Books of the Day
The Plain Man as King
SPEAKING to one of his guests in the drawing-room of Buckingham Palace after the State Banquet to President Wilson in 1918, King George V expressed his admiration of the President's accomplish- ment in delivering an eloquent and word-perfect speech lasting half an hour on such an occasion without glancing at a note. How different from his own speech—an excellent one, by the way—and the labour and trouble and consultation with Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary that had gone to it, and his anxiety up to the last moment lest he should falter or stumble or forget some part of it in delivering it! Then he added, " I am no orator, which is a good thing for this country. My cousin, the German Emperor, was a great orator. A constitutional king should not be an orator."
The scene comes back to me after twenty-two years, and seems to supply a motto for Mr. Gore's " personal memoir " of the King. The theme of it is exactly that he was no orator, but a plain man reflecting in a high degree the virtues of his people and some of their defects. Mr. Gore follows him as boy and man from the nursery to the Navy, thence to his royal activities as heir to the throne, and finally to the scene behind the scenes in the twenty-five years of his reign. Except for certain side- glances, politics are barred, for the good reason that the time to speak of them impartially is not yet: but when the time comes the official biographer will have here a good deal of essential personal material which might otherwise have been buried or forgotten.
A " plain man " was, in fact, what the King liked best to call himself : but it would Le idle to pretend that either his upbring- ing or his life was in any sense a plain one, as other plain people understand that word. Both were, indeed, highly artificial, as they were bound to be, and with such accompaniments of drill, drudgery and boredom as leave one wondering how any human being could have come out of it all with the virtue of simplicity that King George retained to the end. Mr. Gore gives us a picture of three generations of royal personages, each in turn dutifully and conscientiously concerned with the education of their sons and daughters. There was the old Queen, for more than fifty years presiding over them all, a figure of awe, despite the evidence that she had her cheerful and homely side. There was her son, the famous Prince of Wales, a man of the world, moving easily in all circles, but as dutiful and conscientious as his mother about putting his children in the right way. His son George, Mr. Gore tells us, had undying affection for his father, but it never broke through an " awe " which barred intimacy. Finally, in dealing with his own children, King George tempered discipline with a certain breeziness, but his manner was that of the quarter-deck, and apt to frighten without conciliating. It is strange that no royal parent seemed to learn from his own experi- ence as a child.
The young George certainly was not coddled. As a midship- man and naval cadet he shared to the full the rough duties and perils of the sea—rendered no easier by constant sea-sickness. These alternated with periods of leave, in which he returned to luxury, amusement and sport on the royal scale. Between the two his general education lagged behind that of the average public schoolboy. To the end of his life he was never sure of his spelling, and cared little for literature and the arts. What he read for duty or pleasure may be seen in the list that he kept of the books that he read in these forty-five years from 1890 to his death. His great merit was that he never pretended about any- thing. (Wasn't " highbrow," he asked, a misprint for " eye- brow "?) Shooting was his one great accomplishment, and he raised that to the level of a fine art. In his early years he was so little master of his own purse that on going up to London with Admiral Currey at the age of zo, he asked to be allowed to pay the cabman himself, as he had never yet done so. " Currey handed him the fare plus is. tip."
Up to the time of his father's accession, his interests remained almost entirely naval : then, in company with his wife, he had nine years of public ceremonial duties, visits to India and the Dominions, enormously interesting and enjoyable, except for the gruelling programmes which often left them in a state of prostra- tion. During this period he seems to have had none of his father's yearning for political activities denied to him. He was content with his job, which was arduous enough. But he came out of it with an experience and knowledge of the Empire which proved to be of far greater value than any knowledge that he could have picked up from the reading of State papers. • This is the way in which one of the best of British consti- tutional sovereigns was produced. By all academic standards it
was lamentable. But it gave the country the man it wanted for the time now coming, a man of unspoilt character, of wide experience and open mind, who had no class or party prejudices, and was as much at ease with a Labour as with a Tory pame Minister, and had a naturally impartial mind. He was blunt, straightforward, irascible and indiscreet, very liberal m some respects—Ireland and India, for example, zealously conservative in others. He records in his diary that he had an interesting conversation at Knowsley with that " ardent tariff-reformer," J. L. Garvin. Perhaps I may add that the only time in my life in which I had to listen to an exposition of tariff-reform without the privilege of reply, was at a meeting with him at Lord Rose- bery's house in London.
There is inevitably a certain monotony in the record of rova: doings, and some parts of this book might have been curtailed without loss. But Mr. Gore has done his work well, and so fa as politics are concerned, kept honourably within the terms of h:s contract. In another context I could add a comment to the one or two side-glances that he permits himself, especially in the matter of the " contingent guarantees " for the passing of the Parliament Bill in 1911, but one observation may, I think, be added. It would do the King an injustice to infer from the boyish examples of his letters and diaries given in this book that all his letters were like these. I had occasion, in writing the bio- graphy of one of his Prime Ministers, to read many of those that cover the period of the Parliament Act and Irish crisis (191t- 1914). Among them are some of the best specimens of royal letters I have ever seen—letters of admirable simplicity, good feeling and good sense. One abiding impression they left on me, which was that the writer had a remarkable and instinctive capacity for rejecting bad advice, than which there could be no more valuable quality in a constitutional king.
J. A. SPENDER.
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