For King and Country: The British Monarchy and the First World War

By Heather Jones

Cambridge University Press, 2021

From Author's Interview, 4 October 2021

King George V Places a Wreath on the Coffin of the Unknown Warrior

It was the war for "King and Country." This First World War slogan appeared on postcards sent by men at the front to their families, on official war propaganda recruiting posters, even in commercial advertising. Most poignantly, these words remain today on countless war memorials all across Britain, often chosen by the war bereaved themselves to sum up what their loved ones had died for.

Yet the role of the British monarchy in the 1914–1918 conflict–and what it meant to wartime populations in the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland–has been virtually neglected by historians. What was British monarchism in the First World War? And did it really matter at all to ordinary people – men in the trenches or women in munitions factories?

. . . As a specialist in First World War Studies, I began to wonder in what ways the lived experience of total war in 1914-1918 might have affected the monarchy. I found that the reign of King George V is often overlooked, in favour of focusing on the salacious scandal of the abdication crisis that followed his death. There is even a common perception in biographies that George V was rather boring, a royal stamp collector. Yet, as king, George V personally visited the Western Front trenches on multiple occasions, consoled thousands of wounded troops in hospital, and even visited the victims of aerial bombardment in the East End of London within hours of German Gotha planes devastating their homes in 1917. What was the impact of all this, on the king himself and on public perceptions of him and the monarchy? . . .

The result is my new book: For King and Country: The British Monarchy and the First World War. It is the first academic history of the monarchy and monarchism during the war. In the book I find that the wartime reign of King George V was foundational for the modern British monarchy and argue that the war ultimately sacralised and popularised the monarchy because of the multiple ways that it became associated with supporting the troops and the working classes and with commemorating the war dead. This helped what was a dynasty with German ethnic roots to survive both its problematic personal connections to the enemy and an age of wartime and post-war revolution.

I also discovered that the war saw the monarchy emphasize its image as a devoted family, as courtiers sought to present the king and queen in more human terms. The press endorsed this, depicting them as enduring the conflict like any other British parents, worried about their two eldest sons, Prince Edward and Prince Albert, who were serving in France and at sea in the navy respectively. This helped to create sympathy for the royals and make them seem more empathetic and relatable to their subjects, many of whom, particularly after the introduction of conscription, had loved ones at war. 

Far from the First World War ‘modernizing’ the monarchy, therefore, it actually enhanced its older image as a venerated, sanctified institution, one that was presented as distinctly and uniquely British and ancient and as supporting a specifically indigenous British form of democracy, embodied in a simply-living wartime royal family, accessible and relatable to its subjects. The image of the monarchy as a dutiful, hardworking, and religious family who epitomized all the best ideals of wartime Britishness was central to this.

[However,] If the war strengthened the monarchy in Britain, in Ireland it polarized unionists and nationalists around the idea of whether a monarch as head of state was acceptable or not. By 1922, the question of having an oath of allegiance to the king in the Treaty settlement between a newly independent Irish Free State and Britain even helped trigger civil war among Irish nationalists. The case of Ireland shows that the British monarchy’s survival was not inevitable in the First World War; it was the choices it made, to prioritise sharing in the public war suffering in Britain, eschewing luxury, reaching out to the troops and war bereaved, and presenting itself as a ‘moral’ family, that mattered. Victory in the war helped, of course, but it was a very long time coming after 1914: royal popularity was sustained against revolution until 1918 by the monarchy’s policy choices.

Note: For King and Country shared the Tomlinson Prize for outstanding book on the First World War published in 2021.

Adapted from the London School of Economics British Politics and Policy Website, 4 October 2021