A Hundred Years of Queen Mary’s Ruby and Diamond Cluster Earrings

A century ago today, King George V offered his wife a particularly glittering birthday present. Today, a hundred years later, let’s take a closer look at Queen Mary’s Ruby and Diamond Cluster Earrings.

Queen Mary loved rubies from the start. She received numerous pieces of jewelry set with the brilliant red gemstone for her wedding in 1893, including the special bracelet she wears in this early portrait. Over the years, her collection grew significantly, perhaps even helping to revive public interest in the gem. In 1927, a London gossip columnist wrote,

“The Queen is responsible to a very great extent for the revived interest in rubies, which is causing considerable satisfaction at the moment to some jewellers. Besides possessing some good specimens of rubies, the Queen has a keen admiration for the rich red lights of the stone.”

When her husband ascended to the throne in 1910, Mary became the custodian of the jewels left to the crown by Queen Victoria, including the Indian Circlet designed for Victoria by Prince Albert in the 1850s. Queen Alexandra had replaced the original opals in the tiara with rubies, and she had also swapped out the stones in Victoria’s grand opal necklace and earrings for rubies. In 1926, Mary had the transformation of the parure completed, directing Garrard to replace the opals in the matching brooch with rubies as well.

That year turned out to be a particularly important one for Mary’s ruby collection. On her 59th birthday—May 26, 1926—she was celebrated with “a family luncheon party,” during which the guests “numbered close on a score, every available relative being present.” The guest list, notably, included “the new baby Princess”—the future Queen Elizabeth II, who had been born just a month earlier.

To mark the occasion, King George offered her a gorgeous present, described by reporters that spring as “ruby earrings set in a diamond surround.” The cluster earrings were particularly large, much more so than a smaller pair that she’d been pictured wearing in her youth. She may have made one of her early appearances in the earrings a few months later, as newspapers reported that she wore “her finest” rubies at “the great dinner party which was given to the Dominion Premiers” that November.

The earrings certainly made a splash a few years later in a glamorous portrait painted in 1931 by the artist David Jagger. The picture, the second he had painted of Queen Mary, was commissioned by Lord Wakefield, president of the Court of Governors of the Royal Hospitals of Bridewell and Bethlem. Before it was exhibited to the public, critics praised the picture at the end of 1931, describing Queen Mary as “wearing a lovely red velvet cloak and a sable collar,” adding that “her jewellery consists of rubies and a necklace of pearls.”

The rubies in question were Queen Victoria’s remodeled brooch and the large ruby and diamond earrings given to her by King George in 1926. The portrait was chosen to be exhibited at the Royal Academy in May 1932, where it won wide acclaim from viewers. Indeed, the picture was so successful that it was printed on the covers of both the Tatler and the Illustrated London News in the week that the exhibition opened. The portrait still hangs in the boardroom at Bethlem Hospital today.

The next wearer of the earrings was Mary’s granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II—the baby who was present at the birthday party on the day Mary received the earrings. She wore them throughout her seventy-year reign, often pairing them with other diamond and ruby jewels from her larger collection.

Here, at the Royal Variety Performance in the autumn of 1962, she wears the earrings with Queen Mary’s Girls of Great Britain & Ireland Tiara, plus the Greville Ruby Necklace and a large bracelet, which is described by Leslie Field as a “wide Art Deco diamond bracelet [that] is formed of eight oblong plaques studded with small rubies.”

During a state visit to Sweden twenty years later, Elizabeth wore the earrings and the same necklace for an opera gala in Stockholm. On that occasion, she also wore Queen Mary’s Cornwall Rose of York Bracelet, which she had received from her grandmother as a wedding present in November 1947.

During her May 1981 state visit to Norway, Elizabeth wore the earrings with a golden gown for a government dinner at Akershus Castle. Additional accessories on that occasion included the Baring Ruby Necklace, which she purchased herself in 1964, and Queen Victoria’s Wheat Ear Brooches, worn in her hair in lieu of a tiara.

On one occasion, the late Queen wore the ruby and diamond cluster earring with Queen Victoria’s Indian Circlet. She paired the jewels together, along with the Baring Ruby Necklace, during her state visit to Malta in November 2005. The tiara wasn’t worn again publicly until the Princess of Wales brought it out for a state banquet twenty years later.

Elizabeth also combined the earrings and the Baring necklace with another tiara during the same decade. She wore the ruby and diamond pieces with Queen Mary’s Fringe Tiara for a state dinner in Port of Spain in November 2009. Both the circlet and the fringe had only recently arrived in Elizabeth’s collection, having been with the Queen Mother until her passing in 2002.

If my notes are correct, our most recent public glimpse of Queen Mary’s ruby and diamond cluster earrings came in April 2018, when the late Queen wore them with the Girls of Great Britain & Ireland Tiara and the Greville Ruby Necklace for the CHOGM Dinner at Buckingham Palace. Here’s hoping we see them dusted off again soon. Maybe an outing to celebrate their hundredth birthday would be particularly approrpriate?