Lieutenant-Colonel Viscount Lascelles

Henry George Charles Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood was born on 9 September 1882 at London, England. He was the son of Henry Ulick Lascelles, 5th Earl of Harewood and Lady Florence Katharine Bridgeman. He was styled as Viscount Lascelles on 9 September 1882. He gained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the service of the Grenadier Guards and fought in the First World War, commanding the 3rd Battalion from Sep 1918. He was mentioned in despatches and wounded twice. He was decorated with the award of the Croix de Guerre and the DSO in 1918. He was invested as a Knight, Order of the Garter (KG) in 1922. He succeeded to the title of 6th Earl of Harwood on 6 October 1929. On 28 Feb 1922 he married Princess Mary, Princess Royal of the United Kingdom, only daughter of King George V at Westminster Abbey. He died on 23 May 1947 at age 64 at Harewood House, Leeds, Yorkshire, West Riding, England. He and the Princess Royal lived at Chesterfield House in London and Goldsborough Hall in North Yorkshire. Their children were George Henry Hubert Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood b. 7 Feb 1923, d. 10 Jul 2011, and Hon. Gerald David Lascelles b. 21 Aug 1924, d. 27 Feb 1998.

The Royal Wedding 28 Feb 1922

The wife of Viscount Lascelles was the third child and only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary of Teck. She was 24 at the time of the wedding, and Lascelles was 39. She became the Countess of Harewood when her husband inherited the title in 1929. It was later reported that she did not want to marry Lord Lascelles, that her parents forced her into an arranged marriage, and that Lascelles proposed to her after a wager at his club. Her brother the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, to whom she was very close, was against the marriage because he did not want his sister to marry someone whom she did not love. Her elder son, the Earl of Harewood, however, writes about his parents' marriage in his memoirs 'The Tongs and the Bones' and challenges these widespread rumours that the marriage was an unhappy one. He says that "they got on well together and had a lot of friends and interests in common". She was active in her involvement with the Girl Guides, and worked two days a week as a nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital. After the abdication she firmly sided with her brother the exiled King Edward VIII and refused to attend the wedding of the future Queen Elizabeth II. She outlived her husband by 18 years, dying on 28 Mar 1965. She was only 67 but she had lived through the reign of 6 monarchs.

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