George VI the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, J. H. Thomas. King George V had severe reservations about Prince Edward, saying "After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself in twelve months" and "I pray God that my eldest son will never marry and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne." On 20 January 1936, George V died and Edward ascended the throne as King Edward VIII. In the Vigil of the Princes, Prince Albert and his three brothers took a shift standing guard over their father's body as it lay in state, in a closed
Coronation of the British monarch when the fourth recension was first used, having been compiled over several preceding decades. Although influenced by its French counterpart, the new "ordo" focussed on the balance between the monarch and his nobles and on the oath, neither of which concerned the absolutist French kings. One manuscript of this recension is the "Liber Regalis" at Westminster Abbey which has come to be regarded as the definitive version. Following the start of the reformation in England, the boy king Edward VI had been crowned in the first Protestant coronation in 1547, during which Archbishop Thomas Cranmer preached a sermon against idolatry