Читать книгу The Queen: History in an Hour - Sinead Fitzgibbon - Страница 4

In the first twenty years of the twentieth century, the British Royal Family had undergone a period of profound change. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901, after a 63-year reign, marked the end of an era for her subjects. While her passing left many feeling bereft, others were hopeful that the accession of her son, Edward VII, to the throne would reinvigorate a monarchy which had stagnated in the latter decades of his mother’s reign.

Queen Victoria (1887)

Edward VII did prove himself willing to embrace change. In what seemed to some to be indecent haste, the new king enthusiastically set about banishing the lingering cobwebs of his mother’s long rule. In addition to ordering a dramatic refurbishment of the royal residences, he also devised a number of spectacular ceremonies, including the Trooping of the Colour, with the aim of injecting some much-needed pomp and pageantry into the monarchy.

However, Edward VII’s reign was not destined to be a long one – when he died just nine years after becoming king, the Crown passed to his son, George V. Although the serious-minded and conservative George was diametrically opposite in temperament to his more liberal-leaning father, it was during his reign that the British monarchy overcame the most difficult challenge it had faced in centuries.

Edward VII

During the First World War, when anti-German feeling was at its zenith, a wave of Republican sentiment swept through the country, threatening the monarchy’s very existence. This disaffection was borne out of the fact the British Royal Family was an offshoot of the historic German Hanoverian dynasty. To add insult to injury, Kaiser Wilhelm II was George V’s first cousin – and these close family ties with the reviled enemy rankled with a significant proportion of the British public.

George V and Queen Mary in 1914

Around this time, other hereditary European sovereigns were being deposed at an alarming rate, including another of George’s cousins, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. A terrible fate awaited him as he, and his family, would eventually be assassinated in an orgy of revolutionary zeal in 1918. George soon realized that, in order to prevent a similar fate befalling him, something had to be done, and fast.

Tsar Nicholas II and family (1904)

Eventually, in 1917, he hit on a solution to the problem. Displaying a keen survival instinct, which would continue to be a defining characteristic of the British monarchy to this day, George set about ‘Anglicizing’ his family. The only way to disassociate himself from his German ancestry, he decided, was to shed the family surname of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in favour of one which would be more pleasing to the British ear. After considering, and dismissing, a number of possibilities including Tudor, Stuart, Plantagenet, York and Lancaster, George and his advisors finally settled on the perfect dynastic surname for the British Royal Family – by Royal Proclamation on 17 July 1917, the House of Windsor was born.