For King and Country
The British Monarchy and the First World War
Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare Series

This is a ground-breaking history of the British monarchy in the First World War and of the social and cultural functions of monarchism in the British war effort. Heather Jones examines how the conflict changed British cultural attitudes to the monarchy, arguing that the conflict ultimately helped to consolidate the crown's sacralised status. She looks at how the monarchy engaged with war recruitment, bereavement, gender norms, as well as at its political and military powers and its relationship with Ireland and the empire. She considers the role that monarchism played in military culture and examines royal visits to the front, as well as the monarchy's role in home front morale and in interwar war commemoration. Her findings suggest that the rise of republicanism in wartime Britain has been overestimated and that war commemoration was central to the monarchy's revered interwar status up to the abdication crisis.

Introduction; Prelude: The monarchy and wartime political power. Part I. The role of the British monarchy in cultural mobilisation for war: 1. Monarchist mentalities and British mobilisation, 1914–1916; 2. Monarchist culture and combatant practices. Part II. The emperor's new clothes: Changing cultures of deference: 3. The royal body in wartime; 4. De-sacralisation discourses – challenges to the monarchy's status, 1916–1918. Part III. The unknown soldier: The role of the monarchy in post-war commemoration; 5. The monarchy and the armistice: Ritualising victory, channelling war grief; 6. The monarchy's role in sacralising post-war commemoration; Conclusion.

Heather Jones is Professor of Modern and Contemporary European History at University College London. An expert on the First World War, her previous publications include Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920 (2011). She is a former Max Weber Fellow of the European University Institute and has been awarded the Irish Research Council's Eda Sagarra Gold Medal.