George A Tactful, Democratic King.

New York Times 100 years ago today, March 19, 1913:
Danish Prince in British Navy When He Was Elected by the Greeks Exactly 50 Years Ago.
WEATHERED MANY STORMS
His Kindness and Urbanity Overcame Crisis After Crisis Caused by His Turbulent Subjects.
    King George I. of Greece was assassinated fifty years to a day from the date of his election to the Kingship by the National Assembly at Athens, on March 18, 1863. In that half century — at his death the longest rule of any monarch in the Old World, with the solitary exception of Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria — the 17-year-old Danish Prince, who had been taken literally from the masthead of an English man-of-war and transformed from a British midshipman into the King of a distant nation whose language and culture and customs were alike strange to him, had grown, if not to love his alien people and to be one of them, at least to link himself wholeheartedly with their national destiny and to lead them, as a true Greek King, into a more glorious future.
    Time and again, in the turbulent ups and downs of his reign, first one faction and then another, and sometimes the whole populace, had clamored against him and his family as foreigners who had nothing in common with Greeks, and several times his voluntary abdication was rumored. He himself, it was said, never reconciled himself to the thought and ways of the hot-headed people he ruled, and he was often weary of his position and yearned for the gayer and more comfortable life of the French and German spas or his own native Denmark. Yet with imperturbable good humor and genial urbanity he turned aside every storm that gathered around him, disposed tactfully of the most serious difficulties, and, with a plain democracy of living known in few ruling families of Europe, managed invariably to win back the loyalty and allegiance of his hot-tempered people and to remain in very fact their good King. They clamored against him time and again, and made his foreign birth the scapegoat for all their disappointments; but they always addressed him familiarly, as few Kings have been addressed, when they met him in the streets.
    It was no mean proof of George's capacity for kingship that he knew how to preserve his authority intact during the many political frenzies that threatened to tear his land asunder. He went to Greece as a stranger and a youth when, after the retirement of Amadeus, the son of Victor Emmanuel, and the hasty flight of Prince Otto of Bavaria in 1862, two others had refused the proffered kingship as a job too dangerous — Prince Alfred of England and Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. His predecessor, Otto, son of the devoted Pan-Hellenist, King Ludwig of Bavaria, had found the passions of his adopted people too unruly, and the position went begging.
    George, then known as Prince William of Schleswig-Holstein, the second son of Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, who later became King Christian of Denmark, was serving as a midshipman in the British Navy. It is said that when he was first apprised by representatives of the Athens Government of his election to the Greek kingship by the National Assembly, he was aloft on a masthead of his ship, having been sent there in punishment for some refraction of a ship's rule.
    With the consent of the great powers, the young Prince, through his father, as his guardian, accepted the honor, and on June 27, 1863, Prince Christian William Ferdinand Adolphus George was declared of age by the National Assembly. He landed in Greece on Nov. 2 of that year.

Married a Russian Princess.
    In 1867 he married Olga, the eldest daughter of the Grand Duke Constantine of Russia, brother of the late Emperor Alexander II. The royal house of Greece was thus linked with two of the most powerful ruling families of Europe, for George himself was a brother of Alexandra, who married the late King Edward of England. There were five sons and two daughters of the union. The prestige of the Greek royal family was further increased by the marriage of Prince Constantine, the Crown Prince, to Princess Sophie of Prussia, a sister of the present German Emperor, on Oct. 20, 1889.
    But such power as King George had in his long rule over the Greek people was mere the result of his own charming personality than of outside marital alliances with powerful ruling families of Europe. Throughout the crises that troubled his reign, he showed a characteristic coolness and firmness and an equally characteristic shrewdness and penetration. There was a vein of pleasantry in his temperament that enabled him, with unruffled serenity, when deputation after deputation of his feverish subjects presented ultimata at his palace to shake everybody by the hand, and, with imperturbable cheerfulness, good-humor, and urbanity, to win over even the most turbulent of his subjects and turn them from his presence calmer and aware of theretofore undiscovered humor in the most serious of situations.

His Democratic Habits.
    Few tourists in Athens would suspect that the elderly man whom they were apt to find sipping coffee in one of the cheap restaurants of the city was the country's King. His attire was of the plainest, with slouch hat and gray coat and trousers usually uncreased. His entrance into a coffee house inspired no further demonstration than a nod of recognition from a few frequenters of the place, and a hurried bustle of tile proprietor as he hastened to offer the King a seat or strike a match for his cigar. The King as a rule buried himself in a newspaper or watched with interest some game in the street in front of the restaurant.
    Or on an afternoon he would stop in some theatre to watch a performance, paying his fee like the rest of the public, and often taking a seat well back in the orchestra. Many a time, too, in walking further than he had planned from the city — and he was a great walker, usually accompanied by a big dog, he would hail the driver of some passing farmer's wagon and climb up to a seat beside him. Few Kings showed so little consciousness of their royal dignity. In Paris they tell how, with perfect equanimity, he suffered himself to be ejected from one of the German spas for bringing his dog into the place.
    He loved the gay crowds of Paris, and found the spirit there more to his liking than in his own Greek capital. Every year found him installed for at least a month at Aix-les-Bains, mingling indiscriminately with the crowds of bathers and with the crowds at the restaurants.

Long Suffered from Poverty.
    Until comparatively recent years he was a very poor King financially. Great Britain, France, and Russia contributed $20,000 a year to his civil list, making him a King openly in the pay of foreign Governments and dependent on them for half his income. He is said, however, to have reaped a rich harvest by speculating in American grain at the time of the Turkish-Russian war on the advice of his friend, Gen. Meredith Read.
    "I am sure if I were rich." he once remarked at Aix-les-Bains. "I should be a very ordinary King."
    His life at the palace was one of the simplest kind, and the King of the Hellenes preferred his wife's cooking to that of the best chef in Paris.
    His second son, Prince George, through his marriage to Princess Marie Bonaparte, became by far the richest member of the Greek royal family. King George used to reproach him for undue luxury in eating a course dinner every evening, but would add: "But you can afford it; you married a rich woman. Now, I married a woman who can roast me a piece of meat — when I can afford meat." The King was very fond of jesting about his own poverty. Once, priceing a watch at a Paris jeweler's, he exclaimed, aghast: "I never had as much money as that at one time in all my life!"
    It was personal characteristics such as these that charmed the Greek people into keeping and in a measure loving their foreign King. But they taxed his patience often. In 1886, shortly after the revolution at Philippopolis and the Servian-Bulgarian war, they were spoiling for a fight with Turkey and could scarcely be restrained by the firm stand of England. They blamed their King for that. In 1897 they blamed him for the fiasco of their too eager war with Turkey, in which Greece, with its disorganized army, two-dollar rifles, and fifteen-year-old cartridges, was ignominiously defeated. Even more they blamed the Duke of Sparta, (Crown Prince Constantine,) who now becomes King, who had command of the army and Prince George, the Admiral who commanded the Greek Navy.
    Similar clamor broke out against the Greeks' foreign rulers when, in 1900, Crete declared her independence of the Turk and asked to be annexed to Greece. The Greek nation, almost as one man, arose, demanding that the Cretans' request be complied with. Turkey, meanwhile, with its army in good shape, was eager for a fight with Greece.

Greatest Crisis of His Reign.
    King George was put in the dilemma of yielding to the popular clamor and seeing the nation suffer a second crushing defeat or opposing his people and possibly being expelled. From the balcony of his palace he pleaded with the populace of Athens to have patience, to observe the constitutional lines in carrying out national reforms, and to leave Crete to the discretion of the powers.
    So great grew the clamor against the royal family that in August, 1909, the officers and troops of the garrison at Athens walked out of their barracks and formally demanded sweeping military reforms and the removal of the Crown Prince and other Princes from the active list in command of the army and navy. The King was forced to comply. The Crown Prince resigned his post as Generalissimo, two of his brothers applied to be placed on the retired list, and the youngest two sons of King George took leave of the Greek capital, ostensibly to complete their military education in Germany.
    A few days later there was a general exodus of the Princes, the Crown Prince going to Denmark to live with his father's family. Their departure was attended by popular demonstrations of affection as sincere, apparently, as they were sudden. For some time thereafter there was talk of King George's abdication and Prince George, eldest son of the Crown Prince, being chosen as his successor, but presently the King won back the loyalty of his people, as before.
    In one thing — the matter of religion — King George always remained apart from his subjects. While his wife and children are adherents of the Orthodox Greek Church, he remained in the Lutheran faith, in which he was reared.

Queen Olga Much Beloved.
    Despite the frequent outcries against the royal family as "foreigners," the Greek nation has always regarded its ruling house with affection. Queen Olga has made herself beloved throughout the kingdom by her charities and philanthropies, supervising and managing the funds of many institutions, and making frequent personal visits to hospitals, where she tended the sick of her own people and among foreigners visiting her land. The Evangelisimos Hospital and nearly every other charitable institution in the kingdom owe their origin and foundation to the Queen, and it was but in line with her lifelong work of this sort that Queen Olga, in the present Balkan war, volunteered to go to the scene of the war and tend the wounded, a task in which she was recently engaged at Salonika.
    The Crown Prince Constantine took command of the Greek forces at the outbreak of the war, and it was he who, last Nov. 12, captured the City of Salonika from the Turks, thus bringing under Greek sway once more a city which had for centuries been associated with Greece and its history.
    Immediately after learning of the capture of the city, King George, with Prince George and Princess Alice, left Ghida and traveled to Salonika. His entry there was greeted with tumultuous cheers by the populace, and the Greek national colors decorated every house. At the request of King George, a "Te Deum" was sung in the Archiepiscopal Church on the following day. The army was reviewed by the King, and a martial government was established in the city.
    On Nov. 27, the Bulgarians brought 40,000 troops to the city, a step that created great resentment among the Greeks, they holding that they alone were able to keep the situation well in hand and that they were the captors of the city. The feeling between the two allied forces grew intense, and a break was threatened. When the allies granted an armistice to Turkey soon afterward, the Greeks alone refused to be a party to the armistice. In spite of the strained relations, however, King George remained at Salonika and continued to make it his headquarters.
    It was reported in an interview with King George by a Danish newspaper correspondent that Greece, after the war, would probably have a frontier north of Salonika and Monastir, and that the King was inclined to make Salonika a free port.

Previous Attempt at Assassination.
    On one former occasion an attempt was made to assassinate King George. Shortly after the Turkish war, and while the resentment following that defeat was still strong in Greece, two men opened fire with guns on the King's carriage as he was returning home after a drive at Phalernum. The King escaped injury, but his footman was slightly wounded. King George had a clear glimpse of his assailants, who took to their heels when he advanced against them with his walking stick, but the men were never arrested.
    The family of King George and Queen Olga consists of the Crown Prince Constantino, Prince George, the sailor son, who has endeared himself to sportsmen the world over by his activity in promoting the Olympic games in Athens in 1906 and by many deeds of personal courage and prowess, and who was appointed Governor of Crete by the powers in 1896; Prince Nicholas, who is in the army, and an artist of considerable note; Princess Marie, who married the Grand Duke George Michaelovitch and lives in Russia; Prince Andrew, who married Princess Alice of Battenberg, and Prince Christopher, who is 23 years old. One daughter of King George, Princess Alexandra, died at Moscow a little over a year after her marriage to the Grand Duke Paul.