Was Queen Mary a kleptomaniac or a collector?
After months of waiting, this week we’ll find out what happens when King George V and Queen Mary honour Downton Abbey with a royal visit. Downstairs, we know the servants’ hall is thrown into chaos by the arrival of their rather snooty entourage. But upstairs, if the Earl and Countess of Grantham are anything like their real-life counterparts, the news will have them scrambling, too – to tuck their favourite treasures out of sight. Because wherever she went, be it party of pleasure or royal duty, Queen Mary’s roving eye alighted on something that she proceeded to admire so profusely, her hosts felt obliged to offer it up as a gift. Or so the story goes.
It’s a tale that has been handed down along with the silver plate, and still shines just as brightly. When the London Review of Books suggested last year that perhaps it was “simply a rumour”, their readers responded with anecdotes attesting to its truth. But does it do our Queen’s grandmother an injustice?
She was a passionate and acquisitive collector throughout her life, but there’s little hard evidence of any quasi-kleptomania. When James Pope-Hennessy interviewed members of the Queen’s household for his official biography, written and published after her death, her
courtiers pulled no punches. She was supposedly rather dull, fond of order, and so stiff I imagine she’d easily out-glare Downton’s Dowager Countess. Yet, for all their indiscretions, not one of the Queen’s household appears to have mentioned these dishonourable tactics for getting what she wanted.
Michael Hall, author of Art, Passion & Power: The Story of the Royal Collection, thinks there’s room for a different interpretation. He points out that the aristocrats of the Twenties were often indifferent to many of the decorative objects that filled their ancestral piles; indeed, the Earl of Harewood had much of his Chippendale languishing in the stable block. The Queen stood out – not just as a knowledgeable collector, but one whose tastes were ahead of her time.
Like the Countess of Grantham with her della Francesca, Twenties society knew the value of the Old Masters, but the Queen was a champion of the rather less fashionable decorative arts: enamelled snuff-boxes and ornamental etuis, tea caddies and Chinese porcelain, to name but a few. Furniture and objets d’art of the 18th century and Regency era were her chief enthusiasms; nowhere near as conventional then as by the time of her death in 1953. Thus Hall’s very plausible theory is that when her eyes lit up at the sight of an unusual piece, and she turned to her noble hosts to engage them in conversation, they mistakenly interpreted informed admiration as a hint that she’d like to take it home.
And well-informed she was. Despite receiving only the genteel education thought befitting of a royal female, an interest in art history emerged while she was living in Florence as a teenager. Once she started collecting, she built relationships with the country’s leading dealers and curators, from whom she readily sought advice, and her expertise grew in line with her collection.
The pieces Queen Mary acquired are generally thought to be of high quality. The Royal Collection has benefited in particular from her determined pursuit of objects with a historical royal provenance. It was she who rescued the expropriated treasures of her Russian relations, recently shown at the Queen’s Gallery.
Setting aside gifts (reluctantly given or otherwise), acquisition of her pieces was as likely to have been via a provincial antique shop as a smart London auction house. A newspaper report from 1927, the year of Downton’s fictional royal visit, has the Queen arriving unannounced at one such shop in York with her daughter Princess Mary, later chatelaine of nearby Harewood House. Closed for its half-day, the owner had to be called back so that she could rummage through his wares.
If this preference for antique shopping over shooting was hard for her peers to understand, even more so was her insatiable appetite for organising and cataloguing both her own finds and the wider royal collections. Perhaps this was in part responsible for her courtiers’ complaints about dullness. “Queen Mary is never bored indoors,” remarked one, recalling the handwritten labels on which she painstakingly noted each object’s origins. But it was not only the Royal Collection that benefited from her historically minded, museum-like approach. She was an enthusiastic supporter of the restoration of Brighton Pavilion in the Twenties, instrumental in returning original furnishings languishing in palace storerooms.
So, yes, Queen Mary was a diligent and determined royal collector. But a kleptomaniac, intent on acquiring by fair means or foul the objects she desired? I think not.