A Royal Mercy Killing

According to all contemporary newspaper accounts and subsequent histories, King George V of Great Britain died of natural causes in 1936. Last week the - biographer of Lord Dawson, who was the King's doctor, disclosed that the monarch was actually put to death by lethal injections of morphine and cocaine, administered as he lay dying at the royal residence of Sandringham. Dawson's notes say the King's death was induced not only to ease his pain but to enable the news to make the morning papers, "rather than the less appropriate evening journals."

The notes, published by Dawson's biographer, Francis Watson, in the journal History Today, indicate that the royal physician gave the King two fatal injections, one consisting of three-quarters of a grain of morphine and the other of one grain of cocaine, at about 11 p.m. on Jan. 20, 1936. King George, who was 70 and had long been in failing health, died 40 minutes later. After the injections Dawson advised the editor of the Times of London to stand by for late news. Next morning a headline in the Times proclaimed, A PEACEFUL ENDING AT MIDNIGHT.

Dawson, who died in 1945, wrote that he acted on the wishes of the King's wife Queen Mary and his son the future Edward VIII, who abdicated eleven months later. Nonetheless, the story caused an uproar in Britain, where euthanasia is illegal. Kenneth Rose, George V's official biographer, accused Dawson of "murdering" the King, who was the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II. A spokesman for Buckingham Palace, which learned of the mercy killing from Watson on the eve of the publication of the notes, said only, "The events happened a long time ago, and all the main participants are dead."

Watson's article exploded another royal myth. Reports of the King's death gave as his final words "How stands the empire?" According to Watson, George V later muttered, "God damn you," apparently to no one in particular, as he lapsed into a narcotics-induced sleep.