Princess Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck: A Larger-than-Life Royal

 Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, Duchess of Teck, was a larger-than-life figure during her lifetime. The younger of the two daughters (and third child) of Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, and Princess Louise of Hesse-Cassel, Princess Mary Adelaide was well-loved by the public for her generosity and affable nature.

In the biography  Queen Mary: A Life and Intimate Study, Kathleen Woodward, dedicates a portion of the book on the amiable princess, writing:

No censorship could efface the essential personality from the pages of this diary, It went out eagerly to meet all with whom Her Royal Highness came into contact, and invariably people abandoned themselves utterly to this uncurbed, extravagant humanity. She could not pass a child at the stiffest of official functions without administering a hurricane embrace to the “ dear little tot"; nor could she pass an old woman struggling along the country lanes of Richmond with her bundle of sticks without sharing the load.

She made many friend because of her sunny disposition. “Her friends were legion,” Woodward writes and the princess had always opened the doors of her house, White Lodge, every Sunday evening to her “large, varied, cosmopolitan circle.”

Her daughter, the future Queen Mary, was “passionately attached to her” “Mamma”. Her adoration for her was boundless and when things seemed rough with  “difficulties and obstacles,” “Mamma” simply “smiled through the most  too impossible".

The princess’ love for the people is equally repaid by the public acclaim that she enjoyed as “the most popular royal personage of her time.” 

“That a crowd should thrill at her approach was to her a source of inexhaustible thrills,” wrote Woodward. “To the end of her days she kept this simple, insatiable delight in her popularity.”

Princess Mary Adelaide’s high-spirited nature was nurtured early on. This “spirited, lively child” was described  was her childhood playmate, Mrs. Dalrymple: “She delighted in discussing certain characters in history, and one day, brandishing a long ruler in her hand, she turned round suddenly and said to me, ‘Can it be possible that when I go to heaven I shall meet that murderer Henry the Eighth ? Never! I can't believe it! Such a bad character!'"

In 1887, during Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee celebration, the Duchess of Teck made her first public appearance after her first severe illness. Despite being seated amidst a “glittering assemblage” of royalty which flocked Westminster Abbey, the princess was nevertheless noticed by an adoring crowd, which greeted her a “thunder of applause,” leaving the royal “to an ecstasy of joy.”  “Even though I had my back to the horses, they found me out I" she to Lady Mount Stephen, probably  a hundred times that day.

The princess, ever since young, has nurtured a “charming, sympathetic, eager” nature.  Lady Caroline Cust a nineteen-year-old Princess Mary Adelaide as “strikingly handsome”  with her “beautiful hair and dark blue eyes” as “much admired.” “She was dignified and graceful in her movements and a remarkably light dancer…” Lady Caroline continues. The princess was particularly fond of music, and sang “with great feeling, possessing a beautiful meso-soprano voice."