The story of the British royal family’s jewellery is one of constant evolution, but perhaps no single figure influenced the collection as profoundly as Queen Mary, From family heirlooms to her own creations and even treasures acquired from distant empires, the jewels of the British royals stand as a testament to her transformative influence.
The Delhi Durbar Parure was Queen Mary’s most impressive suite of jewels. This elaborate set combined her family’s jewels, gifts from Maharajas, and significant diamonds from the Royal Collection.
In 1911, The Kings of Great Britain were also the Emperors of India. King George V and Queen Mary travelled to India to become the first to be crowned there. However, they needed a new set of crown jewels to take with them because by law the British Crown Jewels cannot leave the UK. This gave Mary the opportunity to commission a new suite of jewels that incorporated her family’s emeralds into a grand royal parure.
Part of the parure was The Delhi Durbar Necklace. The piece features eight cabochon emeralds, three cushion-shaped, four oval and one lozenge-shaped, in cut-down gold and pave-set diamond collets, between six large brilliants in platinum claw settings, on a double platinum chain set with 94 small brilliants, the central emerald suspending a pave-set pear-shaped emerald on a detachable chain of 12 graduated small brilliants, and a marquise brilliant (Cullinan VII) on a detachable chain of ten graduated small brilliants.
Dressed in her imperial finery, Queen Mary debuted the necklace at the ceremony in Delhi, India on 12th December 1911.
Unlike many of her other jewels, Queen Mary would go on to wear the complete parure for the rest of her reign and into her widowhood.
As this was a personal jewel and not an Heirloom of the British Crown, this necklace was not worn by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother but inherited by Queen Elizabeth II on her grandmother’s death in 1953.
Queen Elizabeth made frequent use of the entire Delhi Dhurbar Parure but she preferred to use the Emerald version of the Grand Duchess Vladimir’s Tiara as opposed to the Delhi Dhurbar Tiara.
In 2019, the popular television programme, Downton Abbey was made into a feature film, depicting a fictional Royal visit to Downton by Queen Mary and King George
During one of the grand evening scenes, Geraldine James (Queen Mary) is seen wearing a fantastically accurate replica of the Vladimir Tiara and the Delhi Durbhar suite.
These royal jewels were painstakingly reproduced by the Downton Abbey costume designer Anna Robbins. In an interview, Anna claimed that: ‘we wanted pieces that the audience might recognise from our current royals that also worked in terms of style and proportion for the costumes’. The replicas were made by the model maker Martin Adams using lead-free pewter, mounted, and electroplated in silver. Swarovski foil-backed stones were used to imitate the diamonds and the fifteen “emerald” pendants were actually pigmented epoxy resin.
Queen Elizabeth passed away in 2022, with her vast jewellery collection seemingly being solely inherited by King Charles III.