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MARRIAGES are made in heaven, except for royal unions. These require intervention by elders. In June 1509, Prince Harry (later King Henry VIII) was ordered by his father to marry his elder brother’s widow Catherine of Aragon. The Anglo-Spanish alliance was too important to let death be an obstacle.
In September 1864, Russian Czarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich was engaged to Princess Dagmar of Denmark. He died before they could marry. His parents persuaded his younger brother Alexander (later Czar Alexander III) to marry Dagmar. Alexander resisted for a while. (He loved his mother’s lady-in-waiting Maria Meshcherskaya.) Dagmar and Alexander finally married in 1866. Their eldest son became the ill-fated Czar Nicholas II.
In England, in 1891, Queen Victoria’s heir presumptive, Prince Albert Victor (Eddy). became engaged to a distant cousin Princess May of Teck. (Incidentally, he had visited Lahore the year before.) He died six weeks later from typhoid. Queen Victoria then arranged for his younger brother George to marry May, who she thought “charming, sensible and pretty”. In time, their eldest son as King-Emperor Edward VIII (like Czar Nicholas II) too abdicated.
May (later Queen Mary) came from a spendthrift mother and impecunious non-royal father. That may explain her obsession with the trappings of royalty, particularly jewels. She coveted the Koh-i-Noor and cuttings from the outsize Cullinan diamond. (Queen Elizabeth II called them ‘Granny’s chips’). Mary bought much jewellery from exiled Romanovs. She left them not to her daughter-in-law Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) but to her granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II.
Perhaps, the Koh-i-Noor is best kept intact where it is.
In this, she imitated her own mother-in-law Queen Alexandra who, on her death in 1925, bequeathed her jewels not to Queen Mary but to the future wife of her unmarried grandson, Edward (later King Edward VIII). Queen Mary could do little to prevent Alexandra’s valuable jewellery from passing to Wallis Simpson on her marriage to Edward in 1937. It took years for the royal family (and much massaging by first Lord Mountbatten and then Prince Charles) to winkle these baubles out of the dying Wallis, Duchess of Windsor.
Today, all the jewellery left by Queen Alexandra, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and more recently Queen Elizabeth II, is being enjoyed by a commoner — Camilla.
At the coronation of her second son King George V in 1911, his mother Alexandra remained secluded in Sandringham. There, she could be heard muttering: “It should have been Eddy.” One can sympathise with Princess Diana’s sons William and Harry. Seeing Camilla adorn herself with finery from the royal toshakhana, they must be muttering: ‘It should have been Mummy.’
British laws of succession and punitive death duties have made the royal family take precautions to protect their inheritance. Princess Margaret’s children, for example, had to sell her collection to pay death duties. Queen Victoria took precautions early, as did Queen Mary. She identified certain jewels as Crown property and the remainder as the monarch’s personal collection. The Koh-i-Noor diamond for one is part of the Crown Jewels. The original stone was cut in July 1852, reduced from 186 carats to its current weight of 105.6 carats. Nothing is known of the fragments hacked from it. In theory, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, even Iran and Afghanistan, could each claim ownership of the whole diamond or a share of it. Perhaps, it is best kept intact where it is — the Tower of London.
Monarchies like the Danish and the Swedish preserve their crown jewels as tangible symbols of power. Republics like Iran and Russia display them as imperial follies. The Iranian National Jewels are stored in the Central Bank of Iran and underwrite its economy. These include the pink 186-carat Darya-i-Noor diamond, the gem-studded Sun throne, the 500-carat Samarian Spinel, and mounds of precious stones. Many were part of Nadir Shah’s booty purloined from the Mughals treasury in 1739. In the revolutionary chaos of 1979, some pieces were stolen and smuggled out of Iran.
The Bolsheviks were more careful. After taking over in 1918, they had an inventory prepared by the czar’s court jeweller Carl Fabergé. Some items — for example, the Romanov Nuptial crown and Fabergé’s Easter eggs — were later sold to raise foreign currency. The remaining imperial treasure, known as the Diamond Fund, is stored in the Kremlin.
What relevance do the Windsors and the Romanovs have with today’s Trump Towers, Musk’s multimillions, and Netanyahu’s killing machines? Nothing, and yet everything. Avarice and ambition cannot guarantee immortality. Remember the billionaire Steve Jobs’s dying lament: “Being the richest [or most powerful] man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me.” It does to some current leaders.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, July 17th, 2025
