From starting life as a bare-footed stable boy, he became the richest man in Canada and closely associated with George V, whose wife, Queen Mary, was a lifelong friend and confidante of the second Lady Mount Stephen.

[2][3] Stephen began life as a boy running barefoot through fields to carry letters for the Duke of Richmond for a shilling.

He was educated at the parish school, leaving at the age of fourteen to work variously as a stable boy, shepherd and in a local hotel.

By 1873, he had become a director of the Bank of Montreal, and three years later he was elected president, in which capacity he frequently traveled to London and New York City to meet with the leading financiers there.

[5] In 1877, his cousin Donald Smith introduced him to James Hill, which led to the establishment of George Stephen & Associates, one of the most profitable partnerships in the history of North American railways.

In 1885, they sold the railroad for $25 million, and such was the success of the partnership (minus Kittson who retired from business in 1881) that it had already led them to win the contract with the Government of Canada to build the CPR.

Named as the CPR's first president, Stephen oversaw the monumental task of not just negotiating a route across 2,000 miles of forests, swamps, rivers, and mountains; but also raising the necessary funds estimated at $100 million, of which at least half had to be secured.

At Hill's suggestion he hired William Cornelius Van Horne to construct three major sections of the track, and his partnership with James Ross proved invaluable to the engineering success of the railway.

As Stephen purposefully did not want a long list of investors, the risks were high to all those involved and the CPR found few takers in London and New York City.

Next, Kennedy resigned, depressing the CPR stock even further and making Stephen's increasingly frantic attempts to find capital even more difficult.

In the face of this crisis, fellow Montrealer McIntyre resigned in 1884, forcing the other directors to buy his shares and in the process earning himself Stephen's lifelong enmity.

The final piece in the financial puzzle was secured when, in 1885, he travelled to London for a personal appeal that convinced Lord Revelstoke and Barings Bank to underwrite the sale of £3 million in company stock.

Stephen gave over $1 million to Sir John A. Macdonald's government from 1882 to 1890, knowing full well the important part it played in the successful completion of the CPR when their finances had been nothing short of precarious.

A tireless worker, in private life Stephen was retiring with only one real passion – salmon fishing – an enthusiasm in which his first wife readily joined him.

[5] Remembered as one of the most generous philanthropists of his time, Stephen sought no accolades for his gestures and directed the majority of his fortune towards hospitals.

In 1890, he and his first cousin, Lord Strathcona, purchased the Frothingham estate in the Golden Square Mile as the site for the Royal Victoria Hospital.

Stephen worked closely with the future George V in creating its endowment fund and was its most important benefactor, having made gifts to the amount of £1,315,000.

To put these figures into a personal perspective, when Mount Stephen died in 1921, after providing for his wife, step-daughter and charities, he left £1,414,319 to be divided between nineteen relatives, which worked out at about £75,000 each.

The Stephens kept a London residence at 17 Carlton House Terrace and from 1893 leased Brocket Hall near Hatfield, Hertfordshire, where he died in 1921.

During a Royal Tour, the haemophiliac Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, fell seriously ill at Montreal and Charlotte nursed him back to health.

As such, in 1887, she was first presented to Queen Victoria by her friend Georgina Gascoyne-Cecil, Marchioness of Salisbury, who lived at Hatfield House which neighboured the Stephen's home from 1893, Brocket Hall.

[12] The couple had no biological children, but had adopted as a young woman in Montreal, Alice Brooke, purportedly the daughter of a Vermont clergyman.

Through this connection, Gian was a lifelong friend and confidante of Queen Mary and she and Lord Mount Stephen regularly entertained her and her husband, George V, at Brocket.

[15] Lady Mount Stephen was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1919 for her work with Queen Mary's Needlework Guild, the same year her stepdaughter, Alice, was also awarded the same honour.

[citation needed] Gian, Lady Mount Stephen gave Queen Mary a diamond riviere necklace, which was later given to Princess Margaret, who wore it on her wedding day.