Beneath the surface of Queen Mary of Teck's stoic exterior was a woman with a deep passion for beautiful things.
The eldest daughter of two spendthrifts, Mary grew up a princess without the means to buy many of the luxurious items she desired.
But that all changed when her scheming second cousin, Queen Victoria, orchestrated Mary's engagement to not one but two of her grandsons, opening doors (and purse-strings) that she had not dared dream of.
Mary married Prince George in 1893, only a year after she was set to wed his brother, Prince Albert Victor, who died not long after their engagement.
As a wife and a royal, Mary carried out the duties expected of her but also found time for her favourite hobby: gathering items for the royal collection.
"All through her life, both as princess and as queen, Princess Mary loved to draw up and to check lists, to write labels, and to docket objects and pieces of furniture," wrote her biographer, James Pope-Hennessy.
"It has been said of her that had she not been queen consort, she would have made an admirable and efficient museum curator."
To some of her loved ones, Mary was a brilliant eccentric with a sentimental reverence for objects that once belonged to the House of Windsor.
But to members of the art world and other royals, she was a persuasive hustler, a queen who may have exploited her position to obtain treasures that didn't belong to her.
"She had kind of upmarket kleptomania because she would go stay in somebody's house and she'd be sitting on one of a dozen Sheraton chairs and she'd say, 'Ooh, I do like this chair.' And you'd be obliged to give her all 12," royal ancestor Princess Olga Romanoff claimed in the ITV documentary The Queen and Her Cousins.
"So people got wise to this, and they'd say, 'Oh, god, Queen Mary's coming to stay,' so they'd put the good stuff in the attic and bring the more rotten stuff down."
Today, Mary, the grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II, is regarded as having played a significant role during the reign of her husband, King George V, as both a wife and canny confidant.
But there are lingering questions over the trove of jewels and treasures she amassed in her lifetime.
Was she a thief, a kleptomaniac or simply a misunderstood collector who acquired artefacts through controversial tactics?
The privileged princess of little means
Mary grew up in what was best described as aristocratic poverty.
Her mother, Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, was the grandchild of a king, while her father, Francis, Duke of Teck, was a German nobleman.
Her cousin, Queen Victoria, visited the new baby, who was born at Kensington Palace, and wrote in her diary that Mary was "a very fine one, with pretty little features and a quantity of hair".
But what Mary had in titles and noble blood, she lacked in cash and prospects.
The family lived rent-free in White Lodge, a grace-and-favour home gifted to them by Queen Victoria, and her mother was granted a parliamentary annuity of 5,000 pounds (roughly 476,840 pounds in 2025).
And yet, somehow, the family was always broke — so broke that when Mary was 16, they moved to Europe and stayed with relatives to try to save some money.
"Her love of art was fostered in Florence, where her parents lived for a few years, as they had debts," historian Hugo Vickers, editor of the book, The Quest for Queen Mary, told Vanity Fair.
Mary's financial woes and status as a minor royal could have doomed her prospects.
But just as she entered society, Queen Victoria was looking for a bride for her grandson, Prince Albert Victor.
Second in line to the throne, Albert Victor was struggling to convince any suitable women to marry him.
Rumours swirled among the British upper classes about his sexuality and his intellect.
The New York Times once described him a "dullard" and "stupid perverse boy", who shouldn't "be allowed to ascend the British throne".
He was even rumoured to be Jack the Ripper at one point, though he wasn't in London at the time of the murders and has been excluded as a suspect.
When he proposed to his cousin, Princess Alix, in 1889, she refused him and explained in a letter that "it grieves her to pain him, but that she cannot marry him, much as she likes him as a cousin".
Five years later, Alix moved to Russia to marry Tsar Nicholas II.
Alix became the last empress of Russia, and was executed by a firing squad, along with her husband and children, during the Bolshevik revolution.
Albert Victor pursued several other minor European royals, before Queen Victoria encouraged him to court the "charming, sensible and pretty" Mary of Teck.
Mary was apparently shocked to learn that she'd caught the attention of the heir to the throne, but she agreed to his proposal, and the wedding was set for February 1892.
Just six weeks later, as the world was in the grip of a respiratory viral pandemic, Albert Victor fell ill and developed pneumonia.
He died at the age of 28, plunging Britain into grief, and dashing Mary's hopes of becoming queen.
But in her misery, she sought comfort from Albert Victor's family, and an unexpected love bloomed between Mary and her fiancé's younger brother.
Mary becomes a queen with good taste
Queen Victoria may have been the first to see an opportunity in the fragile bond forming between Mary and George.
Upon Albert's death, the younger prince moved up the ladder of succession to become second in line to the throne.
And, along with inheriting a new title and greater responsibilities, came pressure for him to secure the royal family against future shocks.
To the perennially matchmaking Queen Victoria, that meant finding a bride for George and securing an heir.
And what better woman could there be than the one she had hand-picked for his brother?
George and Mary were engaged and married within a year of Albert's death, a circumstance that scandalised some parts of English high society despite the blessing of the queen.
But the match seemed to be one built on love. Mary bore George six children — Edward, Albert, Mary, Henry, George and John — and, unlike his ancestors, he never took a mistress.
Through her marriage, Mary underwent a radical transformation, from a fringe princess with an uncertain future to a senior royal on the path to becoming queen of England.
She found her true calling as an unofficial royal archivist, combining her passion for arts and culture with her interest in historical family objects.
She collected everything including "Battersea enamels, late jades, miniature elephants of agate with jewelled howdahs, small tea sets in gold or silver, papier-mâché workboxes, tiny watercolours of flower-gardens [and] glass paintings," Pope-Hennessy wrote in Queen Mary.
And when Mary became queen consort to King George V, her unique position opened up new avenues for her to gobble up pieces that had once belonged to the royal collection.
The methods Mary adopted to acquire this collection were no doubt controversial.
Stories quickly spread that if Queen Mary ever popped by an aristocrat's house for a visit and spotted an object she liked, she'd find a way to get it.
"Her insatiable fascination in rearranging and completing the great royal collections at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle left museum directors no more protection from her obsession than antique dealers," wrote biographer Anne Edwards, author of Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor.
"If she saw something that she thought should be placed in a royal residence, she requested a permanent loan of the piece."
Jewels and smuggled Romanov tiaras
Queen Mary's interest in collecting and restoring royal artefacts stretched across the continent.
In 1921, she obtained the now-famous Vladimir Tiara after it was smuggled out of Russia during the revolution that toppled the Romanovs from the throne.
Made from interlaced circles in which pearl and diamond drops were hung, the Vladimir Tiara had been crafted especially for Maria Pavlovna, otherwise known as the Grand Duchess Vladimir, by a Russian court jeweller in the 1870s. It was considered one of her favourites.
The headpiece, along with hundreds of other prized jewels and a wad of cash, was locked in a safe inside Grand Duchess Vladimir's boudoir before she fled her palace in 1917.
While living in exile in a Russian village, she encouraged her son, Grand Duke Boris, and his friend, Englishman and art dealer Albert Stopford, to steal the jewels back.
Dressed as a worker, Stopford (it's unclear whether he was joined by the grand duke) snuck into the palace, moving through a series of secret passageways, until he emerged into the grand duchess's bedroom.
There, he unlocked the safe, dismantled the jewellery and placed them in bits of old newspaper before he smuggled them out of the palace — and eventually out of Russia — in two shabby Gladstone bags.
"Out of the depths of [this luggage] emerged gems that were destined to adorn the rich and famous for decades — royalty, film stars, entrepreneurs, heiresses and celebrities alike — including Maria's immediate family, two queens of Great Britain … and Elizabeth Taylor," historian William Clarke wrote in Hidden Treasures of the Romanovs: Saving the Royal Jewels.
The Vladimir Tiara ended up in London, where it was inherited by the grand duchess's daughter and put up for sale. Queen Mary purchased it in 1921.
While the circumstances surrounding her acquisition of the tiara are murky, there is no evidence the jewels were stolen.
Still, accusations of kleptomania haunt Mary's legacy, fuelled by the complaints of London antiques dealers and more recently, a depiction in Downton Abbey.
In the movie, it's remarked that some small items from the house disappeared after the royal couple's visit, prompting one character to ask: "What if people were to think that her majesty was light-fingered?"
The answer, at least in the real world, is that she was not a thief.
Edwards writes, the accusation that Queen Mary was a kleptomaniac was "never substantiated and thoroughly untrue".
Was there something more to Mary's interest in things?
While some historians, like John Curtis Perry, describe Mary's behaviour in obtaining royal objects as "predatory", others think she had an obsession that verged on hoarding behaviour.
"She bought family things chiefly, and up to the end, would insist on saddling [her son] the duke of Gloucester with a vast and impossible silver tea urn because it had belonged to [Queen Victoria's uncle] the duke of Cumberland," Lord Claud Hamilton told History Extra.
Whatever tactics she used to collect them, Mary clearly felt safe surrounded by the treasures of her family.
"The sad example of her parents' near-bankruptcy, the knowledge of the really considerable quantity of debt … taught Princess Mary a salutary lesson: never to live above one's income," Pope-Hennessy wrote in Queen Mary.
The girl born with nothing but a name died a queen who raised two kings.
"Her soft voice, her cultivated mind, the cosy room overflowing with personal treasures were all inseparable ingredients of the happiness associated with this last hour of a child's day," her son Edward VIII wrote in his memoir.
By the time of her death in 1953, Mary had built up the royal collection to be one of the largest surviving private collections in the world.
Many royal items, which had been sold or given away by her predecessors, were returned to the House of Windsor, items Mary meticulously inventoried and catalogued for future generations.
"It is really rather wonderful what we have managed to collect [and] get together since we married, quite a creditable collection of family things […] without spending much money over it," she once wrote to a relative.
"I confess I feel rather proud of our endeavours. I hope you won't laugh at me."
