How Queen Mary collected Queen Charlotte: an exhibition currently at the Queen's Gallery, London, celebrates the collecting and patronage of Queen Charlotte alongside that of her husband, George III. That this is possible at all is largely thanks to the diligence with which her possessions were recovered and restored by her great-grand-daughter Queen Mary

Apollo, August, 2004 by Charlotte Gere

On 8 September 1761 the seventeen-year-old Princess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz arrived in London after a stormy voyage. (1) That evening she was married with great ceremony to the King of England, a man she had never met and of whose language she was entirely ignorant. She wore a dress of silver tissue and a stomacher covering the whole centre part of her bodice, set with a number of very large diamonds, worth quite extravagant sums according to the Duchess of Northumberland. (2) At the coronation, fourteen days later, she was again laden with pearls and diamonds. For the next twenty-two years she was pregnant almost continuously.

History has judged Queen Charlotte harshly. (3) Her life (she was born in 1744 and died in 1818) and her fifteen children, two of whom died in childhood, brought unimaginable trials. Faced with a husband who was diagnosed insane, the opposition of her eldest son--and the extravagant and dissolute behaviour that masked his qualities--the death in childbirth of the her presumptive Princess Charlotte, her namesake and only legitimate grandchild, and the misconstruction of her motives by the British people, she responded with dignity and discretion. She was treated with particular savagery by cartoonists, who represented her as ugly, overdressed, over-fecund and avid for diamonds and pearls. It was alleged that she presided over 'the dullest Court in Europe', but she loved gossip and was gay and good humoured with those who knew her, such as Mrs Delany, Fanny Burney and her confidante and correspondent of forty years, Lady Harcourt.

In the annals of royal collecting, Queen Charlotte was inevitably eclipsed by the king--in his early twenties he was already making hugely impressive acquisitions of Old Master paintings and drawings and classical engraved gems (4)--but her patronage of artists and manufacturers was important and her commitment to botany and horticulture ensured Britain's place at the forefront of those fields. The current exhibition at the Queen's Gallery gives her equal billing with her husband for the first time. (5) This is not an easy task. Queen Charlotte's personal possessions were sold after her death at 'Mr Christie's Great Room, Pall Mall' under a thin veil of anonymity, and the catalogues reveal a treasure-trove of books, prints, drawings, furniture, objets d'art, jewels and decorative trifles.

Beginning on 7 May 1819, the sales were spread over thirty five days and the items dispersed to the four winds. Had her marriage and coronation jewels survived, as well as the large diamonds given her by the Nawab of Arcot, the royal collection would boast a group of eighteenth century pieces to rival any in Europe, but they were either sold in 1819 or claimed by the kingdom of Hanover in 1858. (6) Her first enchantment with the dazzling array had quickly palled. As she confided to Fanny Burney, 'Believe me it is the pleasure of a week--a fortnight at most--and to return no more. I thought at first I should always choose to wear them; but the fatigue and trouble of putting them on, and the care they required, and the fear of losing them, believe me, ma'am, in a fortnight's time I longed again for my earlier dress'. (7) Faced with the reality of the losses, doing justice to Queen Charlotte might well have appeared to the exhibition curators as a hopeless cause. That it is possible is partly due, as the provenance of so many of the exhibits reveals, to her successor and lifelong admirer, Queen Mary (1867-1953), consort of George V.

Following her husband's accession in 1910, Queen Mary moved into Buckingham Palace and found a task that might have been invented to satisfy, her greatest interests and talents. Born Princess Victoria Mary of Teck (always known as Princess May), a cousin of her future husband, and great-granddaughter of George III and Queen Charlotte through their youngest son, Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, she was brought up in Kensington Palace, where her parents, the chronically impecunious Duke and Duchess of Teck, had a suite of rooms. Queen Mary's interest in family history and collecting was already known by the time she was eighteen, when she received an unusual confirmation present in the form of 'a clasp ... with George III & Queen Charlotte's hair in it, which I greatly value'. (8) Queen Victoria found Princess May's interests congenial, bequeathing to her one of Queen Charlotte's most intimate possessions, the four-strand pearl bracelet with George III's miniature set in diamonds sent to his prospective bride as a betrothal gift and mentioned in Queen Charlotte's jewel inventory. Queen Charlotte's sedan chairs (Fig. 4), which belonged to her mother's family, were in the hall at Kensington Palace and may have sparked Princess May's lifelong interest in the Queen (Figs. 1 and 2). (9) Princess May believed that she resembled Queen Charlotte in looks--proof, if such were needed, of her total lack of personal vanity.

[FIGURES 1-2, 4 OMITTED]

She inherited her appreciation of furniture and objets d'art and her talent for decoration from her father, the Duke of Teck, who had far too little to do and had to make a profession out of a pastime. H. Clifford Smith of the Victoria and Albert Museum extolled her 'special talent in the arrangement of works of art in the happiest relationship to their surroundings--a gift rarer than is commonly supposed and one requiring not only skill and taste but wide knowledge and judgment'. (10) When she arrived in Buckingham Palace she found Queen Charlotte's occupancy almost completely obliterated by George IV's sumptuous decoration. It remained, however, a virtually unexplored treasure house of historic royal art, furniture and memorabilia. Distant bedrooms were furnished with carved cabinets and cupboards by William Vile, and there were drawers-full of fans, parasols, trinkets and mourning jewellery. Recovering them and assembling them in some sort of order brought Queen Charlotte and her possessions back into her first home.