I address you for the first time at a moment of national sorrow, when the whole country is mourning the irreparable loss which we have so recently sustained, and which has fallen with peculiar severity upon myself. My beloved Mother, during her long and glorious reign, has set an example before the world of what a monarch should be. It is my earnest desire to walk in her footsteps.
Of the Speeches of King George V, one of the most interesting was that which he read at the opening of Parliament in 1914—six months before the outbreak of the Great War—when the country was in turmoil over the question of Home Rule and seemed to be drifting into Civil War. One of its passages was said at the time to have been personally written by the King, with a view to mitigating the excesses of Party spirit. It runs:
I regret that the efforts which have been made to arrive at a solution by agreement of the problems connected with the Government of Ireland have, so far, not succeeded. In a matter in which the hopes and the fears of so many of my subjects are keenly concerned, and which, unless handled now with foresight, judgment, and in the spirit of mutual concession, threatens grave future difficulties, it is My most earnest wish that the good will and co-operation of men of all Parties and creeds may heal dissension and lay the foundations of a lasting settlement.
It was the good fortune of George V to be able to announce at the opening of the new Parliament on February 11, 1919, “the end of the struggle between German tyranny and European freedom” and “the dawn of a new era.” The Speech was of unprecedented length, as well as of historic importance. One of its most striking passages was this:
To build a better Britain we must stop at no sacrifice of interest or prejudice to stamp out unmerited poverty, to diminish unemployment and mitigate its sufferings, to provide decent homes, to improve the nation’s health, and to raise the standard of well-being throughout the community.
Never before was the question of the condition of the people enlarged upon so emphatically and boldly in the Speech from the Throne. His Majesty added the warning:
We shall not achieve this end by undue tenderness towards acknowledged abuses, and it must necessarily be retarded by violence and even by disturbance.
5
For many years the Commons went to the House of Lords in a way that was most unseemly in answer to the message of Black Rod, to hear the Speech from the Throne read by the Sovereign. So great was the rush and crush at one of the earlier openings of Parliament by Queen Victoria, that Joseph Hume, as he bitterly complained in the House of Commons, neither saw her Majesty nor heard her voice, although he was within touch of the Speaker as he stood at the Bar. “I was crushed into a corner,” he said, “my head being knocked against a post, and I might have been much injured if a stout Member had not come to my assistance.” Dickens, who was present at the ceremony a few years later, said the Speaker was like a schoolmaster with a mob of unmannerly boys at his heels. “He is propelled,” the novelist wrote, “to the Bar of the House with the frantic fear of being knocked down and trampled upon by the rush of M.P.’s.” In 1851 the Speaker was so pushed and hustled that his wig was knocked awry and his robe torn. Frank Hugh O’Donnell relates in his book on The Irish Parliamentary Party how at one opening of Parliament in the later ’seventies he saved Disraeli from being knocked down by squaring his shoulders and elbows to keep off the pressure of the mob of M.P.’s from the frail person of the Prime Minister. Disraeli sent his secretary, Montagu Cory, to thank O’Donnell. The last time such a scene was enacted was in 1901, at the first opening of Parliament by King Edward. Since 1902 the Strangers’ Gallery of the House of Lords has been set apart for Members of the House of Commons, and they are allowed access to it before the King appears in the Chamber and Black Rod is sent to command the attendance of the Commons at the Bar. It is a spectacle well worth seeing—the King crowned and in his purple robes and standing on the Throne, surrounded by his Ministers, addressing the assembled Lords and Commons. It is the most noble and impressive sight to be seen at Westminster.