Queenly Interventions: the role of Queen Mary in the management of Britain’s Royal Diplomacy 1918-1939’

The Great War had hampered the full flow of European royal diplomacy, but it had continued even with a much lower visible profile. However, the scale of the conflict meant that official diplomacy between the victorious Allied states and their defeated counterparts was initially complex and often hostile, certainly in the period when the post-1918 treaties were being signed. By this time also, George V was in relatively poorer health than he had been before 1914, and personally disinclined t travel outside the UK. By this time also, there had been an unprecedented breach in the royal network, because George V had taken the step of requiring his royal relations based in Britain or her Empire to relinquish their German titles and assume British ones, while removing British titles from his German relations, especially those who had fought against the Allied side. His own wife’s aunt, Princess Augusta of Cambridge, the widowed Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg Strelitz, had ceased to be listed as a Princess of the United Kingdom. There was also the vexed question of the murder of his Romanov cousins, a very painful episode  for the King. Thus active British participation in a restoration of a postwar royal network, supporting a resumption of European royal diplomacy, was not a priority for George V. Instead, it was a responsibility undertaken by his consort, Queen Mary. She herself kept up a sustained correspondence with her German cousins. She had ensured that David, her eldest son, spoke both French and German as part of his training as Prince of Wales, and now encouraged him to undertake visits abroad and to keep up contacts with his royal cousins via that medium. It was a queenly intervention of considerable importance in terms of the rebuilding a network of royal diplomacy in the interwar period., as this paper explores.

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