Glittering state visits were back on the royal calendar in 2021, and Queen Margrethe II of Denmark made several lovely bejeweled appearances during a visit to her German neighbors. Naturally, she picked a pair of tiaras with German royal provenance to wear for both sparkling receptions.
On November 10, Queen Margrethe and Crown Prince Frederik were the guests of honor at a banquet at Schloss Bellevue in Germany. Margrethe is a descendent of several different German royal families, including those from Baden, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Prussia, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau, and Coburg. She has many pieces of jewelry in her collection that have German royal provenance, and so she was able to pick jewelry for this visit that paid special tribute to her hosts.
Queen Margrethe wore an evening gown made of dark teal-green lace with a matching clutch bag for the banquet, and she accessorized with important diamond and pearl jewels. You’ll also spot the miniature ribbon of her German order, the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, pinned to her dress.
Margrethe’s German royal jewels for this banquet come from her Prussian ancestors. The Pearl Poiré Tiara was made for Princess Louise of Prussia in the 1820s. It passed down through her royal descendants in the Netherlands and Sweden before arriving in the Danish royal collection in the 1860s with Queen Lovisa of Denmark.
Lovisa created a married parure of pearl and diamond jewelry by pairing the tiara with a grand diamond and pearl necklace that she received as a wedding present from the Khedive of Egypt. (A coordinating pair of earrings was made using some of the necklace’s pendants.) In her will, Lovisa placed all of the diamond and pearl jewels in trust, allowing them to pass directly from monarch to monarch. Here, you get a view of the pearl cluster clasp of the necklace.
The suite also includes a large diamond and pearl brooch, which Queen Margrethe pinned at the center of her bodice for this banquet. The brooch was also made for Princess Louise of Prussia around 1825, to match the pearl drop tiara. You’ll note that one of the brooch’s pearl pendants went MIA between Margrethe’s arrival at the banquet and the moment when this photograph was taken. It was quickly recovered.
The following evening, the Danish royals were celebrated with a reception at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, and she chose a different tiara with a German royal provenance for the occasion.
Margrethe wore a mint green column gown with a silvery lace overlay for the reception, paired with silver accessories and lots and lots of heirloom diamonds.
Her tiara for the occasion, the Baden Palmette Tiara, also has roots in Prussia. The jewel was a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany to his daughter, Princess Louise of Prussia, on her marriage to Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden in 1856. Friedrich and Louise’s daughter, Princess Victoria, married into the Swedish royal family. She was Queen Margrethe’s great-grandmother.
With the German royal tiara, Queen Margrethe added additional diamonds: a diamond rivière, a diamond ribbon brooch, and the diamond floral earrings that belonged to Hereditary Princess Caroline of Denmark.
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