She was laid down at Portsmouth Dockyard on 10 September 1894. Less than a year later - 22 August 1895 - the Duchess of York stepped up to the platform and broke a bottle of champagne against her bow. The Duchess would later be Queen Mary; her husband, standing beside her, was Prince George, Duke of York, the future King George V, for whom the ship was named. The Majestic class was the dominant battleship design of the late Victorian Royal Navy. Prince George displaced sixteen thousand long tons, carried four 12-inch guns in twin turrets fore and aft, and a secondary battery of twelve 6-inch guns in casemates along her sides. Her belt armour was nine inches of Harvey steel - a new alloy that let the navy build deeper, lighter armour without losing protection. She was commissioned on 26 November 1896. She steamed for the Channel Fleet.

The deepest danger to a peacetime battleship was not enemy action but her own neighbors. On 17 October 1903, Prince George was rammed in heavy seas off Spain by her sister ship at nine knots, taking a large hole below the waterline on her starboard quarter. She nearly sank. She made it to Ferrol with her sternwalk awash, steering on her engines because her rudder had been compromised. After temporary repairs she limped home to Portsmouth. The Edwardian decade brought more of the same: a collision with a German armoured cruiser at Gibraltar in March 1905 (no real damage), and another collision with a British armoured cruiser at Portsmouth in December 1907 (significant damage to her deck plating and boat davits). She was at the 1897 Diamond Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead, present at Edward VII's Coronation Review in 1902, and in 1909 she had radio installed during her Portsmouth refit. The world she had been built for was, slowly but unmistakably, going away.

The First World War found her with the 7th Battle Squadron, an aging unit of pre-dreadnoughts kept on for tasks the new dreadnoughts could not be spared for. In February 1915 she sailed for the Dardanelles as a mine-bumper - a battleship deliberately exposed to swept water to draw mine and shore-battery fire so the real fleet could follow. She bombarded Ottoman forts on 5 and 18 March. On 3 May, firing on Turkish batteries, she took a 6-inch hit below her waterline and limped to Malta for repairs. In July she gave gunfire support to French troops at Krithia and Achi Baba. In December she covered the evacuation of Suvla Bay; in January 1916, the evacuation from West Beach at Cape Helles. On 9 January 1916, a torpedo struck her at Cape Helles - and did not explode. She finished her war as an accommodation ship at Chatham, then in 1918 was converted to a destroyer depot ship and briefly renamed Victorious II, stationed at Scapa Flow.

She reverted to Prince George in February 1919. Placed on the disposal list at Sheerness in February 1920, she was sold for scrapping to a British firm on 21 September 1921 and resold a few months later to a German firm, which contracted to tow her to Germany to be cut up. The voyage began in December 1921. The North Sea in late December is a place ships have to be respected. On the night of 30 December 1921, in weather that overpowered the tow, Prince George broke loose from her line and was driven ashore at Camperduin on the North Holland coast - the dune-and-beach stretch between Petten and Bergen aan Zee. She was twenty-six years old. She had been launched by a queen and christened for a king. She came to rest on a Dutch beach with no crew aboard, on her way to a German scrapyard.

What happened next was practical. Salvors stripped her of valuable materials - copper, brass, anything that could be cut free in the open weather. What remained was too large to move and too useful to remove, so they left her as a breakwater. For decades her hull poked out of the surf line at Camperduin, a familiar silhouette to Dutch beach-walkers, slowly being eaten by salt and sand. In 2014, during a coastal expansion program that pushed the dune line out to sea, the engineers simply buried what was left of her. The wreck is now beneath the sand. A marker rests above where she lies. Twenty-six years of service in three fleets, evacuations at Gallipoli, a torpedo that refused to explode - and the rest is dune grass.