Sarah Bradford - George VI: The Dutiful King

Two weeks after the death of King George VI on 6 February 1952, Ren Massigli, Ambassador of France to the Court of St Jamess, wrote a considered report on the life and reign of the late King for the information of his Foreign Minister, Maurice Schumann. If the greatness of a King, he wrote, can be measured by the extent to which his qualities correspond to the needs of a nation at a given moment in its history, then George VI was a great King, and perhaps a very great King. George VI reigned through the most critical times for his House of Windsor, for his country and, indeed, for the world. Acceding to the throne in the unprecedented circumstances of his brothers abdication, he was immediately faced by the turmoil in European politics in the years leading up to the Second World War, six years of war itself, followed by a period of austerity, social transformation and loss of Empire. Nor were public problems the only or, even for him, the most difficult with which he had to contend. He suffered from that most debilitating handicap for a man in public life, a stammer, and, arising from that, a shyness which could make public occasions painful. As if that were not enough, he succeeded a brother who had been idolized as no royal prince has been either before or since and in whose shadow he had lived almost since the day he was born. With courage, determination, dedication and a fine understanding of the nature and meaning of constitutional kingship, he succeeded in leaving to his daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, in Massiglis judgement, a throne more stable than England has known throughout almost her entire history. At his funeral the wreath from his old companion-in-arms and Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, bore the simple inscription For Valour.

Fifty years after the Kings death, his daughter and successor celebrates her Golden Jubilee. No understanding of Elizabeth can be complete without comprehension of the degree to which she was influenced by her father. Both as a person and a sovereign, he was her role model, and there was an unprecedented continuity in ethos between the reigns of George VI and Elizabeth II. As Elizabeth completes fifty years on the throne, it is timely to review the reign of her father which formed her own concept of her role.

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Heritage

The British Crown is the greatest inheritance a man can have.

W.E. G LADSTONE ,

P RINCE Albert Frederick Arthur George of York came almost apologetically into a world largely ruled by his relations. The latest member of the British royal family had chosen to be born at 3.10 a.m. on 14 December 1895, a date traditionally held sacred in the family as Mausoleum Day, the anniversary of the death from typhoid of his German great-grandfather, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, thirty-four years before, and the death from diphtheria seventeen years later of Prince Alberts and Queen Victorias third child, Princess Alice of Hesse.

The first thought of the babys father, Prince George, Duke of York, was not so much joy at the birth of his second son as apprehension at the reaction of the childs great-grandmother, Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, then at Windsor Castle preparing to spend the dreaded anniversary in the deepest mourning. The tiny, plump, seventy-six-year-old widow exercised an influence over her family quite disproportionate to her physical stature. Her children and her grandchildren lived in awe of her; her eldest son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the new-born Princes grandfather, still sweated with nerves when hauled over the coals by his formidable mother. From Windsor he wrote to his son, Prince George:

Grandmama was rather distressed that this happy event should have taken place on a darkly sad anniversary for us, but I think as well as most of us in the family here that it will break the spell of this most unlucky date.