Sparkling Royal Jewels From Around the World
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| Queen Mary wears the Cambridge Sapphires (Wikimedia Commons) |
All right, everybody. I think it’s finally time to delve into a topic that has been requested consistently for almost two years: the reported conflict that cropped up between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and palace staff over Meghan’s wedding tiara. I’ve avoided writing about the subject in the past for a couple of reasons. For one, the jewelry-centric details of the story just don’t totally make sense. And for another, this isn’t a website devoted to gossip about the royals. But as more and more versions of the story have been published, I think that a website devoted to facts and history about royal jewels may be the perfect place to straighten out what we know—and what we don’t know—about the story that some in the press have begun calling “tiaragate.”
The Duchess of Gloucester, wife of a cousin of the British monarch, has a jewelry collection that outshines those of some entire royal families. Many of her pieces came from Queen Mary via the current duke’s mother, Princess Alice. But today’s jewel, the Cartier Indian Tiara, arrived in the Gloucester collection from a different, lesser-known branch of Queen Victoria’s family tree.