Silver Jubilee

Genuinely unassuming, King George, ever since plans to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of his accession were announced (TIME, Dec. 3), has been warmly surprised and pleased to find that public demand for a regular royal and extravagant celebration has leapingly outrun, week after week, all planned supply.

At first the budget-balancing National Government gave no special thought to decorating London with European royalties and Indian potentates. Suddenly that touch of splendor began to seem imperative. Cables flashed. Excited Rajas and Maharajas grabbed every de luxe suite on liners that could get them to England by May 6. Shoals of them were surging in last week, headed by the pearl-turbaned Chairman of the Indian Chamber of Princes. H. H. the Maharaja of Patiala.

The Government at first did not think of spending millions to bring to London distinctive regiments of George V's loyal troops from all quarters of the Empire, as was done for Queen Victoria's fabulous Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Last week the Cabinet too late regretted such parsimony. Frantic efforts were afoot to scour London for resident Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, Indian and other Empire ex-soldiers who might be able to get their War-time uniforms spiffed up and join some portion of the Royal Jubilee.

Other afterthoughts were bestowed on European royalty. It was mentioned with a hush that 25 years ago King Edward VII was escorted to his grave by 48 Kings and Princes. Only four sovereigns who wore crowns in Europe then still wear them: Italy's gnarled and hardy little Vittorio Emanuele III; The Netherland's marsh-mallowy but masterful Queen Wilhelmina; Norway's tall brooding Haakon VII (George V's brother-in-law); and the rheumy-eyed royal Swedish marvel who can still play tennis. 76-year-old Gustaf V. To get these four to London, however, proved impractical and only European royalty of English blood were expected-- the King's fondly beloved sister, quiet Queen Maude of Norway; his pushing, unwelcome cousin, Dowager Queen Marie of Rumania; his sorrowful, most welcome cousin, ex-Queen Victoria Eugenie of Spain, and her profligate, haemophilic offspring, the former Crown Prince, Don Alfonso. He will sail direct from the Jubilee for Hollywood on the maiden voyage of La Normandie, or so he was saying last week in Paris night clubs.

To the English people, such royal reminders in the flesh of what King George and Queen Mary might have been last week focused fresh loyalty, love and devotion upon what they are. Last week, for every Socialist town council in Great Britain that refused to spend a ha'penny on the Jubilee, there was a score of Socialist town councils that were spending pounds. Best seats from which to watch the Jubilee procession sold for as much as -L-50 ($250).

A cold fact is that Britain, since the legendary days of beamish King Arthur and His Tabb Round, has never had a sovereign so uniformly and usefully beloved as King George. His grandmother Queen Victoria, as most people have forgotten, emphatically was not popular throughout her reign. For years after she married German Prince Albert, his extreme unpopularity and her impetuous flouting of her Prime Ministers made the Crown a target for protests and lampoons. After Albert's death his widow's frantic seclusion, her transports of grief for years on end and her eventual recluse neglect of the Crown's public functions made Victoria for a time almost hated by subjects who rightly considered England's living problems more important than the late Prince Consort. Only in Victoria's great age, when she plucked up heart and spirits again, emerging as Empress of India at the climax of Britain's greatest period of Imperialism, was the Queen for a twilight span surpassingly adored. Down the ages the name of Victoria will resound, while the fifth George is perhaps secure in history only as George V. But all his life he has been and today he remains England's Most Satisfactory King.

"Their Majesties." To Englishmen one of the most satisfactory things about King George is His Majesty's intensely emotional reaction in any crisis, the reaction of an honest English heart.

"They can't have murdered the children --not the children!" cried George V when told that Bolsheviks had done in his Cousin Nicholas II & family. "Russia has gone mad!"

To a foreign Ambassador, after Germany invaded Belgium and Britain declared war, the King exclaimed, "My God, Sir, what else could we do?" All fine theories spun to explain "the economic origin of the World War" have been wasted on His Majesty.

Like Queen Mary, King George has the distaste--rather than dislike--which so-many Englishmen honestly feel for so many U. S. citizens, and directly after the U. S. entered the War on England's side, George V still thought of "Americans" as persons too mercenary or "too proud" to fight. "I've a good story on you," said His Majesty at this time to U. S. Ambassador Walter Hines Page, and last week Englishmen still thought it good enough to be retold in the Jubilee Number of their Illustrated London News. "You Americans," continued the King to Mr. Page, "have a queer use of the word 'some' to express mere bigness or emphasis. Well, an American and an Englishman were riding in the same railway compartment. The American read his paper diligently-- all the details of a big battle. When he got done he put the paper down and said: 'Some fight!' 'And some don't!' said the Englishman. Ha, ha, Mr. Ambassador-- a good one on you!" And King George roared, slapping his knee.

Ambassador Page, fond though he was of England and her King, records that he "ventured to reply: 'The trouble with that joke, Sir, is that it's out of date.' "

Of the Kaiser and German Crown Prince during the War, King George said with honest ire. "They are my kinsmen, but I am ashamed of them!" A sovereign thus honest could be, and was believed when His Majesty remarked off the top of his mind, when visiting a War hospital, "How lucky you are to have hot water. We live [at Buckingham Palace] in one corner of the room to keep warm, and only have one hot bath--once a week. The hot water business is a problem: you can't shave with lukewarm water, can you?"

As every Englishman knows, the King, though right royally fond of whiskey & soda, touched no alcohol in any form from 1915 until Armistice Day. Queen Mary, rationing everything in Buckingham Palace, herself made sure every night that the servants were not wasting electricity but had turned out every light. As one of the King Emperor's principal aides-de-camp afterward said privately: "The War aged him for he was subjected to a peculiar, unremitting strain. He knew that every day everyone he encountered expected to leave the presence of the King with a higher heart and more determined to win the War. It was no uncommon thing in France to hear men worn to the uttermost say, 'If the King can stick this War, so can I, God bless him!' "

After talking fluent German with a wounded German prisoner in a base hospital in France, George V said, "Poor chap. His lot is doubly hard. He can't talk with any of the men around him." It was, however, a specific German atroc-ity--the first daylight bombing of London --which caused His Majesty to declare all German titles held by his family and subjects relinquished, to proclaim on July 25, 1916: "We, having taken into consideration the name and title of our Royal House and Family,* have determined that henceforth our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor."

In the heat and tension of the War Britons came to know King George and Queen Mary in their innermost qualities of heart. Never since then has the Crown been narrowly identified with any class-- whereas Queen Victoria was conquering middle-class and King Edward was almost dilettante Mayfair.

The Reign. After King Edward sickened at balmy Biarritz, but managed to die gamely of bronchitis in inclement England, King George faced at the outset of his reign in 1910 the grim political dilemma which many Englishmen thought had worn down his father and quickened Death.

The House of Commons was at last demanding a whip hand over the House of Lords, and Their Lordships with embattled obstinacy would not yield. They had haughtily rejected the Commons' so-called "People's Budget" championed by liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, later the Earl of Oxford & Asquith, and were arrayed against the radical proviso to impose an extreme tax on income and property of Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, whose ungentlemanly Limehouse speeches at this time were all about "our dissolute dukes!"

Mr. Asquith had told King Edward, and he now plainly told King George, that the House of Lords must be vanquished and that, short of revolution, only the King could vanquish them by creating, or threatening to create, enough new peers --possibly 500--to form a majority of Their Lordships who would vote to subordinate the House of Lords forever to the House of Commons.

It would have been unsatisfactory to the England of 1910 if the new King had made any rash attempt to champion the peers and the prospective tax payers. This fact His Majesty definitely ascertained by forcing Mr. Asquith to go to the polls for a general election. When the Prime Minister was returned without loss of strength and the Lords still continued obstinate, George V promptly commanded Mr. Asquith to announce that His Majesty would "consider it his duty" to create the 500 peers if necessary, and the House of Lords, appalled, hastily passed the Parliament Bill by a majority of 17. Since that historic day any bill which the Speaker of the House of Commons designates a "money bill" need not pass the House of Lords at all, and any other bill, if rejected by Their Lordships, becomes law when thrice passed by the House of Commons, approximately a three-year process.

By this first crisis and its orderly, inevitable solution the tempo of George V's reign was set. Never in the Silver Jubilee period (1910-35) have any of His Majesty's governments taken, from the point of view of high policy within the Empire, a step thoroughly rash or irretrievable. For years after the World War, truculent Ireland was torn with the bloodiest of civil strife--1,200 outrages within a year and the shooting down in London itself by Irish assassins of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. But even that crisis was solved after Prime Minister Lloyd George discovered that in the Irish tongue there is no word for "Republic." Created was a Saorstat ("Free State") which Englishmen can think of as a "dominion" while Irishmen plume themselves on the dignity of President Eamon de Valera who refuses to attend the Silver Jubilee next week and insists that Free Staters are "not British subjects."

Since 1923 the reign has progressed under a Prime Minister who has been alternately either one or the other of two statesmen who began as political opposites but have almost rolled themselves into a political one with the benign assistance of King George. Laborite James Ramsay MacDonald has steadily become more conservative, and Conservative Stanley Baldwin & Party have been fated to maintain or introduce the most radical legislation dished up in any Great Power outside the Soviet Union until President Roosevelt dished his New Deal. In England, while maintaining the Crown with all it implies, the income tax has been raised to confiscatory altitudes; the proletariat have come to accept and demand the Dole as a matter of right; and such amenities as the provision of the phenomenally cheap, brand-new houses for millions of the lower classes now engage crustiest Conservative Ministers as their chief concern.

In 1926 there was one awful period of nine days, the period of the General Strike, when the Empire seemed poised on the fulcrum of social revolution. But next to the good humor and cooperativeness of the British public what was the chief force which caused Labor leaders to call off the strike? Being British, they were routed when the man whom they had heard was "the Empire's greatest lawyer," Sir John Simon, today Foreign Secretary, declared with cataclysmic calm that in his opinion the General Strike was illegal and the Crown could successfully prosecute.

The synthesis of MacDonald and Baldwin, the stabilization of His Majesty's Government as a "National Government" for the years 1931-35, came dramatically on Aug. 22, 1931 when King George, who was in Scotland, learned that Prime Minister MacDonald, then heading a Labor Cabinet, was being forced into resignation by the impossible Dole demands of the Labor Party. On his own royal initiative George V arrived unexpectedly in London. Friends of the King in a position to know say that he bucked up Scot MacDonald when the Prime Minister offered to step down and persuaded Conservative Party Leader Stanley Baldwin to enter and support the present "National Government" under Mr. Macdonald. This new government presented themselves as the only group able to keep Sterling on the gold standard and avoid the inflation into which another Labor Cabinet must rush by printing enough money to keep up their Dole pace. As a horrible example of inflation. Orator James Ramsay MacDonald flourished a dog-eared envelope with the cry, "My friends, during the German inflation it cost 80,000,000,000 marks to buy enough postage stamps to send this letter to England! Do you want that sort of government?"

As things turned out the National Government were obliged to take Sterling off gold (TIME, Sept. 28, 1931). Their next bold policy, after winning a general election in which they asked for a "free hand," was to scrap historic Free Trade and clap on protective tariffs which have given all British activities tremendous impetus. Today the Empire has happy sensations of lifting itself by its own bootstraps rapidly out of Depression.

If some of this achievement seems fortuitous or fortunate, that, to devout King George, is nonetheless satisfactory and perfectly explainable as a righteous working of God's will. A word which rises often and with perfect sincerity to the King's lips is the short word God.

In sum, George V is almost exactly the sort of British monarch called for, per-haps unconsciously, in the stirring stanzas of "God Save The King." Few Englishmen would think of scrutinizing them, but scrutinized they turn out to be almost a capsuled paraphrase of the Silver Jubilee reign. In "God Save The King," swelling proudly this week from millions of British throats, is described a happy state of affairs : the God of a righteous people and their King does much of the heavy work, assisting them to push on to a glorious future, or as Englishmen comfortably say "to muddle through." Especially worth scrutiny are the verses: Oh Lord, our God, arise,

Scatter his enemies,

And make them fall;

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On him our hopes we fix;

God save us all!

* Saxe-Coburg-und-Gotha.

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