The Court Jeweller

Sparkling Royal Jewels From Around the World

Saturday Sparkler: Princess Anne’s Festoon Tiara

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The British royal family has an incredible wide array of jewels. Beyond the pieces owned and worn by the reigning queen, many of the other Windsor women have impressive jewelry collections of their own. Today’s tiara is one of several owned by the Princess Royal: her diamond festoon tiara.

As the only daughter of Queen Elizabeth II, Anne is a hardworking and significant member of the royal family. And as such, she needs quite a few tiaras in her arsenal for the state events she attends. While Anne’s two other major tiaras — the diamond meander tiara of Alice of Battenberg and the aquamarine pineflower tiara that belonged to the Queen Mum — were legacies from her grandmothers, the diamond festoon is a newer piece. It was given to Anne in 1973, the same year that she married her first husband, Mark Phillips. But it wasn’t a wedding present; it was given to the princess by the World-Wide Shipping Group, a Hong Kong firm, after she christened one of their ships.

Anne has worn the tiara on a regular basis since she received it, and in 2008, she loaned it to her daughter-in-law, Autumn Kelly, to wear as a wedding tiara (pictured above). Autumn anchored her veil with the diamond festoon for her wedding to Peter Philips in Windsor that May. Delicate, with just enough height and enough fullness to be visually pleasing, I think this one was an excellent choice for a bride marrying the grandson of a monarch.

Saturday Sparkler: Queen Maud’s Pearl Tiara

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Princess Märtha Louise wears the tiara in June 2013 [1]

One of the most important sparklers in Norway, Queen Maud’s pearl tiara, graced the heads of two generations of Norwegian royal ladies. It would inevitably have crowned a few more, too — if only it hadn’t been involved in a rather notorious jewelry theft!

Queen Maud [2]

The original pearl and diamond tiara that belonged to Queen Maud (pictured at left) was given to her by her parents, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra of the United Kingdom, when she married Prince Carl of Denmark in 1896. It is often reported that the tiara was commissioned from Garrard, then the official royal jeweler in Britain. The piece was a lovely wedding gift for a princess joining another royal clan, but it was never intended to become a central part of another royal family’s jewel collection. Maud unexpectedly became queen of newly-independent Norway in 1905 when her husband was chosen as the country’s new monarch. She wore the tiara, which has a large detachable central element, until her death in 1938.

Maud’s son, King Olav V, inherited the tiara from his mother, but it was a long time before he was reunited with the tiara (and the rest of his mother’s jewels). Maud had taken her jewelry with her to Britain for a visit in the autumn of 1938, and she unexpectedly died while she was abroad. The late queen’s jewels were kept safe in Windsor Castle for another fifteen years, for the duration of World War II and beyond. The Norwegians were finally able to reclaim the tiara in 1953, when they visited Britain for the coronation of Olav’s cousin, Queen Elizabeth II [3].

Olav’s son, King Harald V, is the current owner of the tiara; he received it when Maud’s jewels were divided following his wedding to Sonja Haraldsen in 1968. Sonja wore both the large and small versions of Maud’s original tiara until 1995, when tiara tragedy struck. The piece was sent back to Garrard in London to be cleaned, and while it was there, it was stolen.

The theft revealed the approximate value of the tiara at the time: $312,000 [4]. It has never been recovered. Garrard made a perfect replica of the original pearl and diamond tiara for the family, and that’s the tiara that Sonja has worn ever since. The photograph above shows her wearing the full version of the new tiara at a gala dinner in 2003.

The small version of the new tiara was lent to Harald and Sonja’s daughter, Princess Märtha Louise, for her wedding to Ari Behn in 2002. It was also worn by Crown Princess Mette-Marit at the wedding of Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden in 2010 (where the upright pearls looked a bit wonky to me, possible because she often tilts tiaras backward like headbands; see the photograph above), and by Märtha Louise at Princess Madeleine’s wedding last summer (see the photograph at the top of this post). I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, an exact, precious replica of an antique royal tiara is almost as good as the real thing? [5]

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Cropped version of a photograph available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.
2. Cropped version of a photograph available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.
3. See historian Trond Noren Isaksen’s blog for more.
4. Here’s a news report from an American newspaper about the robbery.
5. A version of this post originally appeared at A Tiara a Day in June 2013.

Sunday Sparkler: Queen Alexandrine’s Fringe Tiara

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Countess Sussie of Rosenborg wears the fringe tiara [1]

If you delve deep enough into any royal tiara collection, you’re sure to bump into a fringe tiara eventually. Nearly every royal family has at least one of the sparklers, in part because so many of them are descended from the Russian grand duchesses who popularized them in the nineteenth century. We’re used to seeing one Danish princess, Benedikte, wearing a flashy fringe tiara on a regular basis. But that’s not the fringe tiara that actually comes from the Danish royal collection; Benedikte wears the fringe tiara of the Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg family. The Danish royal fringe tiara is today’s sparkler: Queen Alexandrine’s Fringe Tiara.

Anastasia Mikhailovna [2]

This tiara, like so many others of its kind, began its life in Russia. Tsar Alexander II gave it to his niece, Grand Duchess Anastasia Mikhailovna, when she married Grand Duke Friedrich Franz III of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1879. We’ve discussed before how popular these diamond fringe tiaras were in the imperial court of Russia. They were made to resemble Russian kokoshnik headdresses, and nearly every grand duchess received one in her wedding trousseau. Anastasia’s fringe tiara is a bit unusual; rather than being set in precise geometric spikes, the individual fringes of the tiara are actually a bit curved along the edges, with round diamonds arranged in a row and pear-shaped diamonds at the tip of each fringe. The tiara appears to be fuller in the photographs of Anastasia than it does on later wearers; this might suggest that the piece was altered at some point, but it might also be a case where the tiara was worn with a fabric kokoshnik behind it to make it look more solid.

Anastasia, who you can see wearing the fringe tiara in the image on the left, was quite the scandalous grand duchess — she gambled in Monaco, had an illegitimate son with her private secretary, and was even (probably falsely) accused of killing her husband. The press today would love her. But in between all of that, Anastasia also managed to give birth to a future queen. Her daughter, Alexandrine, married King Christian X of Denmark in 1898; she would be the next owner of the fringe tiara. According to Alexandrine’s granddaughter, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, she wasn’t that fond of wearing the elaborate royal jewels that she inherited from her Russian mother: “She was a very modest, really shy person. but for great occasions she would put on the jewelry that you would expect her to. But I remember that she did not wear a lot of jewelry.”

Alexandrine of Denmark [3]

When Alexandrine did wear grand jewels, however, this tiara was one that she would frequently wear. In the earlier years of her marriage, she wore the tiara low across her forehead, in the style that was fashionable at the time; later in her life, she wore the tiara atop her head. She later bequeathed the fringe tiara to her second son, Prince Knud. (Knud was set to succeed his brother Frederik as king of Denmark until a change to the constitution allowed his niece — the current Queen Margrethe II — to inherit the throne.) Today, Knud’s descendants still own the tiara, and his daughter-in-law, Countess Sussie of Rosenborg (pictured at the top of the post), often wears it to major Danish royal events. And the tiara also has another slightly peculiar legacy: a brand of Danish sardines features a portrait of Queen Alexandrine wearing the tiara on each tin. If you have to eat sardines, I think you should definitely choose a brand topped with a tiara! [4]

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Cropped still from a YouTube video; source here.
2. Cropped still from a YouTube video; source here.
3. Cropped still from a YouTube video; source here.
4. A version of this post originally appeared at A Tiara a Day in April 2013.