All of these factors are covered at a satisfactory level in the book. He was a terrible father to his four sons and the major blot or his reign is of course refusing asylum to Tsar Nicolas II and his family. He is the father of the modern monarchy as we know it today, but he certainly was not without fault. These good decisions are a credit to him, as we can see with his almost identical cousin Nicholas II, who made almost every wrong decision possible, which led to the collapse of his country. Examples include encouraging the National Government in 1931, working with Ramsey MacDonald and the first labour administration in 1924, disconnecting the monarchy from European dynasties and taking massive personal allowance cuts during the Great Depression. He was able to connect with his people and make great decisions time and again to lead them from the dark of despair to the light of hope. George has often been called ‘dull’ and Ridley does a great job correcting that assumption, stating he was a normal man who achieved extraordinary things. The stress ultimately killed him in the end, albeit in 1936. He did not cause the war, but was caught up in it. The King of the United Kingdom during the First World War, perhaps the greatest disaster the modern world has known, where four ancient dynasties toppled, with his cousins Tsar Nicholas II being murdered and Kaiser Wilhelm II being exiled, a near fatal fall from his horse, rebellion in Ireland, the collapse of the Liberal government in 1916 and the rise of socialism, George was put under an incredible amount of strain to hold it all together. George V was in thick of it, when monarchy was crumbling around him. I understood the man, who was a Victorian living in the uncertain and rapidly changing world of the early 20th century. The narrative of this book is balanced and dives deep enough into George V for the causal historian of this period such as myself. I came to this book after reading Jane Ridley’s ‘Bertie: A Life of Edward VII’, both do not disappoint. She brings us a royal family and world not long vanished, and not so far from our own. Jane Ridley has had unprecedented access to the archives, and for the first time is able to reassess in full the many myths associated with this crucial and dramatic time. George V founded the modern monarchy, and yet his disastrous quarrel with his eldest son, the Duke of Windsor, culminated in the existential crisis of the Abdication only months after his death. Under the couple's stewardship, the crown emerged stronger than ever. Queen Mary played a pivotal role in the reign as well as being an important figure in her own right. But this book is also a riveting portrait of a royal marriage and family life. How this supposedly limited man managed to steer the crown through so many perils and adapt an essentially Victorian institution to the twentieth century is a great story in itself. The status of the British monarchy today, she argues, is due in large part to him. And, as Jane Ridley shows, the modern British monarchy would not exist without George he reinvented the institution, allowing it to survive and thrive when its very existence seemed doomed. The suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under his horse at the Derby, he refused asylum to his cousin the Tsar Nicholas II during the Russian Revolution, and he facilitated the first Labour government. He faced a constitutional crisis, the First World War, the fall of thirteen European monarchies and the rise of Bolshevism. However, though it lasted only a quarter-century, George's reign was immensely consequential. As his biographer Harold Nicolson famously put it, he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps." The contrast between him and his flamboyant, hedonistic, playboy father Edward VII could hardly have been greater. Yet no one could deny that as a young man, George seemed uninspired. The grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, King George V ruled the British Empire from 1910 to 1936, a period of unprecedented international turbulence. From one of the most beloved and distinguished historians of the British monarchy, here is a lively, intimately detailed biography of a long-overlooked king who reimagined the Crown in the aftermath of World War I and whose marriage was an epic romance.
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