THE KING IS DEAD

On his last day, the King went shooting among the oak trees and bramble thickets of the royal estate at Sandringham in Norfolk. Bareheaded and cheerful in the wintry sunshine, the King shot 50 hares, brought down a pigeon with a fine 100-ft. wing shot. That afternoon, pulling off his boots, George VI said contentedly to his shooting companions: "It's been a very good day's sport, gentlemen. I will expect you here at 9 o'clock on Thursday." Footman Daniel Long, who took a cup of cocoa to the King at 11 p.m. and found him in bed reading a sportsman's magazine, was the last person to see the King alive.

Early next day, a servant brought the King's morning cup of tea. The tea was never drunk: a blood clot had stilled George VI's valiant heart as he slept (see MEDICINE).

In the Shadow. He called himself a "very ordinary person"; it was not easy for him to be a King. His health was poor, he was shy and awkward, he stammered. His youth was spent in the shadow of his comparatively dashing elder brother. Of all King George V's sons, Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George, known to his family as "Bertie," was the most unassuming. To his formidable great-grandmother, even the date of his birth--Dec. 14, 1895--seemed inauspicious: as 76-year-old Queen Victoria noted in her journal, it was the 34th anniversary of the death of her beloved Consort, Prince Albert.

His childhood was strictly governed. His father, then Duke of York, kept his sons at arms' length except when he felt it was his duty to reprimand them. "Bertie and I," wrote elder brother Edward, "came in for a good deal of scolding." Years later, watching his spirited daughters splashing through a swimming lesson, George remarked in wonder: "I don't know how they do it. We were always so terribly shy and self-conscious as children."

At 13, Bertie enrolled in the Royal Naval College at Osborne. He liked the navy, and the navy's simple life; he ate with relish the traditional bread, cheese and onions--washed down with beer--before turning in at night. He once got himself punished for letting off fireworks in the head. A pale, slim sublieutenant, sometimes doubled up with pains diagnosed much later as an ulcer, he saw action in the Battle of Jutland, where, as "Mr. Johnston," he was second-in-command of "A" turret aboard H.M.S. Collingwood. "The King," remembered Turret Commander W.E.C. Tait years later, "made cocoa as usual for me and the gun crew during the battle."

The Industrial Prince. After the war, he proposed three times to a Scottish lady named Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon before she accepted him. She was a commoner (the first to become a Queen since Henry VIII's day), and dreaded the bleak rigidity of royalty's life: "I said to him I was afraid . . . as royalty, never, never again to be free to think or speak or act as I really feel . . ." On the eve of their wedding in 1923, the London Times looked right past the royal couple and remarked, with more meaning than good manners, that the public awaited, "with still deeper interest," the marriage of the Duke's "brilliant elder brother."

While his father reigned and his elder brother gaily globetrotted, Bertie conscientiously studied manufacturing processes and workers' hours and wages (he was president of the Industrial Welfare Society). He was called "The Industrial Prince." His still-persistent stammer made public speaking a wearisome chore, yet on one occasion, while rehearsing a speech at Wembley, he endeared himself to a crowd of startled workmen by stammering into a microphone, "This d-d-damn thing won't work," just as it started working. He played a good game of left-handed tennis, shot golf in the 80s, liked to hunt, and was content to let his brother Edward make the headlines.

In 1936, after a reign of but eleven months, Edward's headlines got scandalously big.

The constitutional monarchy of Britain had long since been bereft of power; Edward's abdication seriously diminished its authority and prestige. George VI spent most of his reign re-establishing them. Approving the man, the people gradually recovered their reverence for his office.

Holding a Fort. World War II completed the process. While the Duke of Windsor spent the war years in his Bahamas sinecure with the woman for whom he had abandoned the throne, the King held the fort in London, and endured like other Londoners. Like theirs, his home was bombed. His children, like theirs, were sent to the country; his relatives, like theirs, died in the line of duty. He shared with his people the sweat and tears of war. A memorable wartime newsreel depicted on one side of the Channel a ranting, raving Hitler, surrounded by tanks and planes, and on the other side, all alone, the quiet figure of the steadfast King.

Two nights a week George slipped into overalls and stood at a bench in a nearby arms plant, turning out precision parts for R.A.F. guns. Every Tuesday he lunched with the Prime Minister ("I made certain he was kept informed of every secret matter," said Churchill). While the fires still burned in devastated Coventry, the King tramped from ruin to ruin, picking his way between tottering walls and unexploded bombs.

At war's end, looking as weary as any other man of 50 who had lived through those years, George VI stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and heard his people sing with full and grateful hearts:

Send him victorious,

Happy and glorious,

Long to reign over us,

God save the King!

The Enduring Honor. In postwar Britain, it was George's constitutional duty to approve legislation that created the welfare state and wrested from the crown its brightest single jewel, the Indian Empire. Yet in drab, austere, Socialist Britain, the popularity of the monarchy reached a new zenith. Britons clung to the royal family as the last source of traditional color and ancient ceremony. And the royal family was something much more, though more intangible: the visible embodiment of good form--what the British call "decency." King George's quiet courage, his unostentatious persistence in meeting the everyday duties of his job, personified to Britons their own stubborn refusal to be downed by adversity.

Three years ago, on the eve of a state visit to Australia, the King fell seriously ill with a circulatory ailment. Last year the Commonwealth held its breath as doctors removed his cancerous left lung, and held thanksgiving services in December when he seemed to be out of danger.

He had won his people's hearts in the only way left to majesty, which no longer can stir by bold decisions or amaze by feats of derring-do. He made ordinariness shine. Exhausting himself by faithful performance of the tedious ceremonial rounds, exemplifying in his family life a warm blending of affection and rectitude, he gave his people a standard of conduct to rally to. Winston Churchill, paying a last tribute to his sovereign friend, acclaimed a King "so strong in his devotion to the enduring honor of our country, so self-restrained in his judgments of men and affairs; so uplifted above the clash of party politics yet so attentive to them, so wise and shrewd in judging between what matters and what does not . . . He was sustained not only by his natural buoyancy but by the sincerity of his Christian faith.

"During these last months the King walked with death as if death were a companion, an acquaintance whom he recognized and did not fear. In the end, death came as a friend . . ."

Summoned to the King's chamber by the news, the King's widow, dry-eyed but showing the strain of her shock, leaned over his bed to kiss his placid forehead. "We must tell Elizabeth," she said, a moment later. Then she corrected herself. "We must tell the Queen."

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