King George V

"Litotes sounds like a tropical disease but in fact it is confirmation of the affirmative by the denial of the negative, as in the line, “The King was not unknown for toying with his food”. What is so wonderful about Kenneth Rose’s book that it is again very funny. He writes things like: “It was always a memorable day when the King visited an exhibition. At the opening of the Tate Gallery extension he stood before the French Impressionists and called out to the Queen, ‘Here is something to make you laugh, Mary’. In the National Gallery he shook his stick at a Cézanne. In another room he confided to the director, ‘I tell you that Turner was mad. My grandmother always said so!’… The King’s instinctive dislike of modern painting was reinforced by the treatment he received from leading artists…” It is the dry and wry way of writing that I like very much. He paints a wonderful picture and throws off what must have been months and months of research very lightly. Yes. I remember someone saying about his book that there was not a dull word about an essentially very dull monarch, which is a great achievement. And aside from the funny bits there is a lot of it of great merit as well. The book revealed that really the King had not rescued the Tsar, at which point the Queen Mother’s private secretary told Kenneth Rose, ‘Your chances of an MVO [honour] have just floated down to 20 to one!’ Rose also revealed in a subsequent edition of the book the fact that [the royal doctor] Lord Dawson murdered King George V by sticking a needle filled with morphine into his neck in order to speed his death so it would reach the first edition of The Times , which was seen as more seemly than the evening papers."

"My principal reason for putting Rose’s study of George V on my list is that I consider it the best royal biography ever written. It is a classic which is full of insight and humanity, along with dry wit and revelation. There had previously been an official biography of George V by Harold Nicolson, and Kenneth Rose was able to get hold of the Nicolson papers, where he discovered quite a lot of material that Nicolson had diplomatically left out. It was Kenneth Rose who revealed that the British government had a plan to rescue the deposed Russian royal family, and that it was stopped by King George V and Queen Mary because they thought that bringing the Tsar and his wife to England would destabilise the British monarchy. In 1917 and 1918 the Russian monarchy vanished, the German monarchy vanished and the Austrian monarchy went as well. The three great remaining European monarchies were swept away. Yes. People at Buckingham Palace tried to stop Kenneth publishing this revelation, and other revelations in the book, until his manuscript was shown to the Queen. ‘Let him publish,’ she wrote across the top of the draft, without requesting a single change. Elizabeth II was a very open-minded person who saw that the facts were the facts. She did not see the film The King’s Speech about her father’s problem with stuttering, and there were some people in the family who disapproved of it. But the basic facts of the film about Lionel Logue, the Australian speech therapist, were all revealed in the official biography of George VI, which the Queen originally commissioned and approved. She was very keen that these details should come out. I think that the Queen learnt her public relations skills from George V. On the outside he was very stuffy and conventional, but he was also very nimble and responsive. He grasped that in order for the monarchy to survive it was crucially important that it should no longer sit on top of some social pyramid of aristocracy, middle class and lower class. That was all crumbling in the early 20th century. If the monarchy was to survive, its basic support had to come from the bottom. The monarch had to create and foster a direct personal link with the people. Yes, and George V also did. He started the royal broadcasts and giving out honours such as OBEs and MBEs, which are essentially titles, distinctions and medals for ordinary civilian folk. Yes. George V did not get on very well with his own children. He was a very gruff, old-fashioned parent. But, as is often the case with such parents, he was a loving and indulgent grandfather."