Saturday Sparkler

The Teck Hoop Necklace Tiara

08.04.2018 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

The Queen Mother wears the tiara at the Royal Variety Performance in 1938

Today would have been the 118th birthday of the Queen Mother, one of the most important British royal figures of the last century. (Interestingly, it’s also the Duchess of Sussex’s birthday — happy birthday to Meghan!) We’re celebrating the Queen Mum today with a look at one of her historic royal jewels: the Teck Hoop Necklace, which she cleverly repurposed as a tiara.

The Duchess of Teck wears the necklace with the Teck Crescent Tiara

The first recorded royal wearer of this piece is Princess Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, first cousin of Queen Victoria and mother of Queen Mary. She often wore the necklace with loads of other pieces from her jewelry box, including the Teck Crescent Tiara (which you can read more about here). The all-diamond hoop necklace is set in silver and gold, and it was reportedly created in the 1860s.

Margaret, Marchioness of Cambridge wears the necklace with the Teck Crescent Tiara

The chain of inheritance of the hoop necklace is a little sketchy. We have pictures of different royal women wearing the piece, but we don’t have many definitive statements about its ownership. For example, the hoop necklace and the crescent tiara were both worn by Queen Mary’s sister-in-law, Margaret, Marchioness of Cambridge, in portraits taken around the time of the 1911 coronation, but it’s not clear whether she actually owned the necklace or perhaps borrowed it.

Margaret, Marchioness of Cambridge wears the necklace with the Teck Crescent Tiara

Here’s another angle of Margaret wearing the hoop necklace; she stacked it with a large, lattice-style choker necklace and a double strand of pearls.

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The next royal lady to wear the jewel was Mary’s daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth. (Queen Mary was never photographed in the necklace, to my knowledge, adding another interesting set of questions to the necklace’s chain of ownership discussion.) Rather than wearing it as a necklace, however, Elizabeth primarily wore the diamond hoops set on a tiara frame. For example, in November 1938, Elizabeth wore the jewel as a tiara for the annual Royal Variety Performance.

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Here’s another view of the tiara on that occasion. Elizabeth paired the tiara with Queen Alexandra’s Wedding Necklace.

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Nearly a decade later, Elizabeth was still wearing the tiara. Here, she chose it for the grand re-opening of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in February 1946, just after the end of World War II. On this occasion, she paired the tiara with pearls. The size and shape of the necklace, when set on a tiara frame, would likely have been a comfortable and practical option for a night at the theater.

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Elizabeth did also occasionally wear the piece as a necklace. Here, she wears it with the Greville Tiara for a trip to the ballet at Covent Garden in March 1956.

Margaret wears the necklace for the premiere of The Facts of Life, 1961 (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The next wearer of the jewel was Princess Margaret. To my knowledge, she only ever wore the piece as a necklace, often pairing it with the Lotus Flower and Poltimore Tiaras. For the royal film premiere of The Facts of Life in February 1961, however, Margaret wore the necklace without a tiara. In the image above, you can also spot a diamond and sapphire brooch — the piece generally worn as the central element of Queen Mary’s Russian Bandeau.

The Earl and Countess of Snowdon (then Viscount and Viscountess Linley) at Royal Ascot, 2013 (Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images)

Today, the necklace resides in the collection of Margaret’s son, the Earl of Snowdon. (We had confirmation that David and his wife, Serena, possess the necklace in Sir Hugh Roberts’s The Queen Diamonds.) The Snowdon jewel collection is not a large one, and I think it’s quite possible that, next time she needs a tiara, Serena might choose to revive the Teck Hoop in tiara form once more.

The King Edward VII Ruby Tiara

07.21.2018 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

Queen Silvia of Sweden wears the ruby tiara on a state visit to Japan, March 2007 (EVERETT KENNEDY BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)

Like so many of the Swedish royal family’s jewels, their ruby tiara came to the Bernadottes in 1905 when Princess Margaret of Connaught married Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden. The tiara was a wedding present from Margaret’s uncle and aunt, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra of the United Kingdom.

Gustaf Adolf and Margaret with their four eldest children, Gustaf Adolf, Sigvard, Ingrid, and Bertil, ca. 1912 (Wikimedia Commons)

Unfortunately, Margaret’s story has a tragic end — she never got to be queen of Sweden, as she died in 1920 of an infection after having operation. Her tiaras were dispersed between her children. Today, some are still with the Swedish royals, while others followed Margaret’s daughter, Ingrid, to Denmark. This particular tiara was inherited by Prince Sigvard, Margaret’s second son.

Sigvard Bernadotte, 1944 (Wikimedia Commons)

Sigvard was stripped of his royal title when he married a commoner, but the jewels left to him by his mother stayed with him. Two of his wives, Sonja and Marianne, both wore the tiara as a diadem and as a necklace. But eventually Sigvard decided to sell the tiara. Conveniently, though, there was a royal buyer in the wings: Sigvard’s father, King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden.

Queen Silvia wears the tiara during a state visit to Japan, March 2007 (EVERETT KENNEDY BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)

But there were problems with the sale. Sigvard claimed he’d only really loaned the tiara to his father, but Gustaf Adolf maintained the sale was legitimate. Possibly as a mea culpa, the king left the tiara to Sigvard’s son, Michael, when he died in 1973. But then, even though his father was still alive, Michael also sold the tiara — to the new king, Carl XVI Gustaf.

Queen Silvia wears the ruby tiara for Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark’s 50th birthday party, May 2018 (Ole Jensen/Getty Images)

Sigvard lived until 2002, and although she brought it out very occasionally during his lifetime, Queen Silvia did not begin wearing the tiara regularly in public until after his death. Today she’s the primary wearer of the piece. Now that the ownership of this historic Connaught/Bernadotte piece has finally been settled, perhaps it’s time to place it in the family jewel foundation once and for all?

Note: This is an updated version of an earlier post, with new text and images.

Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna’s Fringe Tiara

07.14.2018 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

Detail of Philip de Laszlo’s portrait of Queen Marie of Romania wearing her mother’s diamond fringe tiara, painted 1936 (Wikimedia Commons)

When the Romanovs reigned in Russia, every grand duchess got a kokoshnik-style diamond fringe tiara as a part of her trousseau when she married. Think about how many Russian grand duchesses there were! No wonder there are so many of these hanging around in royal vaults, huh? But today we’re talking about one, Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna’s Fringe Tiara, that bounced from royal family to royal family before finally disappearing through the doors of an auction house.

Grand Duchess Maria Alexandronva, Duchess of Edinburgh and Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, wears her diamond fringe tiara, ca. 1914 (Wikimedia Commons)

This particular fringe was a gift from Tsar Alexander II of Russia to his daughter, Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna. The occasion: Maria’s marriage to one of the sons of Queen Victoria, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh (and later Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, too). When Maria and Alfred wed, the fringe tiara naturally went with her to England.

Queen Marie of Romania wears her mother’s diamond fringe tiara in a portrait by Philip de Laszlo, painted in 1936

Maria and Alfred’s marriage produced one son, Prince Alfred, and a quartet of fascinating royal daughters: Princess Marie (“Missy,” who became Queen of Romania), Princess Victoria Melita (“Ducky,” who became the Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine and then, later, a Russian grand duchess), Princess Alexandra (“Sandra”, who became the Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg), and Princess Beatrice (“Baby Bee,” who became a Spanish infanta and Duchess of Galliera). Although she was the youngest of the four, it was Baby Bee who eventually inherited the fringe.

Infanta Beatrice, Duchess of Galliera wears her mother’s diamond fringe tiara, placing it fashionably low across her forehead, in a portrait, ca. 1920s

Beatrice wore the tiara during her marriage, which was marked by periods of time living in Spain and lengthy stretches of exile in other countries, including her native England. But the Spanish Civil War meant bad things for all of Spanish royals, and Beatrice ultimately decided to sell the diamond fringe, in part because she wanted to build a hospital for wounded soldiers.

Queen Maria of Yugoslavia wears her grandmother’s diamond fringe tiara in a portrait (Wikimedia Commons)

But even then, the tiara stayed in the extended family. The buyer was her niece, Queen Maria of Yugoslavia (known as “Mignon”), a daughter of Beatrice’s eldest sister, Missy. (Mignon generously loaned the tiara to her mother on more than one occasion, and Missy was even painted in the tiara twice by Philip de Laszlo.) And then, just as they had for the Spanish royals, things took a turn for the worse for the Yugoslavian royal family, too. Mignon’s husband, King Alexander II, was assassinated, and she was eventually forced into exile with her son, King Peter II. In 1960, the tiara was sold by Sotheby’s, fetching £10,000. Its whereabouts today are apparently unknown.