‘This royal cuckoo in the nest and her friend were viewed with suspicion at Buckingham Palace’
to obscure it, but it was highly unusual in those days for girls to leave before taking their exams.
The historian Ricardo Sainz de Medrano described their relationship as “lesbian” but whatever the truth of it, in Form Va they’d forged a lifelong liaison.
Nonetheless after Heathfield, Marie returned to the Balkans to pursue her royal destiny.
Her mother, ruthlessly determined that she should marry well, pushed her plump daughter into tight dresses and tried to instil the proper deportment the school had clearly failed to achieve.
“She loves to sit with her knees far apart and her toes turned inward,” she wailed.
It came as a surprise to all, then, that at the age of 22 Marie agreed to marry King Alexander of Yugoslavia – a vague sort of fellow who, until someone reminded him about his husbandly duties, kept his suite of rooms at the royal palace in Belgrade while Marie was housed “a kilometre away”, according to her mother, at the other end of the building. Marie bore him three sons – Peter, Tomislav and Andrew – before the King was assassinated by a Macedonian gunman in 1934.
Two years later, she quit the country for ever to live in London with Rosemary, who in the intervening years had tried married life with an Englishman, Archie Probart Jones, but had found it not to her taste.
Marie’s eldest, Peter – a king at the age of 11 – was sent to Sandroyd, a public school in
LIFE IN EXILE: Queen Marie in 1925, three years after her marriage. Above: With her three sons, Andrew, Tomislav and Peter. Right: Sloane Square just after World War Two
Surrey, and the two women settled into Cranmer Court in Chelsea where they stayed, on and off, for the rest of their lives. Though they lived in a relatively small flat, Queen Marie never forgot her status, and declared that Rosemary should be known as her “Lady-in-Waiting”.
Among other things, it helped explain their close proximity.
AMILE away, this royal cuckoo-in-the-nest and her friend were viewed with deep suspicion by the inmates of Buckingham Palace, who found Marie interfering and a nuisance. Her son may have been a king but she disliked him, and deliberately cut him adrift – handing him over to a British tutor for safekeeping.
King George VI, Peter’s godfather, deplored this heartless mothering as well as Marie’s determination to meddle in her son’s reign. His brother the Duke of Kent dubbed her “The Fat One” adding for good measure, “She really is a b***h.”
Historian Matthew Sweet wrote of her: “She was a vast, bosomy powerbroker… unused to opposition... who wore her hair in a tight bob and went about town with a Sam Browne holster slung across a military uniform of her own design.”
Marie made it clear she would prefer her second son, Tomislav, as king and, thus abandoned, Peter returned to Yugoslavia just before the Nazis rolled into Belgrade.
Befriended by the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, Marie and Rosemary moved with her two remaining sons to Great Gransden near Cambridge, where Rosemary effectively became their mother while the Queen lolled in bed and chain-smoked.
The younger princes loved Rosemary though Peter, perhaps understandably, hated her. Squeezed by the machinations of Balkan politics, King Peter never really stood a chance.
He was too young to rule when he inherited the throne, and by the time peace was declared in 1945, his country was in the hands of the communists under Marshal Tito.
His effective reign started the day he was proclaimed de jure king in 1941 at the age of 17, and ended just 10 days later when he shinned down a drainpipe to escape the invading Nazi tanks.
Post-war, Peter lived in France and America, rudderless and spendthrift, cheating on his wife and causing her to attempt suicide. The writer Ilsa Chase recorded, after meeting him: “His behaviour in futile pursuit of his throne is so shabby, illadvised and stupid as to seem incredible.
“He squandered his entire fortune, accumulated staggering debts, deserted his wife, and tried to have her son taken from her.”
No longer in touch with his mother, living off handouts, Peter was forced to take a job in a bank.
He lasted several months but suffered depression, was an alcoholic with cirrhosis of the liver and died after a failed liver transplant in 1970. He never re-established contact with his mother.
Queen Marie died in 1961 and was laid to rest in the royal burial ground at Frogmore, Windsor, before being re-interred in Serbia in 2013. There was no such grand farewell for Rosemary Cresswell.
She died childless and anonymous, barely ever photographed, in 1983, taking the secrets of her unique and loving relationship with a Queen to the grave.