Later Life
The Tecks returned from exile in 1885 and continued to live at White Lodge in Richmond Park. Mary Adelaide began devoting her life to charity, serving as patron to Barnardo's and other children's charities.
In 1891, Mary Adelaide was keen for her daughter, Princess Victoria Mary of Teck (known as "May") to marry one of the sons of the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. At the same time, Queen Victoria wanted a British-born bride for the future king, though of course one of royal rank and ancestry – not some "lowly" noblewoman – and Mary Adelaide's daughter fulfilled the rank criteria. After Queen Victoria's approval, May became engaged to the second in line to the British throne, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. The death of the Duke of Clarence only six weeks later looked like a cruel blow. However, Queen Victoria was fond of Princess Mary and persuaded the Duke of Clarence's brother and next in the line of succession, Prince George, Duke of York, to marry her instead.
The marriage of Mary into the top rankings of the royal family led to a dramatic revival in the fortunes of the Tecks, with their daughter one day to be Queen Consort. Mary Adelaide never saw her daughter crowned queen, as she died on 27 October 1897 at White Lodge, Richmond Park, Surrey, and was buried in the royal vault at St. George's Chapel, Windsor.
Read more about this topic: Princess Mary Adelaide Of Cambridge
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
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“Among the earliest institutions to be invented, if I read the stars right, is a Protestant monastery, a place of elegant seclusion where melancholy gentlemen and ladies may go to spend the advanced session of life in drinking milk, walking the woods & reading the Bible and the poets.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)