Unlike many royal families, Sweden’s royals tend to share their tiaras rather generously within the family circle. Even so, it’s still news when a princess wears an antique tiara for the first time, and Princess Madeleine’s debut in her great-grandmother’s ruby tiara lands at the eighth spot on my countdown of the best jewels of the year.
In May, the President of Iceland made a state visit to Sweden. On the first evening of the state visit, the King and Queen hosted a state banquet in her honor at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. They were joined by five members of the next generation of the family, for a total of three grand tiaras in attendance. Princess Madeleine, the King and Queen’s younger daughter, arrived wearing an electric pink ballgown from her wardrobe archive and a very special royal tiara.
The tiara is an Edwardian jewel, set with diamonds and rubies, with a tall scroll and festoon design. It’s a convertible piece, able to be worn on a tiara frame or taken off the frame and worn as a necklace or a corsage ornament. (Additionally, the extender piece used to make it a necklace can also be worn separately as a bracelet.)
It’s the history of the tiara that really makes it interesting. In 1905, Princess Margaret of Connaught, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and a niece of King Edward VII, married the future King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden in a glittering ceremony in Windsor. Among her wedding gifts was this tiara, presented to her by her uncle and aunt, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. She took the jewel with her to Sweden and kept it in her collection until her death in 1920.
When Margaret died, the tiara went to her second son, Prince Sigvard. He lost his Swedish royal titles when he married a commoner in 1934. The tiara remained with Sigvard for a time, until he decided to either sell it or loan it (depending on whom you ask) to his father. A contentious back-and-forth ensued. Eventually, the tiara ended up with Sigvard’s nephew, King Carl XVI Gustaf, who sometimes loaned it to Sigvard’s third wife, Marianne Bernadotte, to wear for gala occasions.
In recent years, the sole wearer of the tiara had been Queen Silvia, who has chosen it with relative frequency, especially for gala events that do not require the grandest diadems from the Bernadotte vaults, like state dinners with countries that do not have royal heads of state.
Silvia has also occasionally worn the necklace setting of the piece. In this photograph, taken in Delaware in 2013, she pairs the necklace with modern jewelry and a royal blue gown.
No other Swedish royal lady wore the ruby tiara in public for several decades—until Madeleine’s appearance in the jewel at the Icelandic state banquet this May. Significantly, Madeleine’s appearance in the tiara came just ten days before Marianne Bernadotte’s passing. She died at the age of 100 in Stockholm on May 16.
After the banquet, Trond Norén Isaksen, the Norwegian jewelry historian, mentioned an interesting possibility: that Carl Gustaf and Silvia have always intended to pass the tiara along to Madeleine. Perhaps this is just the first of many appearances in King Edward VII’s rubies for Madeleine.
My countdown of the best royal jewelry moments of 2025 rolls on this afternoon with a spectacular tiara moment from another corner of Scandinavia. See you then!
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