#warwick.prequel

Like his predecessors, George wore no crown, although the jewelled medals sewn into the breast of his uniform made up for it. His thighs ached, the hour’s long procession had been unforgiving on horseback, and his feet—crammed into knee-high jackboots a size too small—would need to be iced later. George’s crown advisers were in no better shape. They could hardly stand, evidently weakened by age and exhaustion, covertly blitzed on opium and whiskey. Propped up on walls and chair backs, they were a stark contrast to their young sovereign; a half-dozen gout-ridden and barrel-bellied statesmen with an average age of forty-eight. From the peanut gallery, elected members of parliament swayed impatiently. One octogenarian senator dozed off. George’s prime minister merely looked bored. This was the third enthronement ceremony in just under a decade.

There was no crown, no orb and sceptre, no archbishop, no holy oil. There wasn’t even a Bible. Yet it was undeniable that the figure perched before them all was . . . king. Not king through holy ordinance, but secular, constitutional law. When he spoke his voice was strong, maybe a bit high, but determined. Determination had carried him this far, it had carried him to the throne—well, determination and luck. Luck that his intrepid father had sailed to England and fallen in love with the daughter of an earl, luck that his mother hadn’t died giving birth to his sister, luck that said sister hadn’t been a brother.

For many in his sprawling family, George’s luck had translated to tragedy: a fatal bout of tuberculosis, countless stillbirths and miscarriages, an ocean liner swallowed by the sea, the death of a son, and the birth of a healthy baby who’d done nothing wrong but be born female. Secularism aside, it felt like fate, the line of succession had branched off, meandered, and sometimes split, but now it led solely to him, the eldest surviving grandson of Louis II. King George.

There were tragedies on George’s end, too. His sister resented him, his mother had been a smothering, oppressive force for most of his life, and his father had died within a year of his birth. Aunts and uncles plotted against him the moment he left the nursery. George had come into the world red and roaring, shrieking so hard the doctors feared he’d suffocate. It had been a hellish August morning, during a heatwave so intense candles melted from their sockets. George recognized the circumstances of his birth, he believed there was an inherent fire in his veins that would never bleed. As he grew the anger stayed with him and he channelled it to set his determination and wrestle for the throne. Now, the baby who screeched throughout the night, the boy who threw his toys about and stomped his feet, the young man who told off his professors was king, sitting on the throne, trying not to tug at his mustache, trying to look the aloof commander-in-chief.

Despite himself, George wondered about his mother. He longed to see her but could not. She was not at his side or even in the audience. She was back at Woodbine Castle. George’s uncle Louis III had banned women from the enthronement ceremony over forty years prior. He’d wanted to rein in his flighty, obsessive mother, his corpulent sisters, and his loathed second wife. Prevent his enthronement from looking like something “imagined by Christine de Pizan.”

It is often forgotten how much George relied on the women in his life. On the throne, he may have embodied a red-blooded machoism, but he was raised almost exclusively by women. His temper he accredited to his mother. His wife Alexandra served as his secretary for over fifty years. Of all his children, his “pocket self” and protégé was not his first-born son, but his eldest daughter. Yet we give these facts little thought. For that, George himself is partially to blame. To walk the streets of Warwick, now and then, is to be reminded of how obsessively George propagandized throughout his reign. Exit out the rear of the Royal Alexandra and there he is in bronze, seated under an ornate ciborium, flanked by the Virtues. He’s planted square in the middle of Wellington Street, standing proud on his pedestal, gazing sternly into the horizon. At Greensboro Park, his muscular figure is on horseback, sword hanging at his side, reins gripped by kielbasa-sized fingers. The grandiosity was clear, and perhaps some of the mysticism, George was still erecting monuments of this nature well into his seventies. Self-aggrandizing, yes, but George was a fervent believer in his own cult of personality. When he injured his leg in 1903, he declared that he would rather be shot than appear in public with a walking stick. If the king was weak, so was the whole country.

However, the Cult of George has allowed myths to pop up, so many that they often blot out the facts. Perhaps the most damaging, yet pervasive, is this: George stood alone; he was the infallible strong man who single-handedly dragged Sunderland out of the dark ages and into modern times, and that he implemented a form of harsh, but ultimately necessary, Caesarism in the name of collective good, not only as head of state but also as the head of a family, as a husband and father. The idea that strong, fearless men are needed to induce prosperity is a long-standing one, often repeated and associated with many world leaders, from Shaka Zulu to Winston Churchill. Yet it has attached to George with particular vigour; so much so that basic facts about him—his alcoholism, his proneness to tears, his bouts of jealousy—seem unbelievable. Alongside George, the man who lived and breathed, is a second mythical George, one that dominates this country’s pop culture and political discourse, fitted with nationalistic imagery, waiting to be rolled out at just about any crisis. He is astoundingly resilient: the real King George died in 1921, but Mythical George seems to be immortal. We have all been subject to his skewed memory, and it will take a great deal of work to cut through the hyperbole and reach the real George.

It is important to understand that Mythical George did not spring up by happenstance, he is there by design. Even in the decades following George’s death, the task of promoting his image did not stop, it was simply transferred into the hands of his descendants. No greater example of this can be found than what occurred in the spring of 1970. That April, the Americans launched the unsuccessful Apollo 13. Times were changing abroad. The previous month, Rhodesia had cut ties with the United Kingdom to become a republic. Big changes on the horizon at home, too: the same day Apollo 13 splashed down into the Pacific, James II of Sunderland was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer. And just two weeks later, on a tiny plot of grace-and-favour land, a ninety-eight-year-old man prepared to commit one of the most grievous acts of censorship of the twentieth century.

Prince Arthur, Duke of Albion was the last surviving child of George I. Save for a small retinue of servants, he lived alone. His wife, a Danish princess, had died twenty-five years prior. His younger son had sided with the Nazis during World War Two, a shameful scandal that still cast deep divisions within the royal family. Arthur lived on the fringes of upper-class society, his refusal to denounce his Nazi son made him an outcast, but James II didn’t have the heart to cut his great-uncle off entirely. The old duke received a “generous” allowance from the crown, one “befitting a veteran and Prince of Sunderland.” The rest of Arthur’s income came from the Royal Archives. In the last half-decade of his father’s life, Arthur was his unofficial secretary, a job no one else wanted. Throughout World War One and a bit afterwards, Arthur had directed his ailing father’s communications. Outgoing letters were written in Arthur’s hand, and official correspondence passed through Arthur before being handed off to government ministers. In his spare time, Arthur took on the arduous task of organizing his father’s extensive dairies, under George’s direction, Arthur edited, translated, and revised, but most importantly, he omitted. Arthur continued this effort after his father’s death; throughout the interwar period, huge swaths of George’s diaries were rephrased or completely removed. Ultimately these amended documents were shipped off to the Royal Archives for preservation, and the originals were stowed away.

Now, in the early 1970s, Arthur was a weak old man sitting on a mountain of historical documents, shaken by the announcement that James II was dying, and contemplating his own mortality. He knew what he had to do, but there was one lingering wrinkle. So, for the last time, Arthur took to his desk and wrote. In a move that could only be described as calculated, the old duke did not address the letter to James II. Jimmy was a “lame duck,” as Prime Minister Randolph had called him, so Arthur wrote to the next in line. The twenty-four-year-old Prince of Danforth, the future Louis V, although Arthur addressed him as “Loo”:

You may not know that I am my Father’s library executor & as a result I have in my possession a great deal of his documents. Most of them I have transcribed and passed along to the Royal Archives, but a select few remain. They are in his own hand, written mainly in English but also German & French. A long time ago, before you were born, I compiled these papers into a book & I have looked after it ever since, but I can no longer deal with it given my most recent illness. The book contains sensitive personal details; intimate letters between my Father and Mother, his more melodramatic diary entries, and even jottings of his sexual proclivities, if you can believe it. All this to say, they are of little historical or biographical value. No one has been as devoted to protecting my Father’s memory as I have been, and I can assure you the archives have done a thorough job of accurately preserving his legacy. Everything of importance has long been accounted for. I beseech you to grant me permission to destroy this troublesome book. I’m deeply worried it will fall into the wrong hands once I’m no longer around.

The letter never reached Louis. It was intercepted by the Woodbine Castle librarian who, alarmed, passed it on to the Keeper of the Royal Archives, who in turn forwarded the “inflammable letter” to Louis’s grandmother, Sunderland’s Iron Matriarch, Queen Anne. Appalled, Anne motored to Arthur’s estate and begged him not to do “this terrible, terrible thing.” She was too late. By then Arthur had suspected the foul play and he’d quickly burned the book the previous night. This hasty decision forever warped George’s historical image.

Arthur died later that year, but his portrayal of his father has stayed with us. Some glimpses of George’s original writings exist in a handful of biographies that pre-date Arthur’s stint as secretary. The truth of the matter is that through his editing Arthur revealed more about himself than he did his father. The George found in Arthur’s revisions is less emotional, less vulgar, and overall more rational than the real deal. This George didn’t have any pointed thoughts about foreign leaders and all his political opinions were sanitized, perfectly neutral. Arthur scrubbed away paragraphs that made his father seem “indecisive, delicate, or depressive.” Gone are George’s insecurities about his masculinity, his yearning for a father-like figure, and his paternal hardships. Correspondence with his male friends was wiped away, with the excuse that it wasn’t historically relevant. Left behind is an aloof, vague, husk of a man, one that could affect the image of stern, robotic patriarchy, but is otherwise devoid of emotion or personality.

Mythical George shifts and changes from person to person, be they a monarchist or republican; critic, or admirer; or even George himself, the function of Mythical George changes drastically. To one person he might be a genocidal imperialist who sought to expand his blood-thirsty regime, and to the next, he’s a brilliant innovator who detested violence and criticized the horrors of American slavery. For the royal family, however, the role of Mythical George is simple: mass approval. With every bolstered myth and half-truth, every omitted paragraph, the royal family becomes flawless, the perfect family. George was a strong, capable protector and Alexandra was Aphrodite reincarnated. Their marriage was harmonious and their children were dutiful and well-behaved. No one acted selfishly, everyone was a philanthropist, and everything they did was for the benefit of “the country.” Members of the royal family were polished porcelain figurines, unswayed by money, sex, or vice. All of this was, and continues to be, bull.

Novelist Leonard Kane believed three dominant world leaders shaped the nineteenth century: Napoleon, Queen Victoria, and King George I. George was certainly dominant, sometimes to the point of being overbearing: he was a bully, prone to emotional outbursts when things didn’t go his way. He was often rude towards people he didn’t like and at the very least brusque towards those he did like. He treated his children like possessions and manhandled his wife, reducing her to tears on more than one occasion. He dissolved parliament, censured MPs, and threw out prime ministers once they became too bothersome. He scoffed at the suffrage movement and loathed over-zealous social reformers for their rabble-rousing. Millions died during his reign through war, disease, and famine.

Yet behind these glaring faults was a man with a keen sense of duty and justice. He loved his family and defended them passionately, with his brusqueness came an unwavering sincerity and dedication. He educated his daughters as thoroughly as he did his sons. The King abhorred racism and championed civil liberties so fiercely he was considered a radical by stiff-necked European conservatives. He survived four assassination attempts, three strokes, and one world war. He remained on the throne while his ruling relatives were toppled by unrest and revolution. By the end of his reign, no other figure was as universally loved. The infirm and elderly believed he could heal with a touch, enlighten with a word. One Saanich woman travelled over 3,500 kilometres across fifty-two days, from Vancouver Island to Warwick, to speak with George for half an hour. Under George’s watch, the industrial wheel got spinning. George was five years old when the first electrical telegraph was sent, by his death telephone lines were slung across the access road leading up to Rockcliffe Palace. The soggy bogland that surrounded the palace would become dominated by skyscrapers lit up by electricity, flanking bustling streets packed with pedestrians, automobiles, and streetcars. From his momentous reign sprung feminism, populism, communism, fascism and a profound rethinking of social norms and the balance of power.

George was the most famous working man of his generation, equal parts flawed and accomplished. When we allow him to be buried under a mountain of myth and nationalistic sentiment, we are unable to accurately assess his reign. The accomplishments become indistinguishable, a mass of congratulatory propaganda that serves no purpose outside of peddling the Cult of George and Sunderlandian national pride. Worse, the flaws become permissible, a footnote that can be glossed over. Further, we also forget the man behind the legacy, the husband, the father of nine and grandfather of forty. George struggled with issues many modern men face; he grappled with bouts of depression alone, drowned out his innate anger with alcohol, suppressed sexual frustration under the gaze of an emotionally distant spouse, struggled with work/life balance, and felt confined by social expectations that are now forever associated with him, embodied by the everlasting sceptre of Mythical George.

George’s life was embodied by love, loss, and crushing perseverance in the face of family conflict, personal illness, and political strife. Above all, his life was characterized by defying the odds. What we truly forget is that George wasn’t born to rule. He was first a lonely orphan born in a rundown and understaffed palace, named George, after a British monarch, only because he was denied Louis. He had to fight for the throne, and then bend it to his obstinate, fiery will. It was George’s determination and resilience that moulded the modern world.