Queen Mary: Love and Hope

The Quest for Queen Mary
by James Pope-Hennessy, edited by Hugo Vickers
Zuleika, 2018, 321 pages, £30
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It is sixty-five years since that magnificent matriarch Queen Mary died, on March 24, 1953. She was eighty-five and had been at the centre of royal life all her life. She witnessed six monarchs at close quarters—Queen Victoria, her first cousin once removed; Edward VII, her second cousin and father-in-law; her husband, George V; her sons, Edward VIII and George VI; and her granddaughter, Elizabeth II. By 1953, as she faded, she insisted that Elizabeth’s coronation not be delayed by any mourning for her death—the staunchest, most steadfast monarchist since the Divine Right Stuarts sat on the British throne.

But what prompts this arcane interest? A few weeks ago a new publisher, Zuleika, produced The Quest for Queen Mary, a collection of notes, introduced and edited with precision and panache by the royal historian Hugo Vickers, and written in the late 1950s by James Pope-Hennessy as he interviewed thirty courtiers and kin in preparation for his authorised life of Queen Mary. With the encouragement and admiration of Sir Alan (Tommy) Lascelles, Pope-Hennessy met a rich mix of survivors with personal recollections of Queen Mary—from Mr Hough, under-butler to the Tecks, to Grand Duchess Xenia. He went from Ludwigsburg and Stockholm to Denmark and Dee-side; from the eccentric Beauforts at Badminton to the exiled Windsors in Paris. The resulting notes were embargoed for fifty years; thus the wait. Meanwhile Pope-Hennessy’s biography in 1959 was universally hailed as dazzling.

The canon of authorised royal biography constitutes, in most part, a stack of dutiful, dense and dull tomes, a deferential plod through a century of Court Circulars; heaving with admiration and euphemism; yawning with what is left unsaid. But Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary teems with anecdotes and insights. He was especially strong in his exposition of Princess May’s first quarter-century and the light touch he brings to the dizzyingly complex Ruritanian world of German principalities, from which her father, Prince Francis of Teck, had sprung. Francis’s father, Duke Alexander of Württemberg, had unwisely wed a Transylvanian countess; and although she could trace her descent from a sister of St Stephen, King of Hungary in the eleventh century, the unbending rules of succession deemed the match morganatic.

Queen Victoria had no time for this Teutonic stiffness and the penniless but fine-looking Francis was easily persuaded to take the hand of Princess Mary Adelaide, daughter of the Duke of Cambridge, uncle of Queen Victoria and, for four decades, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army. The star of Pope-Hennessy’s populated life is undoubtedly Mary Adelaide. Quest too is full of descriptions of her—charismatic, garrulous, charitable to the point of penury, and as stout as a well-upholstered sofa. The London crowds simply loved “Fat Mary”. She was unwed at thirty-two; the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, despaired that “no German prince will venture on so vast an undertaking”. But Francis obliged in 1866 and their only daughter (three sons were to follow), Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, was born a year later in the same room in Kensington Palace as Queen Victoria.

Princess May grew up in her mother’s mighty shadow—as self-contained as Mama was effusive; as reticent as she was voluble; as shy as she was extroverted; as provident as she was extravagant. But her cousin, Queen Victoria, that imperial matchmaker par excellence, kept an eye on this fine, sensible, dignified young woman who, as the last decade of the century began, was the only available English princess not descended from the Queen. But before she became engaged (successively, to Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence, second-in-line to the throne, in 1891; and, after his death, to his younger brother, George, in 1893, whom she married), she lost her heart to a young aristocrat with an Australian link. This revelation did not find its way into Pope-Hennessy’s life, and this is Vickers’s scoop.

Interviewing Queen Mary’s Woman of the Bedchamber, Maggie Wyndham, in 1956, Pope-Hennessy was told that Princess May might have liked to marry the man who would be Australia’s first Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun, later 1st Marquess of Linlithgow. Miss Wyndham, to whom the old Queen Mary would occasionally confide when they went driving, told Pope-Hennessy that before 1891 Princess May had been truly in love, the only time of her life: “She had used up her capacity for loving then; as much in love as she could ever be.” Pope-Hennessy’s note ends, “Someone she could not marry.” All Pope-Hennessy says in the biography is: “Only a very rich member of the peerage, like Lord Hopetoun, or the Marquess of Bath’s heir, Lord Weymouth, would be in a position to marry Princess May and provide her with an appropriate social position.” But her mother had set her sights on one of the Prince of Wales’s sons for May; while her father, who continued to suffer being a mere morganatic “Highness”, would never have countenanced a non-royal match for his daughter.

Pope-Hennessy’s interview with Hopetoun’s younger sister, Lady Estella Hope, in 1956, confirmed that their mother was a great friend of Mary Adelaide’s. She used to bring the whole family and stay for the autumn holidays at Hopetoun, the family seat on the Forth of Firth, extended by Adam, father and sons, and more like a palace than a stately home. Mary Adelaide loved young Hopie and called him “my Scotch son”.

After their stay in 1880, Mary Adelaide wrote:

I have telegraphed our safe arrival, but I must add just a line to thank you and dear Hopie, over and over again, with all my heart, for the kindest attention and affection (if I may so call it) heaped and lavished upon us during EIGHT of the happiest weeks I ever remember to have spent, the charming recollection of which will always remain with us. The parting was a great wrench, and I could not trust myself to speak just at the last, as you must have seen. Tell dear Hopie his silent farewell touched me more than I can express. It spoke volumes, and assured me that, with the son, as well as the dear Mother, there will ever be a warm welcome awaiting us at beloved, beautiful Hopetoun.

More than a century on, one can almost feel young May’s shrinking from her mother’s gush; all the while yearning, yet never daring, to write herself. How similar this seems to her teenage granddaughter Elizabeth’s love for the older Prince Philip six decades later. Interestingly, the old Queen also told Miss Wyndham, “My husband was not in love with me when we married. But he fell in love with me later.”

The Tecks returned to Hopetoun in 1881 when Hopie came of age and again in 1882 for two months. It is said the attraction was mutual. Who knows what might have happened, but any romance was stifled when the Tecks’ wanton spending forced them to flee to Florence the following year, taking sixteen-year-old May with them. There they remained until 1885. That year Hopie became a Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria and in 1886 he married Hersey Alice Eveleigh-de-Moleyns, daughter of the 4th Baron Ventry. So that was that.

So who was Hopie? In the first chapter of his masterly Kings’ Men (1983), Christopher Cunneen paints a vivid picture of John Adrian Louis Hope as a “Grand Seigneur to the tips of his fingers”. Born in 1860, he succeeded his father as 7th Earl of Hopetoun when he was twelve. A keen traveller, sportsman and a fearless rider; it was said, “Probably he had more of his bones broken in the hunting field than any man of his time in England.” After serving as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, he was appointed (at the suggestion of that great old imperialist Joseph Chamberlain) the ninth Governor of Victoria. He was twenty-nine when he arrived in Melbourne in November 1889. This may have shown either Chamberlain’s great faith in young Hopie or little regard for Victoria; but this was a time when wealthy young aristocrats were sent out to add splendour and colour to the office of colonial viceroy. Hopie proved not just able but popular. As Dr Cunneen writes:

Notwithstanding poor health and colonial astonishment at his habit of wearing hair-powder, his youthful enthusiasm for routine duties and his fondness for informal horseback tours won him many friends, even in Sydney. But Lady Hopetoun was criticized for her haughty manner. His governorship coincided with important years of the Federation movement of which he was a fervent supporter. After an extension of his term he left Melbourne in March 1895.

On his return home, he was Paymaster-General. In 1898, he declined the offer of Governor-General of Canada and became Lord Chamberlain to the Queen. He undoubtedly saw his old love, by now the Duchess of York, at Court during this time. Then in 1900, he was appointed Governor-General of Australia.

It was not a hopeful start. En route, in India, Hopie caught typhoid fever, while his wife was so sick with malaria she could not accompany him. He landed in Farm Cove on December 15, 1900, with the Truth attacking “the gross and atrocious cruelty” of the government’s exploitation of the “care-worn cadaverous earl”. His Australian Dictionary of Biography entry (also by Chris Cunneen) says of him: “Slightly built, with what the Bulletin described as a ‘willowy stoop and a cat like, Lord Chamberlain’s tread’, he was usually clean shaven, but sometimes grew a moustache. Sir George Clarke regarded him as ‘charming but not at all clever’.”

In what became known as “the Hopetoun blunder” he invited the New South Wales premier Sir William Lyne to form the first Australian ministry. To label it a blunder was unfair. After all, he was following the Canadian precedent of 1867 and Barton, although the expected choice, was not even a Member of Parliament. Had Lyne’s predecessor, Sir George Reid, still been Premier and been appointed, there would have been no “blunder”. On Lyne’s failure to form a ministry, Edmund Barton was commissioned. The Governor-General took the oaths of office at the inauguration ceremony on January 1, 1901, and then swore in Barton’s ministry.

On May 6, 1901, he was at Port Phillip Bay for the arrival of May and George, who was now heir to the throne and Duke of Cornwall and York. The Times obit (knowingly?) noted on March 25, 1953: “and the Duchess was given a warm welcome by the Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun—one of her mother’s closest friends”. The Duke was surely oblivious. As Dr Cunneen writes, “he was familiarly addressed as ‘Hopie’ by the royal visitor, ‘his sincere friend George’”.

On May 9, the Duke opened the first session of the Australian parliament. They proceeded to tour the rest of the states for two months. Hopie farewelled the Cornwalls as they left Tasmania for South Australia in early July. By the time they sailed from Fremantle on July 20, the Governor-General had collapsed and had cancelled all functions. In August, he travelled north to Queensland to the property of a relative to recover.

In his eighteen months in office, he had travelled 14,000 miles, frequently journeying between Sydney and Melbourne to moderate their rivalry. However, his term was to end prematurely and on an unnecessarily dour note. The Constitutional Conventions agreed upon an annual salary of £10,000 (as for the Governor-General of Canada) but unlike Canada, no allowance had been made for expenses. Hopie was a rich man and had spent considerably from his own pocket—some £16,000 every year. The Royal Tour had cost him £10,000. He was concerned that future governors-general would not be able to manage in the absence of the large private fortune that he enjoyed. Prime Minister Barton handled the bill badly and the timing—in the middle of an appalling drought—could not have been worse. Parliament and the states refused to supplement the salary or to grant an allowance or even reimburse. The Governor-General had no option but to ask Chamberlain to recall him. As Dr Cunneen writes, “Meanwhile, in a belated, symbolic gesture, ‘all the gas lamps in the Government House drive were at once extinguished’, leaving the approaches to Hopetoun’s official Melbourne residence in darkness.” Even the bolshie Bulletin was disappointed but the Governor-General maintained a dignified reticence and refused to blame Barton or the ministry.

At farewell ceremonies in Melbourne, he was reduced to tears. Like Mary Adelaide, he had always been generous to the poor, and in a parting gesture he provided £100 to the city’s unemployed for champagne. He entrusted its distribution to a most unlikely friend, the anarchist and agitator John William “Chummy” Fleming. It has been suggested that Fleming was also close to the “haughty” Lady Hopetoun and would visit Government House. But anything more seems unlikely as Fleming and Hopie remained friends. In fact, he was one of the last to bid farewell to the Governor-General, who said, “Ah, there you are old Fleming. I am glad of our friendship.” And they continued to correspond until Hopie’s death on February 29, 1908.

Hopie was created Marquess of Linlithgow on his return to Scotland. He would have liked to be Viceroy of India but his son, the 2nd Marquess, attained that honour in 1936 (having declined the offer to follow his father as governor-general in 1935).

On March 5, 1908, as the funeral was being held at Hopetoun, George and May, by then Prince and Princess of Wales, were represented at a memorial service held by the King and Queen for their old friend in the Chapel Royal. May became Queen Mary two years later and would survive Hopie by four and a half decades.

A flavour of Pope-Hennessy’s approach—seen again and again but with greater wit and less restraint in Quest—is apparent in his description of Queen Mary at Marlborough House in the late 1940s not long before she died. He writes:

In the midst of this shimmering Georgian enclave in bedraggled post-war London, visitors found Queen Mary herself, upright, distinguished, dressed perhaps in purple blue or in blue velvet or pale grey, around her neck her ropes of matchless pearls. Awed strangers talked of Queen Mary as a representative of another epoch but this was a misjudgment, for the Queen Dowager was in no way isolated, a magnificent relic, in these 18th century surroundings. She would sally forth from Marlborough House to the young court for juvenile delinquents—“It was most interesting but I have never heard so many lies told in my life”—or to enjoy Oklahoma! or Annie Get Your Gun.

Not long before her death, on March 24, 1953, she told a friend: “I am beginning to lose my memory, but I mean to get it back.” The day after she died, the diarist and MP “Chips” Channon wrote that she was:

above politics … magnificent, humorous, worldly, in fact nearly sublime, though cold and hard. But what a grand Queen. Her appearance was formidable, her manner—well, it was like to talking to St Paul’s Cathedral; yet she was easy and pleasant to meet.

She would undoubtedly have made a splendid Lady Hopetoun too. Of course, this sort of speculation is frivolous. One thinks of some lines of another great Victorian, Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose son, Hallam, happened to succeed Hopie as Australia’s second governor-general: “Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead one to sovereign power.” Or better still: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”