The Princess of Wales and the Fabulous Tiaras and Jewels of the Greville Bequest

Happy Birthday to the Princess of Wales! As Catherine celebrates another trip around the sun, I’m adding to the festivities today with another look at some bejeweled options for her on the horizon. Last year, we surveyed some of the jewels of Diana, Princess of Wales that Kate could soon wear, and today, we’re looking at another special group of royal jewels: the pieces from the Queen Mother’s Greville Bequest. We’ve already seen Princess Catherine wearing some of the sparkling jewels from the collection, and I’ve got a roundup today of the ones I’d like to see her wear next!

Before we dive in, a quick review of the history of the fascinating Greville jewels. Dame Margaret Greville, the daughter of a wealthy Scottish brewery owner, was a celebrated socialite during the reigns of King Edward VII, King George V, and King George VI. Her marriage to the Hon. Ronald Greville, eldest son of the 2nd Baron Greville and officer in the Life Guards, brought her closer into the social circles of aristocrats and royals. In 1906, the Westminster Gazette described her as “young, bright, a capital linguist, a good hand at bridge, and always one of the best-dressed women in Society, Mrs. Greville has speedily become a familiar figure in the little circle specially honoured with King Edward’s friendship.”

Widowed in 1908, Mrs. Greville maintained her friendships with members of the royal family for the next three decades. She became close to King George V and Queen Mary, as well as to their children. In January 1922, King George made her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The following year, when the Duke of York married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Dame Margaret loaned them her country home, Polesden Lacey, to use as a honeymoon getaway. Maggie often referred to Elizabeth as the daughter she never had, and when she died in 1942, she bequeathed her famous jewelry collection to Elizabeth. “She has left them to me ‘with her loving thoughts,’ dear old thing, and I feel very touched,” Elizabeth wrote to her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, after learning of the bequest.

The jewels remain with the royal family today. After the Queen Mother’s death in 2002, they passed to Queen Elizabeth II. She wore a few Greville pieces herself, both jewels inherited from her mother and pieces that her parents had gifted her along the way. She also loaned jewels from the collection to her daughter-in-law, Camilla, and her granddaughter-in-law, Catherine. Today, King Charles III and Queen Camilla are the supervisors of the jewels, and because the complete list of pieces from the bequest has never been made public, we’re still surprised occasionally when “new” pieces from the collection pop up on the royals.

So far, we’ve seen the current Princess of Wales wear a few known items from the bequest. Perhaps the most important of these is the Greville Ruby Necklace, which she wore for the Spanish state banquet at Buckingham Palace in 2017, when she was still Duchess of Cambridge. The v-shaped ruby and diamond necklace has a floral design and a large pendant drop. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth gave it to their daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, as a wedding present in 1947, and she retained it in her collection for the rest of her life. Catherine’s appearance in the necklace in 2017 remains her only public outing in the jewel.

In 2023, after King Charles’s accession, Kate began wearing another important pair of baubles from the Greville collection. The Greville Chandelier Earrings are a marvel of jewelry construction. Over the course of a decade, from 1918 until 1929, Cartier fashioned and revised the earrings until they arrived in their present girandole form. The ultimate result of that creation process, to quote the Royal Collection Trust, is “a lexicon of modern diamond cuts.” These include a trio of pear-shaped diamond pendants, plus diamonds in baguette, baton, emerald, half-moon, trapeze, and square cuts. Like the ruby necklace, the earrings were also given by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Queen Elizabeth II as a wedding present in 1947. The present Princess of Wales has worn them so far on two occasions: a banquet following the wedding of the Crown Prince of Jordan in June 2023, and the Diplomatic Reception at Buckingham Palace later the same year.

So which Greville Bequest jewels could we see Princess Catherine sporting next? Some of the jewels have already been firmly placed in the hands of Queen Camilla, who has worn various pieces from the bequest for two decades. These include the Greville Tiara and the Greville Festoon Necklace, both worn above for the Waterloo Banquet in 2015. She’s also brought out a pair of classic brooches from the collection, the Greville Ivy Leaf Clips, which were favorites of the late Queen Elizabeth II. (Per one royal jewelry writer, the grand diamond stomacher that Camilla wore for the Diplomatic Reception in 2023 is a Greville piece, too.)

We’ve seen some encouraging signs of a new jewelry-sharing policy among the British royals recently, but I have a feeling there are some Greville jewels that may be earmarked as Camilla-only pieces during King Charles’s reign. These may include jewels like the enormous Greville Bow Brooch, a piece made for a queen; the classic Greville Emerald Necklace, which would pair nicely with many of the tiaras at Camilla’s disposal; and the small-but-mighty Greville Scroll Brooch, which is just the kind of petite jewel that Camilla likes to wear for daytime occasions.

So what’s left over for Kate? Quite a lot, really. One of the first pieces from the Greville collection that I’d like to see Catherine take out for a spin is Dame Margaret’s stunning emerald kokoshnik-style tiara. Dame Maggie wore the tiara herself in the later years of her life, but the Queen Mother, to the best of our knowledge, never did. The revelation that the tiara was part of the British royal jewelry collection came in the autumn of 2018, when Princess Eugenie wore it as her bridal diadem. It’s been exhibited, but not worn, in the years since. Given that the present Princess of Wales has worn emeralds well over the years, I think this could be a fantastic option for her going forward. It would pair particularly well with Queen Mary’s Emerald Choker or Queen Alexandra’s Ladies of North Wales Suite—a collection of jewelry featuring Welsh design symbols and cabochon emerald drops.

There are other emerald options that Kate could deploy from the Greville Bequest as well. While I think the Greville Emerald Necklace may be a Camilla piece, perhaps for pairing with Queen Alexandra’s Kokoshnik or the Greville Tiara, the diamond and emerald earrings from the Greville collection may be headed for Catherine’s jewelry box. Part of this is logistics: Kate has pierced ears, while Camilla does not. That could mean, realistically, that all of the Greville earrings are on the table for Kate’s future use.

The Greville Emerald Earrings are faceted, but so if Kate is searching for a jewel to bridge the faceted/cabochon emerald divide, she might look to wear this spectacular diamond and emerald necklace, which many of us believe is also a Greville Bequest piece. Camilla presumably already has a similar piece—the Delhi Durbar Necklace—situated in her jewelry box, perhaps making this one available for Kate. The late Queen Elizabeth II only wore the unusual cabochon drop necklace for one occasion, the Diplomatic Reception in 2019, pairing it with the Greville Emerald Earrings and the emerald setting of the Vladimir Tiara. I’d love to see Kate wear the necklace with the Greville Emerald Kokoshnik Tiara and emerald earrings, perhaps either the Greville Emerald Earrings or the Ladies of North Wales cabochon drops. (Whether Alexandra’s cabochon drops were fully converted to clips for Camilla, or just used as pendants on a different pair of clip studs for her single appearance, remains to be seen.)

There’s at least one other pair of earrings in the Greville cache of jewels that Catherine could bring out of the vaults: the delicious Greville Peardrop Earrings, which feature enormous diamond pendant drops suspended from pentagonal diamond studs and elongated emerald-cut diamonds. Each pear-shaped pendant weighs in at a remarkable 20-plus carats. The earrings were delivered to Dame Maggie by Cartier in 1938. The earrings were a great favorite of the Queen Mother, but Queen Elizabeth II only wore them on rare occasions after inheriting them in 2002. That’s probably because the peardrop earrings are so similar to the Coronation Earrings, which Elizabeth II had been familiar with for half a century by that point. Queen Camilla won’t be wearing either the Coronation or Peardrop Earrings, because both are made for pierced ears, but I could see Kate stunning us all in the peardrops for a gala banquet. (The Coronation Earrings will have to wait for the accession of King William V.)

Of course, these are only the major pieces we know of currently from the Greville Bequest. There are almost certainly other jewels from the collection still hidden away in the royal vaults. But that’s part of the fun: it wouldn’t be a detective story if we had all of the evidence already. Here’s hoping that the Princess of Wales, healthy and happy in 2025, brings us some more bejeweled surprises in the year to come.