Queens | Queen Mary: How She Saved the Royals – HT
Of all the recent royals, there’s one who may have done more to save the monarchy than any other. Queen Mary, wife of King George V and grandmother of our current queen. Today, she may have been largely forgotten, but her influence on Britain has been huge. There’s no doubt she helped save the monarchy.
Our country today would not have been the same without her. From unpromising beginnings, the whole experience of her childhood was an about being embarrassed by her mother. She rose to become the power behind the throne, helping to steer the country through two world wars, the great depression of the 1920s and 30s, and the abdication crisis, which threatened to bring down the monarchy.
I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility. What Mary felt was okay, if that’s what my son wants and he wants to marry Wallace Simpson, he can, but she’s not going to get the title royal highness. But how did this paragon of conservatism become an unlikely modernizer and along with her husband help redefine the role of royalty? They played a role really on the world stage which made a huge impact on the idea of the monarchy as a global brand.
How was she able to become the first royal to reach out to the working classes? Mr. House is an unemployed minor and he and his family have the pleasure and honor of showing Queen Mary over their house. It wasn’t any longer enough to just do a wave. And she and George V were the first of the royals to interact with the general public.
And why was she such a huge influence on our current monarch? Mary exuded that duty, exuded that steadfastness, exuded that uniting a nation. And that’s exactly what Queen Elizabeth has done throughout her reign. This is the truly remarkable story of a queen who not only reshaped royalty but had a profound effect on the whole country.
The truth is Mary’s influence is still around today. We would be a very different world I think if she had not been around and married her king. December the 15th, 1948. The christristening of 4-week old Prince Charles sat respplendant next to the queen, her grandmother, Queen Mary, matriarch of the Windsor clan and a living link between the Victorian era and our present monarch.
However, four years later, she would be mourned by the nation. Her devotion to the monarchy, her services to Britain, her enduring influence on the age which she graced, these created supreme values which will not be forgotten. But who was the woman that helped steer the crown and the country through some of the most tumultuous times in our history? And how did she almost single-handedly ensure the monarchy’s survival when the great royal houses of Europe were toppling like cards? Mary, or May as she was nicknamed as a
child, was born in 1867, the eldest of four children. Her mother, Princess Mary Adelaide, known as Fat Mary, was a cousin of Queen Victoria. Her father was a European prince who had been bestowed the ceremonial title the Duke of Tech after a castle in southwest Germany. Mary was actually born in the same room in Kensington Palace where Queen Victoria had been born.
And Queen Victoria did actually come and visit her and say she was a fine infant with a good quantity of hair. Mary’s parents had been granted their apartment in Kensington Palace by Queen Victoria. To live up to their status as minor royalty, they spent lavishly but didn’t possess the fortune to maintain their grand lifestyle.
When Mary was just 16, her family was threatened with bankruptcy and driven into exile. There came a point when the texts really basically ran out of money. So they had to decamp rather quickly to Florence to avoid their creditors. This of course was brilliant for Princess May because she was very very cultured and so going around all those wonderful galleries she literally absorbed information and um emerged from that phase as a very cultured young woman.
Mary’s interest in art and culture would stay with her throughout her life. However, her upbringing had another more sobering effect on shaping the future queen’s personality. I think the whole experience of her childhood really for May was an about being embarrassed by her mother who was loud and enormous and extravagant and her father who was also very extravagant but also slightly mad and eventually in fact went insane.
And so I think she’s very influenced by this. She grows up to have a sort of immense desire for respectability. May grew up to really need order and control and a sense of uh routine and a sense of things being calm, organized, following protocol. It was order and it was decorum and all of those kind of things uh felt were very important to Mayor and it was monarchy that best represented the virtues that Mary held dear.
virtues that hadn’t gone unnoticed by Queen Victoria. As Victoria approached the end of her long reign, she was preoccupied with the future stability of the monarchy. Her eldest son and future king, Edward, birthname Albert Edward, was a notorious womanizer. His heir and Victoria’s grandson, Albert Victor, who everyone knew as Eddie, also displayed a worrying lack of suitability for the top job.
Eddie was not the sharpest pencil in the box. Uh he had a reputation for being both quite dim and also sort of useless and floppy and sort of fragile. And Queen Victoria felt he needed a wife who was going to kind of support him basically and make sure that he did his duty. Queen Victoria set her mind to finding a good-looking girl.
She had to be good-looking because he likes beautiful women. And the woman who Queen Victoria decided had the perfect combination of beauty and breeding for her grandson, Princess Mary. For Mary, there was something really central about knowing your position, knowing your duty, and knowing what you had to do.
And Queen Victoria could see this. She recognized this in the young princess. By December 1892, Victoria’s matchmaking proved successful. Prince Eddie proposed. For Mary, the engagement offered the chance to restore the damage done to her family’s reputation by their financial difficulties and place herself at the center of royal affairs.
Royal matches were really about uniting royal families together. She wanted to help her family, her parents. And so when this uh opportunity of of this very good marriage came up, you know, she really had no choice but to say yes. At the time there was no question of somebody falling in love and getting married.
It was you just married who you were told to marry. A date was set for the wedding, but Mary’s prospects would be cruy dashed. Between 1889 and 1892, the world was struck by an influenza pandemic, which claimed the lives of around a million people. Even the royal family weren’t immune. Just weeks before Mary and Eddie were due to get married, he was taken seriously ill.
When the family were going to congregate at Sanumam in early 1892, tragedy struck. Eddie contracted the flu which later developed into pneumonia and on the 14th of January 1892 he died. The family had originally decided to meet at Sandringham to celebrate the union but instead it became more of a morning party.
Princess Mary had been struck by the first of several tragedies that would mark her life. However, once again, Queen Victoria would play matchmaker and rescue her prospects. The man Victoria had in mind was now in direct line to the throne. Almost at once, Queen Victoria starts lobbying for her to marry George, who is the second son.
Now, George, I think, initially, was really shocked by this. You know, he had loved his brother and he felt it was all too soon. But Queen Victoria was very bossy. He actually went off to Greece with his mother in order to try and avoid having to do anything about it. But in the end, he gave in. Little more than a year after the death of her fianceé Eddie, Mary was now engaged to his younger brother George.
Whilst they were brought together by circumstance, in her new fiance, Mary had found a kindred spirit. George was very, very different than his brother. rather than being weward um dissolute lifestyle, George was much more measured, much more ordered, much more well behaved. And so in that sense, him and May were a well suited match.
Like Eddie, George had trained as a naval officer. But unlike his elder brother, George adored the regimentation and formality of life in the armed services. George was very straight laced and he liked to keep things simple. He understood his position as now second in line to the throne and this was reflected in Mary.
Duty ran to her call and she understood what was expected of her as a new member of the royal family. Mary and George were married in July 1893 at St. James’s Palace in London. What started out as an arranged marriage would last for over 40 years and come to redefine the role of monarchy. I think that they were so much alike in their sense of duty and responsibility, but considering this was really an arranged marriage.
I mean, who would have thought that this would turn out to be, you know, one of the the greatest uh couples the monarchy has ever seen? Mary would give birth to six children, including two future kings. But after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, George was now next in line to the throne. That meant taking on more responsibilities.
He and May soon demonstrated a more modern style of royalty. When Edward IIIth became king, this had a huge impact on the life and role of Mary May and George. They became heirs apparent and they were to have a role which was increasingly important to the precision and the perception of the monarchy. In particular, they played a role really on the world stage.
They went on a six-month tour of India which made a huge impact on the idea of the monarchy as a I suppose a brand as a global brand. In May 1910, Edward IIIth passed away after just 9 years on the throne. His son George was now king and Mary was queen. However, the changing of the guard also seemed to herald a return to the 19th century ideal of monarchy.
Edward IIIth was a very colorful king and so his death marked a sudden change particularly then with the accession of George and Mary who was seen as complete opposites. They were very much seen as a very conventional couple committed to each other and to uh much more Victorian morality.
The country was racked by social division and the suffragette movement was fighting for women to be given the vote. During the Epsom Derby of 1913, as Mary and George looked on, one protester, Emily Wilding Davidson, ran onto the track, and was hit by the king’s horse. Tragically, she died 4 days later from her injuries. This brought home very, very acutely the threat of social reform to the monarchy, but also made it personal.
The country was also beset by strikes as the working classes became increasingly unhappy with their lot. Despite Mary’s Victorian outlook, she and George realized the social changes underway threatened the stability of the monarchy. They were determined to avoid the fate that would befall their European cousins.
Mary and George realized that there was a job of work to do to find a place for the monarchy in the midst of these great uh tides of social and political unrest and agitation. They were instinctively conservative, but they knew that they needed to be amongst the people, aligning themselves with the social strife, the troubles, the life really of many of the factory workers who were looking for an improvement in their conditions.
The couple embarked on a series of visits to workingclass communities in some of the poorest parts of the country. There are really quite serious strikes, railway strikes, miners strikes which seem to sort of threaten to paralyze the economy. And uh George V and Queen Mary really believe that the the crown has a part to play in kind of making contact, reaching out to the working classes and to the industrial areas.
So for the first time um the king and the queen may always insist on accompanying him to these visits. King George and Queen Mary were catapulted into the center of their first national emergency on the 4th of August 1914 when Britain declared war on Germany. And it seems incredible that it should have started with such a relatively unimportant event as the assassination of the Archduke Leopold of Austria.
World War I not only threatened the future of the country, but also the crown. The incident that began the war was a shooting of a royal. That really was quite shocking to them and I think they felt very strongly that it was a possibility that people would want to throw them off their thrones. Queen Victoria had imagined that if she simply married her children into enough European royal families, then there would never be a war.
But here was the Kaiser, who of course was Queen Victoria’s grandson, beginning a war with George V. For George, I don’t think he ever imagined he’d be a wartime king. European monarchs related to King George were stripped of their crowns, including his cousin, Sar Nicholas II of Russia. Could the British royal family be next? The Kaiser of Germany, the Zar of Russia, and royals all over Europe lose their thrones, and some of them are assassinated.
The British crown wasn’t as secure as it needed to be. It had come under threat. It was in danger. and George and Mary needed to do something about it. This wasn’t their only problem. Almost 9 million troops from the British Empire were sent into battle and the death toll at home and abroad was quickly rising.
So many people died. So many families lost relations. There’s never been such a tremendously awful wipeout of talented, well educated, sound people. was a terrible, terrible loss of life. As war raged on and with the crown under threat, King George was in a precarious situation.
Queen Mary is often credited as being his most trusted adviser, and her wisdom and knowledge would become critical for the survival of the monarchy. He was very concerned about the millions of his subjects who were losing so many loved ones. And he relied tremendously on his wife. She had been taught a lot about history by her governness and she would offer examples of how other royals had coped in different times.
With her by his side, he felt confident enough to make decisions and bring us through the war. In 1918, rationing was rolled out across the country. Under Queen Mary’s guidance, the new austerity measures were implemented at Buckingham Palace. The royal family would now experience the hardships of war alongside their people.
Queen Mary had a reputation for being fantastically frugal. She felt that the royal family had to be seen living very simply. She turned off the heating in Buckingham Palace and kept the lights down low and you know served completely horrible sort of grim food like lots of blange. This was a clever and popular move by the queen.
But driven by her duties and the survival of the crown, work didn’t stop there. Her selfless nature would leave a lasting legacy. Mary was brought up by her mother to always think of others who didn’t have the same advantages that they had. And despite being shy, she attached herself to numerous charities. She passed this on to the queen mother.
She passed it on to our queen. And I suppose you could compare all three of them to a stick of rock. And that wherever you broke it, they were duty ran all the way through. With thousands of troops losing their lives, anti-German feeling was rife, and the royal family’s background was soon brought into question.
As war weariness set in, there were some very very outspokenly nationalistic newspapers who intimated that actually the British royal family was too German and that actually it secretly had sympathy with its German relatives. When the royal family were at Windsor Castle, there were many reports given to the police that they were shining out lights from Windsor Castle to German Ubot to come and invade.
Actually, when the police investigated, it was the lights of the local vicar going home, his car lights. The king had to take action. In 1917, he changed the royal family name from the German dynasty of Sax Cobberg Go to Windsor after the muchloved castle. That rename was a huge statement of Englishness that George and Mary knew that the survival of the monarchy, they had to really cut ties with that German background.
And it was that revolutionary act carried out by George, supported by Mary, which saw this rebrand of the monarchy. For Mary, of course, her parents had both deep German roots. And it might have been a little bit painful for her to reject her heritage. However, she would have done this gladly because she was willing to do almost anything to ensure the survival of the crown.
It was the end of an era for the royal family. They had steadied the crown and the House of Windsor was officially born. By 1918, millions of soldiers had lost their lives. But at 11:00 a.m. on the 11th of November, the war finally came to an end. The role of royal consort is often a difficult one.
Prince Philip has spent 68 years at the queen’s side and in that time has become her rock, guiding, advising, and supporting the monarch. And more than a century ago, this was the job of the queen’s grandmother, Queen Mary. She like Philillip made the role her own. Queen Mary definitely shaped the role of Queen Consort.
There were more royal visits. She helped him write his speeches. I have much pleasure in declaring the dock open for you. And of course, she used her bookish ways as one of the cleverest members of the royal family we’ve possibly ever had to actually influence her husband and the way he dealt with politics. She was very quietly the power behind the throne.
Probably in a a very similar way that um the Queen Mother uh supported George V 6. With Mary as his committed consort, King George had emerged more popular than ever from the Great War. However, the celebrations were short-lived. Just a few months later, their youngest son, John, who had epilepsy, passed away.
She writes in her diary that she’s very sorry and that it’s incredibly sad, but she never refers to him again. I think that she felt very deeply that it was her job to remain strong both uh in public, but also for her husband and for the family and for the crown. Along with their personal problems, postwar Britain presented the House of Windsor with a new set of worries throughout the later years of the king’s reign.
£600 million has been spent in unemployment payment. The country was bankrupt in a terrible mess. There was massive unemployment. They had a very sticky situation on their hands. And I think that George F was worried there might be a revolution. The world really shifted and George and Mary were aware of that and they had to shift with it.
It’s under King George and Queen Mary that the working classes demand more representation, that women get the vote, and that everything becomes a more egalitarian society. And this very much, I think, is sort of antithetical to this pair of great conservatives to preside over this period of huge social change. King George and Queen Mary were seen by many, including their family, as unlikely modernizers.
But to keep themselves relevant and revered by the public, they began to embrace the changing face of Britain. They were conservative with the small sea. Um so much so that their son David said that they were waging a private war with the 20th century. Although they didn’t like change, they understood that it had to be done.
One of the biggest changes was in 1924 when James Ramsey Macdonald became the first Labour prime minister. The king makes this very strong attempt to befriend the Labour prime minister and the queen too plays an important part in trying to um uh you know invite the Labour wives to court and make them feel at home.
This is politically really important. With this huge political and social change happening all around them, it was the British public who really needed convincing by the crown. George and Mary really go out to try and win over the British public be seen to be visiting all sorts of different parts of Britain.
They were seen at industries fairs, visiting charities, visiting hospitals, traveling quite a lot through England, um, and and being seen much more widely. The public appearances endeared the king and queen to their people and crucially the press. Pay news would record what they were doing. The British public would get to know them much better than previous generations than it had been possible.
Queen Mary understood the value of publicity. She regarded it as her royal duty to cooperate with the press. She would always stop and let a photographer get his photograph. With their reputation on the rise, the king and queen decided to go one step further and use technology to bring their voices straight to their people.
If monarchy was to survive, it had to reach the working classes and the working classes had to back it up. This is what George V and Queen Mary understood in a way that many other monarchs did not understand. Hence why many of them ceased to exist. In 1923, the king and queen recorded a message for Empire Day together.
On this day, my people in all parts of the world join to celebrate their unity and that to draw closer the common ties which hold them together. Think always of what you can do to make your home happy. The spirit of the good home is one of the best things in the world. The emergence of a more modernized monarchy with both King George and Queen Mary at the forefront had been wellreceived.
But as the king’s health deteriorated, he looked to the queen to take on a more prominent role. In 1928 particularly, he suffered from a really bad episode with his lungs. Queen Mary sat by his bedside helped nursing through the worst of it and she was actually recognized by one of the king’s doctors.
When he was asked who had saved the king’s life, he quite simply replied, “The queen.” He really did suffer from periods of great exhaustion. And in some sense, the energy of the monarchy, as had been so visible during the early years of uh the reign really now was uh focused on Mary. Throughout the 1930s, Queen Mary increasingly took center stage.
Keeping up the popularity of the crown was vital for its survival. I am happy to name the ship the Queen Mary. Queen Mary’s unwavering commitment to the crown and support to her husband didn’t go unnoticed. In 1930, he opened up to his wife in a touching and personal letter. I can never sufficiently express my deep gratitude to you, Darling May, for the way you have stood by me.
This is not sentimental rubbish, but what I really feel they were an extremely devoted couple. They could have been Mr. and Mrs. George Windsor in Serbon. They were so down to earth in terms of their personal relationship. In 1932, the palace was contacted by the BBC with an innovative idea. They asked if the king would be willing to record a Christmas message to the nation.
Now, he’d already been approached a decade earlier, but the king had declined, not thinking it was such a good idea. But fast forward 10 years, and it seems that Queen Mary might have whispered in George’s ear, recognizing that actually a radio message could be a really good way of getting the people to hear them.
They set up a recording studio at Sandringham and they had the king’s favorite wicker chair there. He sat down rather too hard and went through the seat of the chair. So that was hastily put together again and he addressed his people through one of the marbles of modern style. I am enabled this Christmas day to speak to all my peoples throughout the empire.
And it was a massive massive success and it was then carried on by George V 6. and of course um the queen today. By the king’s silver jubilee in 1935, the popularity of the crown had reached an all-time high. A golden day for the silver jubilee. King George and Queen Mary had triumphed through adversity and become an inspiration to the people of Britain.
The Jubilee was spectacular. Uh it was an outpouring really of gratitude to them of support very different from Edward 7th but crucially had given Britain what it needed at that time steadfast duty loyalty a sense of service and it was that that would become I think one of their greatest legacies.
There are rather nice stories of Queen Mary in floods of tears. For her was something very unusual because she was so moved by the reception that she and the king had received. However, behind the scenes there was a worry. The king’s health was in decline. And on the 20th of January 1936, things took a turn for the worse. He was at Sandringham, his favorite place in the whole world.
He was getting weaker and weaker and eventually he died at 11:55. And there’s always said that he was given a lethal injection by his doctor of morphine and cocaine so that he could die just before midnight so that it could be in the first edition of the London Times, which was his favorite newspaper. what she wrote very very soon after King George died revealed so much about her.
Uh she said the sunset of his death tinged the whole world sky. I think the comment she made was so poetic, beautiful and incredibly moving. On the 28th of January 1936, the funeral took place and people from all over the country lined the streets to pay their respects to their beloved king. And so we turned the last page of this chapter of sorrow. In sadness, he passes.
His majesty King George V, mourned by the whole world. The nation was distraught. They went into mourning. Everybody was in mourning. There was this figure that to their mind represented continuity and stability and suddenly he was no longer there. As long as he lived, he was the guiding star of a great nation.
When he died, the little children cried in the streets. For Queen Mary, duty and the crown came above all else, even family. She and George had five sons. Two of them would go on to become king. The first was Edward. When his father passed away, he became Edward VII. And they say to the king, “What do you mean we by launching a ship?” He said, “That’s a woman’s job, not a man.
” Edward was very handsome. He was small in stature, but very good-looking. He was swamp. He was intelligent, beautifully dressed. He was an innovator of fashion. Everything he wore, people copied. Popular among the people, Edward seemed the perfect fit for the role of king. But he did not share his mother Mary’s views on the importance of duty.
Edward was not bound by protocol, by expectation in the way that Mary always had been. Edward ultimately saw personal happiness as his right. And Mary saw that that always had to be subjugated to duty and to service. Much of this was down to Edward’s childhood. Although they had triumphed in their reign, as parents, Mary and George failed to instill their own values in their firstborn son.
George and Mary were basically disastrous parents. They just couldn’t show any warmth to their children. She was, I think, quite a cold person. She didn’t really know how to talk to her children, certainly not when they were young. Mary was particularly strict with her eldest son, Prince Edward.
And there had been quite a lot of eldest sons in the past who’d misbehaved, been proflegate, had mistresses. That was not what she wanted. She and George really saw it as their role to bring in this very moral, very strict type of monarchy. But their strict and distant parenting style appeared to have the opposite effect.
Edward couldn’t have been more different to his mother. He was young, experimental, fun, entertaining. He was really a party boy. Edward was always having affairs, especially affairs with married women. Couldn’t really settle down. She couldn’t bear the fact that he was having a lot of relationships with people she didn’t consider was suitable.
One of Edward’s lovers caused more concern for Mary than all the others. Edward fell in love with Wallace Simpson, a glamorous divorced American. And it was the divorce that was the sticking point. And the problem was, if you were king, was that you were head of the Church of England. You could not marry a divorcee in the Church of England. It was not seen as acceptable.
Queen Mary was very, very worried. I mean, she didn’t think for one moment that he was going to try and marry Wallace, but she didn’t like the influence that Wallace had over her son, who she knew was perhaps quite weak. And here was this very strong American lady that seemed to have bewitched him. But before being crowned king, what Mary didn’t realize was that Edward had already decided he wanted to marry Wallace.
One time he thought he could have a Morganatic marriage so he could be king and be married to Wallace Simpson, but she wouldn’t be queen. That wasn’t acceptable to Edward. He wanted to marry her absolutely all out. He wanted Wallace to be Queen Wallace. And also the Morganatic wife was not acceptable to some parts of the empire as well.
And he’s told very clearly that you either don’t marry her or you abdicate. Edward was forced into a corner. When it was looking likely that he would abdicate, Queen Mary stepped in. The beautiful Daager Queen was not prepared to allow the personal life of her son to affect the reputation of the crown. When Queen Mary realized that he really was going to give everything up for Wallace Simpson, she summoned him to Mulra House where she was living and said, “You’ve got to reconsider.
You must, you cannot do this. She just couldn’t believe that he could do it. To be placed in the position of having to choose between love and a throne is one of life’s most tragic dilemmas, even if the dilemma is of the king’s own making. But Edward’s decision was made, and only 5 months prior to his coronation.
On December the 11th, 1936, Edward VII addressed the nation. I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love. His brother Bertie, the Duke of York, became King George V 6th.
He was the second of Queen Mary’s sons to become king and was known for his stammer and shy retiring nature. Everybody thought he was going to be a shambles and that his inadequacies would jeopardize the continuity of the monarchy. It was a huge personal crisis for Queen Mary that everything that she and her husband had built up together potentially could bring the whole monarchy down.
Mary as Daaja queen had to do something that no other Daaja queen had done. Most Daaja queens after their husband dies really they get to step back from the public role and that simply wasn’t the case for Mary. She was expected to be out there to be showing her support for her son for George V 6th. And on the 12th of May 1937, Queen Mary’s support was on full display at the coronation of King George V 6th.
Breaking with age-old tradition, Mary made a very significant decision, and that was to go to George V 6th coronation. And that was something that da queens do not do. They do not go to the coronation of the successor. She broke precedent left, right, and center. She was giving the message loud and clear to people all over the world.
I back my younger son as king because there was some doubt as to whether George the 6th would be able to even fulfill the role adequately. However, thanks to the support of his mother, Mary, George would quickly prove to be a powerful symbol of courage and fortitude at the outbreak of the Second World War. Just 2 years into his reign.
For the second time in the lives of most of us, we are at war. George in those activities through the war that him and the later Queen Mother performed were very much inspired by Mary leading from the front, showing a sense of solidarity with people and guiding her son through another war that left once again the monarchy strengthened by it, not undermined as it may well have been.
Mary was ruthlessly determined to protect the monarchy, even putting it above her son. By instilling the same principles and dedication in Queen Elizabeth, Mary would prove to be a huge influence. The death of George V 6th in 1952 was a great shock to Queen Mary. But no one expected him to die so young.
I think she was quite broken by the death of her son and also the end of his reign into which she’d put so much effort. I do think that the death of George V 6th had a great effect on Queen Mary and really you start to see a rapid decline in Queen Mary even though it was her beloved granddaughter who was on the throne even though she’d been devoted to Elizabeth ever since she was a little girl.
Sadly, soon after the death of King George V 6th and only 10 weeks before Elizabeth’s coronation, Mary passed away. Queen Mary has for so long been a familiar presence in Britain’s way of life. Her standards have so greatly helped to build British ideals of conduct that it will be both strange and sad not to see her in the future taking her a custom part in the life of the nation.
I think it was a moment of great sadness and so soon after the death of the king, she represented such an ideal of how people should comport themselves and a sense of duty and a sense of dedication of support for her husband, her son, her granddaughter. But even after the death of Queen Mary, her strong sense of duty remained. She understood the likelihood was that she might die before the coronation.
and she gave instructions that should she die before it that it was to proceed. Queen Mary understood that the role of royalty is to not only embody all the interests of all the people in your country but to be selfabnigating. At only 27 years old, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, but without the grandmother she so heavily relied upon.
I think that the young Queen Elizabeth would have been very, very upset by the death of her grandmother so that she could ask her advice. But what she did have and what she did use and take on board and repeat was her grandmother’s sense of duty, her grandmother’s resolve that it was a very important role she had.
In her role as the new queen, it was evident she resembled the ideals and values of her grandmother. I have to tell you, I do not think that she would have made as good a queen as she has made had she not had her grandmother’s influence. And one of the proofs of that pudding that is in the eating is that whenever Libert has had the choice between her personal preferences and the good of the monarchy, she has invariably taken the good of the crown.
Mary left a great legacy through her sheer determination and dedication to duty by building a stronger monarchy in a time driven by war, political turmoil, and social change. At the age of 94, it’s apparent that Mary still resonates with the queen today. Mary’s devotion to the crown and the nation during times of crisis have had a considerable impact on how the monarchy is viewed today.
If Queen Mary were alive now, she would say above all that she had succeeded because Queen Mary’s great vision, her great aim, the ambition was that the monarchy would continue. She helped lead the country through two major wars and she’s generally opened up to the subjects. I think she helped to save the monarchy.
Looking back, I don’t think she could have realized how important she really was. We would be a very different world, I think, if she had not been around and married her king. Heat. Heat.