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

upon 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 observance to the King of England, a man she had not ever met and of whose language she was entirely ignorant. She wore a dres of silver tissue and a stomacher covering the whole midst part of her bodice, locate with a number of real large diamonds, worth quite extravagant totals according to the Duchess of Northumberland. (2) At the coronation, fourteen days later, she was again laden with pearls and diamonds. For the nearest twenty-two years she was pregnant almost continuously.

History has judg Queen Charlotte harshly. (3) Her life (she was born in 1744 and died in 1818) and her fifteen children, sum of two units of whom died in childhood, brought unimaginable trials. Faced with a husband who was diagnosed insane, the opposition of her oldest son--and the extravagant and dissolute behaviour that masked his qualities--the death in childbirth of the her presumptive Princess Charlotte, her namesake and sole legitimate grandchild, and the misconstruction of her motives by means of the British people, she answered with dignity and discretion. She was treated with particular savagery by dint of cartoonists, who represented her as ill-favored overdressed, over-fecund and avid for diamonds and pearls. It was alleged that she presided above 'the dullest Court in Europe' on the other hand she loved gossip and was gay and advantageous humoured with those who knew her, of the like kind 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 dint of the king--in his early twenties he was already making hugely impressive acquisitions of aged Master paintings and drawings and classical engraved jewels (4)--but her patronage of artists and manufacturers was important and her commitment to botany and horticulture ensur Britain's place at the forefront of those fields. The generally received 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 extent Pall Mall' under a thin veil of anonymity, and the catalogues reveal a treasure-trove of works prints, drawings, furniture, objets d'art, jewels and decorative trifles.

Beginning upon 7 May 1819, the sales were spread above 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 dint of the Nawab of Arcot, the royal collection would boast a collection of eighteenth century pieces to rival any in Europe on the other hand they were either sold in 1819 or claimed through 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 go [i]or[/i] come back no more. I thought at first I should always elect to wear them; but the fatigue and agitate 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 drawn outed again for my earlier dress' (7) Faced with the reality of the losse doing justice to Queen Charlotte might well have appeared to the exhibition curators as a hopeles cause. That it is possible is partly owed as the provenance of with equal reason 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 mov into Buckingham Palace and lay the foundation of 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 time to come husband, and great-granddaughter of George III and Queen Charlotte from one side 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 ranges Queen Mary's interest in family history and collecting was already known by means of the time she was eighteen, when she received an unusual confirmation not away in the form of 'a clasp with George III & Queen Charlotte's hair in it, which I greatly value'. (8) Queen Victoria place Princess May's interests congenial, bequeathing to her single of Queen Charlotte's most intimate possessions, the four-strand pearl bracelet with George III's miniature plant 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 resembl Queen Charlotte in looks--proof if of that kind were needed, of her total lack of personal vanity.

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