Today, Princess Benedikte, an aunt of the King of Denmark, celebrates her 80th birthday in Copenhagen. Benedikte’s jewelry box is brimming with beautiful heirlooms, but today we’re looking at a tiara that was created especially for her as a birthday present back in the 1960s.
Princess Benedikte, pictured on the left above, is the second of three daughters of King Frederik IX and Queen Ingrid of Denmark. Benedikte was born on April 29, 1944, in the midst of the German occupation of Denmark during World War II. The birth of royal babies in Denmark is traditionally celebrated by a 21-gun salute by the Danish Army and Navy. Since that wasn’t going to happen under the occupation, members of the Danish resistance planted 21 bombs in one of Copenhagen’s public parks and detonated them as a salute to both the new princess and their hopes for the future.
Eighteen years later, the future certainly was brighter in Denmark. Princess Benedikte turned 18 in April 1962. At that milestone age, Danish princesses begin attending gala functions, complete with gowns and grand jewels. Fittingly, they’re also traditionally given their first tiaras at that age. King Frederik and Queen Ingrid supplied each of their daughters with a tiara on their eighteenth birthdays. The eldest, Margrethe, received a diamond tiara that had belonged to King Frederik’s late mother, Queen Alexandrine, in 1958.
When it came time to offer a tiara to Benedikte four years later, Frederik and Ingrid decided to use another piece of Queen Alexandrine’s jewelry to create a new tiara for their daughter. They selected an antique diamond floral brooch from Alexandrine’s jewelry box to use as the centerpiece of the new diadem, commissioning additional diamond floral sections to be placed on either side of the original brooch to lengthen it. All three of the diamond floral pieces were able to be removed from the tiara frame and worn as brooches, making the jewel both beautiful and versatile.
Princess Benedikte wore the floral tiara for nearly all of her earliest tiara appearances. Above, she wears the jewel with pearls for a gala dinner in Copenhagen about a year after her milestone birthday. Beside her, her mother, Queen Ingrid, wears the Danish Emerald Parure, the suite of crown jewels recently worn by Queen Mary in the first gala portrait of her husband’s reign.
In the spring of 1964, just before her twentieth birthday, Benedikte wore the tiara for an audience with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican. She accompanied her parents during the visit. This black and white photograph, taken during the audience, highlights the separate sections of the tiara. You can see the differences in the design of the diamond-set leaves in the center section and the end section here.
In 1968, Princess Benedikte married Prince Richard of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. Through her marriage, she gained access to a grand diamond fringe tiara from his family collection. Later, she would also inherit another tiara, Queen Sofia’s Star and Pearl Tiara, from her mother’s collection. Both of those jewels are more substantial pieces, but Princess Benedikte has still continued to wear her diamond floral tiara for gala occasions even after her collection expanded.
Above, she wears the birthday tiara for the banquet at the Guildhall in London in May 1995 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. She’s also wearing a diamond necklace from Queen Alexandrine’s collection and diamond stars that belonged to her Swedish royal great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.
Benedikte also regularly wears the different sections of the tiara as brooches. Here, she wears Queen Alexandrine’s original floral brooch during a visit from the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall (now King Charles III and Queen Camilla) to Copenhagen in March 2012.
And here, she wears the two newer end sections as brooches at the wedding of her nephew, Prince Philippos of Greece and Denmark, in Athens in October 2021.
Princess Benedikte and the late Prince Richard have one son and two daughters, and both Princess Alexandra and Princess Nathalie of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg have borrowed their mother’s diamond floral tiara for family gala occasions. Here, Alexandra wears the tiara for the wedding of Prince Joachim and Princess Marie of Denmark in May 2008.
She also wore the tiara during Queen Margrethe II’s Ruby Jubilee celebrations in Copenhagen in January 2012.
Princess Nathalie borrowed the tiara in May 2004 for another important family event: the wedding of Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary (now King Frederik X and Queen Mary) in Copenhagen.
But Benedikte remains the primary wearer of the tiara, more than sixty years after she received it from her parents. Above, she wears the tiara for a state banquet at Fredensborg Palace during the Mexican state visit in April 2016. On that occasion, she showed off one more versatile feature of the tiara: the center diamond of the tiara’s largest flower can be removed and replaced with other gemstones. Benedikte has worn the tiara in the past with an emerald set in the center of the flower. For the 2016 state banquet, she added a round pearl to the flower’s center, helping the tiara to coordinate even more cohesively with Benedikte’s other diamond and pearl jewels, including her classic scroll brooch.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.