I hope this hasn't been posted, I found a funny anecdote on Queen Mary!
Queen Mary:
Toward the end of her life, Queen Mary (wife of George V) came to possess a Russian ikon of great beauty but unknown origin. A concerted effort was made to establish its provenance, to no avail...
"Then someone in her Household recollected that there was a Russian princess - a cousin of the British Royal Family - still living in the London suburb whither she had fled to escape the Bolsheviks in 1917. Possibly she would know something about the ikon. Queen Mary concurred and at once wrote to the Princess, inviting her to tea.
The Princess, who had lived 30 years in poverty and obscurity, resigned to the ostracism of her Windsor cousins, was overjoyed. Her joy increased at the tea party, as Queen Mary spoke to her kindly about her parents and relations and the dear dead days under the Tsar. At long last, her wanderings and loneliness seemed to have come to an end. Then Queen Mary brought out the ikon and asked if he knew anything about it.
"The Princess took the ikon and pressed it to her heart. She did, indeed, know something about it. She said it was the very ikon given to her at her baptism - the ikon which hung over her bed through her early childhood and to which, each night, she had said her prayers. It was the ikon to which she had prayed for deliverance on the night the Bolsheviks broke into her house, killing her father and mother, her brothers and sisters. It was the ikon she had gone back into the blazing house to rescue, and had carried with her through her long years as a refugee, her sole source of beauty and inspiration until hunger and cold had at last forced her to sell it for a few pennies. Even now, in her illness and despair, its sacred, fragile loveliness still haunted her dreams. The ikon had saved her life. The ikon was her life.
"'I see,' Queen Mary said, taking the ikon smartly back. 'Thank you so much for identifying it.'"
http://anecdotage.com/browse.php?category=people&who=Mary
