This was actually first suggested by the King. Much later, there was the creation of a coalition government in 1931. A recently unearthed memorandum by the Archbishop of Canterbury shows how active the King was in supporting this. The widening of the electorate required the limitation of the powers of the House of Lords in the 1911 Parliament Bill. These were mostly the consequence of immense upheavals in society. There were a number of major constitutional questions during his reign which required the Crown to take action. George V is a peculiarly interesting subject for study. As there’s a taxi driver shortage, can you give me a lift home, please?’ Queen Victoria’s passionate impulsiveness took on larger implications in her relations with Gladstone, for instance, and in her withdrawal after Albert’s death. It is the way the two overlap, or conflict with each other, that gives the genre its force. The best royal biographies, such as Jane Ridley’s superb previous book on Edward VII, Ben Pimlott’s penetrating life of the present Queen and Sarah Bradford’s on George VI, balance the human with the constitutional principle. The first is the individual, the passions and friendships, the flesh and blood and dreaming. The lives of monarchs have a double aspect. Much the same might be said of her grandson. One of his grandmother’s courtiers said that you could never use the expression ‘a woman like Queen Victoria’ because she was utterly unique. From many hints, I find him the most mysteriously tantalising of 20th-century monarchs. There is an enchanting 1935 photograph of Queen Mary on a garden bench with the King, her hand resting shyly on his thigh. He had a famously happy marriage with another gruff introvert, May of Teck, in which they apparently found it hard to convey their feelings for each other in speech. Every photograph of him is of breathtaking, restrained elegance. He was, in my view, the best-dressed of any English monarch. He was a great lover of novels, like his grandmother, and is recorded reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Pendennis and, surprisingly, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as the thunderous yarns of Captain Marryat and Harrison Ainsworth. George V is not much associated with poetry but his character is more complex than many of his contemporaries understood. The anthologies Harold Monro published between 19 under the title ‘Georgian Poetry’ created a lasting school of poets - like the King, well-made, efficient, reticent and given to outbursts of intense romantic emotion. The adjective only really succeeded in one specific instance: as the name of a school of poets. It was already assigned, of course, but George V very strikingly didn’t embody his time in the way that his father and grandmother did. But ‘Georgian’, as an adjective associated with the next monarch in line, never caught on.
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