George V,
the reluctant sailor king
who was never supposed to take the throne.
The sudden and unexpected death of George's older brother
is a cataclysmic blow.
He dreaded the idea of being king,
but he knew he had no choice.
This is the story of a king with two very different sides.
In public, a man loved by his people,
and, with his wife,
the architect of a popular and successful monarchy.
King George would have been half the man without his wife.
He completely relied on her.
George made himself relevant, visible,
accessible to the people,
and so managed to survive and prosper.
GEORGE: From my heart, I thank my beloved people.
But in private,
George could be ruthless, cold-hearted,
and struggled with his emotions.
He wasn't a good father.
He was gruff.
He had a filthy temper.
The public never saw his anger.
If they'd ever seen him at home and going mad
because someone was two minutes late for lunch,
they wouldn't believe that he could be so petty.
What do we really know about George V,
the king who would steer Britain through the First World War?
They liked him because, yes, he did have a bad temper,
but he was a king of the people.
What made him the way he was?
He was something of a perfectionist who really liked discipline.
It's something that he hadn't really had in his upbringing.
And how was his life and death shrouded in dark secrecy?
His death seems to be slightly more sinister.
It's kept quiet and glossed over for 50 years.
This is the story of King George V -
tempers, tragedy and triumph.
June 22nd, 1911.
Britain has a new monarch for the second time in a decade.
George V takes the crown when his father, King Edward VII,
dies suddenly of a heart attack.
Reigning in the shadow of his formidable grandmother,
Queen Victoria,
George V would take 20th century Britain
back to austere Victorian principles.
Yet behind the scenes,
George is filled with anxiety at the prospect of becoming king,
writing his fears in his diary.
"May God give me strength and guidance
"in the heavy task which has fallen on me."
George was dreading becoming king.
He really did not want this great responsibility.
I think the whole idea of having to go out into public
and talk to the world is just the worst thing he can imagine.
George was never meant to be king.
That role should have gone to his brother, Albert.
George V grew up on a beautiful, enormous rural estate
in Norfolk called Sandringham.
The house which he grew up in
had all the kind of most modern mod cons,
and around it were miles and miles of land
on which his father shot birds and beasts.
George was a very boisterous little boy.
He adored his older brother,
and they would play together nonstop.
They were very, very bonded.
George was the spare to his brother, who was the heir,
and so he wasn't brought up
with any expectation that he would one day become king himself.
Family life was unconventional.
The playboy lifestyle of George's father
was a constant strain on his mother, Alexandra.
Edward had started to have affairs
once Alexandra started to have children,
and she couldn't really keep up with his very active social life.
They did not have such a close, intimate relationship
that she could actually rely upon him, because he was too busy
offing about every day with his various girlfriends.
His father's antics would play a huge role
in shaping George's values and personality.
Queen Victoria was not amused by Edward's behaviour
or the way her grandchildren were being brought up.
They just had this sort of band of children,
and they just did what they liked.
Queen Victoria was very much
a hands-on mother, wife and grandmother.
She would tell them off for their very bad behaviour.
She didn't like to see them very much
cos she couldn't stand the noise.
Queen Victoria took charge when it came to the children's education.
She appointed clergyman and strict disciplinarian
John Dalton as their tutor.
Queen Victoria was determined
that the heir and the spare to the throne
would not turn out the way her son,
their father, had turned out.
There was a reason why Albert and George were schooled together,
which was that Albert was not very bright,
so he is going to need the support of his younger brother, George.
But both George and his brother struggled with their studies.
His frustrations would often lead to explosive outbursts,
a side of George that would come to define his behaviour
in years to come.
Because his brother was so much worse than him,
George looked the brighter of the two,
but he also had a really bad temper.
And this, you know, if there's something he didn't understand
or couldn't do, he could really scream and shout.
After six years of home schooling,
the brothers showed little progress.
When George was 12,
he and Albert were sent away to become naval cadets.
But their sheltered childhood left them unprepared for life on the sea.
It was the first time they'd been thrust into the company
of all the boys, and George found it very, very difficult.
He'd been bullied because he was the smallest.
He was sort of regarded as different because, of course, he was a prince.
They had to really learn to stand up for themselves,
so I suppose it was psychologically a good training
for the rest of their lives.
In 1879, as part of their training,
the young princes set sail aboard HMS Bacchante
on a tour of the empire.
They were thrown together with ordinary seamen.
They were midshipmen, and they did what midshipmen do,
and that's really all the dirty stuff.
Soon after the tour ended, the brothers were split up.
Albert was sent to Cambridge in preparation for his life as king.
George was without his brother and best friend for the first time.
This was one of the sort of key moments in George's life,
and so this separation hit him hard.
George was left to continue his career in the Navy.
The Navy really was really where George found his feet.
He was something of a perfectionist who really liked discipline,
something that he hadn't really had in his upbringing.
He really loved this, and it really shaped him as a man.
He did all sorts of jobs. He sort of...
Sluicing out the latrines, helping on the mess deck.
He was expected to do everything.
There was no quarter just because
he happened to be the son of the Prince of Wales
and the grandson of Queen Victoria.
So George learnt the hard way,
and it probably stood him in good stead.
He was very proud of being a naval man.
Where it was invaluable was that it gave him the common touch
in a way that no other royal prince of Britain had ever had before.
But in 1892, tragedy struck.
George's brother Albert died of influenza.
A grieving George was utterly devastated.
The sudden and unexpected death of George's older brother
was a cataclysmic blow for George.
They sort of helped each other.
Each one made up for the other's weaknesses.
George, quite dramatically, very much out of the blue,
has to withdraw from the Navy.
His whole future, his whole life had been thrown up in the air.
George's sadness at his brother's death
was compounded by the fear of one day becoming king.
It was devastating,
because he'd always regarded him as the person who sheltered him
from the need to do any of the things that a king did.
George was given a title by Queen Victoria - Duke of York.
It was a recognition that his position had changed dramatically
from that of number three in line, a prince,
to that of number two in line.
This wasn't the life that George had expected or prepared for.
And on top of that, it was decided that the shy prince needed a wife.
The bride would be a surprising choice.
I think the whole idea actually repulsed him,
but Queen Victoria keeps pushing it and keeps pushing it
and keeps pushing it, and eventually George gives way.
In 1892, as George was still coming to terms with the sudden death
of his brother and the idea of one day becoming king,
his grandmother, Queen Victoria, was busy finding him a wife.
The next thing that happens is that Queen Victoria says,
"We have to get George married, and I have this perfect candidate."
Queen Victoria had chosen Princess Mary of Teck
to be Albert's bride and Britain's future queen.
She had a fine sense of duty,
and she had great reverence for the crown.
In Queen Victoria's eyes,
manna from heaven.
Perhaps unsurprisingly,
George wasn't sold on the idea
of marrying his dead brother's fiancee,
but Queen Victoria had made her decision
and was not one to be disobeyed.
I think the whole idea actually repulsed him,
but Queen Victoria keeps pushing it and keeps pushing it
and keeps pushing it, and eventually George gives way.
He didn't really feel very strongly for her,
but he did what his grandmother told him to do.
George constantly struggled with his emotions,
and although he and Mary did eventually fall in love,
they found it hard to express their feelings.
There are numerous letters
where they articulate how fond they are of each other,
but that they couldn't actually say it in person.
George found it very difficult to express his adoration
in words vocally, and therefore he wrote a lot of notes.
In fact, they wrote a lot of notes to each other.
Almost love letters.
The couple were married at St James's Palace
in the summer of 1893
and began a modest life together on the Sandringham estate.
It was remarkably sort of austere,
but it was exactly where they felt most comfortable
and where they could live their life, really,
as a sort of county gentry family rather than as heirs to the throne.
George didn't like grandeur.
He didn't like fuss.
He wanted a simple life.
There's some wonderful things that he didn't like,
like he didn't like women that wore nail varnish,
and he didn't like modern music,
and he didn't like opera or ballet,
and he didn't like certain books,
so he was...he was a bit of a philistine, really.
The loner prince found an outlet for his frustrations
with solitary pastimes.
He's known for two hobbies most of all.
One is stamps and the other is shooting.
He loved shooting, and it was felt that he, by killing these birds,
he got rid of a lot of tension inside him.
He did have one of the world's greatest stamp collections
that had been started by his uncle, Alfie.
And every afternoon, he would collect more cent stamps,
get them sent from all over the empire
and stick them into his albums.
There's a funny story about his private secretary
coming up to him one day and said,
"Aw, sir, I have just read in today's Times
"that some damn fool went to a private auction
"and paid £1,400 for just one stamp."
He looked at him, thinking, "This is a very interesting conversation
the King would love to talk about."
He said, "I am that damn fool."
George also applied his traditional austere values
to marriage with Mary.
He was nothing like his playboy father.
Although George never spoke disapprovingly
of his father's many affairs and reputation as a philanderer,
I think he set himself to be very, very different from his father
and to be devoted and completely faithful.
He was a committed Christian,
read his Bible every day.
But there were two sides to George.
One was never shown in public.
His temper often got the better of him,
particularly with his six children.
But he wasn't a good father.
He was gruff.
He had a filthy temper.
George V treated family like he's the captain
and everyone in the family is a rating on the boat.
He expected absolute obedience from his children.
He set out to terrorise them, and to a large extent, did.
George demanded similar levels of compliance from Mary.
George was completely controlling.
He dictated what clothes his wife would wear,
how she would wear her hair.
He didn't like the idea that her ankles should show,
so she always wore very long dresses.
He wanted her to be like a slave,
to do absolutely everything he told her to do.
Queen Victoria's death in January 1901
moved George one step closer to the throne,
His father, the new King Edward VII,
sent George and Mary on an overseas tour.
People were fascinated to see what they looked like.
And they came out in their hundreds and their thousands to see them.
They went to Ceylon, which is now Sri Lanka.
They went to Australia,
where George opened the first Australian parliament
of the new Australian Commonwealth.
They went to New Zealand.
This was a proper royal visit to the empire,
and it was the first of its kind.
When George and Mary returned from the tour,
they became the Prince and Princess of Wales.
It was a title George would hold for less than a decade.
In May 1910, George, the introverted prince who hated public speaking,
became king.
I think being the King of the United Kingdom
is an awesome and daunting thing.
And he's very grief stricken at his father's death.
He's loved his father.
His father had always said, "I regard you as a brother."
The day after his father died,
he went to visit his father's privy counsellors,
who were sort of royal advisers.
He said it was the worst ordeal he'd ever been through.
A few months later, he has to address Parliament,
and everybody can see the papers shaking in his hands.
George had a strong sense of duty,
but would rely heavily on Mary's constant support and advice.
I think the whole country sort of knows that he's scared.
He has learnt that duty is everything.
And he, you know, he does his duty,
even though it means that he's waking up
at five o'clock in the morning in a cold sweat
and scribbling notes to himself.
Mary adapted to the role of queen absolutely perfectly,
and she saw her role not as being mother to her children,
but as being, in a way, a mother to her husband.
At his coronation in 1911,
George and Mary were presented to the world.
For this anxious new king and his queen,
it was a momentous occasion.
It lasts hours and hours. Heavy robes.
You've got to get it right.
You look at him in the pictures,
and he seems to, like, wear the robes magnificently,
but I think at the beginning of the reign,
for somebody not particularly well-educated,
not particularly at ease in large gatherings,
I think it was really daunting.
There's a funny little poem by Max Beerbohm,
a satirical writer of the time, talking about the coronation.
He talks about the little king, cos he was very short,
with the crown practically falling over his head onto his nose,
trying so, so hard,
but just not really looking like he's probably up to the job.
And there wouldn't be any easing into his new role.
The challenges began immediately
when King George was thrown into a huge political crisis
that took years to resolve.
The situation when he became king was really, really difficult
and called on the King to intervene
or at least engage with politics in a way
that really he would have felt very uncomfortable with.
The radical Liberal government,
spearheaded by Asquith and Lloyd George,
of planning quite strong financial reforms
with death duties and raised taxes.
The landed interest in the aristocracy are threatened by this.
So the House of Lords uses its blocking powers very, very unusually
to block the budget, so the moment that he becomes king,
he's got to intervene in this enormous constitutional crisis
and stop it all going wrong,
stop the Government collapsing.
He hates the idea, but eventually he does give his promise
that he will agree to make lots of Liberal peers
and swamp all those Tory aristocrats
if the Tory aristocrats refuse to get rid of the Lords' veto.
The fact that George V was prepared to do this
shows that he was going to realign the monarchy
so that the monarchy would be attached
to the more ordinary elements
and the non-hereditary elements of British society.
Within the first five years of his reign,
King George V was also faced with the prospect of a world war
and unease at his family's heritage.
As Queen Victoria's grandson,
he carried the family name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
It was German.
Here we are at war with Germany.
Why is our king having a German name?
In 1914, King George faced the biggest challenge of his reign.
On the 4th of August, Britain declared war with Germany.
Could a shy, short-tempered, simple man
really inspire and lead a nation
through the horrors of the Great War?
The First World War was a war that devastated Britain
in the loss of thousands and thousands of lives.
This was a crisis like no other.
The human cost, the economic cost, the devastation.
The war gave George a real sense of purpose.
He made more than 450 visits to his troops scattered across Europe.
That gave him a direction.
He wasn't just standing there making a boring speech.
He was actually there to help people,
and I think that gave him the courage to do all the things
that he wouldn't normally have liked doing,
and it was really the making of him.
But behind the scenes, he endured a constant battle
with his own emotions and personality.
So if the King was cantankerous before the war,
I think the war and the enormous strain must have frayed his temper,
made it harder to relate to the children.
I think it's fair to say that he was a lot more petulant.
Also, he decided to give up all sorts of things for the war effort.
You know, he agreed with Lloyd George to give up drinking,
and it just made him very, very bad-tempered.
And there were hugely serious issues which emerged on the home front
for the King and his family.
Those that were left at home resented the fact
that here were our boys in continental Europe
getting shot to pieces while there are people with German names
living the life of Riley, and they wouldn't stand for it.
And so people with German names, with German connection were attacked
and were attacked mercilessly.
With a German heritage dating back to 1714
and relatives dotted all over Europe,
the King's allegiance to Britain was soon brought into question.
A lot of rumours started to go around
that they were really pro-German
and they were secretly passing information to them.
This is completely untrue.
George was told he had to withdraw all the titles
his family and he himself had given to his German relatives.
So that was all very awkward.
Across Europe, relatives of King George V
were thrown off their thrones,
and the future of the British crown was headed towards crisis.
The story is that he was at a dinner party at the palace one night,
and a woman happened to let slip that, in some quarters,
it was thought that the royal family
wasn't quite as loyal to the British.
George went absolutely white.
He started to think, you know, to ask himself what they could do
to fix this.
As Queen Victoria's grandson,
he carried the family name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
It was German.
Here we are at war with Germany.
Why is our king having a German name?
And Lord Stamfordham, his private secretary, said,
"Sir, you've really got to change the name."
The King took drastic and decisive action.
He changed the family's surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,
and a new dynasty was officially born.
There was lots of thought given as to what name they should take.
Should it be Tudor-Stuart?
And they came up with the brilliant idea of the House of Windsor.
This, of course, had been, as it were,
the home of the British monarch since William the Conqueror,
and so it was a brilliant piece of image-making
and rebranding of the monarchy.
It was an instant success,
but the King's relationship with the public
throughout war-torn Britain needed nurturing.
For a man who privately struggled to connect with his own family,
greeting strangers was a challenge.
George found public appearances genuinely anxious-making.
He really, really didn't like them.
He really wanted to be hiding away with his stamp collection.
And there's something almost sort of heroic
about this little man just keeping going.
Queen Mary continued to provide unwavering support.
George showed her state papers, official papers,
which no sovereign really should do, but he sought Mary's wise counsel,
and Mary had her head screwed on the right way.
She was very discreet. Her judgment was good.
And he trusted Mary, and Mary trusted him.
The secret to the King's positive public image
was largely down to his wife.
George may have been forced into marrying Mary,
but she became his saviour.
King George and Queen Mary were one of the first power couples.
They would go to hospitals.
They would go anywhere and talk to people.
And I think it's one of these women guile things
that your husband doesn't really notice,
but you are changing him because you're there
and you're doing things together
rather than leaving him on his own and being left behind.
It did soften them up.
I think he couldn't have done it on his own.
In that very odd royal life,
I think you need a help-meet.
So Victoria had her Albert.
George had his Mary.
They were a fantastic couple together,
and I think they strengthened each other.
Yet there are further examples
of George's apparent lack of emotion,
which were hidden from the British people.
During the war, one of his sons, 11-year-old Prince John,
was moved from his home
and effectively vanished from the public eye.
From the age of four, John had suffered from epilepsy.
They actually sent him to live at Wood Farm
on the Sandringham estate.
They never knew when he was going to have the fits.
And in those days, it was really people
with any kind of sort of disability were shut away,
but I think, by today's standard, it was horribly cruel.
He might have been autistic.
It does seem to be the case that the family rather hid John.
He's not in any of George's official biographies.
The king's treatment of his youngest son
was perhaps influenced by his own absent father,
and he was heavily criticised by Edward, his eldest, in letters.
Prince John's life was a mystery for many years.
Decades later, his story was revealed
in the critically acclaimed BBC drama The Lost Prince.
We had been playing with foreigners.
I told you not to do that!
Never!
Prince John later died of an epileptic seizure.
I think Mary was very upset when he died.
Both parents had a deep feeling for him.
They just didn't know what to do with him,
and they were both kind of very bad at showing emotion.
By 1917, the popularity of the crown was soaring,
but King George's heritage came back to haunt him
in the form of his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
George would have said that one of his closest friends
was his first cousin, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
And as kids, they had met on family holidays in Denmark.
They were very similar. They were very shy.
They neither of them really wanted to be monarchs.
In the Russian February Revolution of 1917,
Tsar Nicholas was forced off his throne
and his request for asylum in Britain was accepted.
But behind palace walls, this invitation sparked a worry.
For some extraordinary reason,
George decided it would be a really, really bad idea
if they were given asylum,
and he felt that their presence in this country
would provoke a possible revolution.
The Government didn't think that.
They were quite happy to send a warship and collect them.
The offer of asylum was withdrawn,
and King George seemed to be at the heart of the controversial decision.
George agreed that Nicholas and Alexandra
could not come to the United Kingdom,
and it was up to Stamfordham to tell the Government
that the King was not happy for it to happen.
The King's decision may have been a reaction
from his difficult childhood.
An absent father, a harsh grandmother,
and the death of his brother
hugely impacted the King throughout his life.
I think children who are brought up in an unhappy environment
have to harden their heart in order to cope for the future,
and I think that perhaps he hardened his heart too much,
and he could be very ruthless.
He wouldn't let emotion rule a logical political decision.
It must have been something that he'd inherited,
this feeling that, you know,
it was his duty to protect the monarchy and to protect his country,
which I suppose you can't knock that,
but it was a very harsh thing to do.
In July 1918, the Tsar and his family were executed
by the Bolsheviks,
as graphically depicted in the BBC drama The Lost Prince.
MAN: Somewhere in the farmhouse, they were grouped together.
And they were all shot.
HE CLEARS HIS THROAT
IN RUSSIAN
GUNSHOTS, SCREAMING
Nicolas never knew that it was George.
He always thought that it was the British Government
who refused to rescue him and his family,
and he went to his death thinking that all the way through.
But history has shown that it was not the Government,
but it was George.
It was another cold-hearted decision,
exposing a dark side of the King's complex personality.
I think it is very ruthless.
It's the act of a weak man who's frightened,
and it is, in many respects, a rather awful thing to do
to the person who you said is one of your greatest and closest friends.
In retrospect, it looks ruthless, but it really is not clear cut.
It would have been very, very hard in practice
to get them out of Russia and save them,
and I think that when the King turned his back on them,
he didn't necessarily know that they were going to be horribly murdered.
In November 1918, war finally came to an end.
Despite the tragedies, the Crown and country had triumphed.
He was astonished to see so many hundreds of people cheering
and saying, "God save the King, God save the King."
And he said, you know,
"I can't believe this is happening to an ordinary man like me."
The war had deeply affected the King and changed his family forever.
But to the British people, he emerged from it a different man.
If you look at him very carefully in all the photographs,
he had the saddest eyes you could imagine.
For many years until after the war when they soften,
he's changed and he doesn't feel so negatively about himself.
However, behind closed doors,
the King's fiery temperament had far from softened,
especially with his eldest son and heir to the throne.
I mean, George saw the way he was behaving
and really sort of metaphorically threw his hands up and thought,
"God help the monarchy when he becomes king."
And is there one final sensational secret about George V's death?
His death seems to have been slightly sinister.
It's kept quiet and glossed over for 50 years.
King George V had emerged more popular than ever
from the Great War,
and, together with Queen Mary,
had redefined the monarchy for a modern age.
However, the post-war years were equally challenging for George.
To keep himself relevant,
he'd have to embrace the ever-changing face of Britain.
We had the general strike in 1926,
when tens of thousands went out on strike
because they were paid a pittance,
and it was then that George sort of to said a peer of the realm
who talked about these people being revolutionaries,
George said, "They're not revolutionaries.
"You try living on their salary and see how you feel."
He was very angry. He was a man of the people.
He became more sympathetic and even empathetic to working people,
and I think that was partly his own experiences of the war,
but I think it was also very much the actions and the beliefs of Mary,
who had this real keen sense of social justice.
George V seemed to try to put Britain
before everything else in his life.
Really went outside his comfort zone
and his natural instincts and actually accepted change,
and perhaps even embraced it.
This willingness to move with the times
meant King George's public image was at an all-time high.
But in private, it was a very different story.
George's behaviour towards his children
arguably had a profound effect,
especially when it came to his son and heir,
Prince Edward, often known as David.
He did not like the way he dressed.
He thought he was far too cosmopolitan.
He thought he had an inkling for the good life,
and he criticised him at every possible opportunity.
He complains endlessly about his dad.
I mean, he's furious with him.
He complains that he's a tyrant,
that his rages are endless and unfair,
and he also, I think, he resents him terribly for having been,
you know, rude and bullying to his mother as well.
There was no love lost in this turbulent father-son relationship.
Tensions had been brewing since childhood
and were close to boiling point.
I think that David feels resentful
about how he'd been treated as a younger man.
The tension grows and the void becomes a chasm.
Prince Edward's lifestyle can be seen
as a direct rebellion against his father,
and it infuriated George,
especially his relationships,
evoking memories of George's own father's illicit affairs.
He was hopping in and out of bed with them,
much to his father's disgust.
I mean, George looked at David
and really sort of metaphorically threw his hands up and thought,
"God help the monarchy when he becomes king."
And when Wallis Simpson emerged onto the scene,
the relationship between George and Edward,
who was known as David by his father,
was damaged beyond repair.
But David really didn't care.
At a reception at Buckingham Palace held by the King and Queen,
at which David was supposed to be there,
and David asked his parents if he could invite Wallis,
and the King said, "No, she cannot come to Buckingham Palace."
And during the course of the party,
Wallis turned up, and father went apoplectic.
The King's endless worries about his son
couldn't have come at a worse time.
Little did the public know that, in private,
he was suffering mentally and physically.
He was a smoker, and he suffered a bout of severe bronchitis
and really did become very visibly ill,
and his lungs really never recovered.
It definitely made him sort of grumpier and more petulant.
He rattles the cage a bit more.
And he gets more and more melancholy.
However, there was one Windsor
who managed to escape the King's wrath
and brought out the best in him - his granddaughter, Elizabeth.
George V adored his granddaughter, Lilibet.
He could see no wrong.
She called him Grandpa England.
Here was this gruff man,
this man who castigated his own children
from one end of their life to the other end,
and yet, in her company, he melted.
In 1932, King George started a tradition
that would one day be carried on by his beloved granddaughter.
The BBC contacted the palace with an innovative idea,
one that would bring the Crown
closer to its people than ever before -
a Christmas message on wireless to the empire.
It was quite a performance. It was live.
It was done from his study at Sandringham.
It was an extraordinary feat of engineering.
The King read out a speech written by Rudyard Kipling
to an audience of around 20 million people.
GEORGE: I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all.
To men and women so cut off by the snows,
the desert, or the sea,
that only voices out of the air can reach them.
People really, really like it. It's a huge success.
And so it begins the tradition whereby the monarch of the day
makes an address on Christmas Day.
In 1935, George's devotion and duty to his people
was celebrated on the streets for the King's Silver Jubilee.
How could I fail to be most deeply moved?
Words cannot express my thoughts and feelings.
I can only say to you, my very dear people,
that the Queen and I thank you from the depths of our hearts.
And it really is a zenith for him.
He says at the end of that particular day,
"Maybe they like me for myself."
George actually, at the essence,
was actually quite a modest, humble and simple man.
He was doing his duty, just as he'd done in the Navy.
So I think he was a bit surprised
to see how much he was genuinely loved.
By the start of the following year,
the King's health was rapidly declining.
His life was placed in the hands of his doctor, Lord Dawson.
He fell ill with a cold,
and after five days, he was still bedridden,
and he was obviously going.
The King died aged 70,
but for many years, what happened that night was kept secret.
His death seems to have been slightly sinister.
It's kept quiet and glossed over for 50 years.
In 1986, Lord Dawson's diary was released from the Royal Archives,
and a sensational secret was finally revealed.
Dawson later writes...
Mary, she was certainly not somebody who would condone
for a moment euthanasia.
She was highly religious,
and she said neither one thing or another,
but she let her feelings be known.
They also manipulated it so that he would die
just before midnight
so that his death would make the front page of The Times
the following day,
and that was the King's favourite newspaper.
The King was dead,
a king who had led two very different lives,
and the actions of Dawson that night have divided opinion.
There's been this argument about whether it was murder,
whether it was euthanasia.
If you look at it objectively,
it's a huge decision to make to kill a king without absolute authority.
It's a very, very dark but interesting mystery.
People were saying, "Well, in effect, he murdered the King."
You know, this is a very controversial subject these days.
But then I think that the medical team
certainly had more power than they would have today.
Was it the right thing to do?
It is not for us to judge.
But would the King have survived?
The answer is probably not.
Would he have suffered? Undoubtedly, yes.
King George V was a monarch like no other,
a king who kept his emotions secret and his true self hidden.
The public never saw his anger.
If they'd ever seen him at home and going mad
because someone was two minutes late for lunch,
they wouldn't believe that he could be so petty.
But it just shows you that we're all a very peculiar combination.
Much of the behind-scenes George V
has only emerged in biographies after his death,
so he might have had a fairly perfect image when he died,
but the reality was not quite that.
Despite his problems and his private tragedies,
the public reign of King George V was a triumph.
He strengthened the crown at a time when other monarchies were crumbling
and brought stability to Britain.
He was a king who seemed to put Britain and his sense of duty
before his family and even before his own happiness.
George made himself relevant, visible, accessible to the people,
and so managed to survive and prosper.
So he gave the family a name,
and he gave the family continuity,
and he gave the family respect,
respect that it has earned out in the great wide world.
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