GEORGE V

The life of a reluctant monarch.

Drawing on prodigious research, historian Ridley brings astute sensitivity to her brisk, authoritative biography of George V (1865-1936), an “unpromising prince” who evolved “into a statesman king and the founder of the modern monarchy.” Badly educated, raised by a mother who alternately smothered and neglected him and a father who infantilized him, George was not groomed to be king but rather a naval officer. His elder brother’s sudden death from typhoid, however, put him next in line. Ridley does not inflate the personality of a man who preferred an ordered life, simple food, and the pleasures of shooting birds and collecting stamps. As a father, he bullied his sons, especially his eldest, David, the future Edward VIII; as a husband, he could be boring and sometimes frustratingly opaque. “The biographer searches George’s writing in vain for an inner life,” Ridley notes. Still, he rose to the many challenges of his reign, steering the monarchy through a constitutional crisis, the devastation and privations of World War I, the revolution that ended in the murder of his cousin Czar Nicholas II, “the collapse of dynastic Europe, Irish Home Rule, strikes, Bolshevism, the rise of the Labour Party and the Great Depression—only to be outmaneuvered by an American divorcee.” Ascending to the throne in 1911, after his father’s unexpected death, he became an “arbitrator-monarch,” confronting a host of political and Parliamentary problems. During the war, he added the role of “a service monarchy, making direct contact with ordinary people, similar to the institution as it is today.” Ridley makes Queen Mary, too often relegated to the shadows in biographies of her husband, central to this one, debunking the “royal myth” of her indifference and coldness to her children; elaborating on her contributions to British culture; and portraying her as strong, decisive, and regal.

An engrossing history of an eventful reign.