Ranking Every British Queen Consort's Wedding Tiara!

[00:00:00]When you picture a royal wedding, you probably picture a tiara. Diamonds catching candle light, [music] a veil secured beneath a glittering band, generations of jewels passed down for exactly this moment. That's the image royal weddings have sold us for over a century. But here's the twist. Some of Britain's most famous queen consorts didn't wear one at all. One future queen refused to wear her wedding tiara at all, choosing orange blossoms instead.

[00:00:30][music] One wore a piece her own father bought from a London dealer, not realizing it would outlive her by over a century. And the most recent Queen consort didn't wear a tiara on her wedding day whatsoever because the [music] wedding itself wasn't the kind of ceremony that called for one.

[00:00:49]Tonight, we're ranking every British queen's wedding tiara and why some of these women chose not to wear a tiara at all on the biggest day of their lives.

[00:01:00]Before we begin, it's worth clarifying who we're covering. The wife of a reigning king is called queen consort as distinct from a queennant who holds the throne in her own right. Some of the women on this list, like the future queen mother, married into the family years before their husbands ever expected to inherit the crown, which means the tiaras [music] we're discussing were at the time simply wedding gifts to a bride, not yet symbols of queenship at all. That gap between the wedding day and the coronation is part of what makes each of these stories so interesting. and stay until the end because we've saved a special section for the Queen Consort who didn't wear a tiara at all. Number three, Queen Alexandra. [music] We start with a genuine curveball. In March 1863, Princess Alexandra of Denmark married Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward IIIth [music] at St. George's Chapel, Windsor.

[00:02:04]Ahead of the wedding, the prince commissioned an entire peru from the royal jeweler's garage, including a diamond tiara, a diamond and pearl necklace, matching earrings, and a triple pearl drop brooch. Contemporary newspapers described the tiara in detail, noting its center ornament shaped somewhat like the Prince of Wales's feathers, with large diamond drops set into a band studded with fine stones. But on the day itself, Alexandra didn't wear it. She secured her lace veil with a simple crown of orange blossoms instead and accessorized with the necklace, earrings, and brooch from her new husband's gift alongside a diamond and opal bracelet [music] from her mother-in-law, Queen Victoria. The tiara made of diamonds, later nicknamed the Rundle tiara, only entered Alexandra's rotation for major [music] events afterward and doesn't survive in the royal collection today. Though the rest of her wedding jewels remain part of the family's holdings, it's a reminder that even in the 19th century, a queen consort's choice of what to wear on her wedding day wasn't automatic.

[00:03:17]Even when a magnificent tiara was sitting right there waiting for her.

[00:03:22]Interestingly, Alexandra's most famous tiara today isn't this one at all. 25 years later in 1888, she and her husband celebrated their silver wedding anniversary. And 365 pies of the realm clubed together to present her with an entirely different piece. The Kakosnik tiara styled after the fan-shaped Russian headdress and modeled on one owned by her own sister, the Empress of Russia. That tiara made of graduated diamond spikes rising to a peak at the center. Number two, Queen Mary and the diamond fringe tiara. In July 1893, Princess Victoria Mary of Tech, known to her family as May, married Prince George, Duke of York, at the Chapel Royal St. James's Palace.

[00:04:13]George would become King George V in 1910, and Mary would go on to be remembered as one of the most passionate and knowledgeable jewelry collectors in royal history. Here's where the story gets genuinely interesting and where a lot of casual retellings get it wrong.

[00:04:30]May received a spectacular hall of wedding gifts in 1893, including the girls of Great Britain and Ireland tiara, purchased by a committee of young women led by Lady Eva Grareville. But that tiara was a wedding gift, not her wedding day tiara. May didn't actually wear it at the ceremony itself. Instead, on her wedding day, she wore a diamond fringe tiara given to her directly by Queen Victoria, sourced from the jeweler Collingwood and engineered so it could be worn either as a tiara or taken apart and worn as a necklace. The design was a floral take on the fringe style, then fashionable at the Russian Imperial Court. And in wedding portraits, it sits low toward the back of her head, largely obscured by a spray of orange blossoms pinned into her veil.

[00:05:21]The very same flowers that appear again and again throughout this list. The girls of Great Britain and Ireland [music] tiara meanwhile quickly became one of Mary's favorite pieces regardless. Worn constantly from the mid 1890s onward. In 1914, she had Gared remove its original 14 pearls and replace them with diamond brilliance, repurposing those pearls into her new Cambridge lovers knot tiara. The base was also separated so it could be worn alone as a bando. Mary later gave the tiara to her granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth, as a wedding gift in 1947, continuing a chain of wedding gift tiaras that were given but not always worn on the day itself. It remains in the family today, most associated with Queen Elizabeth [music] II, who wore it so often it appears on current British currency.

[00:06:20]Number one, the Queen Mother and the Strathmore Rose tiara. In April 1923, Lady Elizabeth Bose Lion married Prince Albert, Duke of York, the second son of King George V at Westminster Abbey. At the time, neither of them expected to become king and queen. That would only happen after the abdication of Albert's brother, King Edward VIII, in 1936.

[00:06:46]For her wedding, Elizabeth's parents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorn, gave her a tiara that became known as the Strathmore Rose tiara. The piece was purchased from Catchpole and Williams, a London jewelry dealer.

[00:07:03]Though research by the royal jewelry historian Hugh Roberts established that it had actually been made in England in the late 19th century, decades before the wedding itself. The design features a garland of wild roses rendered in diamonds and set in silver and gold with the option to swap the diamonds at the center of each rose for five clay set sapphires instead. The individual rose motifs can also be detached and worn separately as brooches. The new Duchess of York wore the tiara for a series of official portraits throughout the 1920s, often positioned low across the forehead in the fashionable style of the decade.

[00:07:47]But after her husband's unexpected accession to the throne in 1936, she largely retired the piece in favor of grander tiaras befitting her new status as queen. It remained almost entirely out of public view for nearly a century.

[00:08:03]Inherited first by Queen Elizabeth II after her mother's death in 2002, who never wore it publicly during her own reign. It wasn't until November 2023, exactly a century after the Queen Mother first received it, that Catherine, Princess of Wales, revived the tiara for a state banquet honoring the president of South Korea, describing it as an emotional tie between generations of the family. The tiara's long absence from [music] public life had actually led some royal watchers to wonder whether it had simply fallen into disrepair over the decades since almost no photographic evidence existed of it being worn after the 1930s.

[00:08:49]That theory turned out to be incorrect.

[00:08:52]The tiara had two separate wearable frames all along. one designed for a traditional top-of-the- head placement and another for the low bando style favored in the 1920s.

[00:09:05]And the Queen Mother had clearly preferred the bando setting throughout her time wearing it. When Catherine finally brought the piece out of the vault in 2023, it proved the tiara had survived fully intact, waiting for exactly the kind of occasion it was designed for 100 years earlier. The Queen consorts who wore no tiara at all. Before we close, it's worth spending a moment on the royal bride who didn't wear a tiara at their wedding at all. Queen Camila, our most recent case and perhaps the most surprising entry on this list because there simply isn't a wedding tiara to discuss. When Camila Parker BS married the then Prince of Wales, later King Charles III in April 2005, the ceremony itself was a civil marriage held at Windsor Guild Hall, followed by a service of blessing at St. George's Chapel. For the register office ceremony, Camila wore an oyster silk coat and dress with a matching hat, not a tiara, reflecting the more understated, low-key tone the couple chose for what was for both of them a second marriage. It wasn't until later that year in November 2005 that Camila wore her first major tiara as a member of the royal family. The Delhi Durbar tiara made for Queen Mary in 1911 and later worn by the Queen Mother, which Camila borrowed from Queen Elizabeth II for a state banquet [music] honoring the King of Norway. Since then, Camila's most frequently worn tiara has become the Grareville tiara, made by Beron for the society hostess Dame Margaret Grareville, who bequeathed her entire jewelry collection to the Queen Mother in 1942 upon her death. The tiara features a distinctive honeycomb and loenge design in diamond set in platinum with a large marquees cut diamond [music] at its center. added when the Queen Mother had it altered by Cartier in 1953.

[00:11:15]Camila has worn it consistently at state banquetss and diplomatic receptions ever since inheriting access to it as queen.

[00:11:23]So, while there's no Camila wedding tiara to rank in the traditional sense, her actual tiara story, one built entirely on inherited pieces loaned after the fact, tells us something real about how modern royal weddings differ from their 19th and 20th century counterparts. It's also worth noting how the Grareville tiara itself came to exist. Dame Margaret Grarevel commissioned the piece from the Beron Workshop in Paris in the early 1920s under the direction of the firm's chief designer, Lucienne Hertz. Reusing diamonds from an earlier, more old-fashioned tiara, the same house had made for her back in 1901.

[00:12:08]Grareville, a wealthy society hostess with no children of her own, left her entire jewelry collection to the Queen Mother when she died in 1942. A bequest so significant [music] that it also included the separate Grarevel honeycomb necklace and the Grarevel emerald necklace, both of which have also since been worn by Camila.

[00:12:30]Looking across all of these pieces, the materials used tell their own story about royal [music] taste across the decades. The Victorian pieces, Alexandra's Rundle tiara, and Mary's original Collingwood fringe among them relied heavily on old mine and rosecut diamonds set in silver topped gold designed to catch candle light in the great halls where they were first worn.

[00:12:56]By the time Mary had that fringe reworked into a standalone tiara in 1919, jewelers were shifting toward brilliant [music] cutston and more architectural Russian inspired silhouettes. By the 1920s, when the Strathmore rose tiara entered the collection, tastes had shifted again toward naturalistic floral motifs reflecting the softer aesthetic [music] sensibilities of the interwar period.

[00:13:25]even though that piece itself had actually been crafted decades earlier.

[00:13:30]And Camila's Grill tiara, though not a wedding gift, [music] represents yet another era entirely. The geometric art deco honeycomb styling of 1920s Paris, courtesy of the French jeweler Bucheron, a world away from the Victorian garlands and Georgian rose motifs that came before it. That's our ranking of British Queen Consort's royal wedding tiaras.

[00:13:56]From the piece that spent decades hidden away to the ones that never made it onto the bride's head at all, some were treasured for a lifetime.

[00:14:06]And some weren't worn at all because the day itself called for something different.

[00:14:13]Let us know in the comments which of these tiaras you'd rank differently and which one you'd love to see us cover in more depth. And before you go, please like and subscribe to our channel for more deep dives into royal jewels, tiaras, and the history behind