Queen Elizabeth’s Grandmother Was Secretly Scandalous

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Born a rejected princess from an exiled family, Mary of Teck endured tragedy and upheaval to become the Queen Consort of all Britain, but a crown only seemed to bring her more heartache. Mary of Teck was absolutely heartbroken when her son abdicated. When she died, a private letter came out, and its contents exposed his ultimate betrayal. The whole story is coming up.

Mary of Teck was born into a faded fairy tale. Although she entered the world in 1867 in the same room as her cousin Queen Victoria, Mary’s bloodlines were decidedly on the shadowy side of the royal family. Mary’s mother, the elder Princess Mary, was a notorious spender dubbed “Fat Mary” for her love of expensive feasts and her corresponding girth. The high roller also adored fine clothes and foreign holidays. This would have disastrous consequences. Princess Mary kept spending until it all came to a ruinous climax in 1883. The Tecks had to take their young family and escape to the continent, fleeing from their debtors to try to live cheaply among kind-hearted relatives. Suddenly, little Mary’s status went from unremarkable to black sheep, and it was a long way back to the top.

By 1885, the Tecks were back in England, but it still wasn’t a stable life. As Mary grew into a young woman, a huge problem began to develop. Her parents desperately wanted to see her married, but her off-brand royal lineage presented a hurdle. As a royal, Mary wasn’t allowed to marry a member of the regular aristocracy, yet none of the true nobility wanted anything to do with her either. And then there was another problem. Unfortunately for poor Mary, the British upper crust was none too pleased with her looks. They considered her very German-looking—the height of an insult at the time—as well as frumpish. For an excruciatingly long time, it seemed like the eldest daughter of Teck was going to end up as an old maid.

Then everything changed. As Mary entered her early twenties, a twist of fate altered the course of her life forever. When Queen Victoria needed to find a potential bride for her grandson Prince Albert Victor, Mary’s status as one of the only unmarried British princesses turned into a selling point. On the surface, Prince Albert Victor was the most eligible bachelor in England. His father and mother were the Prince and Princess of Wales, and Albert himself was second in line for the throne and fully expected to become king one day. What more could a girl want? But Mary probably should have thought twice. Mary’s new fiancé may have been a dazzling marriage prospect, but he had a little-known flaw. Described as amiable but indecisive, as well as densely stupid, Victoria had already tried to get Albert hitched to a succession of princesses, but no one was biting. A long list of rumors trailed the prince’s reputation, including whispers that he’d fathered a secret love child, that he had been involved in a scandal with nightwalkers, and even that he was Jack the Ripper. Run, girl, run.

But Mary didn’t. On December 3rd, 1891, the stage was set for Mary’s supposed fairy tale at the country mansion of Luton Hoo. Prince Albert proposed to her, and like any clever girl angling for a crown, Mary accepted. Both the Tecks and the royal family looked forward to the upcoming nuptials. Instead, though, immense tragedy struck bare weeks after Mary had set herself up to become Prince Albert’s wife. The heir to the throne had to go and die. Yep, talk about a cruel twist of fate. Prince Albert became a victim of the infamous influenza outbreak of the 1890s, passing just days after his 28th birthday, and his final words were not complimentary to Mary. According to one source, Mary’s new fiancé didn’t spend time on his deathbed thinking about her, not in the least. Instead of pining for Mary, some of Prince Albert’s final words were pleas for his attendants to bring an unnamed ex-lover to his bed so he could say goodbye to the person he really cared about. And they say fairy tales aren’t real.

Prince Albert’s passing threw the entire nation into despair, and Mary may have had it worst of all. For those six short weeks, she had imagined learning to love her prince, and now he and his crown had been ripped away from her. At Albert’s funeral, she mournfully laid her bridal wreath of orange blossoms on his coffin, but it wasn’t long before she moved on to someone even more scandalous. Mary grew close to Prince Albert’s younger brother, Prince George, who now conveniently took Albert’s place in line for the throne. Queen Victoria, still focusing on securing the succession, helped the pair along, but again, Mary should have probably had some major reservations. Like his brother, George might have looked like a catch from afar, but there were unsettling issues behind closed doors. Just months before, George was in negotiations to marry Princess Marie of Edinburgh, only to have the girl outright reject him. And that wasn’t all. George was also uncomfortable with the idea of, you know, wedding and bedding his dead brother’s fiancée, and Mary wasn’t too happy about it either. They were almost too embarrassed to even converse, and most of what drew them together at first was a sense of duty to the nation.

To no one’s surprise, the proposal was the most awkward moment yet. For months, George and Mary were like a couple of pre-teens at a middle school dance, constantly making eyes but never moving towards each other. In the end, the royal family had to orchestrate their solo time by asking George to take Mary to look at frogs in the pond. George, thank God, finally took this pitiful opportunity to get down on one knee, and Mary said yes. Again, on July 6th, 1893, Prince George and Mary wed at the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. Mary had to completely scrap the dress she had planned for Prince Albert, but her new frock was a showstopper, with flounces of lace and a diamond tiara from Queen Victoria herself. Yet the day’s most touching moment happened away from prying eyes. The morning of their big day, both George and Mary were busy getting ready when the groom accidentally caught sight of his bride-to-be down one of Buckingham Palace’s long hallways. His response was truly romantic: the prince gave a low and courtly bow to Mary, a gesture that touched the girl to her core.

It was the beginning of something no one expected. Within a couple of months, the two were madly and deeply in love, and they would remain so their entire lives, with George refusing to ever take a mistress. But that didn’t mean it was smooth sailing; their time together was downright heartbreaking for a time. Mary’s new life as a royal was a kind of domestic bliss. She and George lived simply for royals, even after becoming the Princess and Prince of Wales. And Mary soon gave birth to a whopping six children. From their eldest son Edward to their youngest son John, the bustling brood of heirs was exactly what the crown wanted. Yet a darker story lurked within their lives. Mary was a distant mother and often missed horrific things happening to her children right under her nose. At one point, a possessive nanny was mistreating her sons, pinching them when they visited their mother so they would cry and return to her more quickly. Mary only found out after her children had gone through months of torment.

Mary’s last pregnancy and labor with her baby son John was incredibly difficult, and although Mary recovered after the ordeal, the little Prince John had a much tougher time of it. The boy struggled with respiratory problems, tending toward fragility well into toddlerhood. As the years wore on, though, it became clear that Mary’s youngest son was in much bigger trouble. John had always been a willful and mischievous child, but when he was four years old, a dramatic change took place. He became both winsome and painfully slow, and within months, he suffered his first seizure, confirming to Queen Mary and the royal doctors that he was epileptic. Mary’s reaction has lived in infamy for years. Following the diagnosis, Mary and George kept Prince John under wraps from the public. While in many ways this was to protect the young boy whose health rapidly deteriorated, experts have also suggested it was to keep John’s shameful illness a secret, and no one outside the family circle knew he had epilepsy.

On January 18th, 1919, Prince John suffered a massive seizure and passed at the tender age of 13. Although Mary wrote in her diary that it was a great shock, the tragedy also produced a more surprising emotion. After the little prince’s years of suffering, Mary confided to a friend that his passing was also a great relief. On May 6th, 1910, George and Mary’s calm, quiet life exploded from the inside when they succeeded to the throne as King George V and Queen Mary upon the passing of George’s father. Not everyone was ready to see Mary ascend to power. Her mother-in-law, Queen Alexandra, deep in mourning for King George’s father, dragged her heels leaving Buckingham Palace and even pocketed some royal jewels that now rightfully belonged to Mary.

The first trial of Mary’s new reign was also one of the most harrowing moments of the 20th century: the coming of World War I. In the wake of the conflict, Mary demanded that the palace undergo rationing like everyone else in England, and she insisted on visiting fatally wounded men in the hospital even when it started to take a toll on her mental health. Yet behind the scenes, she had blood on her hands. During these years, Tsar Nicholas II and the rest of the Russian imperial Romanov family begged for asylum with King George and Queen Mary. This was no random plea either; George and Nicholas were cousins and looked eerily alike. Despite this, Mary and her husband refused them. Months later, the Romanovs infamously perished in the Russian Revolution.

Closer to home, things weren’t much better. The Great War didn’t just take an enormous toll on Mary; it also cost her her husband. George was a heavy smoker, and the stress of the war and the situation in Russia ground George’s lungs into dust. By 1928, the king suffered from bronchitis, septicemia, and a whole host of other issues. Well, Mary knew just what to do. Whatever flaws Mary had as a mother, she seemed determined not to make the same mistakes as a wife. She became George’s most determined nurse, staying by his side whenever she could and making sure he got enough rest. Mary was so instrumental that the royal doctors considered her the person who had pulled King George back to life.

But you can only cheat fate for so long. In the mid-1930s, King George V was suffering more than even Mary could heal. On January 15th, 1936, the king, complaining of a cold, went to lie down in his bedroom. For the next five excruciating days, he never got up—not once. He never got up again at all. Instead, he drifted in and out of consciousness and mumbled feverish ramblings. When the end came, it was shocking. On January 20th, Mary’s beloved husband was so close to the precipice, his doctor Lord Dawson put an official bulletin announcing that the king’s life is moving peacefully towards its close. At 11:55 that evening, George did indeed pass, proving the doctor right. Only, there was something very, very wrong with the picture. The doctor hurried from the house after the king’s passing, and he soon made a disturbing confession. Without Queen Mary ever knowing, the medic had dosed King George with a lethal injection of morphine, effectively euthanizing the monarch. He claimed this preserved the king’s dignity, but Mary, who was extremely religious, probably had different ideas.

Somehow, even with all this turmoil, Mary’s family tragedies weren’t over yet. Her eldest son became King Edward VIII, and she became the Queen Dowager in the wake of George’s death. But this time would not be the Queen Mother’s proudest moment. Edward is infamous for just how disastrous his reign became, and Mary found herself in the middle of it all. Within a year of taking the throne, Mary’s son caused a complete constitutional crisis. To everyone’s horror, Edward decided he wanted the divorced Wallis Simpson as his Queen, even though church and state were both against the idea. Well, so was his mother, Mary. The Dowager disliked Simpson intensely and refused to meet with her either in private or in public. That became very complicated very quickly. Before 1936 was out, Edward abdicated, relinquishing the birthright that Mary had given him in order to wed Simpson. And whilst some saw this as a romantic gesture, Mary herself was utterly heartbroken. Although she deeply loved Edward and even doted on him, she could never forgive him for his disloyalty to the crown.

Few people knew it, but Mary was as smart as a whip. Underneath her conservative looks and strait-laced living, she had a deep, passionate knowledge of history and royalty that she often used to help King George V when he was writing his speeches. You can be darn sure she used those smarts too, but not always for good. Mary was obsessed with collecting royal trinkets, and she happily emptied the palace treasury on jewels that took her fancy, including when she bought baubles from the estate of the Dowager Empress Marie of Russia. Desperate to get what she wanted, Mary even paid three times the market value for a collection of emeralds. By the end of her life, Queen Mary of Teck was practically a British institution, but she hid her worst self from the public.

In her quest for ever more royal memorabilia, Mary started to get downright aggressive in her tactics. While she was over at someone’s estate and saw paraphernalia she liked, the Queen Consort would loudly proclaim how much she admired the piece. It was all in the hopes that her hosts would feel obliged to politely donate the item to their Queen, and there were even darker rumors surrounding this behavior. Although there’s no evidence to substantiate the claims, many people began to whisper that Queen Mary was actually a kleptomaniac and that her relentless and unorthodox collecting was just one symptom of her disorder. Some even said the monarch would outright steal from her hosts, as illustrated most recently in a scene from the Downton Abbey movie. Again, probably not true, but definitely shocking to think about.

As Mary neared the twilight years of her life, her mind somehow got even sharper. She supported her second son Albert as he became King George VI after Edward’s tragic abdication. She also kept a watchful eye over her granddaughters, the future Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret, and insisted on giving them a well-rounded education in defiance of their parents’ wishes. Although both Queen Mary and King George V had tough exteriors, their love ran deep, deeper than even most royalty buffs might know. When the monarchs celebrated their Silver Jubilee back in 1935, King George instructed his speechwriter to put his comments about his wife Mary at the end. The reason why was heartbreaking: he feared he would choke up, saying, “I cannot trust myself to speak of the Queen when I think of all I owe her.”

In 1952, Mary suffered her last tragedy in a life full of tragedies. King George VI, her second oldest son, passed, turning her granddaughter into the new Queen Elizabeth II. This made three children that Mary had to bury, and the blow nearly knocked her over. She said, “I have lost three sons, but I have never been privileged to be there to say a last farewell to them.” In the end, Mary didn’t have to wait long for a release from her pain. The next year, she too passed at the age of 85, just weeks before Elizabeth’s coronation. Mary was a Queen of England until the very end. She left explicit instructions that her death shouldn’t delay the coronation, and everything went as scheduled. Keep calm and carry on, indeed. Mary never managed to forgive her son Edward for abdicating, but he didn’t seem too forgiving towards his mother either. After the Queen Dowager passed, Edward wrote a bitter, spiteful letter to Wallis Simpson, his wife, remembering how hard and cruel Mary was and lamenting that “the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they are now in death.” A cruel way to remember his own mother and the Dowager Queen of England. Thank you for watching this video. Please like and subscribe for more fascinating content.