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This Week in Royal Jewels: May 2-8

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May 2-8, 2014
It’s Friday yet again, magpies — time for another round of the week’s best bejeweled news!

10. A new portrait of Queen Elizabeth II by photographer David Bailey was released on Thursday. The photo, which was taken as a part of the GREAT Britain campaign, features the Queen wearing the George VI sapphires, a nineteenth-century suite of diamond and sapphire jewelry given to her as a wedding present by her father.

9. Queen Sofia of Spain was on hand for the presentation of her nation’s paralympic sailing team on Thursday in Valencia, and her sailboat brooches were quite appropriate for the occasion.

8. At a concert in Amsterdam on Thursday, Queen Maxima surprised royal watchers by recycling a dress first worn decades earlier by her mother-in-law. She accessorized the already-bejeweled dress with bracelets and a pair of dangling earrings.

7. We all know that connections to royal wearers significantly increase the values of pieces of jewelry, but even so, this is kind of staggering: apparently the sapphire and diamond engagement ring worn by both Diana, Princess of Wales and the Duchess of Cambridge is now worth an estimated £300,000 — approximately ten times its original price.

6. To celebrate Princess Benedikte’s seventieth birthday, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark bestowed the Order of the Dannebrog on her sister. The order honors those who have made major contributions to the nation, and as Benedikte continues to carry out engagements (and even serve as regent) in Denmark, I’d say she certainly meets the qualifications. The order has eight grand commanders: Queen Margrethe, Prince Henrik, Crown Prince Frederik, Prince Joachim, (the former) King Constantine II of Greece, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, King Harald V of Norway, and now Princess Benedikte.

5. Although she normally prefers very low-key jewelry, the Princess of Asturias added an unexpected ornament to her hair for an audience at Zarzuela Palace on Thursday: a thin gilded headband.

4. The Countess of Wessex found a cuddly friend on a visit to Newbury this week. If you peek past Rosie the guinea pig, you’ll catch a glimpse of her Heavenly Necklaces snowflake pendant.

3. Queen Elizabeth II debuted an apparently new brooch this week in Essex. The piece appears to feature daffodils, which may suggest a connection to Wales; indeed, the only time it’s been spotted before was in a portrait of the Queen commissioned by the Welsh Rugby Union to mark the 60th anniversary of her coronation.

2. On Tuesday, Queen Maxima wore a questionable hat a beautiful pair of pearl pendant earrings during a regional tour of The Achterhoek.

1. Leave it to the Luxembourgish royals to give us our tiara of the week! Grand Duchess Maria Teresa brought out the family’s aquamarine set during a state visit to Poland.

The Top Ten: Maddest Tiaras

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Time for another new feature category here at The Court Jeweller: The Top Ten, in which we count down the best (and worst) of royal jewelry. Today, we’re celebrating my recent relaunch of classic posts from the Mad Hattery! blog with a rundown of my votes for the top ten Maddest Tiaras in modern royal collections. Have a glance at my picks, and then weigh in with your top ten list in the comments below!

10. Princess Madeleine’s Aquamarine Bandeau: The hunt for the maddest tiaras makes its first stop in the Bernadotte family vaults in Sweden, where this simple yet strange bandeau resides. It’s the tiara given to Princess Madeleine for her eighteenth birthday; for many years, it was one of the only tiaras she wore. The piece is actually an heirloom, but that hasn’t stopped many royal watchers from affectionately (or not?) dubbing this one “the Cyclops.”

9. Queen Fabiola’s Spanish Wedding Gift Tiara: Here’s a case where a transformable tiara can go from lovely to completely mad with a few flicks of the jeweler’s tiny screwdriver. The tiara given by General Franco to Queen Fabiola of Belgium as a wedding gift is perfectly lovely when it’s arranged as a floral wreath tiara. But when its floral elements are propped up atop a coronet, it goes from elegant quite quickly to something … else. Let’s put it this way — would anyone have been surprised if this coronet had shown up during one of Lord Snowdon’s over-the-top ’60s royal spectaculars? Nope, me neither.

8. The Aquamarine Pineflower Tiara: It’s a bit hard to see in the photo above, but Princess Anne is wearing the absolute maddest of her own tiaras at the recent Irish state banquet. This Cartier-made tiara, which includes pinecone elements mixed with large rectangular aquamarines, was once owned by the Queen Mum. Not surprisingly, it’s not been high on the “most-worn tiaras” list for either the QM or her granddaughter.

7. The Norwegian Emerald Parure Tiara: This mad tiara just goes to show that royal provenance can’t totally overcome wackiness. This emerald tiara was once owned by the Duchess of Leuchtenberg, daughter-in-law to Empress Josephine of France. It’s been worn by lots of Scandinavian royals, including the current Queen of Norway, but that still doesn’t trump the fact that the geometric stones in this one look a bit more Willy Wonka than white-tie.

6. The Burmese Ruby Tiara: A relic of the design vacuum that was the 1970s, the Tudor roses in this modern tiara unfortunately read “big red blob” far too often for this one to be anything but a mad diamond and ruby experiment gone wrong.

5. The Swedish Four-Button Tiara: Beep, beep, everybody — it’s the Jeep! I don’t care if the lights are actually antique diamond buttons (and, okay, they are), this one’s just loony.

4. Queen Sonja’s Modern Gold Tiara: It’s just never good when a queen consort’s tiara would look right at home on the set of a 20th century sci-fi flick.

3. The Chaumet Emerald Tiara: The grand ducal family of Luxembourg has some stunning pieces of jewelry tucked away in their palace vaults … and then they also have this tiara, suitable for Wonder Woman’s fanciest gala appearances.

2. Princess Astrid’s Aigrette: According to Astrid herself, she’s pretty sure she can pick up radio signals from across Europe with this puppy, and based on the appearance of these diamond antenna, I believe her.

1. Queen Margrethe’s Golden Poppies: Not so much a tiara, really, as an experience — and by “experience,” I mean a giant creepy gold headdress made of flowers and bugs. It’s another relic of the 1970s, when tiara makers appear to have been as much under the influence of various things as the rest of the population was. Above, at one of the poppies’ more recent public outings (a decade ago (!), at Frederik and Mary’s engagement dinner), Margrethe only wore a couple of the flowers strewn in her hair. But the full madness isn’t apparent until you see the whole thing. I don’t know, though — it’s Daisy the Great Dane, after all. If she’s not going to wear a truly mad tiara, who will?

So, readers, it’s your turn now to offer up your roster of the ten maddest royal tiaras out there. And when you’re done, don’t forget to drop by The Royal Roundup for some classic mad royal hattery!

Queen Mary’s Love Trophy Collar

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May (when Princess of Wales), ca. 1905, wearing the Love Trophy Collar [1]
In our inaugural month of May here at the Court Jeweller, was there any other possible choice for Magpie of the Month than “May” herself, Queen Mary? Born in May, Victoria Mary of Teck was the queen consort of King George V of the United Kingdom, and she was one of the most innovative jewelry collectors and wearers of her era.
The daughter of a German duke and a British princess, the wife of a king, and the mother of two more kings, Queen Mary is also the grandmother of Britain’s reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. May’s jewel collection is legendary, and this month I’m going to be spotlighting some of the rarer pieces from her jewel box. First up: one of her most elaborate choker necklaces, the Love Trophy Collar.
The necklace was made by Garrard in 1901 using diamonds taken from pieces of jewelry owned by May’s grandmother (Princess Augusta of Hesse-Kassel, later the Duchess of Cambridge) and her aunt (Princess Augusta of Cambridge, later the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz). Those gemstones were set in gold in a necklace that Hugh Roberts describes as a “delicately constructed collar, in the Louis XVI style.” In the photograph above, the collar is the top necklace of the two she wears. (She’s also apparently wearing the dress she wore for the coronation of her parents-in-law in 1902; however, this photograph was taken in 1905. She wore different jewels for that coronation, including the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland Tiara and a different choker necklace.)

Queen Mary wearing the necklace [2]
This particular choker is made up of a series of rectangular panels linked together by vertical rows of diamonds. Each “panel” of the Love Trophy necklace features a specific set of symbolic design elements; you can see one panel head-on in the detail of the photograph above. The center of the panels features an “amatory trophy” (hence the name of the piece): a burning torch and a quiver of arrows crossed with an archer’s bow, with clear references to Cupid, the god of love. This “love trophy” is surrounded by a wreath of laurel and suspended from a diamond ribbon tied in a bow.
Roberts notes that necklaces like this choker fell out of fashion rather quickly after May had it made. She passed the necklace along to her daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother), while Elizabeth was still the Duchess of York. Even so, Elizabeth never wore the piece much, and I’ve never seen a photograph of her wearing it in public at all. In 2002, the necklace was inherited by the current Queen, but she hasn’t worn it in public yet either. (And, given her taste in jewelry, I’d be surprised if she ever does.)
It’s sort of a cliche these days to imagine how heirloom royal jewelry would look on the most popular young royal lady out there, the current Duchess of Cambridge, but I really think she might be the one most likely to pull this piece off. She’s tall, she has a long neck, and she favors unfussy fashions that would not compete for the spotlight with an elaborate necklace like this. The Queen has shown that she’s willing to let her granddaughter-in-law wear important pieces of royal jewelry out and about (think of her appearances in the Papyrus Tiara and the Nizam of Hyderabad Necklace). Perhaps the Love Trophy Collar might reappear someday soon on her, too?
NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Photograph in the public domain due to age; source here. The web source dates the image to 1902; however, Hugh Roberts dates a photograph from the same sitting to 1905 in The Queen’s Diamonds.
2. Cropped version of a photograph in the public domain due to age; source here.