royal family, she was perturbed when Edward and Wallace Simpson decided to visit Germany and meet the Nazi leadership a year after his abdication in a much publicized event, which the British government and the royal family made clear was not an official state visit of

any kind. It became especially controversial when the Nazis began the speedy race to war in the months that followed, annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia before the war broke out following their invasion of Poland in September 1939. The elderly and children were evacuated from London for much of the war, particularly so once the German Blitz, the bombing campaign, began in the autumn of 1940.

Mary spent much of the conflict at Badington in Gsters. She continued her royal duties visiting hospitals and also meeting groups of children and others who had been evacuated from London to the countryside. The Queen Darajjo also spent much of the war busying her hands by knitting an elaborate carpet.

 After the war, it was sold to a women’s organization in Canada for the huge sum of £100,000. Mary donated the money to the British exjecker, which badly needed it after a financially ruinous conflict. The Second World War came to an end in Europe in May 1945, though it would continue against Japan in the Far East for another 4 months.

Mary was in her late 70s by the time it ended. In the years that followed, she would be a witness to all of the old truths about Britain and its role in the world beginning to crumble. The British Empire had already been in decline prior to the war. Much of this was based on the demographic realities of the United Kingdom.

 This was a small country with a limited population on the periphery of Europe. Its ascent as the world’s superpower in the 19th century was based on the technological advantages it acquired as a result of the scientific and industrial revolutions, the dynamism of the British people, and the power of the British Royal Navy. By the early 20th century, as the technologies which Britain and other European nations had developed spread around the world, it became more and more difficult to retain control over vast parts of the globe and huge populations.

Moreover, although Britain was an imperial power, the political classes were receptive to calls for self-determination within different parts of the empire. In the aftermath of the war, it began to dismantle its empire. The speed with which it did so was surprising. In 1947, Mary watched as independence was granted to the British Raj where she and George has celebrated the Delhi Dhaba back in 1911.

 Unfortunately, it descended into religious violence in the process between Muslims and Hindus and two major nations, Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India emerged. All across Africa, there were calls for independence in colonies like Nigeria and Kenya. Mary would not live long enough to see these claims realized in most countries, though she did witness the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and the end of British involvement in Kai’s affairs.

On the domestic front, Mary continued to contribute to the activities of the royal family even though she was now in her late 70s and aging. She was not a fan of the Labor government which came to power within weeks of the end of the Second World War in Europe, ousting Winston Churchill’s administration despite his immensely successful wartime leadership.

 Mary was, for instance, opposed to the plans to set up a national health service as a cornerstone of the new welfare state, which was planned to avoid any future descent into extremist politics, such as had brought the Nazis to power in Germany in the midst of the Great Depression. It was not that she was opposed to the very concept of ready access to health care for the less affluent in society.

 Mary simply believed that this could best be achieved through charitable activity rather than the state becoming involved to manage it. This was in keeping with her outlook as queen consort in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s that the new modern monarchy should be an instrument of welfare and charity. There were personal worries and tragedies for her as well during these years.

 Mary had buried one son when John died in childhood all the way back in 1919. In 1942, she had buried a second when George, Duke of Kent, not to be confused with his brother Albert, who adopted George as his regal name, was killed in a plane crash near Dunbeath in Scotland. After the war, King George V 6th became prematurely unwell.

 Like his grandfather and father before him, he was suffering from severe respiratory problems that were worsened by his chain smoking. After years of ill health, he died on the 6th of February, 1952. Mary was one of the first to kiss the hand of her granddaughter and recognize her as Queen Elizabeth II. Mary’s own health was failing by the time Elizabeth ascended to the throne.

She would not live long enough to see her granddaughter crowned. The coronation was scheduled for the 2nd of June 1953. As the months went by after George’s death, it became more likely that his mother would not live to see the new queen crowned. Mary turned 85 in May 1952, a ripe old age in the midentth century when life expecties, even for those with access to the best health care available, was a few years less than it is today.

 She was suffering from a range of health issues, foremost amongst which was a gastric stomach problem. Mary also seemed to have lost some of her drive to live longer, having been affected by burying the third of her children. By early 1953, she was largely confined to bed, rarely rose out of it, and complained of having the curtains opened in her final residence, Mulra House, in London, as the light impacted on her eyes.

 She suffered a hemorrhage early on the 24th of March. Things declined rapidly in the hours that followed, and an announcement by the royal establishment that she was gravely ill was followed within hours by another that she had passed away peacefully in her sleep not long after 10 p.m. An autopsy subsequently revealed that lung cancer had contributed to her death.

 The following day, Winston Churchill, back serving as prime minister, stated that with her passing, the last major link to the glory days of Queen Victoria had passed from the world. The former queen’s remains lay in state for several days afterwards. As visiting European dignitaries and hundreds of thousands of British people came to pay their respects, the official funeral was held at St.

 George’s Chapel at Windsa on the 31st of March 1953 after which her remains were interred in the Royal Crypt alongside her husband who had lained there for 17 years. At the same time, a memorial service was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London for the mourners there. Mary’s legacy and memory lives on in Britain today and beyond its shores across the former parts of the empire.

Her name, for instance, is attached to one of Britain’s most eminent colleges. On the 25th of February, 1931, a fire had destroyed the Queen’s Hall of East London College. A new site was chosen to replace the building next to the People’s Palace. Various names were proposed for the site, including the generic Queen’s College and Victoria College.

 In the end, the name Queen Mary College was chosen and Mary herself presented the formal charter of incorporation when the building work was completed in 1934. Hence, one of London’s leading educational establishments is not actually named after Queen Mary the 1 or Queen Mary II as many people often assume, but the Queen consult Mary of Tech.

 On the other side of the world, Queen Mary College in Lahore in Pakistan is also named after her. There are many other buildings and institutions which similarly bear her name. The wife of George V has also featured in numerous books, plays, films, and television series. Several of these focused on the abdication crisis.

 Miranda Richardson depicted her in a sympathetic manner in The Lost Prince, a series on the more obscure story of Prince John and his death as a child. Claire Bloom played Mary in the King’s Speech, the story of her son Albert’s speech impediment and how he overcame it to become King George V 6th and Britain’s wartime king.

 Eene Atkins has the peculiar distinction of having played Mary twice in two different productions. In 2002 in Bertie and Elizabeth and more recently in The Crown. Mary of Tech’s life and time as Queen Consort were very surprising in some respects. When she was born back in 1867 as the daughter of a second tier branch of the British royal family, her parents and most others that knew her assumed that she would marry an important duke or minor prince and head off to the continent to live out a comfortable life in Germany or the Balkans or some other

country. The trajectory of her life was changed when her cousin, Queen Victoria, decided that she should instead marry her grandson, the second in line to the throne, Albert Victor. When he died before that union could come about, Mary was instead married to Albert’s replacement in the line of succession, George.

 From there it was a steady ascent to become Duchess of York in 1893, then Princess of Wales in 1901, and finally Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India in 1910. She held those positions for just over a quarter of a century through the First World War, the triumph of Britain in its aftermath, and the steady decline of empire that was already setting in during the 1920s and 1930s.

She was a modern kind of queen who devoted a lot of her energy to charitable causes and to making a connection between the royal family and the common people of Britain. Behind closed doors, her family life was complex. She and George loved their children, but George was old-fashioned and a disciplinarian. The children looked to Mary for a gentle form of parenting.

 The relationships were often strained, especially so with Edward, who refused to marry and lived a playboy lifestyle instead, despite being the next in line to the throne. In the end, the death of Mary’s husband in 1936 set off an abdication crisis which probably ended well for all involved when Albert soon became king as George V 6th.

 Mary’s later years were lived against the backdrop of another world war and then the postwar reconstruction of Britain. It was a very different world that mourned her passing in 1953 than the one she was born into 86 years earlier. Mary was one of the key figures in ensuring the monarchy navigated those changes successfully. What do you think of Mary of Tech? Should she be seen as a respectable member of the royal family? Or do recent revelations about her alleged kleptomania cast her in a different light? Please let us know in the comment

section. And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching. King George V and Mary of Tech were the first monarchs of the renamed House of Windsor. Although there was no real break in the line of succession and the royal family’s name was changed purely for political reasons during the war, it was fitting in some ways that a new royal dynasty was created in 1917 as George and Mary presided over a new kind of monarchy.

 Queen Victoria had represented Britain at the height of empire in the 19th century, a country in which the first railway tracks had yet to be laid down when she was born and in which horses, not automobiles, still dominated the streets of London when she died. Her son’s reign was brief, and Edward IIth was not the most substantial or influential of monarchs.

 As a consequence of all of this, it really fell to George V and Mary of Tech to begin modernizing the monarchy for the 20th century. During their time as king and queen, the institution of the monarchy shifted from being a symbol of British imperial power to become more of a charitable and moral institution that provided symbolic leadership within Britain.

 Their success was in managing this transition during a time of war and grave uncertainty.