On the night of January 20, 1936, King George V’s doctor, Lord Dawson, gave the dying king injections of morphine and cocaine. He wrote later that he wanted the death announced in the respectable morning newspapers rather than the evening ones. His notes were only made public fifty years later. The king’s death put his son Edward on the throne, and within a year Edward had given it up. Royal deaths have often reshaped countries, and sometimes the world.
1. Prince Albert (1861)
Queen Victoria’s husband died of what doctors called typhoid fever at Windsor Castle in December 1861, aged 42. Victoria wore black for the remaining forty years of her life and withdrew from public view for so long that a republican movement grew in Britain. Albert’s death also took away the queen’s closest political adviser at a time when the monarchy’s power was shrinking.
2. Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914)
The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife, Sophie, were shot dead in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist. Princip had only got the chance because the archduke’s driver took a wrong turn. Austria-Hungary’s response led, within five weeks, to the First World War.
3. Tsar Nicholas II and his family (1918)
The last emperor of Russia, his wife, Alexandra, their five children and four of their staff were shot by Bolshevik guards in the cellar of a house in Yekaterinburg on the night of July 16 to 17, 1918. The killings ended three centuries of Romanov rule. Their remains were identified by DNA in the 1990s, and the family was made saints by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000.
4. King George V (1936)
George V had reigned through the First World War. His death brought Edward VIII to the throne, and Edward’s wish to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee, led to his abdication in December 1936. His shy younger brother became George VI, and George VI’s elder daughter became heir.
5. King George VI (1952)
George VI died in his sleep at Sandringham on February 6, 1952, aged 56, after years of lung cancer. His daughter Elizabeth was in Kenya on a royal tour and learned that she was queen at a lodge called Sagana. She was 25, and she would reign for seventy years.
6. Diana, Princess of Wales (1997)
Diana died after a car crash in a tunnel in Paris on August 31, 1997, aged 36. In the week after her death, the royal family’s silence at Balmoral was so badly received that the Queen returned to London, spoke on live television and bowed to Diana’s coffin. It was one of the very few times in her reign that she changed course in response to public anger.
7. Queen Elizabeth II (2022)
Elizabeth II died at Balmoral on September 8, 2022, aged 96, two days after appointing her fifteenth prime minister, Liz Truss. She had reigned for seventy years and 214 days, longer than any other British monarch. Her son became King Charles III, and an estimated quarter of a million people queued, some for more than a day, to walk past her coffin in Westminster Hall.
Dawson’s decision in 1936 is the strangest of these stories. It was done to control the news, and it stayed secret until his notes were opened in 1986.