On 20 January 1936, King George V died. Since 1986, it has been widely known that his physician Lord Dawson conducted, depending on one’s view, either involuntary euthanasia or murder. The death occurred at 11.55pm so that the report could appear in The Times and not the plebs’ evening tabloids. The effort is said to have been so well known that it generated a popular clerihew:
Lord Dawson of Penn
Killed many men.
That’s why we sing
‘God Save the King’.
Two consequences of the monarch’s death.
First, the title Prince of Wales went into abeyance for 22 years. Since the 14th century, it has been granted by the monarch to the heir apparent.
An “heir apparent” is a very specific person, a person who is not only first in an order of succession but one who cannot be displaced by the birth of another.
As things happened, King George’s son Edward VIII abdicated. His brother, successor and Queen Elizabeth I’s father had no sons, with the result that it was she who granted her own son the title in 1958, five years after she herself was crowned. Her son as King Charles III has move more quickly. He granted the title to his own son in his first address upon his mother’s death.
Second, it gave rise to the excellent trivia question, what were three years in English history when three kings sat on the English throne? The others are 1066, with Edward the Confessor, Harold, and Harold’s defeater at Hastings William the Conqueror, and 1483, with Edward IV, Edward V, and Edward V’s alleged murderer Richard III.
A pedant might argue that as neither Edward V nor Edward VIII had a coronation, neither sat on a throne. I raise in defence the Statute of Westminster, passed five years before King George V’s death and which proclaimed:
… any alteration in the law touching the Succession to the Throne or the Royal Style and Titles shall hereafter require the assent as well of the Parliaments of all the Dominions as of the Parliament of the United Kingdom…
Succession comes with death and not with a coronation.
