‘Queen Mary: The Official Biography’ by James Pope-Hennessy

I am having a great time this year reading some of the most highly regarded biographies, first and foremost choosing those which showcase the biographer’s art, the subject of the book being a secondary consideration.

This is a classic example. Originally published in 1959, this 600+ page epic is widely considered to be the finest royal biography of the twentieth century. It is highly engaging, very well written indeed and authoritative.

For me, there was an additional pleasure in that, shamefully, I really knew very little about Queen Mary before reading this. I had the wholly false impression, because she was called ‘Princess Mary of Teck’ before her marriage, that she was another in the long line royal consorts who had been imported from the European continent. I thought that she probably spoke with a German accent. I also had an image of her as being austere, humourless and may be somewhat lacking in emotional intelligence.

I have now been put right on all these fronts, and more too. Such an interesting and impressive woman. She was highly dutiful, but also intelligent, caring, very human indeed, and also greatly respected in the country.

Her life is particularly interesting to read about because it was long (she lived to the age of 85), spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and extraordinarily eventful.

It is true that Queen Mary's father was a German princeling, but her mother was Queen Victoria’s first cousin (the daughter of the Duke of Cambridge) and she was thus an integral part of the British royal family from her birth. Her parents had limited money, and got into debt frequently, but she grew up surrounded by other royal children, including the Duke of Clarence who was heir presumptive and to who she was first engaged before his sudden death. After a suitable pause for mourning, she went on eighteen months later to marry another childhood playmate, his brother, Prince George of York who would succeed to the throne in 1911 and become King George V. They reigned together for over twenty-five years pretty successfully, helping to steer the country (and the British Empire) through the first world war and beyond.

She was nearly killed in a car accident, travelled to India on two occasions, witnessed the fall of monarchies in Russia, Germany and Austria, lived through the abdication crisis and the second world war and lived long enough to see the accession in 1951 of her grand daughter Queen Elizabeth II. It was quite a life.

What makes this biography so interesting though is that James Pope-Hennessy was appointed to write it by the Royal family. He was the official biographer. So he was able to interview a large number of people who had known Queen Mary personally (including her children, close friends and royal servants). She also kept a diary throughout her life which he had full access to, as well as hundreds of private letters sent to and by her. She had family ties to many other royal houses across Europe and kept in pretty close touch with.

He was also able to reconstruct her early life in considerable detail because her mother, Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, was similarly well-connected and wrote all the time to her various relatives as well as to Queen Victoria to whom she was close, and who also, of course, famously kept a journal.

The upshot is that we have here a quite superbly written, totally engaging biographical study that absolutely gets under the skin of its subject. It is sympathetic to her, but not wholly uncritical and always fair. As all good biographers do, Pope-Hennessy tries to give the readers her perspective and succeeds completely in letting them understand what it was like to be Queen Mary and to live through the extraordinary times she lived through.

His style is chatty in many respects, recapping helpfully at key points, but he does not skimp at all on detail. There is a pretty vast cast of characters who he has to manoeuvre in and out of Queen Mary’s story, and he does this with terrific skill.

This is a totally engrossing and fascinating book. I was really sorry to reach the end.