The Constitutional King: George V
The future King-Emperor George V, who would reign from 1910 to 1936, was born at Marlborough House, the palatial London residence of his parents, on 3 June 1865, and he would be christened Prince George Frederick Ernest Albert. He was the second son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales and later King Edward VII, otherwise known as “Bertie,” and Princess Alexandra, daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark and always called “Alix.” His paternal grandmother was the bereaved but intimidating Queen Victoria. At the time of Prince George’s birth, the royal house of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was at the apex of the preeminent industrial, financial, imperial, and maritime nation in the world.
There was a problem with the succession. Prince George’s older brother Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward (known as “Eddy”) was quiet, delicate, lethargic, apathetic, and a slow developer (he may, indeed, have suffered from what would now be termed attention deficit disorder). But despite Eddy’s shortcomings, it seemed inevitable he would one day inherit the throne, and this in turn meant that, as a younger son, Prince George lived the first twenty-six years of his life with no expectation of ever becoming king: like many monarchs whose reigns later turned out well, he was not born to succeed.
For schooling, the two young princes were entrusted to a young curate more interested in strict discipline and in ingratiating himself with royalty than in educating his charges. The non-results of this non-education were soon apparent. Prince George would always write in a slow, deliberate, childlike hand, and his spelling was permanently insecure.
A naval education was deemed to
