A Grandmother's Gems: Queen Mary's Bejeweled Bequests to Queen Elizabeth II

In her coronation year, Queen Elizabeth II inherited a treasury of tiaras and jewels from her influential royal grandmother—and debuted an important Romanov diadem

Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom assembled a remarkable royal jewelry collection before her thirtieth birthday, thanks in large part to the careful curation and coordinated inheritance of jewels from her grandmother, Mary of Teck. Today, the first installment in a series on the great royal jewelry bequest of 1953.

Queen Mary, accompanied by a lady-in-waiting, returns to Marlborough House in London after spending the Christmas holidays in Norfolk, January 29, 1953 (AP Wirephoto/Alamy)

On a cold, sunny day in February 1953, a year after the death of her son, King George VI, Queen Mary of the United Kingdom asked her chauffeur to take her on a drive through Hyde Park in London. They left her home at Marlborough House and drove slowly through Mayfair to the western edge of the park. Mary peered out the window of her car to look over the stands that were being constructed along the processional route for the coronation of her granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II, in just a few months' time.

It was a familiar sight. Mary had glimpsed the cheering crowds at Hyde Park Corner from a carriage as part of the coronation procession for her husband's parents, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, in the summer of 1902. Nine years later, in 1911, she had ridden along the same route in the Gold State Coach alongside her husband, King George V, after their own coronation in Westminster Abbey. And on a rainy day in the spring of 1937, Mary watched her granddaughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, waving to the crowds on the edge of the park from their coach as the three of them rode together in the procession after the coronation of her son and daughter-in-law, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. 

And now, little Elizabeth was Queen, and she was steadily preparing for her own coronation in June. It was a celebration that Mary would not live to see herself. On March 24, 1953, just a few weeks after she had driven out to look over the coronation preparations, Queen Mary passed away at Marlborough House. She was 85 years old. Those around her had known it was coming. The death of her son a year earlier, they'd sensed, had begun to drain the life from her. It had only been a matter of time before she too made her grand exit.