George V

George V was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 until his death in 1936. He was born during the reign of his grandmother Queen Victoria as the second son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, later Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and served in the Royal Navy until his elder brother's unexpected death in 1892 put him in line for the throne; he married his brother's former fiancee, Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, and they had six children. His reign saw the rise of socialism, communism, fascism, Irish republicanism and the Indian independence movement, and the Parliament Act 1911 established the supremacy of the elected House of Commons over the House of Lords. As a result of the First World War the empires of his cousins Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany fell, while the British Empire reached its greatest extent, and in 1917 George became the first monarch of the House of Windsor, renaming it from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha amid anti-German sentiment. He appointed the first Labour ministry in 1924, and the 1931 Statute of Westminster recognised the Empire's Dominions as separate, independent states; on his death in January 1936 he was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward VIII.