Word: crowning
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...Other afterthoughts were bestowed on European royalty. It was mentioned with a hush that 25 years ago King Edward VII was escorted to his grave by 48 Kings and Princes. Only four sovereigns who wore crowns in Europe then still wear them: Italy's gnarled and hardy little Vittorio Emanuele III; The Netherland's marsh-mallowy but masterful Queen Wilhelmina; Norway's tall brooding Haakon VII (George V's brother-in-law); and the rheumy-eyed royal Swedish marvel who can still play tennis. 76-year-old Gustaf V. To get these four to London, however...
...never had a sovereign so uniformly and usefully beloved as King George. His grandmother Queen Victoria, as most people have forgotten, emphatically was not popular throughout her reign. For years after she married German Prince Albert, his extreme unpopularity and her impetuous flouting of her Prime Ministers made the Crown a target for protests and lampoons. After Albert's death his widow's frantic seclusion, her transports of grief for years on end and her eventual recluse neglect of the Crown's public functions made Victoria for a time almost hated by subjects who rightly considered England...
...Kaiser and German Crown Prince during the War, King George said with honest ire. "They are my kinsmen, but I am ashamed of them!" A sovereign thus honest could be, and was believed when His Majesty remarked off the top of his mind, when visiting a War hospital, "How lucky you are to have hot water. We live [at Buckingham Palace] in one corner of the room to keep warm, and only have one hot bath-once a week. The hot water business is a problem: you can't shave with lukewarm water...
...heat and tension of the War Britons came to know King George and Queen Mary in their innermost qualities of heart. Never since then has the Crown been narrowly identified with any class- whereas Queen Victoria was conquering middle-class and King Edward was almost dilettante Mayfair...
...King George. Laborite James Ramsay MacDonald has steadily become more conservative, and Conservative Stanley Baldwin & Party have been fated to maintain or introduce the most radical legislation dished up in any Great Power outside the Soviet Union until President Roosevelt dished his New Deal. In England, while maintaining the Crown with all it implies, the income tax has been raised to confiscatory altitudes; the proletariat have come to accept and demand the Dole as a matter of right; and such amenities as the provision of the phenomenally cheap, brand-new houses for millions of the lower classes now engage crustiest...