16 JULY 1983, Page 20

Books

Never cheated, never doubted

Alan Bell

King George V Kenneth Rose (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 12.95)

It cannot have been an easy task for Kenneth Rose to have followed. Harold Nicolson's elegantly written but far from uncritical official biography that has held the field fdr 30 years. Rewriting a life of diligent attention to duty and of solid domestic worthiness, stretching over well- known and unusually well-documented events is a particularly difficult challenge. Yet by persistent coverage of a wide range of archives, Mr Rose has succeeded in pro- ducing a fresh and often original biography that recalls in manner Superior Person, his life of Curzon, and by the deft infusion of a wealth of chirpy anecdotes often brings to mind his The Later Cecils for its narrative skill. Increased documentation and pungent expression carry much weight against some previous interpretations, however eminent- ly backed: Lord Mountbatten's view of the Lloyd George government's responsibility for rejecting the possibly exiled Romanov family can now be met by some still rather puzzling revelations about King George's own shilly-shallying over his cousins' fate in the weeks before Ekaterinburg.

Much of the royal story is necessarily familiar — the inadequate education and strict naval training, the happy marriage to a deceased brother's fiancee, the difficulties with his own sons, the skilled shooting of masses of well-reared pheasants, the Sand- ringham clocks half an hour forward, the King's life drawing peacefully to its close. But Mr Rose brings in a wealth of fresh detail, with different emphases from previous major royal biographies: it is chastening, for example, to be reminded how much the nation was spared by the sudden death of Edward VII's elder son, the Duke of Clarence, whose ingrained listlessness and amiable inattention would have been regrettable in an heir apparent and disastrous in a sovereign.

Naval training had emphasised in King George a forthrightness of opinion and speech which, coupled with a strong but simple temper and a want of adequate knowledge of the niceties of political disinterestedness, could have been a serious liability. It was in this sphere of royal life that the special skills of the Private Secretaries were so useful, and Mr Rose is particularly forthcoming as a guide to the different styles of advice the King could rely on in his secretariat. Lord Stamfordham, Tory at heart and fiercely defensive of whatever he interpreted as the royal prerogative; Lord Knollys, more Liberal in his views and believing that some accom- modation to ministerial advice was prac- ticable; and the much younger Wigram who was inclined to pepper his memoranda with the jolly sporting metaphors of an athletic housemaster: each made his contribution to the political credibility of the monarchy. In their hands the deferential phraseology of the Court, with its traditional, rather Quakerish, syntax, became much more than a vehicle of obfuscation; it was made a useful instrument for buffering to ministers the force of too pungently expressed a royal opinion. The secretaries' contribution — and particularly Stamfordham's — to the strength and stability of the monarch 'can scarcely be exaggerated'.

Such courtierly interposition was essen- tial when the sovereign had to deal with a Prime Minister like Lloyd George, deliberately negligent of the cumbersome established procedures, but when the King had to guide and comfort the beleaguered Ramsay MacDonald, the royal advice was close and individual. Unlike most of his in- timates, the King was not alarmed by the prospect of the first Labour government, and greeted its members with a warmth that they all recognised; `By God, he is a great 'uman creature,' J. H. Thomas declared. MacDonald responded in a similar way, though his aristocratically trained instincts led him to discern a 'bourgeois want of dignity' in the domestic appointments of York Cottage, Sandringham (where the King still lived before inheriting the big house from his widowed mother).

A recognition of the justice of some of the claims of his poorest subjects, coupled with a fierce dislike of industrial disorder (indeed of disorder of any kind) enabled the King to face an unfamiliar administration with a confidence and benevolent humour that most of the new men appreciated. Nothing but force of character and simplicity of argument could have brought the three main party leaders together in the National Government, and the King did not share in the general disapproval that humiliated MacDonald from all sides — 'he saw in his Prime Minister only the patriot and the friend'. Had the King not had a rooted objection to 'abroad' (and a virtual lack of any foreign languages), such direct- ness might have been useful in international negotiation. There is a serviceable guide to the Parlia- ment Bill crisis and the Irish question, but rather than these major political affairs it is the 'spirits of well-shot woodcock, par- tridge, snipe' (mentioned in John Bet- j eman's memorial poem quoted by Kenneth Rose in its original form) that brood over much of the book. Due space is also given to accoutrements and honours, both ob- jects of constant and highly conservative royal vigilance. Uniforms and civilian at- tire, medals and protocol of all kinds were an obsession; honours lists, which are a ma- jor element in the correspondence of the period, were also a major concern — par- ticularly when they gave so much cause for concern. Mr Rose has some interesting pages on the Lloyd George creations (and there were Tory malpractices too), and also tells the tale of that financially disreputable courtier Lord Farqnhar to show how easy it had been for standards to slip at the top.

fear I was somewhat irritable,' the King is reported as having told an equerry after a quarter-deck squall, 'but you know it means nothing.' Behind that royal carapace,' Mr Rose adds, lay the kindliest of hearts.' This shows through not only in the King's attempt to soften the blow to dismissed politicians, but it was even in- tended in his gruff humour. 'Did you come here expecting to eat winkles?' he asked a dinner neighbour when a long hairpin fell into her soup. More persistent memories of the intolerant father, the dominating hus- band, and the sartorial martinet are soften- ed a little by frequent indications of royal considerateness.

Mr Rose's account of Queen Mary, pointing to her shyness and her dutifully self-imposed 'carapace of inhibition' con- tinues the emollient tradition of James Pope-Hennessy's biography, but there is perhaps not enough about her to show the special contribution she made, even during her husband's lifetime, to the development of a widely-based public esteem for the monarchy. It was their joint efforts that enabled them, without deliberately courting any popularity, to counter so easily the ef- forts of wartime anti-monarchist agitators, and to do so with an appreciably enhanced dignity that transcended the stuffiness of the Court and left the institution a fitter in- heritance than they had found it. By the time of the Silver Jubilee (itself a ministerial initiative which he deplored), King George V had, much to his surprise, become the father of his people. 'I didn't know they felt like this,' he said.