Tea at Trianon: The Queen's Life in Jewelery

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

The Queen's Life in Jewelery

From The Tatler:

Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee Necklace was a gift from a group of aristocratic ladies in 1887 to mark her 50-year reign. After some wrangling over excess funds, Carrington & Co were commissioned to make a diamond and pearl necklace featuring a central crown design. Queen Victoria was so fond of the gift that she designated it as an heirloom of the Crown. The Queen inherited it in 1952, and she has frequently worn it at the State Opening of Parliament. During her reign, the Queen has been monarch of up to 15 Commonwealth Realms in addition to the United Kingdom. Among the outstanding inherited pieces from her mother in 2002 was Queen Elizabeth’s Canadian Maple-Leaf Brooch. It had been a gift from her husband King George VI to mark their first visit to Canada in 1939 and has been worn on successive state visits - by Queen Elizabeth II in 1951, by the Duchess of Cornwall in 2009 and by the Duchess of Cambridge in 2011. (Read more.)

Who was Margaret Greville? From Town and Country:

Born in 1863 to a brewery tycoon and his mistress, Greville began her ascent through the ranks of blue-blooded society when she married Ronald Greville, heir to a baronetcy and member of the Marlborough House set, a 19th-century version of the Turnip Toffs, if you will, that swirled around the court of Albert Edward, then the Prince of Wales (and by 1901, King Edward VII). Though her husband died of pneumonia in 1908 after just 17 years of marriage, Mrs. Greville, who never remarried, continued to cultivate her position as a notable socialite and hostess—and ingratiate herself with the royal family.

She was especially close to Alice Keppel, King Edward VII's favorite mistress, who also happened to be Camilla Parker Bowles's great-grandmother (Greville was the godmother to the Duchess of Cornwall's grandmother Sonia Keppel). She became good friends with Queen Mary and particularly adored Mary's daughter-in-law Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future consort to King George VI and later Queen Mother—when the couple married in 1923, Greville hosted them at Polesden Lacey, her grand country estate in Surrey, for their honeymoon.

Much like Queen Mary, Greville had an impeccable eye and voracious appetite for jewelry. She loved Boucheron and Cartier, and picked up gems from her travels around the world. And while Mary loved buying up Russian imperial jewels, Greville might have preferred the French—she supposedly had in her trove a necklace once owned by Marie Antoinette, and another that belonged to Empress Josephine, Napoleon's first wife. Given that the Grevilles never had children of their own, the entirety of her collection (the real ones only, of course—anything under £100 was given to the maid) was left to Elizabeth, "with my loving thoughts," when Greville died in 1942.

Some 60 bijoux are rumored to have been in the Greville bequest but the entirety of its contents will likely never be known to the public: only a handful of gems in this collection have ever seen the light of day over the past 79 years. Still, a select few have become fabulous mainstays in the House of Windsor jewelry repertoire. The Queen Mother made excellent use of possibly the two most valuable pieces: the Greville Tiara, created by Boucheron in 1921, and the five-strand diamond festoon necklace. (She also had the good sense not to debut them until the end of World War II and its subsequent period of austerity.)

Those showstoppers now adorn the Duchess of Cornwall, who have them on loan from the queen for important occasions. Other known treasures in the box include a pair of diamond ivy clips the Queen Mother gifted to her daughter Elizabeth for her 21st birthday; chandelier earrings the current monarch received as a wedding gift from mom; a diamond and pearl brooch the queen likes for low-key functions; a ruby and diamond floral necklace Kate Middleton borrowed for a state banquet in 2017; and the striking emerald kokoshnik tiara Princess Eugenie wore on her wedding day, marking the gem's first public debut since entering the Windsor coffers. (Read more.)