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Sparkling Royal Jewels From Around the World

Saturday Sparkler: The Maltese Cross Tiara

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We’ve been talking quite a lot recently about the Norwegian royal jewels with British connections. Today, we’ve got yet another example: the Maltese Cross Tiara. It belonged to Queen Alexandra, whose daughter, Princess Maud, became queen of Norway in 1905. Trond Norén Isaksen notes that Alexandra had the diamond circlet made as a lighter alternative to the George IV State Diadem, which is still worn today by Queen Elizabeth II.

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Here’s Alexandra in the simpler diamond circlet (with Queen Victoria’s small diamond crown placed inside). The tiara takes its name from the Maltese crosses that are placed atop its bandeau base. As you can see in the photo of Alexandra, the circlet originally also had four fleur-de-lys elements situated between the Maltese crosses. It also was originally able to take the Cullinan VI stone, though that diamond was never permanently incorporated into the piece.


According to Hugh Roberts, Queen Maud inherited the Maltese circlet when Alexandra died in 1925. Isaksen says that Maud is the one who removed the fleur-de-lys elements, as she did not want the tiara to look too much like the original British version. She wore the piece frequently, and brought it back to Britain with her for the 1937 coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Maud also had the tiara with her when she returned to the UK in the following autumn. We’ve been over this story before — she brought her jewels to Britain with her so that they could be cleaned, but she died unexpectedly, and then the jewels didn’t make it back to Norway until 1953. Because of this, Maud’s daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Märtha, never wore the circlet.

Instead, it was Maud’s granddaughter-in-law, Sonja, who would wear the tiara next. The current queen has altered the piece, reducing its circumference, and she most frequently wears it just as a bandeau, without any of the crosses.

Occasionally, however, she wears the piece with three of the four crosses placed at the very front of the circlet, in an attempt (I think) to make the piece look a bit more like a traditional tiara. Today, Queen Sonja is the only member of the family who wears the circlet, though there were two occasions in the early 1990s when she has loaned the bandeau, sans crosses, to her daughter, Princess Märtha Louise.

This Week in Royal Jewels: July 25-31

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July 25-31, 2014
As we begin the month of August, the royals have slowed down and started their summer holidays. This month, we’ll be looking at the top five jewel stories of the week — but we’ve still got some sparkle close at hand!


5. With most of the Windsors gathered in Glasgow, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall have been heading out to other parts of the UK. On Wednesday, they visited the Sandringham Flower Show, and Camilla added a bit of glitter to her outfit courtesy her sparkling butterfly brooch. She’s been wearing the brooch since at least 2006; it appears to be made of diamonds and sapphires.

4. The butterfly wasn’t Camilla’s only brooch outing of the week; she wore a stylized floral brooch to have a pint in Rutland. (This picture was maybe my favorite of the entire week. FYI: Camilla is on my list of “top five royals to have a pint with.” Who are yours?)

3. In Scotland, the Countess of Strathearn kept her jewelry simple while watching the athletics competition at the Commonwealth Games: citrine earrings by Kiki McDonough, a necklace with a set of Asprey pendant charms, her famous engagement ring, plus her wedding ring and her diamond eternity band, and what looks to be yet another of the rainbow bracelets that children often give to royals during walkabouts these days.

2. Princess Charlene of Monaco added a new foreign order to her small (but growing) collection this week, when she was officially made a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the Star of Italy.

1. She may not be the reigning queen consort any longer, but Queen Sofia of Spain is still very much the matriarch of the family. In Palma de Mallorca this week, she wore delicate jewelry while taking her grandchildren to sailing school.

The Norwegian Diamond Pendant Earrings

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To cap off our month-long foray into the jewelry collection of Queen Sonja of Norway, let’s have a look at one of the sparkliest items in the royal vaults: the diamond earrings that Sonja often pairs with Queen Josefina’s elaborate diamond tiara.

Like most of the heirloom pieces in the Norwegian royal collection, the earrings can be traced back to the United Kingdom, birthplace of Queen Maud. Norwegian royal historian Trond Noren Isaksen notes that the earrings “were originally pendants on a necklace worn by Queen Alexandra of Britain.”

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Indeed, Alexandra is depicted wearing this particular pair of diamond pendants on several necklaces throughout her time as Princess of Wales and Queen. Above, she wears the pendants attached to a diamond necklace in an 1883 portrait by Bassano. The pendants are visible to the left and the right of the large central pendant element.

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At the wedding of her second son, the future King George V, in 1893, Alexandra attached the diamond pendants to her own wedding necklace (made by Garrard ca. 1862, and given to Alexandra by her husband). Again, the twinned diamond pendants are seen to the left and right of the central pendant piece.

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Here Alexandra wears the pendants again in 1896, in an image from a series of portraits taken shortly before the Diamond Jubilee of her mother-in-law, Queen Victoria. (Note: this photograph is flipped.)

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And, of course, Alexandra wore the pendants at her coronation in 1902, along with virtually every other piece of jewelry she owned. Above is a detail of a portrait of the newly-crowned queen consort in her coronation robes; as before, the diamond pendants are to the left and the right of the largest pendant on the lowest necklace.

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You’ll sometimes see another explanation for the provenance of the earrings: that they’re the diamond earrings worn by Queen Victoria on her wedding day. She called her wedding earrings the “Turkish diamond earrings,” as they were a gift from the Sultan of Turkey. (So was the necklace of diamond rosettes that she also wore on the wedding day.) There are no photographs of Queen Victoria’s actual wedding, though she sat for Winterhalter in her wedding attire seven years later. You can see her wedding jewels: the Turkish necklace and earrings, plus the sapphire Albert brooch, in the portrait.

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There are definitely some stylistic similarities between the Norwegian earrings and Queen Victoria’s Turkish earrings, which are also pictured above in an 1850s-era photograph of the Queen in court dress. But to me, Victoria’s earrings look considerably larger than either Queen Alexandra’s pendants or Queen Sonja’s earrings. To my knowledge, there is also no documentation that shows the Queen Victoria gave the earrings to Queen Alexandra. I suppose it’s possible they were remodeled and reused by Alexandra, but I also think it seems unlikely that Victoria’s wedding earrings, part of a day that was extremely sentimental to her, would have been refashioned during her lifetime.

Ultimately, the connection to Queen Victoria seems unlikely, but regardless, these British heirloom earrings have become a staple of the Norwegian royal women, as they form a neat pairing with the family’s most impressive diamond tiara. I’ve never found an image of Queen Maud wearing the earrings, but they were worn by Crown Princess Martha, mother of the present king, in a portrait. Today, Queen Sonja wears the earrings quite frequently at white-tie events, pairing them with Queen Josefina’s tiara, with the replica of Queen Maud’s pearl tiara, and even with Queen Maud’s tiny Vifte tiara.