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Monday 19 April 2004

Queen Kleptomaniac?

A Short History of Queen Mary's Petty Thieving

Queen Mary probably did more to perpetuate the image of a queen as a stately, heavily bejeweled, dignified and distant figure than any other English queen before or since. At her best, she was acutely aware of her royal heritage, always conscious of her position and, most importantly, devoted to duty above all else.  At her worst, she showed little passion or emotion for anything in life other than “duty,” including her children, with the exception of collecting.  

Although she started collecting with a vengeance upon her accession, World War I put a temporary stop to her efforts and it wasn’t until after the war that she began spending much of her free time collecting, redecorating, restoring, and even making personal trips to antique shops, where she would seek out porcelain, paintings, or items with a royal connection of some kind. 

Her favorite collectibles included jeweled fans, jewels, and objets d’art, although her overall collection included everything from royal seals to cameos and from Faberg� animals to gold boxes encrusted with jewels.  Later in life, she kept no fewer than 90 valuable objects at the writing table in her private sitting room.  

James Pope-Hennessy, in his biography of Queen Mary, talks at length of her obsessive zeal for “reorganizing the Royal collections and the furniture in the Royal residences, and of retrieving portraits, plate, pieces of furniture, miniatures and relics which had, in earlier years, been dispersed and which she now re-integrated into the collections at Windsor Castle” (not to mention Buckingham Palace, Balmoral and Holyrood House). Similarly, according to Leslie Field, Queen Mary’s careful planning made the royal family’s jewel collection what it is today.  

But it was her method of obtaining objects for her collections that raises eyebrows. Even today, she is widely known to have “politely” connived the owners of valuable objects she desired to either give her the objects as gifts or sell them to her at ridiculously low prices. In “Royal Babylon,” Karl Shaw claims that she even surreptitiously pocketed items that would later be returned to the owners by her aides. Famously, when gazing upon an object of desire, she would announce, “I am caressing it with my eyes.” Or, just before leaving the residence containing the item she longed to obtain, she would ask, “May I go back and say goodbye to that dear little ______?” 

But these were small-scale operations, so to speak. Queen Mary, it seems, was no novice, and more than once she got away with something akin to the crown jewels. In particular, her notorious acquisition of the Romanov jewels is threaded with scandal.  

When Russia’s Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, sister of England’s Queen Alexandra, escaped the Russian Revolution, she brought with her the remains of one of the most magnificent jewelry collections history had ever seen. After her death, her remaining two daughters wished to sell the jewels to provide an income for themselves, so turned to their cousin, King George V for help. But, according to author Suzy Menkes, Queen Mary took advantage of the king’s sudden illness and underhandedly selected for herself several pieces in the collection, offering to pay only half the valuation price. As it turned out, she didn’t even pay the amount she offered, a debt that was later honored by Queen Elizabeth to the descendents of the grand duchesses Queen Mary had cheated.  

There is also the slightly less dubious incident where Queen Mary had to finagle the Cambridge emeralds from her late brother’s mistress. These emeralds, now in the Queen’s collection, were won in a lottery in the early 1800’s and were passed down from Augusta of Cambridge to Queen Mary’s mother, eventually making their way into the hands of Queen Mary’s brother, Prince Frank. Although his contemporaries stated that the emeralds had been bequeathed specifically to him and would therefore have been his to do with as he wished, a family incident ensued after his death where it is said Queen Mary successfully bribed her brother’s mistress to return the jewels. 

Of course, she also managed to get her hands on some of the most important diamonds of her time and, in particular, what was to become the most valuable brooch in the world. The Cullinan diamond, all 3025 carats of it, had been cut into the two enormous stones now set in the Crown Jewels, as well as more than 100 additional smaller stones. While the two main stones were considered to belong to the Crown, rather than any individual, the remaining stones were purchased privately and, in 1910, the High Commissioner of South Africa presented Queen Mary with 102 of them, which are still known today in the royal family as “Granny’s chips.” 

The two largest of these diamonds, the 92-carat pear shaped Cullinan III and 62-carat square cut Cullinan IV, were set into one extremely large brooch. This amazing piece of jewelry, along with all the other stones that were set into various other amazing pieces of jewelry were Queen Mary’s private property. Quite a trick considering they were originally meant for the Crown. Even Queen Elizabeth inherited these items as personal property, although the brooch has now made its way back to being Crown property. 

But whether it was pocketing valuable objets d’art from stately homes or the dubious acquisition of priceless jewels, Queen Mary’s “collecting” went beyond the norm.  It’s been said that a deprived childhood can lead to obsessive collecting as an adult. In relative terms, Queen Mary had just such a childhood, growing up as something of a poor royal relation whose parents were riddled with money problems, so perhaps her amassing of valuable objects as queen was compensation. 

There is at least one occasion in her life where she seems to have been acting out such a scenario. As a child, she had traveled widely to the royal courts of her wealthier relations where she had been made to feel inferior and unimportant. She had her revenge in 1913 when, as Queen Consort of England, she literally covered herself head to toe with diamonds to attend the wedding of Kaiser Wilhelm’s daughter. To her great satisfaction, she was widely hailed as being the most spectacular individual at the gathering. 

On the other hand, perhaps her actions were more clinical than psychological. Queen Mary could perhaps have suffered from kleptomania, which science now indicates may be the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain. This in no way implies that she was practicing a royal form of shoplifting, as the disease is defined as the failure to resist the impulse to steal items that are not needed for personal use or monetary value. And Queen Mary certainly did not need the money. 

So was it obsessive collecting or kleptomania? Deprived childhood or lack of the chemical serotonin? As with many of the so-called “darker” aspects of royal history, we’re unlikely to know for certain. But perhaps the answer can be derived from Queen Mary herself, who claimed that she got her love of collecting from her father, although, she clarified, “he was poor and could not afford to buy.” In the end, maybe she was simply on a single-minded mission to retrieve something in life that she felt her father had missed and, in the process, restore his dignity as well as her own. Or maybe not.

Until next week,

- Tori Van Orden

 


Previous Royal Scribe columns can be found in the archive

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This page was last updated on: Sunday, 29-Aug-2004 20:49:52 CEST