James Pope-Hennessy - The Quest for Queen Mary

James Pope-Hennessy was a British biographer and travel writer. His books included London Fabric (for which he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize), Sins of the Fathers (an account of the Atlantic slave traffickers), Anthony Trollope and Queen Victoria at Windsor and Balmoral . He died in 1974.

Hugo Vickers is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and an acknowledged expert on the British Royal Family. He has written biographies of the Queen Mother, Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, Cecil Beaton, Vivien Leigh, Princess Andrew of Greece and the Duchess of Windsor. His book The Kiss won the 1996 Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. His polemic, The Crown - Truth & Fiction attracted international publicity in 2018.

Princess Victoria Mary of Teck

The Quest for Queen Mary

James Pope-Hennessy

Edited by Hugo Vickers

www.hodder.co.uk

www.zuleika.london

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Zuleika

This edition published jointly in 2018 by Zuleika and Hodder & Stoughton

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Introduction & notes Hugo Vickers 2018

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Contents

PART ONE: THE COMMISSION

By Hugo Vickers

Introduction

Queen Mary, the widow of George V, and grandmother of the Queen, died at Marlborough House on 24 March 1953, a few months before the Coronation. She was eighty-five years old. Unusually for a Queen consort, an official biography was commissioned. The last such exercise was the life of the Prince Consort, commissioned by Queen Victoria. The task was entrusted to James Pope-Hennessy.

Pope-Hennessy was a writer of considerable distinction, but he was young to be chosen thirty-eight years of age. Born in 1916, he came from an intellectual Catholic family. His mother, Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, was herself a well-known writer, who produced books on Sir Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Canon Charles Kingsley and many others. His brother, Sir John Pope-Hennessy, was an art historian, who rose to be Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, then of the British Museum, and finally Chairman of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. While both brothers were still in the nursery they were given type-writers, and as they grew up they were paid by their mother to type her manuscripts (though she made deductions for mistakes).

James was educated at Downside and Balliol College, Oxford. From his earliest days he was destined to be a writer, and during his life he held few regular jobs. He worked for a Catholic publishing firm; he served as private secretary to Sir Hubert Young, Governor of Trinidad; he worked in military intelligence during the war; and he was literary editor of the Spectator from 1947 to 1949. His first book, London Fabric (1939), won the Hawthornden Prize.

His personal life was always somewhat chaotic. James Lees-Milne wrote: A natural rebelliousness was accentuated by his unremitting homosexuality Although physically attracted to his own sex he loved the companionship of women to whom most of his enchanting correspondence was addressed. They were fascinated by his understanding and sensitivity. All his life he was much sought after by hostesses for his sparkling conversation. His friends were amongst the most interesting artists, writers and muses of their generation Cecil Beaton, James Lees-Milne, Clarissa Churchill (now Countess of Avon), Joan Moore (Countess of Drogheda), Viscountess Rothermere (Ann Fleming), and others. His brother, John, described him thus:

I had never known James really well. I had boundless admiration for his talent, but his life seemed secretive (more so to me than to other people, I suspect), and I looked upon his forays into low life and smart society with some reserve. Years later, a close friend, Maud Russell, described him to me as two characters lodged in one shell. The serious, hardworking, self critical (so far as his writing was concerned) workmanlike being, and that other self, wild, careless, unheeding. A person might easily have known only one half of him and not had a clue to the other half.

John Pope-Hennessy also addressed James as a writer:

James regarded himself as an artist, in the rather old-fashioned way that writers in the 1920s and 1930s had been prone to do. He was unintellectual, not in the sense of being unintelligent (he was indeed extremely clever), but of being uninterested in criticism or in ideas. Most of my friends were my own contemporaries; most of his were much older or younger than himself. In the 1950s it worried me that his life seemed to be built around people he was likely to outlive. The determining influence on his career as a writer was a wise woman of extraordinary intuition, Lady Crewe

Pope-Hennessy had indeed established his reputation as a biographer with the two volumes on Monckton-Milnes, which were published in 1949 and 1951. He published his biography of Lord Crewe in 1955, a book which even he admitted was less than inspired.

It was, however, the biography of Crewe that led to his appointment. Crewes daughter, Lady Cynthia Colville, had been a long-serving Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Mary. She suggested him to Sir Owen Morshead, the Royal Librarian. Morshead wrote to Pope-Hennessy on 13 June:

Dear Pope-Hennessy,

I wonder whether, after you have finished with Lord Crewe, you would care to undertake the official life of Queen Mary? Your researches into the period and circumstances of Lord Crewes life would be useful: and no less so would be your friendship with Lady Cynthia. Johns experience at the V. & A. would help you in that important aspect of Her Majestys life. I would give you every assistance in my power, and make free of all the papers.

The timing is not important; Wheeler-Bennetts life of King George VI must appear first (because of the Abdication) and that will not be for 12 or 18 months yet. The financial arrangements and choice of a publisher would rest with you.

I hope very much that you will feel able and free to undertake this task. You are free to discuss it with Lady Cynthia: and for my part I would welcome the opportunity of a discussion with you either here or in London. But I am in no hurry.