Heavily in the red, the family was forced to depart London court life in 1883 and lead a more modest existence in a rent-free villa in Florence. There the sixteen-year-old princess developed her taste for precious objects, visiting every day the Pitti Palace and marvelling at the Titians, Van Dycks and Raphaels. She frequented other art galleries and churches and with her parents’ encouragement took painting lessons, learnt Italian and perfected her German. When not in Italy, she often stayed by the Swiss lakes or with her German cousins in Wuerttenberg. Thanks to this peripatetic childhood, she was better educated and more cultured than many of her royal contemporaries, some of whom may not have taken kindly to her superior airs. Her early financial instability must also have taught her the importance of acquiring wealthy possessions. On her marriage to Prince George in 1893, she received a cascade of wedding gifts worth £300,000, including a diamond brooch from her friend Alice de Rothschild. At the ceremony she wore a diamond riviere given to her by the Prince of Wales. The death of her mother in 1897 and her brother in 1910 brought her more diamonds and some of the Cambridge emeralds but these family heirlooms had as much sentimental as monetary value. She had also inherited from her mother (“fat Mary”) her statuesque looks (without, thankfully, the weight). In the eyes of many her fuller figure and perfectly proportioned neck and shoulders made her well suited to the wearing of jewels - particularly when she was dressed à la décolleté. In France, she acquired the nickname "soutien-Georges" - a play on words for her support for George V and the French term for bra (soutien gorge). She also had to wear dresses with a reinforced lining to accommodate the extra weight from the jewels.
Her first major acquisition of jewellery came in the aftermath of the Boer War. As a token of their loyalty to the crown, the people of the Transvaal gave Edward VII cleavings (or chips) from the Cullinan Diamond, the largest diamond in the world that had been discovered by a mineworker in 1905. Just before the king's death in 1910, the South African government gave the future Queen Mary one hundred and two cleavings from the diamond. She turned Cullinan III and IV - known as the Lesser Stars of Africa - into a spectacular brooch which is today Crown property and the most valuable jewel owned by the Queen. She later set Cullinan VII into another brooch and Cullinan IX into a claw ring.16 With typical royal understatement her younger relatives always referred to these magnificent jewels as "Granny's chips". They are thought to be worth £29 million.
More gifts from the empire flooded in after the coronation. In December 1911 she was acclaimed Empress of India before tens of thousands at the Delhi Durbar and presented with the finest gems from the Maharajahs' palaces. The most valuable probably came from the Maharani of Patiala who gave her a magnificent set of emerald necklaces, pendants and brooches.
The death of Queen Alexandra in November 1925 brought further riches. As we saw earlier, she died intestate and a quarter share of her personal jewellery passed to Mary and George V. They picked out several royal pieces given to Alexandra on her wedding to the future Edward VII in 1863 and a few bequests from Queen Victoria in 1901. It is known that Mary acquired two expensive wedding presents - the Dagmar Necklace, an historic Danish jewel, and a valuable diamond necklace presented by the City of London. As for the state property, she also inherited some of the remaining Cullinan diamonds that Edward VII had given to Alexandra.
It was Alexandra’s unruly younger sister, the mischievous “Minnie” described in Chapter Two, who was to be responsible for Queen Mary’s biggest windfall – the fabled Romanov jewels. The daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark, she married Tsar Alexander III of Russia in 1866 and took up the title Empress Marie Feodorovna of all Russias. Her son Tsar Nicholas and his family died at the hands of the Bolshevik revolutionaries at Ekaterinburg in 1918 but she was protected by White Russian soldiers in Crimea and on the urging of her sister and with the help of a gunboat sent by King George V, she managed to escape to the west, eventually ending up in her native Denmark. She bought with her a large leather jewellery case containing some of the finest gems in the world: ropes of pearls the size of cherries, globular cabochon emeralds, deep blue sapphires and a fistful of large rubies.
George V tried to take control of his aunt's finances as well as the jewels that had been valued at half a million pounds. He granted an annual pension of £30,000 for the empress and her daughter Grand Duchess Olga to live in the luxury they were accustomed to in their Copenhagen Palace and provided a further stipend of £2,400 a year and a grace-and-favour cottage in Windsor Great Park to her other daughter Grand Duchess Xenia who had earlier lost £20,000 worth of her personal Romanov jewels to a conman. When the empress finally died in October 1928, the king decided that her collection of jewellery should be sent to Buckingham Palace for safe keeping.
Once all the family had been reunited in London, it was agreed that the gems should be sold discreetly so as not to flood the market and the money put in a trust for the two grand duchesses. The royal jewellers Hennell and Sons valued all the items and eventually sold them for a reported sum of £350,000. What was not known in court circles at the time - when all attention was directed on the ailing King George who had earlier promised to organise the sale - is that Queen Mary had an inside track in the process. Back in 1921 she had managed to buy a diamond tiara from Grand Duchess Vladimir and now she had the pick of the Romanov jewels for herself - including the empress's stunning sapphire brooch surrounded by two rows of diamonds with a pearl drop. "She bagged all the best," was how the socialite Lady Pamela Berry summed up the selection process in which the two duchesses also participated. Later it was also questioned whether she had actually paid the full valuation price.17
A clearer picture only emerged in the mid-sixties after the publication of the memoirs of the Grand Duchess Olga which alleged that she and her sister, Xenia, had received a fraction of the money from the jewels. Further investigations strongly suggested that just £100,000 of the reported £350,000 figure had been paid of which £40,000 went to Olga and the rest to Xenia. It also emerged that Mary herself had paid a mere £60,000. In her defence it was argued that some of the jewels were not sold until 1933 by which time the world recession had depressed gem prices and some of the missing £250,000 could be explained by her husband recouping the considerable financial support he had given to the empress and her family. If this had indeed happened, no one told the Grand Duchess Olga or her two surviving sons - Guri and Tikhon - who demanded an explanation from Buckingham Palace. A team of lawyers was engaged to sift through the documentation and weigh up the competing arguments. In 1968, according to the jewellery expert Suzy Menkes who after the death of Guri was in close contact with Tikhon, any outstanding debts were finally settled.18
But how could Mary have afforded to buy the Romanov jewels in the first place? Although she did not pay the full price, she still had to find £60,000 – a significant amount in anyone’s money. It has been suggested that due to illness George V was not fully aware of what his wife was up to. It is true that the removal of a near fatal abscess on the king’s lung forced him to take a six-month convalescence in Bognor in 1929, but overall he was clearly mindful of his wife’s passion for collecting. Even Mary’s official biographer - who glosses over any mention of the Romanov jewels - admits that her collecting was an interest of which he did not disapprove.19 In fact, on many occasions the king added to her collection of jewels - beginning with a diamond anchor before their wedding in 1893 and more recently giving her for Christmas 1928 a stunning topaz and diamond pendant.
So, how could George himself afford to fund his wife's hobby? At the start of his reign his finances were in a fragile state with the sprawling Sandringham House, farm and its stables haemorrhaging £50,000 a year. On the advice of friends in the countryside, the estate was reorganised and following the counsel of some city contacts his investment portfolio was put on a surer footing. By 1935 the annual losses of the farms at Sandringham, Balmoral and Windsor had been reduced to £12,650 a year.20
But the biggest bonus came from changes to his Civil List payments. In 1910 he managed to persuade the Treasury that for the first time they should be tax exempt. This important concession allowed him to accumulate money for his own personal use that had been allocated not just for his Privy Purse but for the general running of the Royal Household. According to Treasury figures, he saved £643,133 gross (on average £25,725 per annum) from the Civil List in the first 25 years of his reign.21 As one Treasury mandarin observed wryly, "King George was a very careful person in money matters."
As we saw in Chapter One, he did not let the exigencies of World War One get in the way of picking up bargains for his stamp collection – on several occasions enlisting the support of the Foreign and War Offices to track down rare specimens in territories captured by British forces. During the fighting he also snapped up the prized stamp collection of the Earl of Crawford for a modest price (and many of these items were sold at auction in 2001 for £625,000).22 He benefited from the fact that his passion for collecting stamps was known throughout the empire and even though he claimed not to accept unsolicited gifts (unless official presents), he was prepared to make exceptions, as in the case of the rare stamps from St Vincent sent to him by a Mr H Vaux in the West Indies. In 1911 at the Coronation Durbar he had the opportunity to add to the collection when after being asked whether he wanted a souvenir of the occasion, he said he would like to visit the archives of the Postal Department. According to the story told by Sir John Wilson, the Keeper of the Royal Philatelic Collection in the 1930s, he spent a fair amount of time there with a pair of scissors and as a result there are now items in the Royal Collection that are not represented in Delhi.23
Apart from his stamp collecting and shooting, the king spent relatively little on himself. He bought his furniture from Maples on the Tottenham Court Road and hung on his walls reproductions from the Royal Academy. Diffident by nature and distasteful of public ceremony, he shunned the smart set and what he called the intellectual "eyebrows", rarely going out to private parties and entertaining little at home. A typical evening would see the king dining alone with his wife - although for the sake of appearances she always wore a tiara.
While George waged his war on the twentieth century (as the Duke of Windsor memorably put it), Mary fought hers on waste. In the eyes of her relatives, she was famous for being generous in spirit but exceedingly mean about money.24 On one occasion when she moved out of Buckingham Palace to Marlborough House, she took with her all the silk wall coverings from two sitting rooms - at a cost of £550 to the public purse. From her childhood in Florence she learned the importance of making economies and she extended this to her collecting. If a beautiful item took her fancy when visiting relatives or friends at their country home, she would drop a none too subtle hint that they might wish to sell it to her at a discounted price or even give it to her for free. Other acquaintances would be drafted in to act as "spotters” or “shoppers" in her quest for jewels and antiques.
By now she had got the itch for collecting antique furniture. She regularly called on antiquaires and even in her later, frailer years, she would often visit the top London showrooms and dealers. Sometimes she acquired furniture simply through inheritance. When Lord Farquhar, the wealthy banker and steward of the royal household, died in August 1923 he left her the complete contents of his home at White Lodge along with a Louis XVI commode.
One of the great ironies of the queen's obsession with jewels is that she had so little occasion to show them off. In part this explains why she was reduced to wearing them while dining alone with her husband. Allergic to long distance travel, the king managed in the interwar years just two state visits abroad, visiting fellow sovereigns in Belgium and Italy, while at home he kept state pageantry to a minimum. His wife had many more jewels than she could ever hope to wear and so most of the time they remained locked away in the store room at Buckingham Palace. She spent hours cataloguing all her collection and writing labels on the jewels. Often she gave them personal names like the "Surrey" tiara, the "Kensington" bow brooch and the "City" collar.
It has been suggested that her collecting - particularly in later life - became a displacement activity for her children. Unable to show overt love for her offspring, she poured her passion into her jewels. One of Prince Charles's earliest memories is visiting his great grandmother ("Gan Gan") in Marlborough House and not being allowed to touch her priceless collection of jade that was displayed around the room in cabinets.25 It has also been argued that her collecting was a form of revenge against more snobbish relatives who looked down on her imperfect royalty. In a sense, she found true regality in her royal jewels. But perhaps the real roots of her mania go back to her childhood and the penury of her parents. She once let slip that her interest in fine objects came from her aesthetically-inclined father – who sadly was poor and did not have the means to buy them.26
When she died in March 1953, Mary was regarded as the richest royal, with a fortune estimated at £3 million. Bearing in mind her fabulous treasure trove of jewels, this might seem an undervaluation. But when probate was finally granted in August 1953 following the sealing of her will, her estate was valued at just £406,407 9s 8d. In principle if it had been treated as a normal private estate falling in the band of £300,000-£500,000 it would have been liable to death duties at a rate of up to 60% leaving a tax bill of around £240,000 - although if her estate had been valued at £3 million, it would have fallen into the higher band rate of 80% leaving a liability in the order of £2,400,000 - a difference of a neat £2 million.
Any attempt to answer the question what happened to her “missing millions” must first distinguish between crown property and personal property. Obviously the crown jewels as inalienable property would not have been included in her personal estate - most would have passed to Queen Elizabeth (the consort of George VI) in 1936 after the abdication of Edward VIII. But the wider category of crown jewellery (including gems given as public gifts or through official bequests) is less easy to pin down. "It's a grey area," admitted Dickie Arbiter, the former palace press secretary. But the writer Leslie Field who had access to the Royal Archives for her book "The Queen's Jewels” believes that Mary left a list to the present queen cataloguing which jewels belonged to the crown for perpetuity and which were family heirlooms27 and Sir Hugh Roberts, the former director of the Royal Collection, has indeed viewed an unpublished inventory of Mary’s jewels.28 As gifts presented to the crown, the Cullinan diamond from the Transvaal and the Ladies of India emerald necklace from the Delhi Durbar were both classified state property, whereas the Vladimir diamond and pearl tiara which was bought with Mary's own money would have been deemed private property.
But tracing Mary's missing millions is complicated by her tendency to recycle and shape shift her jewels. She loved to acquire one piece and convert it into something else. For instance, she took the large sapphire which was the centrepiece of the diamond tiara bought from Empress Marie Feodorovna’s estate and turned it into a separate brooch. She gave this to Princess Margaret and the stripped-down tiara to Princess Alice. The accompanying diamond chain link necklace in the collection was further divided into two bracelets.
Sometimes she converted raw gems into finished pieces. When she visited South Africa in 1901 as part of an official tour of the empire, De Beers presented her with a magnificent cache of diamonds. On her return to England, she turned some of the gems into an ornate tiara with a diamond set in each of the seven arches, although when she later became queen she never wore it and it disappeared into the vaults of Buckingham Palace. Similarly, she reportedly turned the Cambridge emeralds inherited from her mother into a delicate choker and late reworked it (possibly with the addition of some of the Romanov emeralds) into a fashionable Art Deco design.29 As a result of this shape shifting, on some occasions private gifts might become crown property and on others “state gifts” might become private property. Whichever way they went, the effect would be to muddy the waters of prov
enance.
Mary in her will, according to Elizabeth II's biographer, left the bulk of her estate to the Queen.30 This of course ignores what she gave her before her death which in part may explain the low probate valuation. We know that on Princess Elizabeth's marriage to Prince Philip in November 1947 she gave her twenty-five wedding gifts including furniture, silver salvers and nine pieces of jewellery.31 One of the most valuable pieces was Elizabeth's first tiara (the so-called "granny's tiara") which had been made from the De Beers diamonds given to Mary in South Africa. Two other items were gifts Mary had received on her own marriage in 1893: a pair of pearl button earrings and a ruby and diamond pendant. She also gave her the Duchess of Teck’s corsage brooch, the Rose of York ruby bracelet and two diamond studded Indian bangle bracelets that she had been given in India in 1907.32
The wedding gift seemed a favourite transmission belt by which Mary passed on her jewels to her family and avoided death duties. When her fourth son, Prince George, the Duke of Kent, married Princess Marina in November 1934 she gave the couple a pearl and diamond choker and an antique sapphire and diamond parure. When her third son, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, married Lady Alice Montague Douglas Scott in 1935, a similar hoard of jewels was passed on. This time the parure of matching jewellery was made of turquoise and the rest of the gem case consisted of two necklaces of Indian pearl and emerald, two wide diamond and emerald bracelets, a baroque pearl brooch and a pair of diamond stud earrings. In the years after the wedding, Prince Henry’s family were to receive many other gifts - not just jewels, but silver and furniture - from his mother. Henry had become a serious collector of antiques (see Chapter Sixteen) and Mary obviously saw him as a chip off the old block.
Royal Legacy: How the royal family have made, spent and passed on their wealth Page 11