Overview

From one of the most beloved and distinguished historians of the British monarchy, here is a lively, intimately detailed biography of a long-overlooked king who reimagined the Crown in the aftermath of World War I and whose marriage to the regal Queen Mary was an epic partnership The grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, King George V reigned over the British Empire from 1910 to 1936, a period of unprecedented international turbulence. Yet no one could deny that as a young man, George seemed uninspired. As his biographer Harold Nicolson famously put it, he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps. The contrast between him and his flamboyant, hedonistic, playboy father Edward VII could hardly have been greater. However, though it lasted only a quarter-century, George's reign was immensely consequential. He faced a constitutional crisis, the First World War, the fall of thirteen European monarchies and the rise of Bolshevism. The suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under his horse at the Derby, he refused asylum to his cousin the Tsar Nicholas II during the Russian Revolution, and he facilitated the first Labour government. And, as Jane Ridley shows, the modern British monarchy would not exist without George; he reinvented the institution, allowing it to survive and thrive when its very existence seemed doomed. The status of the British monarchy today, she argues, is due in large part to him. How this supposedly limited man managed to steer the crown through so many perils and adapt an essentially Victorian institution to the twentieth century is a great story in itself. But this book is also a riveting portrait of a royal marriage and family life. Queen Mary played a pivotal role in the reign as well as being an important figure in her own right. Under the couple's stewardship, the crown emerged stronger than ever. George V founded the modern monarchy, and yet his disastrous quarrel with his eldest son, the Duke of Windsor, culminated in the existential crisis of the Abdication only months after his death. Jane Ridley has had unprecedented access to the archives, and for the first time is able to reassess in full the many myths associated with this crucial and dramatic time. She brings us a royal family and world not long vanished, and not so far from our own.

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"Ridley is a serious scholar and historian, who keeps Bertie's flaws and virtues in a fine balance. -- ""The Boston Globe on The Heir Apparent"""

Ridley is a serious scholar and historian, who keeps Bertie's flaws and virtues in a fine balance. -- The Boston Globe on The Heir Apparent

Author Information

Jane Ridley is a professor of history at the University of Buckingham, where she teaches an MA course on biography. Her books include The Young Disraeli, 1804-1846; The Architect and His Wife, which won the Duff Cooper Prize; and Victoria. The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince, was a Sunday Times bestseller. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Ridley writes book reviews for the Spectator and other newspapers, and has also been featured on radio and appeared on several television documentaries. She lives in London and Scotland. Joanna David is a highly acclaimed actress whose theater credits include The Importance of Being Earnest, The Ghost Train Tattoo, and The Deep Blue Sea. On television, she was the second Mrs. de Winter in the BBC's Rebecca, while among her other credits are Foyle's War, The Forsyte Saga, The Glass, Dalziel and Pascoe, Midsomer Murders, and A Dance to the Music of Time.

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