The Quest for Queen Mary

"Queen Mary, the widow of George V, and grandmother of the Queen, died at Marlborough House on 24 March 1953, a few months before the Coronation. She was eighty-five years old. Unusually for a Queen consort, an official biography was commissioned. The last similar exercise was the life of the Prince Consort, commissioned by Queen Victoria. The task was entrusted to James Pope-Hennessy. Pope-Hennessy embarked on his three year quest for Queen Mary in 1955. It was to take him to many royal courts and to the lunch and tea tables of retired courtiers and ladies-in-waiting. He had access to a great number of private documents. He was shown royal residences both in England and in Europe. As he went along, he kept notes about who he met and what he saw. Pope-Hennessy had not intended the notes of his royal interviews to be published for fifty years (i.e. until 2009). He described them as follows: 'To supplement the manuscript and printed sources I kept a private and confidential file recording in considerable detail the conversations I had both with Queen Mary's immediate descendants, related German, Danish and Norwegian royalty and with surviving members of the Court of King George V…

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More by Hugo Vickers

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