The Greville Tiara
It takes a lady with serious tiara hair to pull off one of the biggest sparklers in Britain: the Greville Tiara, which was a favorite of the late Queen Mother and is now worn by her granddaughter-in-law, the Duchess of Cornwall.
The tiara was originally not a royal piece at all. It was made in 1921 by Boucheron — hence it’s often called the “Boucheron Honeycomb Tiara” — for the Hon. Mrs. Greville, a society hostess who was a friend of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The piece was constructed using diamonds from jewels already owned by the Grevilles. When Mrs. Greville died in 1942, she left a boatload of jewels to Queen Elizabeth, including this tiara. The tiara originally lacked the diamond clusters that sit atop the piece — those were one of the Queen Mum’s later additions, made possible by Cartier. (In older books on British royal jewels, including Suzy Menkes’s book, you’ll sometimes read that this tiara was an entirely new creation, ordered by the Queen Mother and made with South African diamonds. That’s incorrect; Hugh Roberts’s book offers a correct, updated provenance for the piece.)
Elizabeth’s term as the nation’s queen consort was relatively short; she was widowed at 51, and she lived for another half century afterwards. Even though her daughter was now queen, the Queen Mother continued to conduct a large number of royal engagements, and she still had reason to wear some of her elaborate jewels. She wore the Boucheron tiara up until her death in 2002, when the sparkler was inherited by the current queen.
Elizabeth II has never worn this particular tiara in public, however. In 2005, when Camilla Parker Bowles married Prince Charles, the queen gave her three tiaras as long-term loans, and the Boucheron tiara was among the collection. (The other two, per Hugh Roberts’s The Queen’s Diamonds, are the Delhi Durbar Tiara and the Teck Crescent Tiara.) The Greville Tiara is now frequently sported by the Duchess of Cornwall at white-tie events, including state banquets and the state opening of parliament.
Camilla garnered major public attention when she wore the tiara at a pre-inauguration reception for the new king of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, in the spring of 2013. Like the Queen Mum before her, Camilla has made the Greville Tiara something of a signature diadem, wearing it more times than all of her other tiaras combined.
The Luxembourg Empire Tiara
If there were a contest for “biggest tiara in Europe,” I’d be hard pressed to think of another sparkler that could best this one. The Empire Tiara owned by the grand ducal family of Luxembourg is a massive diamond fortress of a tiara. At more than four inches tall, it’s a giant of the tiara world. Because of its size, the all-diamond tiara has plenty of room for the incorporation of numerous motifs, including geometric, anthemion, and scroll designs.
But even though it’s such a knockout, its provenance is a bit unclear. This tiara gets its name from its empire style, not because it came from imperial vaults. It’s an early nineteenth-century piece. For years, there were two major theories posited about how it arrived in Luxembourg. One traced it back to Romanov Russia via Grand Duchess Elizabeth Mikhailovna, the first wife of Grand Duke Adolphe. The other pointed to Adolphe’s daughter, Grand Duchess Hilda of Baden, who died without descendants and may have left jewelry to her nieces. But the ladies over at Luxarazzi have done some digging into the family’s jewel inventories, and they have ascertained that the piece was in the family’s possession by 1829 (because that year, the jeweler Jakob Tillman Speitz made alterations to the piece), making both of those previous theories impossible.
So the Luxarazzi ladies have posed a new theory: that the tiara was possibly acquired as a wedding gift for Pauline of Württemberg, who married Wilhelm, Duke of Nassau, in 1829. The German dukes of Nassau became the rulers of the grand duchy of Luxembourg in 1890, when salic law prevented Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands from ruling. (The two countries had been in a personal union; it’s similar to what happened when Queen Victoria was unable to become Queen of Hanover in 1837.) The tiara came with the new Grand Duke Adolphe to Luxembourg. It’s now mainly reserved for the use of the reigning grand duchess or the consort of a reigning grand duke.
It’s also twice been used as a wedding tiara by members of the family. In 1919, it was worn by Grand Duchess Charlotte to marry Prince Felix of Bourbon-Parma; they’re the grandparents of the current grand duke, Henri. Charlotte’s younger sister, Princess Hilda, also wore the tiara at her wedding to Adolf, the 10th Prince of Schwarzenberg, in 1930. The tiara was worn regularly by Grand Duchess Joséphine-Charlotte during the twentieth century, and today it is worn by her daughter-in-law, Grand Duchess Maria Teresa. She tends to bring out the tiara only for the grandest of occasions, and it’s easy to see why!