The Quest for Queen Mary by James Pope-hennessy ed Hugo Vickers Nicola Shulman

NICOLA SHULMAN

The Quest for Queen Mary In 1955, James Pope-hennessy was commissioned to write the official biography of Queen Mary, wife of George V and grandmother of the present Queen. His book, dispiritingly described by Sir Alan Lascelles as containing nothing ‘that could offend or distress the Queen herself or any members of her family’, has still set a benchmark of excellence for biographies of royal consorts.

Anyone reading Queen Mary now would be surprised to learn PopeHennessy thought he’d ‘got away with murder’. That is not its predominant effect. Among the many unpleasant matters that he fudged, ignored or rendered so obliquely that Queen Mary herself would be pushed to spot an indiscretion are: her feelings about the abdication; the mysterious illness and death of the Duke of Clarence (eldest son and heir of Edward VII, and Mary’s first fiancé); the case of Prince John (her youngest son who suffered from an unnamed malaise and was put away); and the abandonment of the Romanovs when they begged for shelter in England.

The Quest for Queen Mary is not that book. It’s not a biography at all, but a collection of the interviews conducted by Pope-hennessy in his research, when he sought out every living person with a connection to Queen Mary. He had access to the contractually discreet: friends, some servants and many royal relatives of greater and lesser degree, clinging on after two world wars in European palaces or lock-up flats in Dolphin Square. When the book came out, he put these interviews away, with instructions that they were not to be accessed for fifty years.

Now that they are broached, are they dynamite? By the standards of their day, certainly. Britain was not then ready to hear Queen Mary described as ‘the greatest moral coward I have ever known’ (the view of the Duke of Windsor and George V’s private secretary) and ‘one of the most selfish human beings I have ever known’ (Lord Claud Hamilton, equerry to George V). Or that the Duke of Clarence had syphilis and the Duke of Kent was a heroin addict (the Duke of Gloucester); and the King and Queen were terrible, awful parents (everybody).

I doubt this would shock many people today, as most of it has already emerged by other means. If fifty years in the cask has dulled the element of surprise, do the interviews bear reading anyway?

Emphatically, yes. Many of them are polished pieces of writing which J P-H left for us in the sure hope they would live after his death. They retain the gleeful freshness of the day they were written and offer peepholes into a lost world when European royalty was a felt cousinship stretching from Britain to the Balkans. They also act as blowholes for the author’s youthful waspishness (he was 38) and comedic gifts. Here, supported by all the context you could want in Vickers’s admirable notes, the interviews read like chapters in a bizarre picaresque adventure.

Pope-hennessy quickly reached the conclusion that Royalties (his word) are ‘not quite human beings’. They had common peculiarities, such as always expecting you to know what they are thinking. He rises magnificently to the task of conveying them as both more and less than human: vividly present, but without the standard provision of dimensions.

The general effect is of someone who has strayed into a parallel universe, as in the semi-animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where a live-action Bob Hoskins investigates an underworld populated by cartoon animals. Princess Pauline of Württemberg, for instance, as short as she is fat in ‘the smallest room I have ever seen inhabited’, with thimbles of plum liqueur seized in her plump little hands, is as Tiggywinkle as anyone could be without having actual prickles.

The longest piece here is an account of a weekend with the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and Princess Alice of Athlone. It is a comic masterpiece, easily worth the book’s cover price. Pope-hennessy, who seems to have had a Boswellian capacity for recall in the wake of much drink taken, notices everything: the recurrent preoccupation with money; their unfeigned and unanimous admiration for a ‘rather unpleasant Formica tea trolley’ on rubber wheels, a present from the Queen.

‘What a nice trolley that is, Alice.’

‘Yes. It’s the very latest thing… Wasn’t it kind of her? Terribly expensive, though.’ ‘How much?’ ‘Seventeen pounds. It came from Fortnum & Mason.’

Then there is the sublime battiness of the Duke’s table talk, which deserves a book of its own:

‘ “What are you talking about, Geoffrey?” said the Duke suddenly from the sofa. ‘ “About Holland, sir.” ‘ “Funny shape for a country, Holland. Damn funny shape,” and the Duke relapsed into silence.’

You learn a lot here about J P-H’S own prejudices and predilections. He views the modern royals as coarse and inelegant, deploring the current ‘Kensington-girl policy of non-attachment to German relations’, for which he blames the Queen Mother. The best he can say for the young Queen (‘who was wearing no scent’) is ‘she clearly does not feel inadequate’.

He prefers people who find themselves out of sympathy with the post-war barbarism, like Duke Philipp of Württemberg and his brother, Dom Otto, a Benedictine monk, who delight him with their table, their Catholicism and their civilised, multilingual jeremiads against freemasonry and atheist Jews. Best of all, he likes the Duke of Windsor, ‘the one member of the royal family for whom one needs to make no allowances… intelligent, original, liberal-minded’.

Being perceptive is no guarantee of good judgement.