OPINION: HOLY COW! HISTORY: The Queen who saved Britain’s Monarchy

It’s been a rocky road for Britain’s House of Windsor of late. Ever since the end of World War II, it has wobbled dangerously close to the cliff’s edge of abolition, only to catch a breather and soldier on.

Currently, it’s the alleged antics (illegal and unamusing) of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the royal formerly known as Prince, that are putting the monarchy back on the endangered species list.

Given that March is Women’s History Month, the current scandal provides the perfect opportunity to revisit the tale of how one woman single-handedly kept the royal family on the throne. That woman just happened to wear a diamond tiara.

Talk about being born with a silver spoon in your mouth: Mary of Teck seemed destined for royal greatness from the moment she was born in 1867 in the same room in Kensington Palace where her first cousin, Queen Victoria, had been born 48 years and two days earlier.

Born Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, to her family she was “May,” nicknamed for the bright and sunny month of her arrival. A bright and sunny girl, her childhood, although happy, was strict. From the moment she learned to walk, she was groomed to move elegantly through the highest levels of Britain’s aristocracy.

That preparation paid off in 1891 when she became engaged to Prince Albert Victor. He was second in line to become king (the position young Prince George holds today).

However, the prince died in a global pandemic just six weeks later. Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales didn’t want to let this prize get away, so they persuaded Albert Victor’s brother, Prince George, to marry her instead.

After they tied the knot in 1893, royal watchers were stunned by what came next. The couple were genuinely happy together and developed a deep bond.

The prince finally became King George V on May 6, 1910. And his wife was now styled Mary of Teck, Queen of the United Kingdom and British Dominions and Empress of India.

You’ll know Queen Mary if you’ve seen the hit TV series “The Crown” or the Academy Award-winning film “The King’s Speech.” Both portrayed her exactly as she was in life: coldly strict, emotionally remote and personally intimidating.

Britons of the time appreciated her devotion to duty. They respected her, but they didn’t love her. However, George V did, and that was all that mattered.

Their lives ran smoothly. Until World War I erupted.

Queen Mary was among the first to sense that the global conflict posed a clear and present danger to what insiders call “the Firm” — the British royal family and the organizational machinery that supports it.

There was a delicious irony in the predicament. George V, the man who symbolically led Great Britain in its fight against Germany, came from a German family. A very German family, in fact.

When the Great War (as World War I was called at the time) began, the sovereign was head of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. German royals had married into the British monarchy for centuries. In fact, the English royals often spoke German among themselves in private. George V was even a first cousin of his Teutonic rival, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

That posed a serious problem in London. British wartime propaganda had skillfully whipped up a frenzied hatred of all things Germanic. It was greatly aided in its work by the Kaiser, who had once urged his soldiers to act like the vicious barbarians led by Attila the Hun in the fifth century. The Allies promptly labeled their German enemies “the Hun,” and anything even remotely associated with him — including beer, sausage and sauerkraut — was verboten.

Queen Mary sensed danger. With anti-German sentiment spreading, it was only a matter of when, not if, it would reach Buckingham Palace.

Her husband remained unmoved. She slowly but steadily worked on him until she eventually won him over to her way of thinking. And in July 1917, George V issued a royal decree. From that moment on, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was gone, replaced by the House of Windsor (a name taken from the family’s beloved Windsor Castle solely because it “sounded English”). Britons enthusiastically cheered the change.

In Berlin, Cousin Wilhelm sneered, saying he looked forward to attending a performance of the “Merry Wives of Saxe-Gotha-Coburg,” a mocking reference to Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

However, Mary of Teck had the last laugh. Within 16 months, Wilhelm and his House of Hohenzollern had lost the throne in Germany. The same happened to the czar’s House of Romanov in Russia and the emperor’s House of Habsburg in Austria-Hungary.

While the Windsors survived.

As for Queen Mary, a world-famous ocean liner, a battleship and even a university were named in her honor. All because she had the steel-eyed calculation to spot a threat at the outset and the courage to neutralize it before it metastasized.

J. Mark Powell is a former television journalist. His nonfiction book “Witness to War: The Story of the Civil War Told by Those Living Through It” is available at jmarkpowell.com. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.