38656356325923

grandparents, Queen Mary in silver and diamonds, glittering, as one person described
it, like the slopes of the Eiger.
There was a great outpouring of love for the simple old King, which surprised him
most of all. Returning flattered but puzzled from a hugely successful tour of the poorest
streets of London’s East End, he told his old friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘But I
cannot understand. I am quite an ordinary sort of fellow.’ To which the Archbishop
somewhat unflatteringly replied, ‘Yes, Sir, that is just it.’ Twenty-five years earlier, on
the King’s accession, Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Asquith’s
Government, had diagnosed the secret of the King’s appeal: ‘The King is a very jolly
chap but thank God there’s not much in his head. They’re simple, very very ordinary
people, and perhaps on the whole that’s how it should be.’ 11 In a special broadcast from
Buckingham Palace the King expressed his feelings: ‘I can only say to you, my very very
dear people, that the Queen and I thank you from the depths of our hearts for all the
loyalty and – may I say so? – the love, with which this day and always you have
surrounded us.’
Foreign observers underlined the paternal image that George V publicly represented
(in contrast to his private performance of that role). The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
hailed the King as ‘father of the nation’, while the French Ambassador, Rene Corbin,
reported to his minister that George V had become during the course of his reign ‘not
only the King, but the Father of his peoples and to the loyalty has come to add the
warmth of love. That is the secret of the personal and living emotion which today fills
the heart of this Kingdom and Empire.’ He could not, he said, but be struck by ‘the
cohesion and power which the family of the British Democracies draw from their
attachment to the Crown, considered at the same time as a paternal force and the
symbol of unity’. 12 For Elizabeth, the Empire and the monarchy which she had learned
about in the schoolroom took on reality during those days of celebration of her
grandfather’s Silver Jubilee, when the royal family seemed borne on a huge wave of
love and excitement. She was too young to have known the times when things did not
seem quite so secure; when, after the assassination of his cousin, the Tsar, and the
discontent of traumatized troops returning from the Great War, followed by the General
Strike, her grandfather had been haunted by the fear of revolution and had realized that
he was going to have to work to keep his throne. In that, he had been eminently
successful.
King George’s apotheosis came as his life was nearing its end. That winter his doctor,
Lord Dawson of Penn, told the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, that the old King was
‘packing up his luggage and getting ready to depart’. The family Christmas at
Sandringham was overshadowed by the weakness of the King and by a certain
awkwardness in the atmosphere. The Kents were there, with their new baby, Prince
Edward, born in October, and the Gloucesters, Uncle Harry and his new wife, the former
Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott, whom he had married in November (Elizabeth and
Margaret had been bridesmaids, dressed by Norman Hartnell in Kate Greenaway dresses
with the skirts specially shortened on the King’s orders because ‘I want to see their