The Princess Royal Wears Queen Elizabeth II’s Signature Pearls

Two years ago, after the world mourned the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, many of us were heartened when a very familiar necklace began popping up on her daughter, the Princess Royal. Are the classic pearls worn by Anne the same ones that were so loved by her mother? I think they are, and we’re taking a closer look today.

On October 3, 2022, the Princess Royal traveled to New York to visit the headquarters of the English-Speaking Union of the United States. During a gala that evening, she wore a striking necklace made of three strands of graduated pearls. Anne has several pearl necklaces in her personal jewelry collection, but this one hadn’t been seen on her in public before. The similarities between the necklace and the one worn nearly every day by the late Queen Elizabeth II convinced many jewelry lovers that Anne had inherited her mother’s beloved pearls.

We’ve seen the necklace very often on Anne in the two years since her first appearance in the pearls. She wore the pearls again a few weeks later for another foreign trip, this time to Uganda, and then again at the Festival of Remembrance in November. Since then, she’s worn the pearls for a whole range of occasions, including more overseas trips, palace garden parties, and even Royal Ascot.

Anne’s pearls appear to be a visual match for this particular necklace from the late Queen’s collection. Like her daughter, Elizabeth II owned numerous pearl necklaces, but this specific necklace is the one that she wore on an almost daily basis for royal engagements. She commissioned the necklace, which features three strands of graduated pearls, in 1952, the year she became Queen. The pearls, per Leslie Field, came from the family collection, and the new monarch had them arranged with a new diamond clasp. Above, Elizabeth wears the 1952 pearls at Goodwood six years after her accession.

The 1952 pearls would go on to accompany Elizabeth II on countless royal engagements both in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth of Nations. Here, she wears the necklace with the Duchess of Cambridge’s Pearl Pendant Brooch during the Silver Jubilee tour of New Zealand in 1977.

And here, she wears the pearls as she lays the foundation stone for the Commonwealth Memorial Gates, a war memorial honoring the service of volunteer soldiers from India, Africa, and the Caribbean during World War I and World War II. (The Queen Mother was originally slated to lay the stone, and the inscription engraved on the monument even credits her with doing so, but she had to cancel for health reasons at the last minute, and Queen Elizabeth II stepped in to replace her.)

The 1952 pearls continued to be a mainstay in Elizabeth II’s jewelry wardrobe until the last years of her life. Here, in Norfolk in February 2017, she wears the pearls with the magnificent Cullinan V Brooch.

The pearls were even present during our last glimpse of the monarch, who was photographed at Balmoral as she received a new prime minister just two days before her passing in September 2022.

It can be notoriously difficult to make definitive identifications of pearl necklaces, but the 1952 necklace has a few features that help to set it apart from other similar necklaces. The fact that the pearls are graduated in size, with the smallest placed near the clasp and the largest in the middle of the necklace, helps to differentiate it from others. But the best way of all to ID a pearl necklace is to look at the clasp. These are often hidden behind collars and under hair, but if you can spot the clasp, you can generally feel confident in your identification.

The 1952 pearl necklace, as Leslie Field explains, has a clasp set with diamonds. Queen Elizabeth II always wore the necklace with the clasp placed at the nape of her neck. You can see the diamond clasp in the photograph above, taken during a visit to Queen’s College in Barbados in 1989.

Here’s a closer look at the clasp from Elizabeth II’s visit to Southampton in June 2008. You’ll note that the clasp features three rows of small round diamonds, arranged almost like a square grid, with more pavé-set diamonds on the open half-circle elements set on either side of the square. The design is sort of an echo of the diamond clips that were so popular in the 1940s and 1950s.

To my knowledge, Princess Anne has so far only been photographed on one occasion with the clasp of the necklace visible, at a Buckingham Palace reception for overseas guests held on the night before the coronation in May 2023.

A photographer working for the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office snapped a picture during the reception that showed Anne speaking to a guest in the background. The resulting image is blurry, but it shows that the clasp of the necklace is set with diamonds and has a very similar horizontal arrangement to the clasp of the 1952 pearls.

Here’s a side-by-side image that I find particularly convincing. Note the dark spots created by the open spaces on either side of the clasp’s diamond grid. They appear to me to be an exact match.

I think we can confidently say that the three-stranded pearl necklace now worn by Princess Anne is the same necklace that was commissioned by her mother in 1952. We’ve begun seeing many of the late Queen’s jewels appearing on the women of the family since her death, but it’s particularly poignant, I think, to see her favorite pearls gleaming merrily along on her only daughter.