Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna’s Romanov Wedding Jewels

Welcome to a brand-new feature here on The Court Jeweller: the Sparkling Spotlight! Every afternoon, Mondays through Fridays, we’ll be shining a spotlight on a bejeweled ensemble worn by a royal woman. Today, our first post in the series focuses on the imperial jewels worn by Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia for her wedding to Prince Wilhelm of Sweden in 1908.

Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna (1890-1958) was the daughter of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich of Russia and his first wife, Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark. Maria’s royal connections were wide-ranging and fascinating: her first cousins included both Empreror Nicholas II of Russia, the last tsar, and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Maria was only two when her mother died. After her father’s controversial second marriage, she and her brother, Dmitri, were placed in the custody of their uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, and his wife, Grand Duchess Ella. (Both Sergei and Ella were later killed by revolutionaries.)

In 1907, when Maria was sixteen, her aunt Ella engineered a marriage for her with a member of another royal family. Prince Wilhelm of Sweden (1884-1965) was the second of three sons of King Gustaf V and Queen Victoria of Sweden. He visited Russia during the Easter holidays in 1907, and a day after meeting Maria at a family dinner, he proposed marriage. Maria was torn. She later noted that she felt pressured to accept the prince’s proposal, but she was also ready to leave her native Russia and see more of the world. Ultimately, she said yes. After Wilhelm’s father and Maria’s cousin gave their permission, the couple’s betrothal was announced that June. The young couple became better acquainted with each other through a correspondence over the next several months.

The grand imperial wedding celebrations were held the following year. On May 3, 1908, they were married in the small chapel at Tsarskoye Selo. Before the wedding, Maria was brought to the apartments of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna for the customary robing ceremony. There, Empress Alexandra and Empress Marie Feodorovna helped Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna dress in the traditional Romanov wedding attire, including a richly-embroidered dress of silver brocade that was cut to reveal her shoulders. Gemstones were sewn into the dress, which also featured dramatic sleeves and buttons that ran down the front of the skirt.

The ensemble also included a long train and a mantle of ermine-trimmed velvet. The velvet used in Maria’s mantle was described as being the color of strawberries. The wedding ensemble had been virtually the same for all Romanov brides since the 1830s. The two empresses were aided in the complicated process of dressing the bride by several maids of honor and ladies-in-waiting. The train was so heavy that five chamberlains had to help carry it as the bride moved.

Along with her traditional dress, Maria was adorned with the jewels worn by all Romanov imperial brides. These diamond-studded ornaments included numerous pieces with incredible imperial history. The diamond tiara, which includes the famed 13-carat Paul I Pink Diamond, was made for Empress Elizabeth Alexeievna, wife of Emperor Alexander I. Behind the tiara was placed the Romanov Nuptial Crown, which was made in 1840 using diamonds taken from ornaments that belonged to Catherine the Great. The stones are attached to a frame covered in pink velvet, with flaps at the base that allowed it to be pinned in the bride’s hair.

The diamond cherry earrings dangled from Maria’s earlobes were also from Catherine the Great’s jewelry collection. The earrings were so heavy that they required a second gold wire, looped over the ears, to help distribute their weight. In one of her memoirs, Maria recalls that she found them so uncomfortable that she took them off during the wedding banquet and hooked them over the rim of her water glass, a gesture that was apparently very amusing to the emperor.

The incredible diamond necklace, which is threaded on silk, is set with enormous stones cut during Catherine’s reign as well. The largest of the necklace’s stones weighed in at 32 carats. A four stranded diamond bracelet, made in St. Petersburg during the nineteenth century, was placed on Maria’s wrist. Like the necklace, the bracelet is threaded on silk, making it incredibly flexible to wear. And last, but certainly not least, Maria’s ermine and strawberry velvet mantle was fastened with Catherine the Great’s eighteenth-century diamond cloak clasp, reportedly made by the empress’s court jeweler, Jeremie Pauzie.

The effect would have been dazzling—and incredibly uncomfortable. Once the bride was fully dressed and adorned, Prince Wilhelm was brought to the empress’s apartments to see his wife for the first time. Their wedding guests were stationed in various rooms along the procession route from the empress’s apartments to the tiny chapel. The guest list includes a who’s who of family members from the period, including Nicholas II, Alexandra Feodorovna, and their daughters (for whom this was their first official state engagement); the groom’s parents, King Gustaf and Queen Victoria of Sweden; Queen Olga of Greece, with Prince and Princess Nicholas of Greece and Denmark and Prince and Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark; Ferdinand and Marie of Romania; and Carl and Ingeborg of Sweden.

Sadly, the marriage was not nearly as spectacular as the wedding ceremony. Though they had a son, Prince Lennart, Wilhelm and Maria were not well suited. In 1914, after years of unhappiness, Maria successfully secured a divorce. She remarried and had another son, but following the Russian revolution, her world was shaken even more severely. She lived out the rest of her life in exile, documenting her experiences in a pair of memoirs. The imperial wedding jewels were also dispersed. The imperial wedding tiara remains in Russia today in the Kremlin’s Diamond Fund. (I’ve seen sources that say that the cherry earrings and the cloak clasp are in the Diamond Fund as well.) The necklace was sold, and its whereabouts are unknown. The bracelet seems to have suffered a similar fate. The nuptial crown was acquired by American heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, and it is on display today at the Hillwood Museum in Washington, D.C.