On the twelfth of December 1911, as many as half a million people packed the Coronation Park in Delhi to witness the most spectacular display of imperial power the British Empire had ever staged. The event was the Delhi Durbar, a grand court held to mark the formal proclamation of George V as Emperor of India, and beside the king-emperor stood his wife, the new Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India. She was a woman who would carry the British throne through two world wars and the end of the imperial age itself. Her name was Mary of Teck, and in time she would come to be known as the matriarch of the House of Windsor.
She had been born in the same room of Kensington Palace where Queen Victoria had come into the world forty-eight years earlier. That was on the twenty-sixth of May 1867, and the full name given to her at her baptism was Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes. In childhood she was known as Victoria Mary, later simply as Mary when she became queen, though her family and friends always called her May. Her father was Prince Francis, Duke of Teck, a title drawn from the Swabian region of Germany, and the son of Duke Alexander of Württemberg.
So Mary, though born in London, was of strongly German blood on both sides of her family—as was the British royal family itself, which also traced descent from the Welsh Tudors, the Scottish Stuarts, and the Anglo-Norman kings of medieval England. Her mother was Princess Mary Adelaide, daughter of Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, who was in turn a son of King George III, who had reigned from 1760 to 1820. That made little Mary, born in 1867, a granddaughter of George III and a first cousin of Queen Victoria, who had sat on the throne since 1837. Mary’s parents had married only the year before her birth, and she was their first child and their only daughter, followed by three sons: Adolphus in 1868, Francis in 1870, and Alexander in 1874.
All four children lived to adulthood. The world into which Mary was born was changing faster than any era in human history before it. The Industrial Revolution had begun nearly a century earlier, transforming England from a rural agricultural society into a country of factory cities. In the 1830s the new railways began to link those cities, and in 1851 the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London showcased the inventions that would reshape the world.
During Mary’s childhood the second Industrial Revolution was underway: electricity was being introduced, photography and the telegraph became common in the 1870s, and soon came the first automobiles and radios. When Mary was growing up, London was a city of gas lamps, oil, and horses; by middle age it was a metropolis of cars and electric street lighting. It was also an age of democracy. When Victoria was born in 1819, Britain was effectively ruled by the wealthy, with voting restricted to men of property; within Mary’s lifetime it became a full democracy in which all adults could vote.
On the surface Mary’s childhood was supposed to be one of privilege. She was a member of the royal family, though not in the direct line of succession—there was no chance that she or her brothers would ever inherit the throne. Yet the reality was very different. Her father had not arrived in England with any great fortune from his German estates, and although her mother received a parliamentary grant of £5,000 a year—a large sum in Victorian times—they spent far beyond their means.
Much of their trouble came from the expectation that they would fund ceremonies and formal gatherings and maintain a large staff of servants at Kensington Palace and at their other home, White Lodge in Windsor. As a result her parents were careful not to spend extravagantly on her education and upbringing. Her governess was an Alsatian woman named Helene Bricka, to whom Mary became close, and she spent much of her childhood with her mother, from whom she learned a tendency toward charity and care for the poor. When Mary turned sixteen she was sent to Florence, where she spent eighteen months in the heart of the Renaissance.
Between that stay and study back home she learned Italian, French, and German, and developed a growing interest in literature and art history. As she reached adulthood, the court described her as shy, more inclined to reading than to royal ceremony, with a gentle nature. As with any daughter of a high royal or aristocratic family in the nineteenth century, the question of Mary’s marriage arose early. As Queen Victoria’s cousin and a member of the royal family she could not marry a commoner or someone of lower rank, yet her position did not allow her parents to arrange a marriage to one of the leading heirs of Europe’s grand royal houses.
It was assumed she would marry the second or third son of a small royal family and become a duchess somewhere on the continent. But her cousin had other ideas. Queen Victoria conceived an unconventional plan: Mary would marry Victoria’s grandson Albert Victor, the eldest son of Victoria’s heir, the future Edward VII. Albert Victor was an eccentric young man who resisted marriage, disregarded royal protocol on several matters, and was caught up in scandal in 1889 when rumor connected him to a homosexual brothel on Cleveland Street in London.
Some historians even tried to claim that Albert Victor was Jack the Ripper. None of these claims was ever proven. Victoria clearly believed Mary might help her grandson settle down, and the marriage was arranged. It never took place.
Before the wedding, Albert Victor died in January 1892 of pneumonia brought on by what was known as the Asian flu pandemic. Observers noted that Mary was deeply grieved by his death and the failure of the wedding plans. In the end she married the second in line to the throne anyway—but the prince concerned had changed. With Albert Victor dead, his younger brother George Frederick became second in line, and he was created Duke of York in May 1892 to mark his advancement.
On the sixth of July 1893, he and Mary were married at St James’s Palace. The marriage began under inauspicious circumstances. George had fallen in love with Julie Stoner, the daughter of one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting, but it was made clear to him that he could not marry a commoner. So he married Mary instead.
This was no bad development for her. George was not perfect, but he was a man committed to his royal duties, and their marriage became an example of love, though marked by a good deal of formality, even after many years. He often wrote to her expressing his appreciation, and she replied that it was a pleasure to hear it in writing—though she added she would not mind if he told her in person that he valued her as a wife. They had six children.
The eldest, a boy named Edward—the future Edward VIII—was born in the summer of 1894, less than twelve months after the wedding. Another son, Albert, the future George VI, arrived in December 1895. Their only daughter, Mary, came in April 1897, followed by Henry in 1900, George in 1902, and their last son, John, in 1905. John suffered from ill health and died in his early teens; the rest lived to adulthood.
The family lived between York Cottage on the Sandringham estate and York House in London. Their parenting style was by no means modern. George was strict in discipline, a trait he had learned from his own father. One observer remarked that George, who had served in the Royal Navy in his youth, ran his family like a naval commander trying to control a mutiny.
Physical discipline of children was not unusual in Victorian and early twentieth-century Europe, but what was more unusual was the use of servants in their household to administer it in a way considered out of the ordinary at the time. George’s reserved nature did not create a warm family atmosphere. Mary was closer to her children, who often turned to her to soften their father’s harsh methods. In 1901 they embarked on a lengthy tour of the empire, traveling to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and they were deeply troubled by leaving their children behind for so long.
They would later be criticized over the fate of their youngest child, Prince John. Born in 1905, he began to suffer from epilepsy at an early age, which forced him away from public events and London society. He did not attend his parents’ coronation in 1911, and after 1913 he was rarely seen in public because his health deteriorated. He died in 1919 of increasingly severe seizures.
Mary and George may be criticized for trying to hide John from the public, but epilepsy was poorly understood at the time, and exposing John to public events could have worsened his condition. It seems unfair to blame them for failing to handle better something they did not fully understand. No sooner had they returned from the imperial tour than Queen Victoria died on the twenty-second of January 1901, aged eighty-one, after what was then the longest reign in British history—nearly sixty-four years, surpassing even George III. Her son succeeded as Edward VII.
He was fifty-nine and in poor health, which meant that George now became heir apparent, and it was reasonable to assume he would become king before long. Certainly he would not wait fifty-nine years as his father had. Mary in turn soon became queen consort, and their new status as Prince and Princess of Wales increased their royal engagements and raised their profile. In 1905 they traveled to India, then under British rule, and the following year they visited Madrid for the wedding of Princess Ena of Battenberg to King Alfonso XIII of Spain.
Edward VII’s reign lasted until 1910 despite his failing health—he suffered from bronchitis, is believed to have weighed over 127 kilograms, and had several heart attacks, all aggravated by years of chronic smoking and an unhealthy lifestyle. He died on the sixth of May 1910, aged sixty-eight. George became King George V of the United Kingdom and Emperor of India, and Mary became queen consort and empress. Although her baptismal name was Victoria, she adopted the royal name Mary—partly out of preference for the name she had always been called, and partly out of respect for the legacy of her cousin Queen Victoria.
The coronation did not take place until the twenty-second of June 1911. A delay of fourteen months was not unusual, but in George’s case it was partly because Britain had been plunged into a constitutional crisis when he became king in the early summer of 1910, arising from the unprecedented decision of the House of Lords to block the People’s Budget, a financial program designed to redistribute wealth and introduce labor and social reforms. The coronation could not be planned until that crisis was resolved. It was a magnificent event by every measure.
It was the last royal coronation before the First World War, and therefore the last time the great European royal houses—the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns—still ruled their countries as they gathered in London for a British coronation. Mary wore a cream coronation robe embroidered with symbols of the British Empire: the Star of India, the rose, the thistle, and the shamrock, representing England, Scotland, and Ireland. It was also the last coronation in England at which a king and queen consort were crowned as sovereigns of a united Ireland under British rule. One might say Mary and George had two coronations.
As soon as the first was over in England, the new king and queen intensified planning for a second, to be held in India. The Delhi Durbar, or “Court of Delhi,” was held in the capital of the British Raj. It was the third Durbar: the first, in 1877, had marked Queen Victoria’s proclamation as Empress of India, though she did not attend in person; the second, in 1903, celebrated Edward VII’s accession two years earlier, and he too stayed away. So when George and Mary sailed from Portsmouth to India on the eleventh of November 1911, they were the first king and queen to attend a Delhi Durbar in person.
They arrived in Delhi four weeks later. The main event took place on the twelfth of December 1911 in Coronation Park. British India had been formed from many principalities and sultanates over more than a century, and many of the local lords had retained prestigious positions. The Durbar was an opportunity for thousands of Indian aristocrats and officials to formally acknowledge George and Mary as Emperor and Empress of India.
The following day, Mary and her husband appeared on the balcony of the Red Fort in Delhi, the historic seat of the Mughal emperors, and waved to the half-million people who had gathered to see their new rulers. After the farewell ceremonies, Mary and George traveled on to Nepal. The entire official visit to India was filmed and later shown as a motion picture titled Our King and Queen in India. After their return home, Mary’s style of managing the affairs of the queen consort became clearer to the British public, and the differences were noticed immediately.
Edward VII and his wife, Queen Alexandra, had behaved entirely independently of each other. George and Mary quickly made clear that they were a team. In fact, George consulted his wife on many issues. Mary was frankly more intelligent than her husband and better informed on social questions.
She was also more in tune with ordinary people and court officials, while George was more comfortable pursuing his hobbies away from the London spotlight. Mary was simply better suited to being queen than he was to being king, and he relied on her heavily. She urged him to engage with a wide range of social issues. The nineteenth century had been an age of appalling labor practices—children working in factories, men expected to work seventy or eighty hours a week, urban poverty rampant in some of the great cities.
By the 1910s much had been done to reform these problems, but communities in England were still mired in poverty. Mary encouraged George to take an interest. When coal miners went on national strike in 1912, the king and queen visited the pits in the Rhondda in South Wales and elsewhere. She was not, however, receptive to the suffragette movement campaigning for votes for women.
In 1913 she and George were present at the Epsom Derby when Emily Davison, a suffragette, ran onto the course in front of the king’s horse, Anmer. Davison died after being struck by the galloping horses. Strange as it seems to think of it now, such militant action turned many people against the suffrage movement at the time. Mary’s early years as queen were marked by successive crises in European politics.
Colonial rivalry was a constant source of friction between the powers—in the winter of 1898 Britain and France had nearly gone to war over the Fashoda Incident in Sudan—and the greatest rival was the German Empire, with which Britain had been engaged in a naval arms race since the turn of the century. What ultimately dragged the continent into war was a political assassination in the Balkans, aggravating the larger struggle of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires to expand their influence there as the Ottoman Empire’s four-century rule over southeastern Europe collapsed. A series of declarations of war followed in late July and early August 1914. The First World War was a uniquely family affair.
Mary, like the rest of the royal family, was of German descent, and now Britain was at war with Germany. Her husband was a first cousin of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II and a cousin of similar degree to the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, with whom Britain was allied. There were many other royal connections: Queen Marie of Romania, for example, was another royal cousin—indeed, before Mary married George, there had been a suggestion that she marry her. Romania finally entered the war on Britain’s side in 1916.
These family ties weighed heavily on the royal family during the conflict. Mary believed she had an important role to play in the war. In her diary in early August, a few days after Britain entered the war, she noted the need to contribute to various relief programs: supporting the families of young men heading to France to fight in the trenches, and supporting the hospitals that would soon be caring for hundreds of thousands of sick and wounded. Much of her activity initially centered on the Embroidery Guild, renamed the Queen Mary’s Embroidery Guild.
Under her patronage a small group of women began knitting clothes for charities and institutions such as the Red Cross, the St John Ambulance, and the National Relief Fund. A visitor to St James’s Palace in 1915 would have seen piles of parcels waiting to be sent out. She also coordinated her efforts with various groups to ensure women were employed on the home front while men went to war. This led to an unlikely alliance with Mary Macarthur, secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League, and the two developed a close, almost friendly relationship, coordinating their efforts in 1914 and 1915.
This was highly unusual for the time, as trade unions were still regarded as dangerous instruments of socialism, and royal family members were principal supporters of the established Conservative and Liberal parties. Mary’s workload increased dramatically during the war years; palace staff later noted that she attended roughly three times the number of peacetime engagements. She also led a campaign to impose rationing and austerity on the royal family, for it was not acceptable for them to continue living in luxury while ordinary Britons struggled to make ends meet and sent their sons to die in France. This was not out of character for Mary, who, despite being royal and queen consort, was known for avoiding extravagance.
Her wartime service was honored in an unusual way. After the war the state gave her a doll’s house—but not an ordinary one. The idea came from Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and a cousin of George and Mary, who had grown up with Mary and remained her friend. Marie Louise thought Mary would enjoy such a gift and deserved the honor for her war service.
She approached the celebrated architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, and together, with a committee, they began designing the doll’s house in 1921. It was far larger than the usual doll’s house, built on a scale of one inch to one foot. It stands over one and a half meters tall, one meter wide, and sixty-six centimeters deep, its rooms spread over four floors in the style of an Edwardian mansion. Over the next three years, hundreds of craftsmen worked on it, and artists and writers were brought in to add their touch.
The level of accuracy and detail is extraordinary: the tiny books on the bookshelves contain miniature extracts from the writings of authors commissioned for the project; miniature portraits of the king and queen were painted and hung on the walls of the main salon; a dining table in the basement is laid with exquisitely precise miniature tableware; there is even a wine cellar with tiny bottles of wine and brandy, each containing a small amount of real alcohol when opened. The Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House was presented to her in 1924, and the following year it was placed as a centerpiece in its own room at Windsor Castle, where it can be visited to this day. When the war ended, royal life returned to some semblance of normality. It was a difficult period for royal families across the continent.
The Russian Revolution had toppled the Romanovs and led to their brutal murder. The Habsburgs, who had founded Austria as a family inheritance, were overthrown, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved into several states. The German imperial family disappeared, and the Kaiser was exiled to the Netherlands. Portugal had lost its monarchy in 1910, and Spain would follow in 1931.
The possibility of the British constitutional monarchy falling seemed remote, but there was widespread unrest after the war. Men who had fought in the trenches for years returned to a country of high unemployment and growing support for the labor movement as communist systems emerged across the continent. In the face of this, the royal family intensified its efforts to connect with the British people in the 1920s. At Buckingham Palace, George kept a record of the family’s public engagements and community work.
Mary took a particular interest, becoming a generous patron of British hospitals and of organizations concerned with children’s welfare. The royal secretariat wrote of the new task of reforming the monarchy so that the royal family appeared as individuals not merely ruling from above in Buckingham Palace but committed to improving the lives of the British people. To that end, Mary patronized many projects aimed at improving living standards among the working class. The efforts of Mary and George did not go to waste: the monarchy had the unusual distinction that its popularity increased by the end of a sovereign’s reign rather than at the beginning, when enthusiasm usually faded over time.
Mary managed this work through a family environment that was often difficult. By then all their surviving children had reached adulthood. There were successes. Their second son, Albert, was quiet and handsome, married early to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in a suitable match, and was working to overcome a speech impediment that affected his confidence and his royal duties.
Their eldest daughter, Princess Mary, married Henry Lascelles in 1922 and was by then a responsible member of the royal family—indeed, she became the first member of the family to visit France after the armistice of 11 November 1918, arriving just nine days later to visit wounded British soldiers in field hospitals near the Western Front. But there were problems with the other sons. Henry did not marry; he began an affair with Lady Markham that started in Kenya in 1928 and continued in London with raucous parties at the Goring Hotel. George, Duke of Kent, did not marry at an early age, and rumors circulated that he fathered an illegitimate child in the mid-1920s.
The greatest worry for the king and queen was their eldest son, Edward, Prince of Wales and heir to the throne. Edward did not marry throughout his youth, and his relationship with his father became strained. By all accounts Mary stayed out of it, never speaking to Edward about his affairs or his failure to marry and produce an heir. As the difficult war and postwar years gave way to a new era of prosperity in the mid-1920s, Mary devoted much of her time and attention to the arts.
She had developed a strong interest in art history in her youth, after living in Florence and spending time in its great galleries and museums—an interest she inherited from her mother, but unlike her mother she had the financial means to pursue it seriously. As queen consort she began building the Royal Collection, gathered over centuries and today the largest private art collection in the world. Mary acquired many pieces over the years, much of it portraits of royal family members and the great history paintings fashionable in the nineteenth century. It must be said that her taste was not refined: she preferred quantity to quality, and few of the works she acquired rivaled the masterpieces collected by kings like Charles I and his son Charles II in the seventeenth century—it was Charles II, for example, who acquired the hundreds of Leonardo da Vinci drawings that remain among the jewels of the Royal Collection to this day.
Mary’s acquisitions went beyond paintings: she was interested in jade carvings, many from China at a time when interest in the Far East was at its height; she added to the collection of magnificent decorative eggs; much of what she acquired centered on birds; and elsewhere she worked to reorganize and consolidate what was already there, for many of her predecessors had shown little interest in the collection and it needed work to organize properly. George was happy to let her do this, despite her spending large sums, apparently seeing her hobby as parallel to his own stamp collecting. Perhaps someone should have pointed out to him that paintings by great European masters cost rather more than stamps. Mary’s prolific collecting habits have led to accusations in the modern era that she stole a great deal of material for the Royal Collection—that she was, in essence, a kleptomaniac.
She has been portrayed in a modern television series stealing items from the houses of British aristocrats during her visits. There is a good deal of truth behind this portrayal. Mary was fond of collecting all sorts of things, and she was known during visits to other people’s homes to cast an eye over a particular piece and express admiration for it, indicating a wish to receive it as a gift and thereby prompting her generous host to offer it. But the idea that the Queen of Britain and Empress of India was often seen rifling through the drawers of her host’s drawing room for things to put in her handbag is an exaggeration.
Rather, Mary partook of a centuries-old custom in which the royal family received gifts from aristocrats or people seeking favor, gifts that were usually reciprocated through various forms of royal patronage. Moreover, when she acquired pieces for the Royal Collection, she was not in fact acquiring them for herself—the collection is owned by the Crown as a trust for future generations. There may have been another motive behind her collecting mania: perhaps she was trying to distract herself from her husband’s declining health. In 1915, during the war, George fell from his horse while reviewing troops in France.
He also suffered from severe respiratory problems aggravated by excessive smoking, and by the 1920s he looked prematurely aged. His doctors advised rest and a healthy lifestyle, to no avail. In 1928 he suffered a serious illness and developed a septic infection in one lung; from then on his health was never good. He was often exhausted, lacking energy, and confined to bed for long periods.
Mary faced this difficulty in the 1930s with firm resolve. She had great self-control and did not reveal her feelings to anyone—indeed, her lack of emotion led many to wonder what she was suppressing. Making matters worse, Edward was not acquiring the maturity and character needed to take the throne if George died soon. Still, her husband kept fighting.
On the sixth of May 1935, with Mary beside him, he celebrated his Silver Jubilee—twenty-five years on the throne—the first silver jubilee ever celebrated by a British monarch. The concept of the Golden Jubilee, at fifty years, had been developed under George III, and Victoria had celebrated her own fiftieth in 1887. There was good reason to celebrate George V’s Silver Jubilee, for it was by no means certain he would have reached it. In his speech he praised Mary highly as his wife.
John St Helier painted individual portraits of the king and queen to mark the occasion. It was the last major act of George’s reign and of Mary’s time as queen consort. George died eight months later, on the twentieth of January 1936. His doctor administered a fatal injection of a mixture of drugs to hasten his death, given the king’s severe suffering—a procedure that has aroused controversy over the years.
The year after her husband’s death was one of crisis. In accordance with royal custom, her eldest son succeeded as King Edward VIII. Edward had long been a controversial heir: a spendthrift young man who spent lavishly during the 1920s and 1930s and mixed with a wide circle of people. As noted, in his youth he refused to marry and settle down, which caused a rift with his father in particular.
It was the duty of the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne to marry and raise a family to ensure the continuance of the royal line, and by refusing he neglected one of his essential duties. He reached forty in 1934, the year he was expected to marry. To the astonishment of his parents, it became clear that he was determined to continue his relationship with Wallis Simpson. She was an American society woman who had been married and divorced before, and was still married to her second husband, Ernest Simpson, when she became involved with Edward.
The relationship continued until Edward came to the throne in early 1936. The new king’s refusal to end it led to the abdication crisis in the autumn of 1936. There were several aspects considered scandalous then that would not be so troubling today: Wallis was not of the nobility, so a marriage would have been considered a misalliance with a commoner; her status as a divorcée and an American also posed problems. Mary’s position on the unfolding crisis was complicated.
As she adjusted to her new role as queen mother, the widowed former queen consort, she remained fully informed of the situation with Edward, receiving regular updates on what he was doing and what his next steps regarding Simpson might be. Like most people, she was taken aback during the spring and summer of 1936 that Edward did not end the relationship. In late summer she received updates as photographs appeared of Edward and Wallis holidaying in the Mediterranean, in Greece and Yugoslavia. When Edward returned home he dined with his mother at Buckingham Palace in September, and a fortnight later at a family gathering at Marlborough House.
Understandably, she did not press him at those meetings about what he ultimately intended to do. Many people were urging Mary to intervene directly with her son before the British press broke the story. Strangely, Mary was in contact with members of the cabinet who were trying to prevent Wallis from divorcing her second husband—if she could not divorce Ernest, she could not marry Edward. Yet Mary did not raise these matters directly with Edward, indicating the gulf between mother and son.
The question of the marriage became a real crisis in November. Only then did Mary intervene directly. She invited Edward to tea and pleaded with him to consider the position of his younger brother Albert. Albert had not been raised as heir to the throne, and if the crisis led to Edward’s abdication, Albert would suddenly be forced to become king.
In the end, that is exactly what happened. On the night of the eleventh of December 1936, Edward abdicated in a broadcast on the BBC, and Albert succeeded as King George VI. Edward later married Wallis Simpson, and the couple lived an odd life afterward, mostly in Paris, including a controversial visit to Nazi Germany in 1937. Because of the abdication crisis, Mary could not settle into life as a queen dowager immediately in 1936; it was only when Albert became George VI and matters settled in 1937 that she was able to retire in earnest.
She continued her work with various artistic institutions, though the pressure had eased now that a new queen, her daughter-in-law, had taken up the role. As queen mother, Mary enjoyed attending the theatre, exhibitions, and museums. She also became a regular presence at the Wimbledon tennis championships in London in the summer, a role she continued after the Second World War—in 1948 she presented the trophies to the winners. She had in fact established the connection between the royal family and Wimbledon in 1906, when she and George had attended as Prince and Princess of Wales, a link that continues to this day: since 2017, Catherine, Princess of Wales, has been patron of the All England Club, which organizes Wimbledon.
Her early years as queen mother also brought more time with her grandchildren, and a car accident that nearly killed her. In May 1939, while Mary was traveling by car in Putney, London, with Lord Claud Hamilton and Lady Constance Mills-Gaskell, a truck loaded with steel pipes tipped over beside her car. The car overturned onto its side, and the queen had to be helped out with a ladder. The accident made national headlines, and Mary received wide press coverage after she was heard to say that she needed a cup of tea as soon as she was out of the wrecked car.
Mary’s attendance at Wimbledon had a strange connection to developments on the European continent. In 1935, 1936, and 1937, Gottfried von Cramm, a German who had won the French Open twice, in 1934 and 1936, was runner-up in the men’s singles each year. Von Cramm was probably obliged to play under the banner of Nazi Germany, and the regime exploited his successes in London and Paris as much as possible. But von Cramm was not a Nazi supporter and refused to join the Nazi Party despite pressure.
His appearances at the Wimbledon finals came in years of growing anxiety in England about his country’s actions, and Mary was as aware of this as anyone. Like the rest of the royal family, Queen Mary was disturbed when Edward and Wallis Simpson decided to visit Germany and meet the Nazi leadership a year after his abdication, an event that received wide media coverage and which the British government and royal family made clear was not an official state visit. The controversy only grew as the Nazis accelerated their rush toward war in the months that followed, annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia before the war broke out after their invasion of Poland in September 1939. The elderly and children were evacuated from London for much of the war, particularly after the German bombing campaign, the Blitz, began in the autumn of 1940.
Mary spent most of the war at Badminton House in Gloucestershire, continuing her royal duties by visiting hospitals and meeting groups of children and others evacuated from London to the countryside. She also spent much of the war knitting an elaborate rug. After the war the rug was sold to a women’s organization in Canada for the enormous sum of £100,000, and Mary donated the money to a British cause in dire need of funds after a financially devastating conflict. The Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945, though it continued against Japan in the Far East for four more months.
Mary was in her late seventies when it ended. In the years that followed, she witnessed the collapse of old certainties about Britain and its role in the world. The British Empire had been in decline before the war, largely because of Britain’s demographic reality as a small state with a limited population on the fringes of Europe. Its rise as a world power in the nineteenth century rested on technological advantages from the scientific and industrial revolutions, the dynamism of the British people, and the strength of the Royal Navy.
By the early twentieth century, as technologies developed in Britain and other European countries spread across the globe, it became increasingly difficult to maintain control over vast areas of the planet and their enormous populations. Moreover, despite being an imperial power, British political classes were receptive to calls for self-determination in various parts of the empire. After the war Britain began dismantling its empire, and the speed of that dismantling was startling. In 1947 Mary witnessed the granting of independence to the British Raj, where she and George had celebrated their Durbar in 1911.
Unfortunately, events descended into religious violence between Muslims and Hindus, and two major states emerged: predominantly Muslim Pakistan and predominantly Hindu India. Across Africa, calls for independence grew in colonies such as Nigeria and Kenya. Mary did not live long enough to see those demands fulfilled in most countries, but she did live to see the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and the end of British intervention in Cairo’s affairs. At home, Mary continued to contribute to the royal family’s activities despite being in her late seventies and advancing years.
She was not a supporter of the Labour government that had come to power a few weeks after the end of the war in Europe, replacing Winston Churchill’s government despite his leadership during the war. She opposed, for example, the plans for a National Health Service as a cornerstone of the new welfare state, designed to prevent any future slide toward the extreme politics that had brought the Nazis to power in Germany amid the Great Depression. It was not that she opposed the idea of poorer people easily accessing health care; rather, she believed the best way to achieve that was through charity rather than state administration. This was consistent with her vision as queen consort in the 1910s and 1920s: the modern monarchy should be an instrument of welfare and philanthropy.
These years were not without personal sorrows. Mary had buried her son John, who died young in 1919. In 1942 she buried her second son George, Duke of Kent, who was killed in a plane crash near Dunbeath in Scotland—not to be confused with his brother Albert, who had taken George as his regnal name. After the war, King George VI’s health deteriorated prematurely.
Like his grandfather and father before him, he suffered from severe respiratory problems aggravated by excessive smoking. After years of illness he died on the sixth of February 1952. Mary was among the first to kiss the hand of her granddaughter and acknowledge her as Queen Elizabeth II. By the time Elizabeth came to the throne, Mary’s own health was declining, and she did not live long enough to see her granddaughter’s coronation.
It was scheduled for the second of June 1953. As the months passed after George’s death, the likelihood grew that his mother would not live to see it. Mary turned eighty-five in May 1952—an advanced age in the mid-twentieth century, when life expectancy even for those with the best available health care was some years lower than today. She suffered from various health problems, most notably a stomach disorder.
She also seemed to have lost some of her will to live, having been affected by the burial of her third child. By early 1953 she was mostly confined to bed, rarely rising, and complained that the curtains in her last residence, Marlborough House in London, should not be opened. When light fell on her eyes, she suffered a hemorrhage in the early hours of the twenty-fourth of March. Her condition deteriorated rapidly in the following hours: after the royal establishment announced she was seriously ill, another announcement came a few hours later that she had died peacefully in her sleep shortly after ten o’clock that evening.
The autopsy later revealed that lung cancer had been one of the causes of death. The following day, Winston Churchill, who had returned as prime minister, said her passing meant the passing of the last major link with the glories of Queen Victoria’s days. Her body lay in state for several days, as European dignitaries and hundreds of thousands of Britons filed past to pay their respects. The state funeral was held at St George’s Chapel at Windsor on the thirty-first of March 1953, after which she was buried in the royal vault beside her husband, who had rested there for seventeen years.
A memorial service was held for mourners at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Mary’s legacy and memory remain present in Britain today and across the former empire. Her name is attached, for example, to one of Britain’s leading colleges. On the twenty-fifth of February 1931, a fire destroyed Queen’s Hall at East London College.
A new site was chosen to replace the building next to the People’s Palace, and many names were proposed, including Queen’s Public College and Victoria College. In the end the name chosen was Queen Mary College, and Mary herself presented the formal charter when the building was completed in 1934. Thus one of London’s leading educational institutions is named not after Queen Mary I or Queen Mary II, as many people believe, but after Queen Mary of Teck. On the other side of the world, Queen Mary College in Lahore, Pakistan, also bears her name, and there are numerous other buildings and institutions named after her.
George V’s wife has also appeared in numerous books, plays, films, and television series, some focusing on the abdication crisis. Miranda Richardson portrayed Mary sympathetically in The Lost Prince, which tells the story of the lesser-known Prince John and his early death. Claire Bloom played Mary in The King’s Speech, the story of her son Albert overcoming his speech impediment to become George VI, Britain’s wartime king. Eileen Atkins is notable for having played Mary twice in two different works: in Bertie and Elizabeth in 2002, and more recently in The Crown.
Mary of Teck’s life and reign as queen consort were surprising in some respects. When she was born in 1867, the daughter of a minor branch of the British royal family, her parents and most who knew her assumed she would marry a significant duke or minor prince and move to Europe to live a comfortable life in Germany, the Balkans, or elsewhere. Her path changed when her cousin Queen Victoria decided she would marry her grandson, the second in line to the throne, Albert Victor. When he died before the marriage could take place, Mary married George, Albert Victor’s successor in the line of succession.
From then on her rise was steady: Duchess of York in 1893, Princess of Wales in 1901, and finally Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India in 1910. She held those positions for more than a quarter of a century, through the First World War, Britain’s victory in its aftermath, and the gradual decline of the empire that had already begun during the 1920s and 1930s. Mary was a modern queen who devoted much of her energy to charity and to fostering contact between the royal family and ordinary Britons. Her family life was complicated.
She and George loved their children, but George was conservative and strict in their upbringing, and the children looked to Mary as a gentler model. Relations were often strained, especially with Edward, who refused to marry and lived a dissolute life despite being heir to the throne. In the end, her husband’s death in 1936 sparked the abdication crisis, which perhaps ended well for all concerned when Albert became George VI. Mary lived her final years through another world war and the postwar reconstruction of Britain.
The world that mourned her in 1953 was utterly different from the world into which she had been born eighty-six years earlier. She was one of the key figures in ensuring the monarchy successfully weathered those changes.
