Great Britain, George V, Halfcrown 1911, PCGS MS 64

History

George V came to the throne in May 1910 inheriting not just a crown but a constitutional crisis that was already two years old and showed no sign of resolving itself.

The trouble had begun in 1909, when Lloyd George’s radical People’s Budget – proposing new taxes on land and wealth to fund old-age pensions and social reform – was vetoed by the Conservative-dominated House of Lords. It was an act of extraordinary constitutional audacity. For centuries it had been accepted that the unelected Lords did not obstruct money bills. Now they had, and in doing so they had forced a question that could no longer be deferred: who, in a modern democracy, actually governed Britain? Two general elections in 1910 failed to resolve the deadlock. The new king, barely months into his reign, was asked by the Liberal government whether he would be prepared to create hundreds of new Liberal peers to flood the Lords and break the impasse. George V – a conscientious, steady, deeply uncomfortable man who disliked political theatre of any kind – agreed, reluctantly, that he would if it came to that. It never quite did. Faced with the prospect of being diluted out of existence, the Lords backed down and passed the Parliament Act in August 1911 by a margin of seventeen votes. The centuries-old veto of the upper house was gone.

The coronation of George V took place that same summer, in June 1911, and the Half Crown struck that year carries the fresh portrait of a new king on a throne transformed almost the moment he had sat down in it. The obverse portrait – the work of the Australian sculptor Bertram Mackennal, the first non-European to design the effigy of a British monarch – shows a bare-headed George V, composed and direct. The reverse carries the crowned and quartered shield within the Garter band, framed by the motto HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE – Shame on him who thinks evil of it – the ancient device of the Order of the Garter, unchanged on English silver since the medieval era.

The man on this coin was not a natural king. He had been a naval officer, the second son, never intended for the throne. His older brother Albert Victor had died of influenza in 1892, and the crown had passed unexpectedly to George, who spent the rest of his life taking the responsibility with a seriousness that bordered on the monastic. He was methodical, dutiful, and entirely without vanity – qualities that would serve him well through the catastrophes that lay ahead. The First World War. The Russian Revolution. The Irish War of Independence. The General Strike. He would navigate all of it, quietly and steadily, and die in 1936 still on his throne and still, somehow, trusted.

But in 1911, the worst was still unimaginable. The coronation crowds were jubilant, the empire was vast, and a new reign had just begun on the foundations of a constitution quietly, irrevocably changed.