Philip Ziegler - George VI (Penguin Monarchs): The Dutiful King

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Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2014

Copyright Philip Ziegler, 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design by Pentagram
Jacket art by David Downton

ISBN: 978-0-141-97738-6

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THE HOUSES OF WESSEX AND DENMARK

THE HOUSES OF NORMANDY, BLOIS AND ANJOU

THE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET

THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK

THE HOUSE OF TUDOR

THE HOUSE OF STUART

THE HOUSE OF HANOVER

THE HOUSES OF SAXE-COBURG & GOTHA AND WINDSOR

If Ethelred was notoriously Unready and Alfred Great, King George VI should bear the designation of George the Dutiful. Throughout his life he dedicated himself to the pursuit of what he thought he ought to be doing rather than what he wanted to do. Inarticulate and loathing any sort of public appearance, he accepted that it was his destiny to figure regularly and conspicuously in the public eye, gritted his teeth, largely conquered his crippling stammer and got on with it. Deeply conservative with a small c and, if he had been free to vote, with a capital C as well, he realized that he must work with the Labour ministers of 1945 and win their trust and respect. Ferociously short-tempered, he learned not merely to suffer fools gladly but to remain calm in the face of what he sometimes felt was almost intolerable provocation. Home-loving and not deriving from travel the intellectual stimulus which some people find in it, he nevertheless resignedly undertook laborious journeys around the world in the service of his country. A passionate imperialist, he presided with only muted complaint over policies which he realized must lead to the disintegration of the British Empire. It was, in many ways, a ghastly life; yet at least he could tell himself that he had never failed to do his duty.

Like many of Britains more estimable monarchs, he was not born to be king. He was a second son, doomed by his royal birth to occupy a prominent position yet spared the ultimate burden of the crown. And on 14 December 1895, when Prince Albert Ferdinand Arthur George was born at York Cottage, a house in the grounds of Sandringham in north Norfolk, that burden was indeed heavy. The powers of the monarchy had been dwindling for several hundred years but its influence was still formidable. Queen Victoria, the baby princes great-grandmother, took it for granted that it was her right to be informed of any development of importance in her realm and was affronted if her opinion was ignored. She was grandmother to half the crowned heads of Europe and presided over the most extensive and richest empire that the world had ever seen. In the long years of seclusion that had followed the death of her beloved husband, Albert, the monarchy had to some extent lost favour with the people but now, in her extreme old age, the rare appearances of that tiny dumpy figure, swathed always in the blackest mourning, commanded extravagant respect and interest. That tired old clich a legend in her own time might have been coined for Queen Victoria.

To be the great-grandson of a living legend is a daunting proposition. Bertie, as he was generally called, had further problems. His grandfather, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, was mildly alarming but on the whole benevolent. His father, then Duke of York and eventually King George V, was a more daunting figure: a martinet of limited intelligence and negligible imagination who had spent his most formative years in the Royal Navy and never shed the rigid mindset and conventional ideas that are traditionally associated with military service.