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    A Century of Royalty
    A Century of Royalty
    A Century of Royalty
    Ebook110 pages53 minutes

    A Century of Royalty

    By Edward West

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    About this ebook

    One hundred years of the Royal family in stunning and surprising photographs.

    Over the last century Britain has witnessed a royal family saga that has been at once compelling, tumultuous and heartwarming. The constitution has been thrown into crisis by an abdication, royal divorces have become commonplace, coronations and jubilees have brought the nation together – and though Princess Diana's death precipitated perhaps the most serious turn in public opinion yet, the Windsors' place in our hearts was confirmed beyond any doubt by Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee and the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's son, Prince George.

    With full-page illustrations from the Daily Mirror's archives and illuminating explanatory text, this book is a unique look at one hundred years of royalty in Britain.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateApr 10, 2014
    ISBN9780747814870
    A Century of Royalty
    Author

    Edward West

    Edward West is a regular columnist for The Daily Telegraph and a features editor for The Catholic Herald. He is a social historian with interest in broad trends in British identity and society.

    Read more from Edward West

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      Book preview

      A Century of Royalty - Edward West

      INTRODUCTION

      In 1917, towards the end of the First World War, the House of Windsor was born by royal proclamation with George V’s decision to change the family name from the Germanic Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In many ways this marked the beginning of the age of modern royalty, responding as it did to popular pressure for the royals to disassociate themselves from Britain’s German enemy.

      Living through the overthrow of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburgs, the German Hohenzollerns, and the murder of Russia’s Romanovs, George V would create in Britain a modern, adaptable royal family for the twentieth century. Unlike his royal cousins, George would survive as king after the epoch-ending First World War to thrive in a new world.

      To his granddaughter Lilibet (the future Queen Elizabeth II) he was ‘Grandpa England’, but with the skilful use of new technology such as radio broadcasts, he would become a father figure for the nation and the Commonwealth. This idea of a new type of royalty continued under his son George VI, who in key respects transformed the royals into a middle-class family with whom the nation could identify, and helped to hold the country together during the traumas and disruption of the Second World War.

      From the first days of modern mass communication to the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Diamond Jubilee, the royal family has been many things: a national soap opera, with its very own dark moments; a slice of Ruritania in a world of presidents, democracies and dictatorships; a social institution; and an essential part of national identity.

      Under Queen Elizabeth II royalty has continued to adapt to the modern world, and despite some bad times, remains the strongest of British institutions. And from the photographs of the funeral of Edward VII, which captured the quaint sight of kings in his cortege who would soon find themselves at war, to the age of Facebook updates for the British Monarchy’s 620,000 online fans, it is a story told on camera.

      Their history is also the most visible and well known of modern Britain, taking in the instability and horror of the First World War, the difficult inter-war period and the life-or-death struggle against Nazism, the social changes of the 1960s and the country’s attempts to find a new place in the twenty-first century. A Century of Royalty captures the major events that have shaped modern Britain, as well as the glamour of royalty, an almost magical force exemplified in extremis by Princess Diana. It illustrates the enormous psychological impact that the royal family (and its individual members) has had on people’s lives, sometimes struggling, but mostly succeeding, in its very public role. Despite the troubles of the 1990s (and of Edward VIII’s abdication) it is the story of the ultimate survivors throughout one hundred years of British history right through to the latest generation and the happy arrival in July 2013 of another royal George.

      Edward VII’s Funeral

      20 May 1910

      In many ways the story of the twentieth century begins with the funeral of Edward VII, the last British king to bear a German surname (and because of his heavily Germanic upbringing, a slight accent). For all the glamour and technological buzz of the Edwardian era – the age of the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, radio and cinema – it was now a distant world of traditional monarchs.

      Nine kings and thirty-two princes would follow the coffin of Edward, a popular, jovial figure with a great lust for life (and women and food), whose greatest legacy was the use of royalty as a force for diplomacy. Famously charming and graceful, he arrived in Paris in 1904 to a hostile crowd and

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